Republicans Learned Nothing From 2006 About Midterms And Foreign Wars

Tuesday’s midterm elections are shaping up to be the “biggest national wipeout for Republicans since 2006, when voters brutally punished the GOP for an ill-advised and poorly planned war in the Middle East,” The Federalist’s CEO and co-founder Sean Davis said in a post on X.

In 2006, 56 percent of voters disapproved of the Iraq War, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of a national exit poll. The majority of those voters backed Democrat candidates, 80 percent to 18 percent.

Twenty years later, Pew released a survey in October that found 65 percent of Americans disapproved of how President Donald Trump was handling U.S. military action in Iran, while just 33 percent approved. According to the Associated Press, roughly one-third of voters said the Iran War was a crucial factor in their vote for Congress this election cycle.

But this wasn’t the outcome that the war’s advocates have pushed.

“There is no U.S. downside to striking the Iranian regime,” Marc Thiessen wrote in The Washington Post in January.