Joshua Scheer
Trump’s war on Iran came home to American voters in the price of gasoline, groceries and other essentials. In this Geopolitical Economy Report analysis, Ben Norton argues that the war helped drive Republicans out of power in both chambers of Congress by deepening a cost-of-living crisis. In the exit polls he cites, 63% of midterm voters said going to war with Iran was the wrong decision, 51% said U.S. support for Israel was too strong, and 52% still held an unfavorable view of the Democratic Party.
That last number matters. Democrats won control of Congress even as a majority of voters viewed the party unfavorably, and now their leaders face a test. Norton points to Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer’s opposition to the Obama-era Iran nuclear deal and House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries’ refusal, when the war began, to call for blocking its funding. The first fight after the midterms is over what Democrats will do with the power voters just gave them, including whether they’ll use Congress’s spending power to challenge Trump’s war policy and put limits on military aid to Israel.
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U.S. Voters Reject the Iran War and U.S. Backing for Israel, but Democratic Leaders Won’t Break With Trump
Transcript | Ben Norton, Geopolitical Economy Report | Nov. 7, 2026
Editor’s note. This transcript has been lightly edited for readability. Section headings have been added.
The midterm verdict
Ben Norton Today, we’re going to analyze the results of the 2026 midterm election in the United States and explain why Donald Trump and his allies in the Republican Party were so thoroughly defeated. And we will also discuss why this election is not only important for the United States but for countries around the world, because American voters overwhelmingly rejected the U.S. war against Iran and also Israel. Exit polls of voters who participated in the midterm found that 63% said that the U.S. war against Iran was the wrong decision.
51% said that U.S. support for Israel is too strong and the U.S. should cut its support for Israel. And 43%, a plurality, said that the U.S. should have a less active role in international affairs and stop being so interventionist. It was widely acknowledged that the loss suffered by Trump and the Republicans represented a massive popular rejection of his war against Iran and the inflation crisis it has caused not only in the United States but in countries around the world.
Oil prices skyrocketed in response to the U.S. war against Iran. And this caused gasoline prices to double, and gasoline is needed to transport goods throughout the economy, fueling inflation. So given that U.S. government policy has such a massive impact on the world, it’s important to understand what exactly is happening.
Democrats take Congress
Now in the midterm election, the Democratic Party won a majority in both chambers of Congress. In the Senate, the Democrats won seven seats and have a slight majority of 54 out of 100. Likewise, in the House of Representatives, the Democrats won a slight majority of 254 out of 435 seats. And it’s clear that voters were very angry at Donald Trump and the Republicans because the Democrats won the largest share of the popular vote since 1976.
However, with that said, it’s important to emphasize that voters were not necessarily voting for the Democrats. They were voting against Trump and the Republicans because exit polls of American voters show that a slight majority of American voters have a negative opinion of the Democratic Party. 52% see the Democrats negatively. It’s just that the Republicans are even less popular. 60% of voters have a negative view of the Republican Party.
So, the Democrats didn’t win because everyone loves them. They won because Trump is extremely unpopular. The exit polls showed that 64% of voters say Trump does not have the right priorities. 62% say that he prioritizes his own personal interests above those of the country. 66% say Trump’s policies made the economic conditions in the U.S. even worse and 63% say that Trump’s policies caused much higher prices and inflation.
Democratic leaders and the veto threat
So, it’s important to keep that context in mind because the leadership of the Democratic Party is trying to portray its victory in the election as a sign that supposedly Americans love Democratic Party leaders like the Senate leader Chuck Schumer, who is a right-wing pro-war, pro-Israel Democrat. What the leadership of the Democratic Party is conveniently ignoring is that many rank-and-file Democrats, many voters are tired of the pro-war right-wing leaders of the Democrats.
