Republicans have a foreign policy problem. Whatever the outcome of the war in Iran, the GOP keeps drifting further from the issue that matters most to U.S. voters: affordability. Off-year elections just demonstrated that housing, health care, and education are paramount to voters who struggling to make ends meet—yet President Donald Trump has turned his attention overseas. It started with Venezuela, where U.S. forces seized President Nicolás Maduro and brought him back to the United States for trial.
But now Trump has raised the stakes further, joining Israel in a massive operation against Iran that killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and plunged the region into chaos. The bombing campaign has only intensified, and Iran’s regime—which replaced Khamenei with his even more hardline son—has retaliated by launching missiles across the region and choking off oil shipments through the Strait of Hormuz. Oil prices have skyrocketed and markets have tumbled. For ordinary Americans, the consequence of the chaos is simple: Prices go up, including at the gas pump.
The war has been deeply unpopular from the start. Republicans back the operation, but balk at deploying ground troops, which becomes more likely as the conflict intensifies. Some of the right’s biggest media voices, including podcaster Joe Rogan, have turned against Trump. And Democrats and Independents, who together make up more than half of the electorate, are strongly opposed.
With rare exceptions (including the 1942 or 2002 midterms, which both followed attacks on U.S. soil), wartime presidents do not deliver electoral success for their party. And when voters sense the president is more focused abroad than at home, they punish him for it.
This can hold even after a successful military operation, as President George H.W. Bush learned in 1992. His political downfall is a warning to Republicans and a reminder to Democrats: Stay focused on the economy.
When Operation Desert Storm ended on Feb. 28, 1991, Bush and the GOP seemed invulnerable. The operation had a single objective: Expel Iraqi forces from Kuwait, which Saddam Hussein had invaded in August 1990. Hussein’s invasion had drawn immediate international condemnation, threatening regional stability and global oil supplies. Bush, elected in 1988 to succeed Ronald Reagan, had responded by assembling a multinational coalition to drive Hussein out by force.
The U.S. president mounted an aggressive domestic campaign to rally support for the war. While Democrats warned that Iraq could become another Vietnam—a quagmire still vivid to the generation then holding power in Washington—Bush vowed to end Vietnam syndrome (which he perceived as Democratic resistance to ever enter into another major foreign policy entanglement) once and for all. When Congress voted to authorize force on Jan. 12, 1991, 45 Senate Democrats and 86 House Democrats voted no, instead pushing the government to give sanctions more time to work. Republicans united behind the president.
Operation Desert Storm did not turn out to be another Vietnam. The campaign was fought primarily through air power and special operations forces, and though 148 Americans died in combat, victory came swiftly. Hussein’s forces, including the much-feared Republican Guard, were routed. Some fled. Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf’s candid and humorous press conferences turned into must-see television; the commander of the United States Central Command proved highly effective at walking the public through the progress of the war. There were foreign policymakers who criticized the administration’s decision to stop short of Baghdad and leave Hussein in power. Yet most Americans—who had watched the conflict unfold in eerie imagery on cable television that evoked video games, giving rise to the label of the first “cable war”—Bush had delivered a striking triumph. U.S. military power was back.
Bush and the Republicans reminded Americans that many Democrats had voted against authorizing force. When Bush addressed a joint session of Congress on March 6, 1991, with his approval ratings soaring to 89 percent in Gallup polls, Republicans signaled their support by wearing pins that read: “I voted with the president.” Democrats scrambled to survive being seeing as the party that voted against U.S. military power, and more importantly, military success.
As Bush looked ahead to 1992 and his reelection campaign, many prominent Democrats—such as House Majority Leader Richard Gephardt and New York Gov. Mario Cuomo, chose not to run for president, believing the race was unwinnable. The resulting vacuum opened the door for a little-known Democrat, Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton, who entered the contest and ultimately won the nomination.
Political conditions quickly turned. The support Bush had built turned out to be paper thin, particularly as the economy had been in a serious recession. Several factors triggered the downturn: The Federal Reserve had kept interest rates high throughout the late 1980s, a savings and loan crisis required a massive government bailout, and oil prices spiked following Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. The pain was persistent. Unemployment climbed from 5.2 percent in the summer of 1990 to 6.9 percent a year later, peaking at 7.8 percent in June 1992, more than a year after the recession had officially ended.
For his part, Bush seemed unable to stop reminding voters how out of touch he was with working Americans. In December 1991, visiting a General Motors plant near Dallas on the eve of massive layoffs, he sat down to a roadside lunch of chicken-fried steak and potatoes at Cafe 121. The photo-op was going well until he pulled out a wad of cash to cover the $48 bill and announced, “Of course I’m buying, I’m loaded.”
