The Scoreboard
Eleven days from now, on November 3, Americans will vote in the first midterm election of Donald Trump's second term.[1] I want to start with where things actually stand, because the numbers tell a story that a lot of people on the right do not seem ready to hear.
On the generic congressional ballot, the question pollsters use to measure which party voters want running the House, Democrats lead by roughly nine points in Nate Silver's polling average as of October 20.[2] That isn't one outlier. In mid October alone, CNN had Democrats ahead by 10 points among registered voters, the New York Times and Siena College had them up 11 among likely voters, and a poll from ABC News, the Washington Post and Ipsos had them up 8.[3] Among independent likely voters, that last poll found Democrats ahead by 21 points.[4]
The president's numbers are worse. The same ABC, Washington Post and Ipsos poll found that 66 percent of Americans disapprove of the job Trump is doing, the highest disapproval of either of his terms.[4] And this isn't only about Trump. The poll found the Republican Party 28 points underwater on favorability, with 35 percent of Americans viewing it favorably and 63 percent unfavorably.[4]
I want to be fair about one thing up front, because it comes back later in this piece. Democrats are not popular either. That same poll found them 10 points underwater.[4] Voters are not falling in love with the Democratic Party. They are walking away from the Republican one.
So why? Ask the loudest voices on the right, and you get a very different answer from the one the numbers point to. Laura Loomer, whom Trump has publicly praised as a great Republican strategist, says the GOP needs to start talking more about Islam and address what she calls "the Muslim problem in America."[5][6] Mark Levin, according to former Congressman Matt Gaetz, argued that the war with Iran would not affect the midterms at all.[7] Across much of the MAGA media world, the explanation for the party's troubles keeps circling back to two things: Muslims and antisemitism.
Opinion I think that explanation could not be further from the truth. The reasons Republicans are about to lose are sitting in plain sight: a war they promised not to start, a president whose family has made billions while he holds office, files they swore to release and didn't, prices that keep climbing, and a coalition they spent two years tearing apart. In the sections that follow, I'm going to lay out each of those reasons one at a time, with the receipts. Then I'm going to look at what the party's own voices say went wrong, and why I think they have it exactly backwards.
"No New Wars"
For years, one promise sat at the center of Donald Trump's political identity: he would not drag this country into another war in the Middle East. On the campaign trail, he told a crowd in Pennsylvania that he would not send Americans "to fight and die in stupid foreign wars that never end."[1] On election night in November 2024, when he no longer needed a single vote, he said it again: "I'm not going to start a war, I'm going to stop wars."[2]
On February 28, 2026, the United States and Israel launched joint airstrikes on Iran.[3] The strikes killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei along with several other Iranian officials.[4] Trump never sought congressional approval.[5]
It was not a quick operation. A two week ceasefire brokered by Pakistan took effect on April 8.[6] In June, the presidents of the United States and Iran signed a memorandum meant to end the war.[4] Fighting resumed anyway on July 8.[6] At least 18 American service members had been killed as of August.[7] By September, the Department of Defense estimated the war's cost at $43.6 billion.[4]
Congress eventually pushed back. The House passed a war powers resolution 215 to 208 on June 3, and the Senate followed 50 to 48 on June 23, directing the president to end U.S. military involvement in Iran.[5] But it was a concurrent resolution, which means it carried no binding enforcement power, and Trump has maintained that he never needed Congress's permission in the first place.[5]
When NBC's Kristen Welker asked Trump in June what happened to his promise, he answered, "I didn't guarantee no war."[8] The record I just laid out says he did, more than once. I walked through the full history of how this war started, and how its justifications kept moving, in my earlier investigation, A War That Was Never Ours.
The American people saw through it from the start. A CNN poll taken right after the first strikes found nearly six in ten Americans disapproved.[9] Three months in, support had fallen to 34 percent, and a CNN analysis found Americans turned against it much faster than they did against the wars in Iraq or Vietnam.[10] By July, 68 percent of Americans told the Washington Post and Ipsos that the war was not worth fighting.[10] This month, Pew found that 65 percent disapprove of how Trump is handling it.[11]
Opinion I believe this is the most unpopular war in American history. Every war this country has fought in my lifetime started with the public behind it, at least at first. This one never had that. There was no rally around the flag, no honeymoon, no moment where the country came together behind the mission. Americans opposed it on day one, and they have opposed it more every month since.
And it isn't over. This week, ABC News reported that the American and Israeli militaries have drawn up plans to resume joint strikes on Iran, almost certainly after the midterm election.[12] Trump has publicly ruled out strikes before the vote and said the conflict will "end immediately after the elections," and the Wall Street Journal reported he told aides he expects to resume bombing once the midterms are over.[13]
Opinion Think about what that timing means. The plan is to ask for your vote first and restart the war second. If the people running this war believed the public supported it, they wouldn't need to wait until the ballots are counted.
Whose War Is It?
If you want to understand who this war was really fought for, start with the man who campaigned for it hardest.
Lindsey Graham spent years pushing for exactly this. In May 2024, on NBC's Meet the Press, he compared Israel's war in Gaza to America's atomic bombings of Japan and said, "Give Israel the bombs they need to end the war."[1] Two years later, nine days into the Iran war, he went on Sean Hannity's show on Fox News and declared, "I'm with Israel, until my dying day."[2] In the same appearance, he told the country his plan for the voters he was elected to represent: "I go back to South Carolina, and I'm asking them to send their sons and daughters over to the Middle East."[3]
Read that again. A United States senator, on national television, promising to ask his own constituents for their children.
