dhruv
I’m a researcher and writer interested in politics, history, media, and contemporary affairs. My work focuses on digging into facts, examining narratives, and understanding the ideas and events shaping India and its public discourse.
What does a war fought thousands of miles away have to do with a voter in Kansas or Texas? On paper, it’s nothing. Kansas has no sea, no oil tankers stuck in the Strait of Hormuz. But on the night of 3rd November 2026, Kansas voted out its Republican senator. South Carolina and Texas did the same, the states everyone calls Trump country. A Democrat has captured the seat and been sent to the Senate. Why does it matter?
Because these were not swing states. Trump’s party was supposed to win these states easily. So when they turned, something bigger was clearly going on. But what? Republicans might say midterms always go against the President’s party. Even Trump said it a day before the vote. That’s true, but only up to a point. A normal midterm costs a President a few seats. It doesn’t cost him Texas.
Now ask the voters, and you get a different answer. According to the pollsters, around six in ten said that going to war with Iran was the wrong decision. In the summer, eight in ten had said the war made their petrol and groceries more expensive.
So here is the question: was the 2026 midterm election a vote against the Iran war? The answer is yes, but not in the way you might think. Americans didn’t vote directly on foreign policy, but they voted on how the war affected them in their daily lives. In simple words, the war was fought in the Gulf, but it was lost at the petrol pump. Let’s understand how.
First, let’s understand what was at stake. Every two years, Americans vote for all 435 members of the House of Representatives and about a third of the 100-member Senate. In the Indian context, the House of Representatives can be seen as America’s Lok Sabha and the Senate as a much stronger Rajya Sabha. Although India follows a parliamentary system and America a presidential one, the difference matters here. In India, the Prime Minister comes from the party that wins the Lok Sabha, so losing the Lok Sabha means losing the government. But in America, the President is elected separately and serves for four years, no matter who controls Congress. So, the midterms can’t remove Trump, but they can decide whether he can pass laws, approve budgets, and appoint judges. And unlike the Rajya Sabha, whose members are chosen by state legislatures, American senators are elected directly by the people, two from every state, big or small. This time, 35 Senate seats and 36 governors were also on the ballot. Before the vote, Republicans controlled both houses. They had 53 of the 100 Senate seats and a small lead in the House. Democrats needed a net gain of four Senate seats and just three or four House seats to take over. According to the Associated Press, they gained seven Senate seats.
In America, an election commission does not announce results on the night of the vote, unlike in India. Instead, news agencies like the Associated Press (AP) study the counted votes and “call” a race once one side can no longer be caught. Late on election night, AP called the Senate for the Democrats. The seat that took them over the line was Iowa, where Democrat Josh Turek defeated the Republican Ashley Hinson. But why does Iowa matter? It was the same seat that pushed Democrats to 51, the number needed for a majority in the 100-member Senate. Once they won Iowa, Republicans could no longer catch up, even if they won every remaining race. For context, it was a farm state that Trump won easily in 2024, which made it a fitting place for Republicans to lose their majority.
Before Iowa’s results, Democrats had already snatched Republican seats across the country. In Texas, James Talarico defeated Ken Paxton. In Ohio, former senator Sherrod Brown returned to the Senate by defeating Senator Jon Husted. In Kansas, Adam Hamilton became the first Democrat to win a Senate seat in the state since 1932, ending a 94-year Republican winning streak. Annie Andrews won in South Carolina, and Roy Cooper won the open seat in North Carolina. In Alaska and even in Mississippi, one of the most Republican states in America, Democrats were leading a day after the vote.
Then came the House. According to NBC News and CBS News, it reported that Democrats also won control there. This puts Hakeem Jeffries, the Democratic leader in the House, on course to become its Speaker, the person who runs the House and decides which laws come up for a vote. He would be the first African-American to hold the post.
In simple words, Trump’s party didn’t just lose the battlegrounds. It lost its home grounds. Texas, Kansas, South Carolina, Iowa and Ohio are not swing states, where either party can win. These are the states that Republicans usually win without much effort. Losing swing states is normal politics, but losing its strongholds means even its loyal voters have turned away. Trump still has two years in the White House. But for the first time in his second term, he can’t run the country on his own.
To understand why voters turned, we need to go back to February.
