If you’re a Republican running for office in a part of the country that isn’t deep red in 2026, how are you supposed to run in this mess?
That’s what Republicans across the country are asking. Some Republicans like Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC) have chosen to deny reality and pretend everything is wonderful.
The truth is clearer in the Washington Post/ABC News/IPSOS survey:
President Donald Trump’s war in Iran is as unpopular among Americans as the war in Iraq during the year of peak violence in 2006 and the Vietnam War in the early 1970s, according to a Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll, amid growing economic pain and fears of terrorism in the wake of the military campaign.
Sixty-one percent of Americans believe the use of military force against Iran was a mistake, and fewer than two in ten Americans believe U.S. actions in Iran were successful. Around 4 in 10 say it hasn’t come to fruition, while another 4 in 10 say it’s “too early to tell.”
Trump’s Iran War is the inverse of Bush’s Iraq War, which became unpopular when it became clear that Americans were hurting and dying and there was no hope of winning.
The Trump conflict has turned to the economic suffering that the Iranians have managed to inflict on the American people in a war that also appears unwinnable for the United States.
Trump’s war took a bad economy and made it worse.
The president has so inflamed an already angry electorate that even mainstream figures like CNN’s John King are calling the war a disaster.