And there were hundreds of thousands of signatures on a petition demanding that the Democrats choose a new Senate majority leader in order to replace Schumer. But, of course, the Democratic Party leadership is not actually Democratic and is ignoring what its own base wants. And the same thing is happening in the House of Representatives. The DNC leadership insists on imposing Hakeem Jeffries, another right-wing, pro-war, pro-Israel Democrat, as the leader of the House in order to prevent any progressives and anti-war voices from having an impact.
And once again, by doing this, the leadership of the Democratic Party is acting very undemocratically and ignoring its own base, which is demanding that the Democrats should choose a new leader in the House to replace Jeffries, who’s extremely unpopular. So, even though the Democrats won a majority in both chambers of the Congress, you should not expect many significant changes. One because the right-wing pro-war pro-Israel leadership of the Democratic Party is ignoring its own base and trying to sideline and isolate the young progressive candidates who won.
But also because even if the Democrats had a more ambitious agenda, which they don’t, Trump himself has said that he’s going to be “Mr. Veto” and he’s going to veto any legislation the Democrats may introduce. And the way that the U.S. political system is designed guarantees gridlock. It guarantees that nothing will be accomplished because the Democrats would need a two-thirds majority in Congress in order to override Trump’s veto.
They don’t have that two-thirds majority. So don’t expect any significant changes.
Inflation and the cost of the Iran war
Now, with all of that said, let’s look at some more data to understand what the most important issues were in the 2026 midterm election. The plurality of voters said that the most important issue was the economy. 75% of voters said that the condition of the U.S. economy is not good or poor. And 66% of voters say that Trump’s policies have worsened the economic conditions in the U.S. 79% of voters say that inflation has been a severe or moderate hardship.
And Trump’s policies have only made inflation worse and have led to an objective decline in the cost of living for the average American, which is why he lost the election, not because the Democrats are so loved. And by the way, inflation and the cost-of-living crisis is also why the Democrats lost the 2024 election. Trump won that election not because everyone loved Trump and the Republicans, but because voters were rejecting the Democratic Party and Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, whom they blamed for the high rates of inflation coming out of the pandemic when there was global inflation to be clear.
But the Biden-Harris administration failed to bring down the cost of living and average working people saw their living standards fall and they voted against the Democrats as a form of protest. Just as now in the 2026 midterm, voters rejected Trump and the Republicans, who are in government. What it comes down to is the slogan “It’s the economy, stupid.” That’s what these elections are about. However, I should say that sometimes people make a false dichotomy and they say that the economy and foreign policy are not linked and voters don’t really care about foreign policy.
But that’s simply not true. Because one of the reasons why the state of the economy in the U.S. and much of the world is so bad, one of the reasons why inflation has been rising is because of the U.S. war of aggression against Iran. And the Wall Street Journal came to the same conclusion, noting that the U.S. war against Iran has pushed up the cost of everything from freight to fertilizer.
And the victory of the Democrats in the midterm election is a direct result of Trump’s decision to go to war in Iran, sending gasoline prices up 40%. So, the state of the economy and these U.S. wars are not separate issues. And American voters overwhelmingly rejected Trump’s war of aggression against Iran. Exit polls showed that 63% of voters say the war was the wrong decision. In fact, the analyst Stephen Semler showed in a study that the Iran war is the most unpopular U.S. war on record.
Now, when you exclude World War II, which of course was an exception, pretty much all U.S. wars become unpopular over time. However, many of these wars start with a small amount of popularity, which declines over time. The Iran war is unique because from the very beginning of this war, it was extremely unpopular and it’s only become less popular over time. And what’s striking is if you look at polling on voters’ top concerns in the U.S., you can see that the top concern has always been inflation and high prices.
However, when the U.S. war against Iran was launched in late February of this year, suddenly the percentage of voters saying that they were suffering from inflation and high prices massively increased. So this is clear evidence that the U.S. war against Iran significantly hurt the living standards of many Americans, which is of course why they went out and voted in protest against Trump and the Republicans.
This fact is pretty much impossible to ignore.