Graham died in July.[4] His sister Darline now holds his seat and is in a tight race to keep it on November 3.[5] The voters of South Carolina will get to weigh in on his legacy after all.
Opinion I don't take any pleasure in criticizing a man who can no longer answer for himself. But his words don't stop mattering because he's gone. Graham said out loud what Washington usually says behind closed doors, that his loyalty ran to a foreign government first, and that the price would be paid by somebody else's sons and daughters. He never asked his own voters what they wanted. He told them what they owed.
He wasn't alone in seeing it that way, and the clearest dissent came from inside Trump's own administration. Joe Kent, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, resigned less than three weeks into the war. His letter didn't hedge: "Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it's clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby."[6] The White House called the idea that Israel goaded Trump into the war "insulting and laughable."[7] Trump called Kent weak on security.[7] The White House called Kent's letter false and insisted Iran was an imminent threat. But Sen. Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said Kent was right on that point: there was no credible evidence of an imminent threat.[8]
Follow the Money
Kent named a lobby. Here's what that lobby is doing right now, in this election.
AIPAC's super PAC, the United Democracy Project, is one of the largest outside spenders of the 2026 midterms. It has spent $54 million in congressional primaries, part of a pro-Israel network spend that tops $71 million.[9] Through June, it had raised about $104 million for this cycle.[10] And a Politico analysis found it shielded more than 40 percent of its primary spending through pop-up and pass-through PACs, so voters wouldn't see its name on the ads.[10]
It doesn't care which party you belong to. It spent $2.3 million against Tom Malinowski, a center-left New Jersey Democrat, after he said he would be open to conditioning aid to Israel.[11] Its spokesperson branded Thomas Massie, a Kentucky Republican, "the most anti-Israel Republican in the House."[10] Step out of line on Israel, in either party, and the money comes for you.
Then there's the money that doesn't need a PAC. Larry Ellison, one of the richest men in the world, is one of the top donors to Friends of the Israel Defense Forces, a group that funds programs for Israeli soldiers, and is close enough to Benjamin Netanyahu that Netanyahu has vacationed on Ellison's private island in Hawaii.[12] Ellison's family company, Skydance, was buying Paramount, the owner of CBS News. While that sale was waiting on the Trump administration's approval, Paramount agreed to settle Trump's lawsuit against CBS for $16 million. Regulators signed off on the sale weeks later.[13]
Opinion So here's the arrangement as I see it. A lobby spends record sums to make sure no one in Congress, Republican or Democrat, dares to question the money going to a foreign military. A billionaire friend of that country's prime minister buys a major news network right after it settles with the president. And the bill for the war goes to American taxpayers, American soldiers, and American families paying more at the pump. They fund the war. You fight it. They tell you it's about American security. Joe Kent sat in the room where those threats were assessed, and he told you it wasn't.
Venezuela and the Oil
Before I say anything else, I want to be clear: this is not a defense of Nicolás Maduro. The United States and many other countries stopped recognizing him as Venezuela's legitimate leader after the disputed 2024 presidential election.[1] I have no interest in carrying water for him. My question is narrower: why did we actually go in?
On January 3, 2026, American forces raided Maduro's home in Caracas, seized him and his wife, Cilia Flores, and flew them to New York.[2] He pleaded not guilty to four counts: narco-terrorism, conspiracy to import cocaine, and possession of machine guns and destructive devices.[3] He has been held in pretrial detention in Brooklyn ever since, and his trial is set for June 1, 2027.[1]
The official story was drugs. So let's look at the drugs.
Venezuela has never been listed as a source or transit country for fentanyl in any edition of the DEA's own National Drug Threat Assessment.[4] Fentanyl was involved in 65 percent of American overdose deaths in 2024.[4] Cocaine is a different story, but not by much. According to DEA data, only 8 percent of the cocaine leaving South America by sea in 2019 traveled the Caribbean corridor north from Venezuela.[5] And a Brookings Institution expert noted that much of the cocaine moving through Venezuela is headed to Europe, not here.[4]
Then the story got weaker in court. The 2020 indictment named Maduro as the leader of the "Cartel de los Soles," a cartel the government said was using cocaine as a weapon against America. The new indictment, unsealed the day he was captured, cut the references to the Cartel de los Soles from 32 to two, recast it as a system of "patronage" inside Venezuela's government, and dropped the claim that it was weaponizing drugs against the United States.[6] As Drop Site News put it, the Justice Department quietly abandoned the claim that the cartel existed as a formal organization at all.[7] Experts on Venezuela say the "Cartel de los Soles" was never an organization at all. It's a nickname Venezuelan media coined in 1993 for corrupt generals. The Trump administration designated it a terrorist group anyway, then quietly dropped the claim in court.[8]
The administration spent months telling Americans Maduro ran a terrorist cartel. When prosecutors had to write that down for a federal judge, they wouldn't. What's left is a "narco-terrorism" charge that only works because the same administration had just relabeled the cartels he allegedly worked with as terrorist organizations.[8] What didn't shrink was the oil.
