The American People Have Spoken: A Mandate for Peace on Iran

The 2026 midterm elections that took place last Tuesday delivered what can only be described as a resounding indictment of the Trump administration’s policies over the past two years. Exit polls showed a particular focus for voters was the ongoing war in Iran which the United States and Israel launched in February, ostensibly to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon. 

While the strategic objectives of the war have long been vague and often contradictory, its negative impacts have been much clearer. The Pentagon has acknowledged twenty-three Americans have been killed and many hundreds wounded while Iranian deaths, though unknown, runs into the thousands. Iran’s targeting of shipping through the Strait of Hormuz has choked off much of the Gulf’s vital crude oil exports, leading to skyrocketing gas and diesel prices in the US and around the globe. In addition, none of the war’s originally-stated aims have been achieved. The status of Iran’s uranium enrichment program, which was damaged in last year’s more limited US-Israeli bombing campaign, remains largely unchanged. Though Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was killed in the war’s opening strikes, the regime has not collapsed. In fact his son, Mojtaba Khamenei, believed to be even more hardline than his father, succeeded him as Supreme Leader. Iran’s vast arsenal of ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, and drones has also not been neutralized. Finally, the war may have had the opposite of its intended effect, further incentivizing Iranian leaders to finally blow past the nuclear threshold and develop the very weapons the Trump administration says it wants to keep out of Iranian hands. 

With all this in mind, voters went to the polls and delivered the Republican Party its greatest defeat in a midterm election since 1974. Ballots are still being counted, but when the 118th Congress convenes in January, Democrats are projected to hold fifty-six Senate seats and about 260 House seats. 

The political disaster for the Trump administration cannot be chalked up solely to “thermostatic” voting behavior, the whiplash phenomenon in which voters tend to reflexively vote for the opposition party to check the government they previously put in power. The sheer scale of the defeat makes it clear that it was a direct result of a foreign policy that repeatedly rejected pragmatic diplomacy with Iran in favor of a costly war of choice. 

The war had almost immediate and deeply-felt impacts on the average American. It severed most commercial transit in the Strait of Hormuz through which 20% of the world’s crude oil flows, leading not just to higher prices at the pump but downwind price impacts on countless other goods and services that rely on freight trucking or petroleum product inputs. American voters understood this and the Iran War quickly became the “inflation war” in the public mind. Data from a poll sponsored by the Eurasia Group’s Institute for Global Affairs just before the election is striking. About 44% of respondents said a candidate’s support for the war would make them less likely to support that candidate while 56% said they wanted prices to come down even if Trump’s military goals in Iran are not achieved. 

The war has proven just as destructive and needless as its opponents have warned from the beginning. The election’s result is an important vindication of the hard work of Ploughshares’ grantees and partners during the past two years. Over the course of the war, Ploughshares’ Iran coalition partners—including the Center for International Policy, J Street, the Friends Committee on National Legislation, the National Iranian American Council, Win Without War, and many others—have tirelessly pressed Congress to check the administration, successfully pushing through its first bipartisan War Powers Resolution in June.

The election has now opened up even more horizons of opportunity. Ploughshares grantee J Street enjoyed a record-breaking midterm cycle this year, seeing 96% of its endorsees, all pro-peace, win their races, while the Friends Committee on National Legislation is holding a new action alert to pressure legislators to oppose the Trump administration’s bloated $1.5 trillion defense budget, part of a broader effort on Capitol Hill to cut off funding for the war with Iran. Additionally, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s recent impeachment process in the House, though it narrowly failed to advance, was an important sign of Congress’ new resolve to provide a check on the administration’s prosecution of the war.

The American voters have spoken and they have delivered a mandate for peace. Their message to the Trump administration and its accomplices is clear: the war against Iran is making Americans poorer, not safer, and it must finally come to an end.