Clinton, whose team posted a sign in the campaign office reading, “The economy, stupid,” kept hammering away at the suffering Americans were experiencing. He drew on his record as governor to speak with voters about the struggles they faced—struggles he had witnessed firsthand among his own constituents—and promised to make bread-and-butter issues his priority. In his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention, Clinton said: “Tonight 10 million of our fellow Americans are out of work, tens of millions more work harder for lower pay.”
The Democrats were helped by a primary challenge from right-wing speechwriter and pundit Pat Buchanan, who attacked his fellow Republican as “King George,” invoking Bush’s patrician background and painting him as a leader out of touch with ordinary Americans. Bush defeated Buchanan in the primary, but the damage had been done.
Even though the recession officially ended in March 1991, during the general election campaign, Bush could not shake the perception that the economy was still faltering and that he cared far more about foreign policy than domestic concerns. Indeed, many Americans were less concerned about the recession than the fact the country seemed to be bleeding jobs to other countries. In 1990, three-fourths of the country believed that the United States was declining in economic power relative to “Japan, West Germany, and other leading Asian and European countries,” according to pollster Louis Harris. Bush blamed the press for these perceptions. “Who is it that convinces the American people … that everything is bad in terms of an economy that has been growing?” the president asked, implicating the media. Voters blamed him.
Two moments crystallized this vulnerability. On Feb. 4, 1992, Bush visited the National Grocers Association convention in Orlando, Florida, where cameras caught him reacting with apparent surprise to a new kind of checkout scanner capable of reading damaged barcodes. The press framed the moment as proof that the president was out of touch and had never encountered an ordinary grocery scanner. Bush and his allies pushed back, arguing he was simply reacting to a genuine technological innovation. But the harm proved hard to undo.
The second damaging moment came on Oct. 15, in Richmond, Virginia, during the town hall debate between Bush, Clinton, and Texas billionaire Ross Perot. The format was unprecedented in presidential politics, and none of the candidates knew quite what to expect. When audience member Marissa Hall asked the candidates how the national debt had personally affected them, Bush visibly struggled. Clinton, on the other hand, walked toward Hall, looked at her directly in the eye, and spoke with disarming empathy: “I’ve been governor of a small state for 12 years. … When people lose their jobs, there’s a good chance I’ll know them by their names. When a factory closes, I know the people who ran it.” Bush, caught on camera glancing at his watch at another moment, never recovered.
By Election Day, three-quarters of voters disapproved of how the president was handling the economy.
The election was a Democratic rout. Bush, who just 18 months earlier had seemed untouchable in the glow of Operation Desert Storm, fell to defeat, winning just 37.5 percent of the popular vote. Democrats retained control of the House and Senate. Voters had rendered their verdict: They wanted a leader who understood the struggle of making ends meet, not a president whose gaze was fixed overseas. Twelve years after Reagan’s supporters claimed that they were leading a “revolution” to change U.S. politics, Democrats had regained control of the government once again.
The political peril for the GOP may be even greater today—and this isn’t even a presidential election year. Unlike Kuwait, Operation Epic Fury was a war of choice; no imminent threat justified it. Yet Trump, backed by the Republican Congress, committed billions of dollars and an as-yet-unknown number of human lives to toppling the Iranian regime. The effort has been deeply controversial from the start, and with no clear objectives and little prospect of meaningful change on the ground, public support shows no signs of recovering.
The war is also making the economy worse. Bush was blamed for letting the economy falter through inattention, but Democrats now have a more direct line of attack: connecting a war of Trump’s own choosing to the economic pain Americans are feeling. If conditions continue to deteriorate, the argument creates a massive opening for a Democratic Party that has already been making significant gains on the issue of affordability.
The neo-isolationist faction of the Republican Party is also far more powerful today than it was under Bush in the early 1990s. What Buchanan represented then—a growing but marginal fringe—has since become a dominant force within the GOP, elevated in no small part by Trump himself. Now that dynamic is working against him. Trump faces a two-front problem: an energized opposition and a restless base that increasingly shares those same economic concerns.
The biggest factor limiting the fallout is that the electorate has grown far more polarized since the 1990s. Today, political opinion shifts far less dramatically in response to news or economic anxiety, regardless of the facts on the ground. The flip side is that smaller electoral shifts can now produce far more dramatic swings in the balance of power, since majorities are held together by razor-thin margins.
War should never be measured by politics alone, yet politics cannot be ignored. Despite the national myth, politics has never stopped at the water’s edge. Experts across both parties have questioned the logic of this war on its own terms, the absence of clear objectives, chaotic civilian leadership, and whether the instability that it has generated was worthwhile, regardless of the brutality of the Iranian regime. What is clear is that the 2026 midterms will be a historic inflection point for U.S. political power. The war in Iran may yet unravel the fragile coalition Trump assembled in 2024, just as a far more successful and popular military operation couldn’t save Reagan-era Republicans in 1992.