Trump never hid it. Two weeks before the raid, he told reporters Venezuela "threw our companies out, and we want it back."[9] He was referring to the oil industry Venezuela nationalized in 1976, when companies like Exxon and Gulf Oil were major players, and to the billions in compensation Exxon Mobil and ConocoPhillips say they're still owed for the assets Hugo Chávez seized from them in 2007.[10] Five days after the raid, he told the New York Times, "We're going to be using oil, and we're going to be taking oil."[11] He also threatened another strike if Venezuela didn't cooperate with opening its oil industry.[3]
Venezuela got the message. The country's new acting president, Delcy Rodríguez, was Maduro's own vice president. On the day of the raid, she insisted Maduro was still Venezuela's "only" president, then turned around and offered Washington her cooperation.[12] Trump said she was "willing to do what we think is necessary to make Venezuela great again."[13] Under pressure from the administration, her government passed a law ending the state oil company's monopoly and handing private companies control over oil production and sales.[14] In August, she announced a 25 year deal that Trump said gives the United States majority control of 65 billion barrels of Venezuelan oil.[15]
And then something stranger happened. In 2009, Hugo Chávez cut diplomatic ties with Israel over the war in Gaza.[16] For seventeen years, Chavista Venezuela was one of Israel's loudest critics in the hemisphere. Within weeks of the raid, Venezuelan crude was shipped to an Israeli refinery for the first time since 2020, a report Rodríguez's government dismissed as "fake news."[18][19] By August, after Israel sent an aid team following twin earthquakes in Venezuela, the two countries had restored consular relations.[16][17] One analyst writing for Al Jazeera concluded that Rodríguez was courting Israel to secure Washington's support.[20]
Opinion Put it all together. A raid justified by a drug war that the DEA's own data doesn't support. An indictment that shrank as soon as prosecutors had to prove it. A president who told us, out loud and on the record, that he wanted the oil back. And a government installed in the aftermath that figured out, almost immediately, that the fastest way to win Washington's favor was to warm up to Israel. The road to Washington now runs through Jerusalem, and even Caracas knows it. This was never about fentanyl. It was about oil, and Americans were told a story about drugs so they wouldn't ask.
Gaza: The Policy That Survived the Election
There is one policy in Washington that never changes, no matter who wins. I want to show you what it looks like across two administrations.
It started on October 7, 2023, when Hamas-led fighters attacked Israel and killed 1,195 people, 815 of them civilians.[1] Hamas is a terrorist organization, and nothing in this section changes that. What followed is the subject of this section.
Under Joe Biden, the weapons kept flowing. In August 2024, Secretary of State Antony Blinken approved a $20 billion arms package for Israel, including fighter jets and missiles, while critics pointed out that the administration refused to use those weapons as leverage to secure a ceasefire.[2]
Then Donald Trump took office, and the policy didn't soften. It accelerated. Biden had paused one shipment of 2,000-pound bombs in 2024 over civilian casualties in Gaza. Trump lifted that hold after taking office. His administration later used an emergency determination to skip the usual congressional review for nearly $3 billion in arms sales to Israel, including more than 35,500 one-ton bomb bodies, and approved another $6.67 billion in sales in January 2026.[3] The Congressional Research Service calculated that his administration approved about $20 billion in arms exports to Israel from January 2025 onward.[4] This month, it moved ahead with another $2.8 billion sale, including 40,000 one-ton bombs, the kind of munitions that have drawn international outrage for the civilian casualties their wide blast radius causes.[4]
Trump will tell you he ended the war. His administration brokered a ceasefire that began on October 10, 2025.[5] Here is what that ceasefire looked like on the ground. The United Nations human rights office verified 1,076 conflict-related deaths in Gaza between the ceasefire and the end of July 2026, including 268 children.[6] It called that level of violence during a supposed ceasefire "simply unfathomable."[7] It also reported that Israeli forces expanded their deployment from about 53 percent of Gaza at the start of the ceasefire to a stated goal of 70 percent.[7] According to Gaza's Health Ministry, at least 74,389 Palestinians have been killed since October 2023, including at least 21,976 children.[6]
In April, Bernie Sanders forced Senate votes on resolutions to block sales of bulldozers and bombs to Israel. Every single Republican voted against them.[8] The bombs kept moving. And the American public has noticed: in June, a Quinnipiac poll found 48 percent of voters believe Washington is too supportive of Israel, the highest figure in the nine years the survey has asked the question.[9]
Opinion This is a genocide. I'm going to say it plainly, because I think the evidence has earned plain language. A United Nations Commission of Inquiry concluded that Israel committed genocide in Gaza.[10] Genocide Watch, an organization that has spent decades tracking atrocities around the world, recognizes it as one.[11] And the killing didn't stop when the ceasefire started. It just stopped making the news.
Opinion Joe Biden armed it. Donald Trump armed it. Republicans in the Senate voted unanimously to keep the bombs moving, and Democratic leaders voted alongside them, which I'll get to later in this piece. This is the one policy both parties will never let you vote on. You can pick a different president every four years, and the same bombs still land on the same people. If you want to know why so many Americans no longer believe a word either party says about this region, start here.
The Epstein Files
Jeffrey Epstein is the one story where both parties have had their hands on the evidence and neither one has delivered. But this section is about the administration that made the loudest promises, so I'm going to start with Donald Trump, and I'm going to start before his second term.