On 28 February 2026, the United States and Israel launched a joint attack on Iran. The US called it Operation Epic Fury. Trump said the strikes were meant to “defend the American people by eliminating imminent threats from the Iranian regime” and to stop Iran from ever building a nuclear weapon. On the very first day, Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, was killed. Iran hit back where it would hurt the world most. In early March, Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow sea route between Iran and Oman. Before the war, around a quarter of the world’s seaborne oil and about a fifth of its liquefied natural gas passed through it. Iran laid mines, attacked ships and struck refineries across the Gulf. By the end of March, oil had crossed $100 a barrel. In April, a two-week ceasefire was announced. It did not last long. The two sides could not even agree on what the ceasefire covered, and peace talks collapsed after 21 hours without a deal. The main sticking points were Iran’s uranium enrichment and control of the Strait of Hormuz. Trump responded with a naval blockade of Iran’s ports.
By the end of April, Brent crude briefly touched $126 a barrel, up from about $73 before the war. Then in June, Trump announced the war was over. “The deal with the Islamic Republic of Iran is now complete. Congratulations to all,” he posted. “I hereby fully authorize the toll-free opening of the Strait of Hormuz… Ships of the world, start your engines. Let the oil flow.”
It read like a victory speech, as if some outside force had shut the world’s most important oil route, and Trump had sent his Navy to open it again. But who closed it in the first place? Before 28 February, the Strait of Hormuz was open, peaceful and toll-free. Tankers carrying around a quarter of the world’s seaborne oil passed through it every day without any trouble. It was only after the US and Israel began bombing Iran that Iran shut the Strait of Hormuz, laid mines and started attacking ships. Then the US answered with its own blockade. The “crisis” Trump was celebrating the end of was a crisis his own war had created. In simple words, he started the fire, and then asked to be thanked for calling the fire brigade. And even that celebration was short-lived. The June talks collapsed, and by mid-July, the US blockade was back.
By October, attacks on ships in the Gulf were at their highest since the war began, with at least a dozen vessels hit in a single week. Oil flows through Hormuz were still about 40% below normal. And on 2 November, the day Americans went to vote, US forces carried out fresh strikes on Iran. In simple words, Trump promised a quick war. Eight months later, it still wasn’t over, and every American filling up their car on election day was paying the price.
Did Americans connect the war to their vote? The polls say yes. On election day, the AP’s voter survey found that around six in ten voters thought the US decision to use military force against Iran was wrong. According to CBS News’ exit poll, the same was found, with one important detail added: about a quarter of Republican voters also thought the war was a mistake. CNN’s exit poll also found that 74% of voters said the Iran war was either a “crucial” or a “major” factor in how they voted.
This was not a sudden change of mood; the war had been unpopular for months. In October, a Pew Research survey found that 65% of Americans disapproved of how Trump was handling it, up from 61% in March. Even among Republicans, approval had slipped from 69% to 63%. Nearly half of all Americans expected the war to drag on for more than a year. And an AP-NORC poll released on 1 October found that 69% of Americans thought the war had not been worth fighting.
The most shocking number came from the University of Massachusetts in August. It found that 68% of Americans disapproved of Trump’s handling of the war. Moreover, 80% agreed that attacking Iran had “increased the cost of gas and groceries.” That included 75% of Republicans. In other words, even people who supported Trump believed the war was making their lives more expensive. It was no longer only Trump’s opponents who were unhappy with him; because of the war, even his own supporters were feeling the pain.
And it showed in how people voted. Trump’s name wasn’t on the ballot. But that did not stop voters from judging him. The Associated Press asked voters whether Trump was a reason behind their vote, and gave them three choices: to support him, to oppose him, or that he was not a factor at all. About four in ten said they voted to send a message against Trump. Fewer than two in ten said they voted to support him. The rest said he did not matter to their decision. In other words, for every voter who backed Trump, two voted against him. In simple words, Americans used an election for Congress to deliver their verdict on the President.
Young voters, who had split almost evenly in 2024, backed Democrats by about seven to three. Hispanic voters, who had moved towards Trump in 2024, moved back. CBS put Trump’s approval on election day at just 38%.
