Gloating Democrats are passing off a war-weary electorate as a mandate for socialism.
Plenty of Republicans want to pin the wreckage on ICE, tariffs, and MAGA.
But the President’s private polling tells a very different story, and one Texas senator sits right in the middle of it.
The Slide Deck Blair Passed Around the West Wing
Over the summer, James Blair, the operative who left the White House to run President Trump’s midterm strategy, circulated a slide deck among West Wing officials.
The New York Times got its hands on the details for a sprawling post-mortem on the Republican collapse. And one slide in that deck says more about the 2026 midterms than a month of cable panels.
Blair lined up the party’s polling against a timeline of the war with Iran.
The Democrat advantage ballooned during the fighting. It shrank while Vice President JD Vance hammered out a memorandum of understanding with Tehran. Then it shot back up once the ceasefire collapsed.
Sit with that for a second. The one stretch on Blair’s chart where the line bent back toward Republicans came while Vance sat at the negotiating table.
Tony Fabrizio, the President’s chief pollster, tested the deal head-on. According to the Times, voters who knew about the agreement backed it by 41 points, and 67 percent believed it would bring gas prices down.
Forty-one points. Congress can’t get numbers like that on a resolution praising apple pie.
Blair’s bottom line, glowing in highlighter yellow, spelled out the price of holding the House: an extended ceasefire, an open Strait of Hormuz, and falling gas prices. Without them, the slide offered a blunt forecast.
“A final result approaching D+10 would likely cost us the Senate,” it read.
He nailed it. By the end of July, Democrats held a 10-point lead on the congressional ballot. The Times now estimates Republicans will lose the national House vote by about 13 points, the worst midterm beating since Watergate.
The Hawks Who Wouldn’t Let Peace Breathe
So what killed the one thing that was working?
Tehran kept testing its leverage, the way that regime always does. But the Iranians had help knocking the deal off its feet. The Times reported that Republican Iran hawks, US Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) among them, pressed the President to keep the squeeze on.
Cruz didn’t keep his objections in a back room. He took them straight to the reporters camped out at the Capitol.
“The Ayatollah should not reap a single penny from the free transit of the seas,” Cruz said, according to Jewish Insider. “I think the president, unfortunately, is receiving bad advice once again.”
Bad advice from whom? Cruz never said the Vice President’s name. He didn’t need to. Vance had become the public face of the agreement, and everybody in Washington, DC knew exactly which adviser the Texas senator had in his crosshairs.
He kept at it. Fox News quoted Cruz telling reporters that “giving billions of dollars to theocratic lunatics who want to murder us is an exceptionally bad idea.”
Don Jr. didn’t let it slide. The President’s son went on X and accused Cruz of “lying thru [sic] his teeth about the deal.”
And Vance had a question of his own for the hawks. When an interviewer raised Cruz’s fear that the deal amounted to a sellout, the Vice President didn’t flinch.
“If your proposal is to send 200,000 ground troops into Tehran so that you can make Reza Pahlavi the leader of that country, then say that,” Vance said. “But I don’t appreciate criticism without alternatives.”
Nobody took him up on it. The hawks had complaints, not a plan.
Ben Shapiro joined the pile-on too, branding the MOU a disaster on Fox News. Shapiro backed Ron DeSantis over Trump in the 2024 primary. He has also spent years pushing for a harder line on Iran.
Readers can connect those dots themselves.
The deal fell apart. The shooting resumed. And the polling line marched right back to where Blair’s slide said it would go.
The 2028 Audition That Cost Republicans the House
None of this happened in a vacuum.
Cruz ran in 2016 as the Never Trump alternative and refused to endorse the nominee from the convention stage. Axios later obtained recordings of him trashing Trump’s tariffs in front of donors. The man clearly has his eye on 2028, and his pitch lands best with the donor class that misses the pre-Trump party and its taste for Middle East adventures.
Taking a shot at Vance’s signature deal fit that neoconservative lane perfectly. Torpedoing the most popular thing the administration did all year made for a steep price on an audition.
But Republican candidates paid that price, not Cruz. And his own state picked up a big share of the tab. Republicans dumped close to $300 million into Texas trying to save the Senate seat, according to the Times, and lost it by 12 points anyway.
Fabrizio’s final survey, taken two weeks before Election Day, asked Republicans who planned to sit out the election what it would take to win them back. Their top two answers: end the war and tackle inflation.
Those two answers are really one answer. Gas blew past $4 a gallon because Iran choked off the Strait of Hormuz.
Compare that with the issue the pundits keep blaming. Exit polling showed voters who called immigration enforcement crucial broke for Republicans 58 to 40. And an Echelon Insights survey of 2024 Trump voters who now disapprove of the President found just 3 percent pointed to tariffs and trade, against 15 percent who named foreign policy and wars, Iran included.
So the base didn’t walk away from the border. It walked away from a war it never asked for.
Even Trump has started asking the right question. “If we never went into Iran, what do you think would happen in the midterms?” the President asked privately, according to the Times.
Fair enough. But the more painful question is what would have happened if Cruz and the hawks had let Vance’s deal breathe.
Voters Ran This Experiment in 1968
American politics has watched a collapsing peace effort swing an election before.
In 1968, Lyndon Johnson announced a halt to the bombing of North Vietnam days before the election, and Hubert Humphrey surged in the polls. Then South Vietnamese President Nguyễn Văn Thiệu announced his government would skip the Paris peace talks.
Thieu made no secret of his reasoning. “A Humphrey victory would mean a coalition government in six months. With Nixon at least there was a chance,” he later recalled.
Humphrey’s comeback ran out of runway, and Richard Nixon won the popular vote by less than a point.
Thieu at least had his own country on the line. The hawks in 2026 had a primary calendar and a few talking points about the Ayatollah.
The irony is that Trump’s team saw the problem coming. On a call in the final weeks of the campaign, Blair cracked a line the Times used to sum up the whole debacle. He meant the hapless candidates. His own chart points the finger somewhere closer to the Senate floor.
“I have seen the enemy,” Blair told the group. “And it is us.”
Sources:
The New York Times, “‘I Have Seen the Enemy, and It Is Us’: Inside Team Trump’s Historic Collapse”
Jewish Insider, “Ben Shapiro criticizes JD Vance over ‘disaster’ Iran MOU”
Fox News, “Trump issues stark warning to Iran as critics raise red flags over emerging agreement”
Fox News, “Vice President JD Vance warns Israelis they can’t just ‘kill’ their way out of their national security issues”
CBS News Texas, “Texas Senators Cruz, Cornyn express concerns over President Trump and VP Vance’s Iran deal”
Axios, “In secret recordings, Cruz trashes Trump tariffs, Vance”
Echelon Insights, survey of 2024 Trump voters who now disapprove (September 2026)
Time, “The Bombing Halt: Johnson’s Gamble for Peace”
American Foreign Relations, “The Vietnam War and Its Impact: Bombing Halt”