In 2008, Alex Acosta was the U.S. Attorney in Miami when he oversaw a non-prosecution agreement with Epstein. Epstein avoided federal charges and served 13 months in jail.[1] A federal judge later said the deal violated federal law because Acosta never notified Epstein's victims.[2] In 2017, Donald Trump made Acosta his Secretary of Labor. Acosta resigned in July 2019, after federal prosecutors in New York brought new sex trafficking charges against Epstein and his old deal came back under scrutiny.[3] Trump called him a "great" labor secretary on the way out.[2]
A month later, on August 10, 2019, Epstein was dead.[4] He died in federal custody, under Trump's own Justice Department.[5] Trump himself would later suggest Epstein may have been killed.[5]
Then came the campaign. In June 2024, Fox News asked Trump if he would declassify the Epstein files, and he answered, "Yeah, yeah, I would."[6] His campaign's own War Room account posted the clip with the caption: "President Trump says he will DECLASSIFY the 9/11 Files, JFK Files, and Epstein Files."[7] To be fair to the record, Trump never put the Epstein files in a major speech or policy rollout, and he only discussed them when asked.[8] But his campaign chose to advertise that answer to his voters. They wanted the credit.
Once in office, his attorney general, Pam Bondi, told audiences she had a list of Epstein's accomplices "sitting on my desk right now."[9] The Wall Street Journal reported she told Trump in May 2025 that his name appeared in the files. In July, the Justice Department announced it would not release any more files and that the client list didn't exist.[10]
It took an act of Congress to force the issue. In November 2025, Congress passed and Trump signed the Epstein Files Transparency Act, requiring the Justice Department to release its files by December 19, 2025. It missed the deadline.[10] It released more than three million pages in January 2026, but later reporting revealed that documents containing accusations against Trump had been withheld.[10] Democrats on the House Oversight Committee say that's only half of the six million documents the department collected.[11] In June, a federal judge concluded the administration likely violated the law.[12] Even Republicans lost patience. Nancy Mace led a bipartisan 24 to 19 committee vote to subpoena Bondi.[13] Weeks later, Trump fired her.[14]
And the arrests? Since the files were released, there have been none in the United States.[15] The Justice Department's explanation is that there's no credible evidence Epstein's crimes extended to his network. The memo that should explain why no one other than Ghislaine Maxwell was ever charged is the part that's redacted.[15]
There's a part of this that should bother everyone, regardless of party. In 2025, Pam Bondi stood at the White House and told reporters, "There are tens of thousands of videos of Epstein with children or child porn."[16] Her own FBI director, Kash Patel, contradicted her on Joe Rogan's podcast.[16] Then her own Justice Department put it in writing. The July 2025 memo confirmed that the files contain images and videos of victims who are or appear to be minors, plus more than ten thousand downloaded videos and images of child sexual abuse material and other pornography.[17]
Read that word again: downloaded. Epstein didn't produce all of that himself. Someone made it, and it came from somewhere.
According to a complaint filed by Epstein's survivors, investigators reviewed 38,934 images from his devices to prepare for Ghislaine Maxwell's trial. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, which runs the database used to identify children in abuse images, still hasn't finished reviewing the collection. And few if any of the survivors in it have ever been told that Epstein had their images.[18]
Opinion Producing, distributing and possessing child sexual abuse material are federal crimes on their own, whether or not a single famous name ever turns up. So where did ten thousand downloaded files come from? Who produced them? Who did Epstein get them from, and who did he share them with? The attorney general of the United States went on camera, told the country she had her hands on tens of thousands of these videos, and walked away with zero prosecutions. There is no world in which that is acceptable. You don't need a client list to open a child exploitation case. You need the evidence, and by Bondi's own account, they've had it the whole time.
Democrats don't get a pass here either. For four years under Joe Biden, the files sat inside the Justice Department. It took a law passed in Trump's second term, not any decision by the Biden administration, to pry them loose.[10]
Opinion Three administrations. Trump's first, Biden's, and Trump's second. Three chances to tell the public the truth about the most notorious sex trafficker of our lifetime, and three administrations that chose not to. But only one of them ran a campaign account bragging that it would release the files, and only one of them had an attorney general claiming the list was on her desk. That's what makes this a cover-up and not just a failure. They didn't fail to find the truth. They found it, and then they decided you didn't need to see it.
Opinion And here is why it matters for November. Every month the files stay buried, more Americans assume the worst about why. Polling shows it: as of February, more Americans disapproved of Trump's handling of the Epstein investigation than disapproved of his presidency overall.[19] You cannot promise transparency, deliver redactions, arrest nobody, and then act surprised when voters stop believing you.
The Family Business
Every president leaves office richer than he came in. Book deals, speaking fees, the usual. What's happening now is something different. The Trump family isn't cashing in after the presidency. It's cashing in during it.
Most of the money runs through crypto. World Liberty Financial, the crypto venture Trump co-founded with his sons, sends 75 percent of its token sales to a Trump entity, and the president personally owns 70 percent of that entity.[1] According to the Wall Street Journal, World Liberty brought the Trump family at least $1.2 billion in cash over 16 months, plus another $2.25 billion in paper gains.[1] For comparison, Trump's real estate empire took eight years, from 2010 to 2017, to generate $1.2 billion in cash.[1]
Then there are the memecoins, launched just days before he took office. Trump's own financial disclosure shows he earned $635 million in royalties from an entity linked to his memecoin in 2025, along with more than $500 million from World Liberty token sales.[2] A Financial Times investigation found the family's crypto ventures generated more than a billion dollars in pre-tax profit over a single year. When the FT asked Eric Trump about it, he said the real number was "probably more."[3]
Now look at who's buying in. Just days before Trump's inauguration, a UAE firm controlled by Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the country's national security adviser, bought 49 percent of World Liberty for $500 million.[4] The Trump family received $187 million of that upfront.[1] A foreign government official, buying half of the sitting president's family business, days before he took the oath.