Now, let’s be fair. If you ask American voters what their biggest issue was, most did not say Iran. According to the AP survey, about four in ten said the economy was their top issue, and about three in ten said the state of democracy, but very few named foreign policy. About half said the cost of living and government corruption were “crucial” to their vote. That is more than said the same about the war in Iran. So does that mean the theory is wrong? Not really. Because the question is not what voters were worried about. The question is why they were worried.
Look at the petrol pump. On the day the war began, the average price of a gallon of petrol in America was $2.83. By May, it was $4.39, a jump of about 55%. In California, it crossed $6. In parts of Los Angeles, it crossed $8. In September, US inflation rose to 3.7%, and petrol alone made up more than half of that month’s increase. By October, 73% of Americans said they were extremely or very worried about fuel prices. And when fuel prices rise, the price of everything moved by truck, ship or plane rises with it. That is why eight in ten Americans linked the war to grocery costs too.
In simple words, the Iran war may not have topped the list in the surveys, but the economy people were voting on had been shaped by the war. The war did not defeat Trump’s party by itself. The prices it caused did.
We usually judge wars by who won and who lost. But this war is better judged by what it cost, because it brought a lot of losses and very few gains. Let’s start with the lives. By the end of October, the Pentagon’s official count stood at 23 US service members killed and 865 wounded. In Iran, rights groups documented more than 3,600 deaths, around half of them civilians. Civilian sailors were killed in attacks in Hormuz, and workers from across Asia died when Iranian missiles struck Gulf countries.
And then there are the people who had nothing to do with the war at all: the sailors. The Strait of Hormuz is not a battlefield; it is a shipping lane, used every day by tankers and cargo ships from across the world, crewed by ordinary seafarers. Since February, the International Maritime Organisation, a UN shipping body, has recorded 113 attacks or attempted attacks on ships in and around the Strait. At least 24 seafarers have been killed. Tankers have been set on fire, ships have hit mines, and in October, a Singapore-registered cargo ship, the GFS Pride, sank after being struck. Its 21 crew members were rescued, but around 6,000 seafarers remain stranded on ships trapped in the Strait. Even in the days after the midterms, several tankers caught fire after hitting mines near Hormuz. IMO Chief Arsenio Dominguez had a simple plea for the countries involved: “Do not use these conflicts to attack innocent seafarers.” In simple words, sailors are not soldiers. They carry the world’s oil, gas and food. And in this war, they became targets.
Then comes the money. According to Pentagon figures given to Congress, the war had cost the US about $47.1 billion by mid-October, and that does not even include the damage to US bases in the region. Iran’s government put its own damage at around $270 billion. But some of the highest costs were paid by countries that had nothing to do with the war.
When the Strait of Hormuz shut, the shock hit every economy that depends on Gulf oil and gas. The Japanese bank Nomura named Thailand, India, South Korea and the Philippines among the Asian economies most exposed. In Pakistan, petrol prices jumped sharply, and imported gas prices rose by 22%. Bangladesh started rationing fuel and cut government working hours to save energy. Analysts warned that Sri Lanka, Nepal, Pakistan and Bangladesh faced a risk of food crisis if the conflict dragged on.
India felt it too. Around 40–50% of India’s crude oil and about 90% of its imported LPG, the cooking gas used in most Indian kitchens, come through the Strait of Hormuz. When the route shut, LPG supplies came under pressure, and restaurants and small businesses were among the first to feel it. India’s foreign exchange reserves dropped by over $11 billion. The war also put at risk the livelihoods of around 9 million Indians working in the Gulf, who send home about $50 billion every year. The government cut fuel taxes to soften the blow, and India remains the fastest-growing major economy. But the bill for a war it had no part in still reached Indian homes.
In October, the IMF said the economies of the Middle East and Central Asia would shrink this year, and growth in developing economies would slow from 4.5% to 3.7%.
So who actually won? In one word: Russia. When Gulf oil was trapped behind Hormuz, Russia had plenty to sell. Its Urals crude, which sold at a heavy discount of around $45 a barrel in February, was fetching about $90 by mid-March. Russia’s oil exports jumped by $9.3 billion in March alone, and its oil and gas revenues were up 39% on the previous year by May. The irony did not end there: to ease the supply crisis it had created, the US had to waive some of its own sanctions on Russian oil. In simple terms, the war hurt almost everyone, and the biggest winner was the one country America has spent years trying to squeeze.
