Will Voters Forgive Trump For Iran?

Polling, special election results, and primary results have thus far converged to show a very coherent conclusion:  Donald Trump is unpopular and Republicans in Congress stand poised to be punished as a result of that unpopularity come November.  The magnitude of cheating before and after the election will undoubtedly blunt the impact of any Democratic victory, but it's hard to deny at this point that the Republicans are gonna get spanked.  Any hope of a snapback for the GOP ahead of the election probably vanished into the ether when Trump invaded Iran, leading the global economy down a long-term rabbit hole of higher energy prices and inflation.

It certainly seems as though it's too close to the election for voter dissatisfaction to be assuaged, but damn if I'm not seeing a framework of scenarios unfolding where GOP losses are more manageable than the fundamentals would suggest. Let's break it down:

First of all, we're dealing with an electorate that forgave Donald Trump for not only refusing to accept his undeniable defeat in the 2020 Presidential election, but leading an insurrection against the U.S. Capitol with the goal of assassinating his own Vice-President in response to that refusal to accept his defeat.  As I've written before, contemporary voters are too myopic and cartoonishly selfish to care about any of that, but it's nonetheless astonishing to consider having happened in a Western democracy, and speaks to how much will be tolerated in the interest of hardened partisanship and petty self-interest perception.

Second, the same judicial system that two years ago granted Trump a lifetime get-out-of-jail free card for all current and future crimes is predictably twisting itself into a pretzel to rig the election on behalf of the incumbent party, green-lighting efforts by red states to change their maps while roadblocking efforts by blue states to modify theirs.

Third, the Democrats are well positioned to win by default this year but their voters' addictions to questionable choices put them at a deficit.  Graham Platner, Peggy Flanagan, and Abdul El-Sayed being the likely nominees for three must-win Senate races says all you need to know about a Democratic base that's lost touch with voter priorities during the MAGA era, where the consequences of choosing poorly have amplified downstream consequences.

All of that is relatively obvious and well-known, but the wild card here is if the persuadable voters this fall are primarily motivated by the direction the economy is going, it's not as clear to me now as it was even a month ago that things won't be upwardly mobile by fall.  Add in the dumb luck that has followed Trump at every stage of his life (I swear it's like he's holding a new winning lottery ticket every week) and it's easy to imagine a "wave election" for Democrats falling short of expectations.

The first recent development to take shape was the Supreme Court rolling back most of Trump's tariffs.  Ostensibly, they ruled against Trump....and Trump pretended to be enraged by that.  But the reality was that the Court gave Trump (another!) lifeline to save him from himself with tariffs that were unpopular and not working.  With tariffs out of the way, one of the primary anchors on the blistering economic growth that we would be expected to experience right now has been quietly lifted.  Inflation is still rising because of Iran-related energy costs, but a lot of the systemic rot that was festering because of the tariffs is vanishing behind the scenes.  There's a good chance we're now standing poised to straighten out supply chains and stabilize the flow of global commerce in a way that will fairly quickly airbrush the memories of the tariffs from voters' collective psyches.  The issue that just six months ago seemed to be Trump's biggest electoral bugaboo has basically become a footnote as the general election season approaches.

Beyond that, the stock market just won't quit.  Sure, it's entirely the byproduct of the same AI bubble that will be bringing the average person to his knees in a couple short years, but anybody glancing at their quarterly 401K statement won't be connecting those dots.  It's probably only 10-15% of the population feeling any appreciable benefit from the exploding value of Nvidia stock--and most of them are likely to be MAGA-averse professionals--but the lack of expected collapse in the stock market predicted when Trump was imposing six-figure tariffs last year will keep Republicans from sustaining the kinds of losses they would from the professional class.  The bottom line is that if you're among the 10% richest Americans doing 50% of the consumer spending, you're not gonna be motivated to punish Trump in 2026.  This could help the GOP on the margins, both in votes and campaign contributions. If the Dow was at 35,000 now instead of 51,000, as seemed all but certain 12 months ago, the GOP would be in a much darker situation heading into November.

Most importantly though, Trump's foolish decision to invade Iran in February is looking less like the anchor that seemed inevitable just a few weeks ago. And nowhere is this less obvious than gas prices.  Last month, I paid $4.49 for a gallon of gas.  Today, I paid $3.35.  Gas prices are now closer to what they were before the war than they were at their mid-May peak.  This speaks to a bit of price gouging on the part of oil retailers as, up until the last few days, the 25+% fall in prices at the pump hasn't been driven by anything real.  With the diminished supply of oil reserves in the last few months, it's entirely possible that prices could go up again, but the $6 per gallon gas that seemed inevitable just a few weeks ago now seems very unlikely.

Everything points in the direction of Trump once again being able to make massive blunders and paying little to no price for them.  Sure, the Democrats are still gonna have an advantage this midterm, but the wholesale abandonment of the GOP that would have come if we were still quagmired in Iran, with soaring gas prices and downstream inflation, seems much less likely now.  Make no mistake that the "deal" that Trump brokered with Iran in exchange for opening up the Strait of Hormuz is as at least as big of a foreign policy face plant as Biden's withdrawal from Afghanistan, but if it's met with falling gas prices, Trump's soft supporters aren't gonna flee en masse.

As pessimistic as I am typically about American voters' choices in contemporary America, I allowed myself a couple of months this spring to really dream big in terms of the magnitude of the backlash directed at Trump this fall.  It could still happen, but with Trump once again appearing poised to avoid the consequences of disastrous policy choices that would befall basically anybody else in politics, I'm scaling back those aspirations.  A repeat of 2018 in terms of generic ballot advantage for Democrats seemed like the worst-case scenario a month ago.  Now another 2018 is looking more like a best-case scenario.