And it doesn't stop at crypto. A New Yorker investigation in August 2025 estimated the Trump family will have enriched itself by more than $3.4 billion by the end of this term, counting Trump Organization projects in Saudi Arabia, Oman and the United Arab Emirates, a luxury Boeing 747 gifted by Qatar's royal family, and $2 billion invested by a Saudi fund led by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in Jared Kushner's private equity firm.[5]
Meanwhile, Trump keeps signing policy that helps the industry his family is profiting from. He signed executive orders opening 401(k) retirement plans to crypto and barring federal regulators from restricting crypto companies' access to banking.[6] And in August, the Comptroller of the Currency, whom Trump himself nominated, granted World Liberty preliminary conditional approval for a national trust bank charter.[7]
Asked about the profits, Trump has said he "hasn't looked."[4]
Opinion He doesn't need to look. Everyone else can see it. While Americans are paying more for groceries and gas because of a war he started, the president's family is pulling in billions from crypto tokens, foreign royals and Gulf sovereign wealth funds. Some of the people writing those checks have business before his administration. Some of them are foreign governments. And the man setting the rules for that industry owns the biggest piece of it.
Opinion For four years, Republicans could not stop talking about Hunter Biden. They held hearings. They launched an impeachment inquiry into whether Joe Biden profited from his son's business deals.[8] Their whole case came down to one idea: a president's family should not be cashing in on his name with foreign money.
Opinion They were right. And then they did the same thing on a scale Hunter Biden never came close to. Hunter got a board seat at a Ukrainian energy company and made his money in the millions. The Trump family is making billions, from crypto tokens bought by a foreign government official, from Gulf royals, and from a Saudi crown prince's fund, while the president is still in office. Hunter Biden was a private citizen trading on his father's name. Donald Trump is the sitting president, and he's the one getting paid.
Opinion Biden pardoned his son for everything from 2014 through 2024 on his way out the door.[9] That was indefensible, and I'll say so as loudly as anyone. But the same Republicans who called Hunter Biden the face of corruption have looked at billions flowing to the Trump family and said nothing at all.
Opinion Instead, today, eleven days before the midterms, two former FBI officials surrendered on charges of lying to Congress about the bureau's handling of Hunter Biden's laptop.[10] Their lawyers say the Justice Department is trying to revive the scandal for the election.[11] This is the same department that said it had tens of thousands of child abuse videos in Epstein's files and never charged a single person. It found time to arrest two people over a laptop from 2020, right before you vote. Hunter Biden is still useful to them. Accountability for their own side isn't.
The Grocery Bill
If there's one thing Donald Trump was elected to fix, it was prices. Americans spent the Biden years watching their grocery bills climb, and they voted for the man who said he would bring them back down. Here's where things stand.
In September, consumer prices rose 3.7 percent from a year earlier, up from 3.4 percent in August and above what economists expected.[1] The jump was big enough that markets started pricing in the chance that the Federal Reserve would raise interest rates, not cut them.[1]
The biggest driver is the one you see every time you fill up your car. Gas averaged $4.33 a gallon in September, according to AAA, well above the previous September record of $3.83, set in 2023. By October 1, it had climbed to $4.41.[2] One hundred days into the war, oil was trading above $96 a barrel.[3]
Americans know exactly where that came from. In an August University of Massachusetts Amherst poll, four in five Americans said the Iran war has increased food and gas prices. Three out of four said Trump is not handling inflation well.[4] This month, Pew found that higher gas and fuel prices are Americans' single biggest concern about the war, cited by 73 percent of the public, up from 69 percent in March.[5]
And the White House's answer has been to point everywhere except the mirror. Trump promised in June that prices would be "coming down as soon as the war's over."[3] The war isn't over. Earlier this month, he blamed rising oil prices on Ukrainian strikes on Russian refineries instead of the war he started.[6] This week, he accused Iran of "making up fake hits" to drive up oil prices before the midterms.[6]
Opinion Think about that last one for a second. The president started a war in the region that ships a huge share of the world's oil, the price of gas went up, and his explanation is that Iran is faking attacks to make him look bad before the election. Even if that were true, he'd be admitting the war he started gave Iran the power to raise your gas prices whenever it wants.
Opinion Americans didn't vote for a war. They voted for cheaper groceries. Instead they got a war that made everything more expensive, and a president who promises it'll all get cheaper the moment the war ends, while his own military draws up plans to restart it after the election. You can't promise lower prices and a longer war at the same time. Voters have noticed, and that's not something any amount of talk about Islam or antisemitism is going to fix.
The Coalition They Threw Away
I want to be honest about something before I go any further. I voted for Donald Trump in 2024. I never believed "no new wars" was a realistic promise. No president controls the whole world. But I voted for him because he promised, specifically, not to take us to war with Iran. That was the line. And it wasn't just me. The coalition that put him back in the White House was built on people who were sick of exactly this kind of war.
