Neocons Are Desperate To Blame The GOP Midterm Wipeout On Everything But Iran
By The Federalist.
Neocons sprang into action this week amid the fallout from Tuesday’s historic Republican defeat in the midterms, pushing a theory of the election that’s completely divorced from reality. Their basic argument is that it wasn’t the costly and unpopular Iran War that turned voters against President Trump and the GOP, it was tariffs, corruption, candidate quality, ICE raids — nearly anything you can think of besides the war, which they are still defending amid the smoldering wreckage of the Republican Party.
The Wall Street Journal editorial board, a champion of the war from the beginning, went after Vice President J.D. Vance this week for a lengthy X post on Wednesday in which Vance rightly cited the war as the primary cause of the Republican midterm disaster.
“The reason we lost is the war. The president himself said so last night,” Vance wrote. “If you’d like to argue it was worth it, that losing the Senate for the next 6 years was worth it, then do so. Argue it was a worthwhile cost to pay. Agree or disagree, that’s at least honest.”
The WSJ editors are not interested in an honest conversation. They criticized Vance for not mentioning corruption and tariffs as major reasons for Republican losses. Tariffs in particular is a familiar refrain among all those who pushed for the Iran war. The problem is, public opinion on tariffs doesn’t show what the neocons say it shows. After Trump’s “liberation day” tariffs were enacted on April 2 of last year, Trump’s approval rating dropped from 47 percent down to about where it was during the best times of his first term, about 40 percent, which is Trump’s baseline on economic management.
The entire tariffs talking point is just a tactic to distract from the Iran War and its costs and shift the conversation to something else. Dana Loesch went even further than the WSJ and claimed that Iran and Israel weren’t even a top four concern for voters, that instead it was the economy, cost of living, and tariffs. But that’s not what exit polling shows. Loesch in particular was widely mocked on X for her inability to correctly read exit polls that showed three out of four voters said the Iran war was a “crucial or major factor” in their vote for Congress. (Read more from “Neocons Are Desperate To Blame The GOP Midterm Wipeout On Everything But Iran” HERE)
