Within hours of the GOP’s midterms walloping, Vice President J.D. Vance was quick to assign blame. “The reason we lost was the war,” he argued in an X post. The new White House chief of staff, Stephen Miller, is apparently blaming the war, as well. Both men, for slightly different reasons, are intensely concerned about the views of the most ideological of Trump’s MAGA base, who were never that jazzed about the Iran War to begin with. Vance hopes to become the MAGA movement’s candidate for president in 2028 and Miller wants to toss the war and those who backed it over the side so as to protect his own wildly unpopular agenda.
It’s not so clear, however, that it was the most important issue in the minds of midterm voters. The best evidence that it mattered quite a bit comes from a pre-election Gallup survey in which 77 percent of Americans said “the situation in Iran” was “extremely” (47 percent) or “very” (30 percent) important to their vote. That ranked it behind the 87 percent who said “the economy” (50 percent “extremely important,” 37 percent “very important”); even with the share that said “health care” (50 percent “extremely important,” 27 percent “very important”); and slight...