Nearly three-quarters of Americans who voted in Tuesday’s midterm elections and spoke with NBC exit pollsters afterward said that President Donald Trump’s illegal war of choice on Iran was a significant factor in their vote, a figure that opponents of US militarism said underscored the need for the Democrats to become a true anti-war party.
According to NBC News exit polling, 74% of voters called the ongoing US-Israeli war on Iran a “crucial” or “major” factor in their vote, with Democrats winning 63% of people who responded that way. Meanwhile, 63% of voters said the Trump administration made the wrong decision in taking military action against Iran, compared with 37% who said it was the right decision.
They had company in that view even even high up in the Trump administration. “There will be a lot of infighting and arguing over what happened and why that is,” Vice President JD Vance said Tuesday in a lengthy social media post. “One of the pollsters I really respect told me that our economic messaging wasn’t sharp enough down the stretch. I’m sure that’s true.”
“But the real reason we lost is obvious to almost everyone,” the vice president continued. “The reason we lost is the war. The president himself said so last night.”
Indeed, Trump acknowledged that the war harmed Republicans, telling Fox News, “I think a part of it was Iran,” – but he nevertheless defended the 35-week military campaign, insisting that “people understood the importance of what I’ve done with Iran.”
In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Trump was similarly unapologetic, declaring: “I did the right thing. I would have done it again.”
Numerous observers contended that Tuesday’s results offered an opportunity for Democrats to do more than simply capitalize on Republican mistakes.
“Among other things, this is an absolute rebuke of the war in Iran. Democrats would be wise to heed that lesson and truly become the anti-war party,” said commentator Ben Rhodes – who, while serving as a senior national security adviser to then-President Barack Obama, supported US intervention in countries including Iraq, Libya and Syria as well as Obama’s wider drone war campaign.
Geopolitics scholar Van Jackson opined on social media that “if Democrats remain the party of the national security state, they will lose everything in 2028. If they become the anti-war party, they’ll consolidate this wave with the presidency.”
A Wednesday analysis on the libertarian site Reason by Matthew Petti argued that Democrats now have an opportunity to exercise Congress’ constitutional power over the war, including by withholding military funding.
Petti noted that Representative Ro Khanna (D-California) told Fox News last week, “The House and the Senate should stop the funding for any further actions in the Iran War,” just like “we did to stop the Vietnam War.”
However, Petti cautioned that Democratic electoral victories usually don’t lead to anti-war foreign policy.
“Party leadership that is willing to attack Republicans’ execution of the war may not share a principled anti-war commitment,” he wrote, recalling how Democrats swept the 2006 midterms over public anger with the Iraq War but then struggled to use their control of both chambers of Congress to end it.
Senator Chris Van Hollen (D-Maryland) wants his party to cut off funding for Trump’s war and said Democrats can do so by demanding explicit restrictions on war spending as a condition of supporting the fiscal year 2027 government funding bill that expires next month.
“Right now, the continuing resolution goes through December 11,” Van Hollen told The Lever on Tuesday. “And my view is that Democrats should not advance spending to continue to fund this war.”
“The Vietnam War ended only when Congress defunded it,” he added. “This is an illegal war, and we need to make sure that taxpayer monies are not used to continue an illegal war.”
Institute for Middle East Understanding executive director Margaret DeReus pleaded on social media, “For the love of all that is good, Democrats, do not squander this.”
“The voters have given you a mandate. Use it. Be the party of working people. Be the anti-war party. Be the anti-corruption party,” she added. “We cannot go back to business as usual.”
Matt Duss, a former top aide to US Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) who serves as executive vice president at the Center for International Policy, noted that “Trump ran and won as an anti-war candidate in 2024 because Democrats left that lane wide open for him.”
“Voters have just brutally punished him and the GOP for breaking that promise. Will Democrats finally get it?” Duss added. “Americans are tired of war. They want a new foreign policy.”
The problem with this argument is that Democrats nor Republicans are “anti-war” parties and they are not going to become one. They are both beholden the the military industrial complex and their leaders are products of that complex.
What is needed is not an “anti-war” party, its a foreign policy that does not value America’s “leadership” in the world more than the interests of the people who live here. We can’t both fund domestic priorities and sustain the level of commitments that have been made with the required expensive military backup.
We have a retirement system that is both expensive and broken, an expensive health care industry with poor outcomes (witness COVID), and an expensive system of higher education that leaves graduates in permanent debt without the skills needed to pay for it.
We have a tax system that allows the wealthy to decide where their tax burden will be spent while the rest of us make up the difference to pay for the services we need. Major college football programs around the country are funded by wealthy donor’s tax deductions while laying off their faculty for lack of tax receipts.
In short, we have a political system that is captive of the military industrial complex and serve the wealthy owners of the businesses profiting from that complex. You don’t become a peach party without abandoning those priorities. And if you went to Harvard or Yale, as most of our leaders did, you have been trained to support, defend and profit from that system. Even asking whether it matters to us if Russia or Ukraine wins the war is sacrilege.