For Americans, the bill did not come in barrels or billions. It came at the pump, in the supermarket and in their tax money. And petrol was only one part of the problem. While the war pushed fuel prices up, Trump’s tariffs were pushing up the price of almost everything else.
Trump had always said tariffs would make foreign countries pay, but the data says otherwise. According to a Kiel Institute study by Germany, it looked at more than 25 million shipment records, covering over $4 trillion of US imports. It found that Americans paid about 96% of the tariff cost, while foreign exporters paid only about 4%. “The claim that foreign countries pay these tariffs is a myth,” said Julian Hinz, one of the researchers. “The tariffs are an own goal.” The Yale Budget Lab estimated in August that tariffs were costing a typical American household more than $1,000 a year. Even the US Supreme Court stepped in. On 20 February, eight days before the war began, it ruled 6–3 that the emergency law Trump had used did not allow him to impose tariffs at all. The administration simply switched to other laws and kept them going. In simple words, American families were squeezed from two sides at once: war prices at the petrol pump, and tariff prices in the shops. Trump said other countries would pay. The bill landed in American homes.
There is also a bill that doesn’t reach American homes directly, but is paid with their tax money: the cost of the war itself. By mid-October, the Pentagon told Congress the war had cost $47.1 billion. About $29 billion of that went just on replacing missiles and other munitions, and around $6 billion on lost equipment. By May, the US Congressional Research Service had counted 42 American aircraft lost or damaged in the war.
According to the OpIndia article in March, Iranian strikes badly damaged a US early-warning radar in Qatar that cost over $1.1 billion, one of only a handful of its kind in the world. A THAAD missile-defence radar in Jordan was destroyed. Three F-15E fighter jets were lost to friendly fire over Kuwait, an aerial refuelling tanker went down over Iraq, and at least 11 MQ-9 Reaper drones, worth about $30 million each, were hit. Some of these systems will take years to replace.
For a President who promised to put America first, it was a strange way to do it: another expensive war, far from home, paid for by American families.
The White House does have its list of achievements. It says the strikes badly damaged Iran’s nuclear programme and its stockpile of enriched uranium. It points out that Khamenei, the man who ruled Iran for over three decades, is gone. In June, it announced that the Strait of Hormuz had been reopened, toll-free. Let’s look at each of his claims.
Khamenei is gone, but the regime is still there. Mojtaba Khamenei, son of Khamenei, took over control. He is said to be more of a hardliner than his father, with closer ties to the Revolutionary Guards. Iran is still a theocracy. In simple words, the regime survived under new management. The nuclear programme was damaged, but the question of Iran’s enriched uranium was left for future talks. In October, Iran still refused to give up enrichment. Trump now claims Iran would need about 25 years to rebuild, yet even after the midterms, his own officials were still negotiating, through Qatar, over what happens to Iran’s uranium stockpile. In simple words, if the problem had really been solved by bombing, there would be nothing left to negotiate.
The Strait was reopened, but it had been open before the war. Tankers moved through it without tolls until the bombing began. During the war, Iran’s Revolutionary Guards actually began charging tolls on ships. So Trump’s big achievement was getting back what the world already had before he started, and even that did not last. This is why the claims didn’t move voters. The gains felt distant and uncertain. The costs were felt every day.
The war will not end because of an election. But the election changes who decides how it is paid for. From January, Democrats will control both houses of Congress, and under the US Constitution, it is Congress that controls the money. According to the Analysts at the Council on Foreign Relations, this is where Iran policy will change first: through funding. Every dollar for the war, every replacement radar and every new deployment will now need the approval of a Congress elected by voters who mostly opposed the war.
Democrats have already made their plans clear. Gregory Meeks, the senior Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, has promised to bring resolutions “to immediately terminate the President’s war with Iran”. Katherine Clark, the party’s second-most senior leader in the House, called it “a reckless war that had no exit strategy, had no clear goals”. But the President does not seem to have got the message. A day after the vote, Trump admitted it was “largely true” that the war had hurt his party because of petrol prices, but added, “If I had it to do again, I’d have to do it again.” Two days after the vote, he went further. “I’d rather not destroy the rest of the country, if possible, but maybe I’ll have to,” he told reporters in the Oval Office. “You’ll know soon enough.”