JD Vance distances himself from Trump
And even Trump’s vice president, JD Vance, is now trying to distance himself from Trump. And in a long post on Twitter, JD Vance admitted that one of the main reasons why they lost the midterm election is because voters overwhelmingly rejected their war against Iran. Vance argued that there were four main reasons why many of the voters who had previously supported Trump in the 2024 election instead voted for the Democrats in the 2026 midterm.
He said those reasons were the U.S. war against Iran, the high cost of living and inflation, the failure to “put America first”. I don’t like that slogan. It’s meaningless. But anyway, and he said the U.S. relationship to Israel. Now, I do think that Vance is partially correct in his analysis there. However, we need to call out Vance for being an extreme opportunist. He’s very cynically acting as though he opposed Trump’s war of aggression against Iran.
But actually, if you go back a few months and look at the record, Vance did not oppose the war. Vance was repeatedly asked about the war and he said that he trusted Trump. JD Vance openly supported Trump and refused to criticize him as he was bombing schools full of children in Iran, carrying out these horrific atrocities. And Vance didn’t say anything to actually oppose the war.
But now that the Republicans have been absolutely trounced at the polls, Vance is suddenly throwing Trump under the bus and saying, “Actually, I don’t support Trump’s war against Iran.” Showing just how much of an extreme opportunist he is. When he actually could have had an impact, he didn’t say anything. And we all know why this is. It’s because Vance is now preparing for his presidential campaign in two years.
And previously, he thought it was politically convenient to go along with Trump. And now, obviously, most Americans clearly don’t like Trump. They just overwhelmingly rejected Trump. So, Vance is suddenly distancing himself from his boss, whom he never criticized for the past several years. Because Vance doesn’t believe in anything. He just wants to replace Trump and carry out the same policies that Trump has continued.
AI data centers and Big Tech
And by the way, speaking of JD Vance’s opportunism and hypocrisy, when you go back to the list of reasons why the Republicans lost the midterm election, there’s another very important factor that he conveniently left out. He talked about the Iran war, U.S. support for Israel, foreign intervention, and the cost-of-living crisis. He conveniently forgot to mention that another major issue in the midterm was AI data centers.
In exit polls, 56% of voters say AI and data centers were crucial or a major factor in their vote. 76% said they would oppose the construction of a data center in their community. In fact, on Election Day, voters in at least 29 jurisdictions across the U.S. passed bans or restrictions on data centers. As the U.S. media outlet Axios put it, American voters delivered an AI earthquake, rebuking Big Tech and the billionaire oligarchs behind these Big Tech corporations and their AI data centers.
The reason JD Vance did not mention this important issue is because he supports all of these Big Tech corporations in Silicon Valley. JD Vance previously worked in Silicon Valley. He worked at a venture capital firm run by the right-wing billionaire oligarch Peter Thiel. And then when JD Vance pivoted out of Silicon Valley to run for Congress in Ohio, Peter Thiel funded his campaign. JD Vance was created in a political petri dish by Peter Thiel.
And Thiel is an extremely influential venture capitalist who’s part of the so-called PayPal mafia. These are the Big Tech oligarchs who were originally involved in PayPal two decades ago and have now gone on to create other Big Tech corporations. Not only Peter Thiel, but other right-wing Trump supporters like Elon Musk, who are now going to pivot, and instead of supporting Trump, they’re all going to support JD Vance for the 2028 election.
Billionaire donors in both parties
By the way, while we’re on the subject of Elon Musk, I should point out that the biggest loser of the midterm election along with Trump was Musk. Musk is of course the world’s richest oligarch and he spent nearly half a billion dollars trying to influence the 2026 midterm. He spent $445 million funding right-wing politicians and yet almost all of the Republicans funded by Elon Musk lost the election.