Comedian and podcaster Dave Smith, who endorsed Trump in 2024, put it plainly on Joe Rogan's show: in 2024, Trump won the popular vote, every swing state, and, as Smith put it, "the youth and the culture."[1] Then he said what a lot of us were thinking: "That whole coalition has been destroyed over this war."[2] He has since predicted that Democrats will take over in the midterms.[3]
Look at who walked away.
Joe Kent. A Trump appointee who ran the National Counterterrorism Center, Kent wrote in his resignation letter that he backed Trump in all three of his campaigns because Trump understood that the wars in the Middle East were a trap that robbed America of its patriots.[4] Then he resigned over this one. Trump's response was to call him weak on security.[5]
Marjorie Taylor Greene. Once one of Trump's fiercest defenders in Congress, she resigned this year and has said she no longer supports the Republican Party.[6] When Lindsey Graham said he'd ask South Carolina parents for their children, Greene told voters to send Graham to the front lines instead.[7]
Tucker Carlson. The most influential voice on the right for years, Carlson has become one of the war's most vocal critics, amplifying Kent's dismay while still saying he likes Trump.[8]
Thomas Massie. Massie, Greene and Carlson all clashed with Trump over Iran.[6]
Joe Rogan. The host of the biggest podcast in the country, and the man whose 2024 interview with Trump reached millions of young men, became one of the prominent voices opposing the war.[9]
Tulsi Gabbard. Trump's own Director of National Intelligence was sidelined from administration discussions on Israel and Iran.[10] She resigned in May, citing her husband's cancer diagnosis.[11] Reuters reported that the White House had in fact pushed her out.[12] I'm not going to put words in her mouth about why she left. But a woman who spent years warning against exactly this war is no longer in the room where it's being run.
RFK Jr. He's still in the administration, but his movement isn't happy. Kennedy spent years fighting glyphosate, even winning a landmark case against Monsanto, and then publicly backed Trump's executive order to boost its production.[13] A leading activist in his own movement called the order "a betrayal."[14] One voter told PBS she had to hold her nose to vote for the Trump ticket, because her vote was really a vote for RFK Jr.[15]
Opinion I know plenty of people who voted for RFK Jr. first and Trump second, and the word I hear most from them now is "spineless." They didn't sign up for a man who spent his career fighting chemical companies and then signed off on helping them. They signed up for someone who'd stand his ground, and he didn't.
Opinion This is what the party refuses to understand. In 2024, Trump pulled together something no Republican had managed in decades: independents, young men, disaffected Democrats, libertarians, anti-war conservatives, and health-freedom voters, all in one coalition. Every one of those groups had a reason to believe him. The anti-war voters believed him on Iran. The MAHA voters believed him on chemicals. The young voters believed he was different. Two years later, the people who built that coalition are the ones leaving it, and the party's response has been to call them traitors, weak and low IQ instead of asking why. I'm one of the people who believed him. I'm not leaving because of antisemitism or because the party didn't talk enough about Islam. I'm leaving because he started the exact war he promised me he wouldn't.
What They Think Went Wrong
So far, I've laid out what I believe is actually driving voters away: the war, the money, the files, the prices, and the coalition. Now I want to let the other side make its case, in its own words.
Start with Laura Loomer. This summer, she posted that the GOP needs to talk about what she called the real root cause of everything: "Islam. The more you ignore it, the more the GOP will lose."[1] She hasn't let up since. In August, she called it "your daily reminder of why it's a bad idea to elect Muslims to office in America."[2] This week, she wrote, "The GOP needs to start talking more about Islam. We must address the Muslim problem in America."[3] Writing to Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, she called Islam an "entire death cult."[4] And on her own show in June, she said, "Maybe, just maybe, it's not such a great idea to allow for Muslims to be involved in our political process in America," and followed it with, "Maybe we need another 9/11," because, she said, the clips she had shown weren't going to be enough to convince the Democrats.[5]
This isn't some random account with no reach. Donald Trump stood on stage at a rally in Alabama this month and called her a great Republican strategist.[6]
Then there's Mark Levin. His version is different, but it lands in the same place. On Muslims, he asked on X in October whether the country could ban the Muslim Brotherhood, CAIR and Hamas, and "then export their followers back to where they came from."[7] A few days later he declared, "New York City, London, and Paris now conquered Islamist cities."[8]
But Levin's real specialty is antisemitism, and who he decides is guilty of it. In September, he went after former Congressman Matt Gaetz, accusing him of "endless antisemitic rants." In the very same post, he explained what the fight was actually about: "We disagree on the war. I support POTUS. He supports Iran."[9] In October, he called Tucker Carlson a "fraud, nut, sellout, America- and Trump-hating anti-Semite."[10] Days later, he wrote that Carlson is "thoroughly evil and full of hate for our country, for millions of Christians and, of course, Jews," and warned Vice President JD Vance that the friendship would be an anchor around his neck in 2028.[11]
Trump has his back too. When Levin came under fire from other conservatives this spring, Trump posted that he was a great American patriot and warned that those who speak ill of him "will quickly fall by the wayside."[12]
They aren't alone. At the Republican Jewish Coalition's gala last November, Sen. Ted Cruz warned that the party faced "an existential crisis" as Carlson, Candace Owens and Nick Fuentes built their audiences.[13] Rep. Randy Fine called Carlson "the most dangerous antisemite in America."[14]
So that's the diagnosis from inside the movement. The party is losing because it won't talk enough about Islam, and because antisemites have infiltrated the right. Notice what's missing: the war, the prices, the Epstein files, the billions. Barely a word.