In simple words, the voters have spoken, but the war is not over yet. The fight has now moved from the ballot box to Congress. Then there is the question of what Trump can still deliver. With Congress against him, passing new laws will be hard. So he will look for wins he can secure on his own. And one of the biggest is waiting in New Delhi.
If there is one place where things could change quickly, it is the long-pending trade deal between the US and India. But before we get to the deal itself, look at who lost on 3 November.
For India, some of these results carry an extra meaning. The South Carolina seat that Democrats won once belonged to Lindsey Graham, the senator who had pushed for tariffs of up to 500% on countries buying Russian oil, and who, along with another senator, named India among those “fueling Putin’s war machine”. Graham died in July, and his sister Darline was appointed in his place. She lost. The law named after him, signed in September, still allows tariffs of up to 100% on buyers of Russian oil, including India. In Ohio, Jon Husted, who lost his seat, had sponsored a bill to make H-1B visas, used heavily by Indian professionals, far harder to get. And in Texas, Ken Paxton had investigated companies over their use of H-1B workers, while the party around him faced criticism for anti-Indian rhetoric during the campaign. One poll found that a quarter of Indian Americans who voted for Trump in 2024 planned to switch to the Democrats this time. In simple words, some of the loudest voices against India’s interests in Washington will not be there in January.
But the bigger question is what happens to the trade deal. To understand that, let’s go back a little. In August 2025, Trump hit Indian goods with a 25% tariff, and then added another 25% as a penalty for India buying Russian oil. That made it 50%, one of the highest rates he imposed on any country. In February 2026, both sides announced a framework for an interim deal that brought the rate down to 18%, and the Russian oil penalty was removed. But the deal never actually started. Just two weeks later, a Supreme Court ruling removed the legal basis for the 18% rate. Since July, most Indian goods have been paying a 10% duty under a different law, and the deal itself has been stuck in what officials call the “fine print”.
In October, it looked close again. Trump told reporters, “They want to make a deal. We’re going to make a deal. Pretty close, yeah.” Secretary of State Marco Rubio visited India and said the two sides were “very, very close”. Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal said the first tranche had been finalised. Yet, as of election day, nothing had been signed.
After 3 November, the situation could change. A trade deal is one of the few things Trump can sign without Congress. And a deal with India, the world’s fastest-growing major economy and one of America’s most important partners in Asia, would be a big one to show, especially after a war that has brought him nothing but bills. In simple words, it is Trump who now needs the India deal more than India does.
That does not mean a deal is guaranteed. Democrats are expected to question his tariffs, and analysts expect overall US tariff levels to stay high. But the pressure has clearly shifted. The President who wanted to show the world how tough he could be now needs a partner who can help him look like a winner. And for India, that is a much stronger position to negotiate from.
So, was the 2026 midterm a vote against the Iran war? Not directly, but Americans were not asked whether they supported the war, and most did not name it as their top issue. But they were asked, in effect, whether their lives had got better or worse. And their answer was clear. Petrol had jumped by more than half. Groceries were costlier. Tariffs were adding over a thousand dollars a year to the average family’s bills. And all the while, the war that was supposed to end quickly kept going, with a deal announced in June, collapsed by July, and fresh bombs falling on election day.
The war was sold by the Trump administration as a show of strength. It became a lesson in costs: in lives, money, military hardware, and political capital. Russia earned billions, Iran’s regime survived, and Asian nations had to suffer instability, price rise, and damage to a crucial trade route that brought their fuels. Wars are won or lost on battlefields. But in a democracy, they are also judged at petrol pumps, grocery supermarkets and household bills. On 3 November, American voters gave their verdict.
The Supreme Court asked, ‘Where does the money go?’ Treatment is cheap in government hospitals, yet why do hundreds of thousands of families still have to pay out of pocket?
Nearly six decades after Naxalbari, the balance sheet is stark. The movement redistributed no land, overthrew no government, and built no lasting institution. Ironically, it ruined the lives of local people by cutting them off from their basic needs.
The best ability of Indian refineries is that they can switch between Gulf crude, Russian Urals, and Venezuelan heavy oil. They were built with deep conversion capacity, with units that crack the heavy, sulphur-laden bottom of the barrel into clean diesel and petrol.
Selected issues, clear explanations and thoughtful perspectives—delivered when we publish.