That said, although it’s true that most billionaire oligarchs supported the Republicans, we should keep in mind that there were also some billionaire oligarchs who funded the Democrats. And the fourth biggest donor overall in the 2026 midterm was the Democratic billionaire oligarch Michael Bloomberg. So just because voters rejected the Republicans funded by Elon Musk doesn’t mean that the U.S. is now suddenly a great democracy. Because in reality, what we’re going to see is simply one faction of billionaire oligarchs replaced by another faction of billionaire oligarchs.
Michael Bloomberg is extremely influential in the Democratic Party. Joe Biden actually gave Bloomberg the Presidential Medal of Freedom to thank him for funding the Democrats. And, of course, Bloomberg is a right-wing Democrat who’s pro-war. His economic policies are neoliberal and pro-corporation. And, of course, Bloomberg and many other Democratic Party leaders are extremely pro-Israel.
U.S. support for Israel
And this brings us to another extremely important issue in the 2026 election, which was Israel. The Washington Post acknowledged that U.S. support for Israel was an important issue in this election. And Israel has become so toxic that it’s not only progressive Democrats, but even centrist Democrats and some Republicans are now distancing themselves from Israel because they recognize that the Israeli regime is so widely despised.
The most interesting outcome of the 2026 midterm was that pro-Israel groups like AIPAC spent $55.3 million campaigning against progressives, especially the left-wing Democrat Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan. Pro-Israel groups spent $22.3 million trying to prevent Abdul El-Sayed from winning. Yet, at the end of the day, they failed. Abdul El-Sayed still won the Senate race in Michigan, which proves that support for Palestine is growing across the United States.
Trump and the Republicans ran an extremely racist and Islamophobic smear campaign against El-Sayed and they still lost. And Israel has become such a toxic issue among the people of the U.S. that even some more mainstream centrist Democrats like James Talarico in Texas openly distance themselves from Israel. Talarico emphasized that he will never take money from AIPAC, but this is significant. You know, you can call out the hypocrisy and inconsistency of these centrist Democrats, but the fact that even they are now having to publicly distance themselves from Israel demonstrates how support for Israel has collapsed among the U.S. public.
A poll published this July by the Pew Research Center found that a majority of Americans, 62%, have a negative opinion of the Israeli regime. And this has massively shifted in the past few years. In 2022, a slight plurality of Americans, 47%, had a positive view of the Israeli regime. That figure has fallen to 32%. And what’s striking is that the Israeli regime has also lost the support of many Jewish Americans.
A poll published this November found that Zohran Mamdani, the left-wing pro-Palestinian mayor of New York City, is much more popular among Jewish American voters than the Israeli regime’s leader Netanyahu. Roughly half, 49% of Jewish American voters have a favorable view of Mayor Mamdani, whereas only 20% of Jewish Americans have a favorable view of Netanyahu. 72% oppose Netanyahu. Moreover, this poll that was published this November by the group J Street found that 31% of Jewish Americans say that the U.S. needs to cut off military aid to Israel given the horrific atrocities that it committed in Gaza.
And 49% of Jewish Americans say that the U.S. should end the $4 billion in subsidies that it provides Israel every year to buy U.S. weapons.
The fight over Democratic leadership
So, another major lesson that we should take away from the 2026 midterm election is that it shows that there is a civil war happening inside the Democratic Party, not only between progressives and centrist and right-wing Democrats on economic issues, but also particularly on foreign policy and Israel. The majority of Americans oppose the Israeli regime. And this is especially true for Democrats and progressives and young Americans.
But the problem is that the Democratic Party leadership refuses to listen to its own base largely because the Democratic Party leadership is only accountable to its own faction of billionaire oligarchs like Bloomberg whom I mentioned earlier. So, now that the Democrats have won a majority in the Senate, they refuse to change Chuck Schumer, the right-wing pro-war Democrat who’s going to be the Senate majority leader, according to the Washington Post.
This is despite the fact that many new incoming Democratic senators have openly rebelled against the party leadership and said they do not want Schumer as majority leader. A petition was launched demanding that the Democrats should not name Schumer as the Senate majority leader. And in one day, it got 100,000 signatures. Schumer is despised among the base of the Democratic Party. But this is precisely why the undemocratic billionaire-funded leadership of the DNC insists on appointing Schumer as the head of the Senate.