Opinion There's a real hypocrisy at the center of all this. The same voices who warn constantly about religious hatred against Jews are, in the same breath, telling Americans that Muslims shouldn't hold office, that Islam is a death cult, and that it might take another 9/11 to convince Democrats. You cannot credibly fight one form of religious bigotry while spreading another. Millions of Muslim Americans are just trying to live their lives, the same as the rest of us. Antisemitism is real, and so is this. If you only object to bigotry when it's aimed at the people you like, you were never against bigotry. You were just picking a side.
Opinion And look at how Levin uses the word. He told you himself that his fight with Gaetz is about the war. He told you Carlson's sin is opposing the war and turning on Trump. Disagree with Mark Levin about Iran and you get called an antisemite. That isn't fighting antisemitism. That's using it as a weapon against anyone who won't fall in line. In the next section, I'm going to explain why I think that makes the real problem worse.
Why That Explanation Is Backwards
I want to be careful here, because this is the part of the piece that matters most to me and the part that's easiest to twist.
Antisemitism in America is real, and it's getting worse. The Anti-Defamation League recorded just over 8,400 antisemitic incidents from 2020 through 2022. Since 2023, it has recorded more than 24,500.[1] Total incidents fell in 2025, but incidents involving deadly weapons rose 39 percent, and the ADL called it one of the most violent years for American Jews on record.[1] According to FBI data, hate crimes against Jews made up 70 percent of all religion-based hate crimes in 2024.[1] Earlier this year, Jewish worshippers were attacked at Temple Israel in Michigan.[2]
So on one point, Levin and Loomer are right. This is a crisis. Where they're wrong is about the cause.
Look at what changed. From 2020 through 2022, only about 10 percent of the incidents the ADL recorded were related to Israel or Zionism. In 2024, it was 58 percent.[3] The hatred didn't rise at random. It rose in step with the wars. And it happened again this year: in the first week of the Iran war, antisemitic incidents around the world jumped 34 percent, and nearly half were tied directly to the conflict, including conspiracy theories blaming Israel or Jews for the fighting.[4]
Look at young Republicans, too. An April Pew poll found 57 percent of Republicans aged 18 to 49 now view Israel unfavorably, compared with 25 percent of those 50 and older.[5] A University of Maryland Critical Issues poll found only 22 percent of Republicans aged 18 to 34 say Israel's actions in Gaza are justified.[5] And Quinnipiac found that the share of Republicans who say the United States is too supportive of Israel has tripled since October 7.[5]
Levin's explanation is that influencers like Tucker Carlson poisoned these young voters. But a poll by the Washington Free Beacon, a pro-Israel conservative outlet, taken in August 2025, before the Iran war, found that young conservatives who regularly consume content from anti-Israel figures on the right did not significantly change their views on Israel.[6] That same poll found young conservatives still viewed Israel largely positively at the time, which cuts against the idea that the right's young voters had already turned. But it cuts even harder against Levin: the podcasts weren't moving anyone. What changed after that poll was the war. It isn't the podcasts. It's the policy. Young Americans watched Gaza, they watched their own country get pulled into a war with Iran, and they drew their own conclusions.
Before I go any further, I want to say this as clearly as I can: every antisemitic attack is the fault of the person who carries it out, and no one else. Not Israel's government, not American Jews, nobody. Sen. Jacky Rosen put it well this summer: "Blaming Jewish Americans for the violence and hate they're facing is not just wrong, it provides an excuse to those perpetuating these anti-Jewish hate crimes."[7] She's right. Explaining a pattern isn't excusing it.
Opinion But you can't fight a problem you refuse to diagnose. And this is where I think Republican leaders and their allies in the media are making it worse. For years, they've fused two completely different things: the government of Israel and the Jewish people. They treat every criticism of a war, a bombing campaign or an arms sale as an attack on Jews. That does two terrible things at once. It cheapens the word "antisemitism" until it means nothing more than "disagrees with me about Israel." And it tells ordinary Jewish Americans' neighbors that Jews and the Israeli government are one and the same, which is exactly what the real antisemites have been saying all along.
Opinion Look at what happens when the label gets stretched that far. Mark Levin calls Matt Gaetz an antisemite in the same post where he admits the real disagreement is the war. Joe Kent, a Gold Star husband who resigned on principle rather than send more Americans to die in the Middle East, gets treated as a pariah for questioning Israel's influence over that decision. When a man like Kent gets lumped in with people who genuinely hate Jews, the word stops meaning anything, and the people who actually deserve it get cover. You can't sound the alarm on every critic of a war and then expect anyone to listen when the real thing shows up.
Opinion And here's who pays for it. Not Mark Levin. Not the donors funding AIPAC's primary campaigns. Not the senators voting for more bombs. The bill lands on Jewish families in Michigan and New York and everywhere else, who never voted for any of this, who never got a say in what Israel's government does, and who are now being blamed for a war by people who can't tell the difference between a government and a people. The people funding this war aren't the ones who pay for it. Republican leaders say antisemitism is costing them the election. I think their own conduct is feeding the very antisemitism they claim to be fighting, and voters can see that too.
The Other Side of the Ballot
I said at the start of this piece that I'd hold both parties to the same standard. So let me be clear about what a Democratic win in November would and wouldn't mean.
