MADRID – The Republican Party suffered a crushing defeat in the U.S. midterm elections. 

The Democrats won the Senate and the House of Representatives, taking control of Congress for the remainder of Donald Trump's presidency. Trump emerges weakened from what has clearly been a referendum on his presidency, no matter how insistently he denies the connection. 

The central question in these elections was whether voters across the country would hold Republicans to account for the president's foreign policy agenda, including the tariffs and the war against Iran, two factors that have driven up the price of both the weekly shop and fuel. 
It is evident that they have. 

In 1992, Bill Clinton's campaign team coined the phrase “it's the economy, stupid” as its campaign motto. Campaign experts note that voters do not usually rank foreign policy among their principal concerns; but in these elections, the economy and foreign policy, specifically, the disastrous war against Iran, have become one and the same. 

In this sense, the key date of Trump's second term was the attacks on Iran of June 2025, which laid bare the errors that have punished his party and, in general, the American people. 

Trump promised to lower energy prices. Instead, the war against Iran produced the opposite result, and has continued to do so. The price of a barrel of oil has remained above $100 since June, and this has fed through into prices across the board. Diesel at $6.39 a gallon, for instance, carries an enormous cost: by some estimates, $3,500 a year for the average household. 

Exit polls captured that economic cost early on: 62% of voters said the decision to take military action against Iran was wrong. According to several Western outlets, including NBC, 95% of those who voted for Democratic candidates said it was the wrong decision, against 22% of Republican voters; the remainder backed it in similar proportion (77%). 

Overall, 74% of voters said the war was either a “crucial” issue or an “Important factor” in deciding how to vote. 

Trump himself, in an interview with Fox News on election night, acknowledged that the war against Iran and its economic consequences, among them the rise in petrol prices, had contributed to the Republicans' defeat. 

The war against Iran has become a political boomerang that ended up striking those who had been cheering it on from the start. The link between the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, rising world oil prices and costlier petrol for American consumers is hard to ignore. What began as a military confrontation thousands of kilometers from U.S. shores has become a domestic economic and political problem. Americans pay more every time they fill up, and the administration is paying a political price for it. 

This is what Iran set out to achieve: to show the Trump administration that the colonial illusion of waging a war without economic and political consequences was not possible. The election results have proved it right. 

Now, in any rational scenario, all of the above would mean the end of American adventurism in Iran and the region. Trump and his administration would grasp that the war has exposed American vulnerability to supply disruptions in the Persian Gulf, and the sensible course for Washington would be to leave the region for good and never return. 

But the problem is that the United States is not a rational political formation. All signs point to the “lame duck”, the leader who keeps the office but loses influence as the end approaches, not materialising this time. With no political future ahead of him, Trump could opt for all-out military escalation against Iran in a bid to reverse the defeat. 

But what would he achieve by it, beyond inflicting more suffering, economic turmoil and, potentially, an open rebellion within his own party? 

The absence of rationality in American politics is not the exclusive property of the Trump administration. The same was true of Biden and his unwavering support for Israel in the genocide in Palestine. 

American voters have delivered an unequivocal verdict: the war against Iran has been a disaster, economic, political and reputational. The question is whether politicians will be capable of understanding the message.