And by the way, I should point out that Schumer agrees with Trump on foreign policy. He is a neoconservative. Chuck Schumer supported the George W. Bush administration’s illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003. He supported the U.S. war on Libya in 2011 and the war on Yemen and the war on Syria. And then during the Obama administration, Schumer actually publicly broke with Obama in order to oppose Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran.
Chuck Schumer agrees with Donald Trump when it comes to Iran. Not only in opposing the Iran nuclear deal under Obama, but also when Trump launched the war against Iran. Schumer refused to publicly oppose it. Of course, he didn’t openly support it because he knows that would be toxic. But we all know that not so secretly, Schumer supports this U.S. war against Iran. He supported every major U.S. war over decades.
He’s a right-wing pro-imperialist, pro-Israel Democrat.
Hakeem Jeffries and war funding
And we see the same thing happening in the House of Representatives, where the Democrats won a majority, and yet the leadership of the DNC insists on imposing another right-wing pro-war pro-imperialist pro-Israel Democrat, Hakeem Jeffries, as the head of the House. And once again, the Democratic Party leadership is being extremely undemocratic in doing this. Axios reported that House Democrats have been inundated with calls from rank-and-file Democrats from the base demanding that Hakeem Jeffries should not be named as the speaker of the House.
Yet the DNC leadership doesn’t care about its own base. It only cares about what billionaire funders of the Democratic Party want. And they want Hakeem Jeffries because they know that he’s a loyal right-wing pro-war Democrat. Let’s not forget that when Trump launched this war of aggression against Iran, Hakeem Jeffries publicly went on NBC News and he refused to call for blocking funding for Trump’s war in Iran.
Later, he criticized the war, but that doesn’t mean anything. You can criticize the war, but if you refuse to cut off funding for the war, your criticism is meaningless. This is what the Democratic Party excels at doing. DNC leaders love to publicly claim that they’re going to do something, but when it comes to actually voting on legislation, they ally with the Republicans. And by the way, if you look at the website OpenSecrets, you can see a list of the top recipients of money from pro-Israel groups.
And it’s not a coincidence that it includes many of these right-wing Democrats who are the leaders of the party, including Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, Kamala Harris, Hakeem Jeffries, and Chuck Schumer. They have all received millions of dollars from pro-Israel groups. This is why it was not surprising when in July, Jeffries openly said that he will oppose any efforts to cut off military aid to Israel.
He supports Israel. Likewise, just a few weeks before the midterm election, there were reports that Hakeem Jeffries was secretly holding discussions with Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, in order to discuss areas of common ground and cooperation. So, the Democratic Party leadership does not care about what its own voters want, about what its base wants. They want to continue with these warmongering policies just like Trump.
What comes next
So I’m not trying to sound pessimistic, but I want to be realistic. You need to understand what’s actually happening here. And that is that, yes, voters in the U.S. overwhelmingly rejected Trump and his war of aggression against Iran and the cost-of-living crisis. Israel has become a toxic issue in the U.S. The majority of Americans oppose the Israeli regime and they don’t want to continue sending more and more weapons to Israel to help it carry out these horrific atrocities against the Palestinians.
But the leadership of the Democratic Party will not change anything. There are some new young progressive Democrats who are fighting against the DNC leadership, but it is an uphill battle. And you should not expect that just because the Democrats have won a majority in Congress, things are going to change. The U.S. system is still oligarchic. It’s still controlled by billionaires. And the U.S. empire is still going to wage war and destabilize countries around the world.
This is why it’s always important to speak out and educate yourself about what’s actually happening in politics today. And if you want to do that, you should definitely subscribe to our work here at Geopolitical Economy Report. I’m the editor, Ben Norton. Please like and subscribe, and thanks for joining me today.