It would not mean voters have fallen back in love with the Democratic Party. Almost a year before this election, congressional Democrats hit an 18 percent approval rating, the lowest Quinnipiac had ever recorded, and even among Democrats, only 43 percent approved of their own party in Congress.[1] Today the party is still underwater on favorability, at 44 percent favorable and 54 percent unfavorable.[2]
Voters have been telling Democrats exactly what's wrong for two years. A poll commissioned by a Democratic super PAC, Unite the Country, found voters describing the party as "woke," "out of touch" and "weak."[3] On transgender policy for minors, an analysis on The Democratic Strategist found that just 18 percent of moderate voters back the party's default position.[4] The issue isn't at the top of most voters' lists; in an April Fox News poll, fewer than 1 percent called it the most important issue facing the country.[5] But that cuts both ways. Voters aren't choosing Democrats because of their cultural politics. They're choosing them in spite of it.
And on the issue at the heart of this piece, Democratic leadership hasn't exactly covered itself in glory. When Bernie Sanders forced votes to block bomb and bulldozer sales to Israel in April, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer voted against both.[6] When the Senate had a chance to rein in the Iran war in May, and again in July, it was a Democrat, John Fetterman, who cast the deciding vote to keep it going. Both measures failed by a single vote, 49 to 50. And when the Senate finally did pass a war powers resolution in June, 50 to 48, Fetterman was the only Democrat to vote against it.[7]
So why are Democrats about to win anyway? Look at where they're winning.
In Texas, a state that hasn't sent a Democrat to the U.S. Senate in more than three decades, Democrat James Talarico leads Republican Ken Paxton 48 to 46 in the latest University of Houston poll, and independents favor him by 28 points.[8] A Siena College poll has Talarico up four.[9]
In Ohio, Vivek Ramaswamy, the Trump-endorsed candidate for governor, is trailing Democrat Amy Acton 50 to 43 in a new Marist poll.[10] Some of that is his own doing. His campaign is spending $4 million on an ad featuring Acton's estranged mother, Donna Arthur, calling her daughter a liar.[11] Acton has said she was removed from her mother's custody at age 12 for "severe abuse and neglect and sexual abuse."[12] She has been estranged from her mother since 1978, when Acton testified in court against her stepfather and her mother took his side.[13] Acton's brother, Philip Stearns, has spoken publicly about the abuse the two of them endured as children.[14] That is the woman Ramaswamy's campaign put on television to tell Ohio voters her daughter can't be trusted.
Polling averages show Democrats competitive or ahead in Senate races in Ohio, Iowa, Michigan and Georgia, and even within striking distance in Kansas and in Nebraska, where Democrats have lined up behind an independent.[15] And this month, Sen. Mike Rounds of South Dakota, who leads his race in the Silver Bulletin polling average and by 21 points in an October Quantus Insights poll, scrubbed mentions of Trump from his campaign website.[16]
Opinion Let that sink in. Republicans aren't losing to a better Democratic Party. They're losing to the same Democratic Party that lost to them two years ago. Same leaders, same cultural baggage, same weakness that voters complained about in 2024. The Democrats haven't adjusted a thing on the cultural issues voters rejected in 2024. They haven't had to. Trump is doing all the work for them.
Opinion How badly do you have to blow it for a Democrat to win a Senate seat in Texas? How badly do you have to blow it to lose Ohio? In 2024, Trump had the popular vote, every swing state, the young vote and the culture. Two years later, a party voters still don't like is walking back into power without changing anything, because the coalition that beat them is gone. That's the real cost of everything in this piece. It isn't only that Republicans are going to lose. It's that the people who wanted something different from both parties are about to be handed the same old Democrats by default, and the Republicans broke their promises so badly that voters will take them anyway.
You Decide
I've laid out my case. Now it's yours.
Republicans will tell you they're about to lose because the party won't talk enough about Islam. They'll tell you antisemites have infiltrated the right. Mark Levin and Laura Loomer have been saying it for months, and the president has stood behind both of them.
So here's what I'd ask you to weigh before November 3.
Did you vote for a war with Iran? Because you got one, from a president who said on election night that he wasn't going to start a war, and whose own military is planning to restart it as soon as the ballots are counted.
Did you vote to send American troops into Venezuela for oil, on a cartel story the government's own prosecutors wouldn't put in writing?
Did you vote for the same bombs to keep falling on Gaza, no matter who sits in the White House?
Did you vote for an attorney general who told the country she had tens of thousands of videos of child abuse, and then never charged a single person?
Did you vote for a president's family to pull in billions from crypto tokens, Gulf royals and a foreign government official, after four years of Republicans telling you Hunter Biden was the face of corruption?
Did you vote for $4 gas and a grocery bill that keeps climbing?
Did you vote for a party that would rather call you an antisemite for questioning a war than admit it broke its word?
I didn't. I voted for the man who promised me he wouldn't take us to war with Iran. That promise is the only reason he had my vote, and it's the reason he doesn't have it anymore.
The people who built Trump's coalition aren't leaving because of Muslims or because of Jews. They're leaving because they were lied to. And the saddest part of this whole story is who's waiting to take their place: a Democratic Party that hasn't changed a thing since 2024, that voters still don't like, and that's about to walk back into power without having to earn it.
Neither party is going to fix this for you. They've both shown you exactly who they are. The question is whether you're still willing to look away.
You decide.