It’s been six months since President Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth attacked Iran. There are now street protests over fuel costs around the world. But the price of oil is down below $100 again, as it has been for much of the war. In America, we are dealing with higher gas prices and some additional inflation, but given the loud warnings of economic catastrophe we heard in the spring, the economic impact looks relatively modest. As with the tariffs, the war has hurt the economy, but you could also be forgiven for whistling into the fall thinking the panic back in March was a story of the boy who cried wolf.
In politics, though, it’s a different story. There, the war has registered quite conspicuously, right from the start, and now hangs like perhaps the most obvious albatross among many around Trump’s neck. Only one-third of the country approves of Trump’s handling of the war, according to recent polling. But even worse is the effect Americans believe it has had on what they say is their most important issue — and what has become Trump’s worst one. Eight in 10 Americans say the war has raised the cost of living.
As the calendar turns past Labor Day, pollsters like to say, the picture of fall elections tend to come sharply into focus. And what we see in the polls from the first weeks of September is very clear: a big blue surge on top of what looked already like a big blue wave. Polling averages now put Democrats further ahead this cycle than in the major wave election in 2018. To me, the evidence suggests that Senate seats in Kansas, Iowa, South Carolina and Florida are in play.
The election is still weeks away, Republicans have oceans of cash to spend, and the path to a Democratic Senate always looked from afar like a tightrope walk. But Trump is unpopular, and trending downward. There is no sign of the much-hyped realignment of young, Black and brown voters this cycle — in fact it’s now an open question whether that realignment was really a blip or a mirage. And Democrats don’t even look like a party with a brand problem anymore, steadily surging upward in generic polling and doing even better when candidates are named. Yet what is perhaps most striking to me about the lay of the political landscape heading into the midterm homestretch is the way that among all of Trump’s vulnerabilities — his naked corruption, his malice on immigration, his paltry legislative achievement and his siding so blithely with A.I. accelerationists against a large majority of the country — the Iran war stands out.
Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised. The conflict has been a military humiliation, the world’s most expensive and imperious fighting force held at bay by the disposable drones and cheap missiles of a much lesser power. Eighteen U.S. soldiers have been killed, officially, and recent reporting suggests the number may be higher. Regional bases have had to be evacuated to protect American lives, the country’s missile and interceptor stockpiles are now woefully diminished, and conditions on U.S. ships have become a global embarrassment. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the military adventure has cost the Pentagon $38 billion, and is rising with each additional month. The war seemed needless at the outset — at best. Now it looks potentially endless, too.
That’s just the military side of things. At home, in six months of war, Americans have already paid more than $100 billion more for fuel than they would have in the absence of conflict — a Trump-branded surcharge that when annualized is equivalent to nearly 1 percent of G.D.P. The C.B.O. estimates that more than one-third of the increase in American inflation this year is the result of the war, and the problem looms large enough that even the president’s handpicked Fed chair — whom Trump publicly said he chose to guarantee future rate cuts — just raised interest rates instead. Much has been made of Trump’s so-called betrayal of his antiwar commitments, which were paper-thin and opportunistic to begin with. But the Iran war may prove just as politically damaging for dramatizing his broken promise to lower prices.
This is new, and not just for Trump. For decades, even if the U.S. wasn’t very good at fighting remote wars, it seemed to feel confident embarking on them without worrying too much about domestic political blowback — in some sense, this was the country’s real military superpower, however foolish the political calculation and perverse the consequences. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz has marked a profound shift of that dynamic, a lesser power expected to duck and cover quickly finding ways to impose costs on the American home front, as well. Look at the president’s approval ratings, and the pattern is remarkably clear. Overall, there is a step down in the spring of this year, coinciding with the beginning of the war. More telling is his approval rating on inflation and the cost of living. Inflation itself jumped in March and has stayed elevated since. And Trump’s net approval on those issues dropped off a cliff, falling 25 points and then largely staying there through the summer and into the fall. It’s almost as if something very big happened in late February.
Months later, even Trump’s loyal voters still feel pretty gloomy about an economy that would qualify, by most historical standards, as obviously imperfect but relatively solid. In January, 72 percent of Republican voters said they thought the economy had gotten stronger over the previous year. In September, the number is more than 40 points lower, at just 29 percent.
These numbers are extremely low, particularly given the headline strength of the American economy — low unemployment, relatively strong growth numbers and a booming stock market — and everything we have learned in recent years about partisan perceptions of the economy. Not that long ago, liberal commentators in the Biden era spent years racking their brains to explain what was often called the “vibe-cession” — the reality that public sentiment about the economy seemed so much bleaker than the conventional measures suggested. The vibes have collapsed on Trump, too, and quite a lot of that collapse looks tied up with Iran.
Things may be about to get worse still. For six months, the economic effects of the war were muted by a lucky conspiracy of factors: fuel rationing across Asia, growing renewable capacity around the world, political jawboning of markets and the draining of global oil stockpiles, especially by China, whose cut to imports at the start of the war was so significant in this story that it’s been called the demonstration of a new geopolitical weapon. Even so, the gas price signal — that cartoonish standby of American politics — broke through. The price of gas has risen by 50 percent since February. Diesel is now at $6.50 a gallon.
In July, China’s imports surged back up — although not to prewar levels. The Houthis blew up the pipeline Saudi Arabia had been using to reroute oil west to the Red Sea, and the damage is forcing the country to cancel some of its shipments to Europe. The world’s oil reserves, many of which are already at historic lows, are rapidly approaching their floors. Last week, J.P. Morgan published a research note warning that it had no way to map the chaos of the fall to come. The election is less than two months away.
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