Democrats Sweep Midterms as Trump's Iran Narrative Fails to Persuade Voters

The midterm elections were the most expensive in American history, with nearly $12bn spent, much of it on advertisements and message control, and the majority of that money going to Republican candidates. Most voters were not persuaded. The outcome was a Democratic sweep on a scale not seen in half a century, since the post-Watergate midterms of 1974.

Democrats now hold 253 of the 435 seats in the House and 54 of the Senate's 100 seats, up from 47. Seven red states have flipped to blue. Among those elected are the country's first Native American and Black female governors, its first Muslim senator, and a record number of women.

The programme's commentator said the result was a verdict on Donald Trump's governance and a blow to his grip on the narrative. Trump had thrown himself into the campaign, holding rallies across the country, where he urged voters to support Republicans in the context of the war on Iran.

Donald Trump has long been able to turn controversy and crisis into spectacle. In these midterms, however, the president lost control of the message. Meenakshi Ravi, who has followed the political fallout since the vote, noted that there was a rare consensus across Democrats, Republicans and people within the Trump administration that the election was about the war on Iran.

Ravi said Iran was the killer issue for Republicans. Conventional wisdom holds that foreign policy rarely moves US elections, but in this case the domestic costs were too high to ignore: prices at the gas pump, household bills, and the billions of dollars the Treasury has spent on the war effort.

Vice President JD Vance made the link most explicit, publishing a 600-word essay on X that tied the war in Iran to the election losses. Republican strategist Rob Arlet, who worked with the Trump campaign, called it very significant for a sitting vice president to acknowledge that the war shaped voters' decisions. He said this was an honest admission of a truth that the administration and Trump had not connected with voters.

Arlet said it is not unusual for a vice president to take responsibility after a bad midterm for an incumbent president, but he argued Vance was not doing that. Instead, Vance was stressing that the most important thing was to keep the administration's core priorities. Arlet described the war as having been justified in the administration's view, but said voters had not been convinced.

Ravi added that Vance's message could also be read as a bid to position himself. Commentators have long asked whether Trumpism can survive without Trump, and Ravi suggested Vance's post was a way of signalling that he could carry that agenda himself.

Trump has conceded that the Iran war was a major factor in the electoral outcome, but he still argues that going to war was the right call. That position has not sat well with some MAGA media voices, who are criticising Trump in ways the programme says had not been heard before.

The MAGA information ecosystem is not a monolith, and divisions have run for some time, over the Iran war and over US support for Israel. The pro-Israel camp argues that the problem was not going to war in the first place, but that Trump did not go far enough and did not win decisively. Trump, in a quoted remark, distinguished between the war in Iran as the reason it was initiated and the execution of the war, saying the war should be fought fast and hard to finish it and achieve its ends.

On the other side of the MAGA debate are voices railing against Trump for damaging the Republican Party. Maya Berry, executive director of the Arab-American Institute, explained that Trump's 2024 pitch included ending all wars everywhere, an idea that resonated with a particular base, including those who call themselves America First.

Berry said that once the Iran war began, it ran so contrary to that promise that an important and vocal part of the MAGA base came out strongly against it. She said this group includes figures such as Tucker Carlson, Megan Kelly and Candace Owens, who she said see the war as a betrayal of the agenda Trump put forward.

Commentators such as Tucker Carlson, Megan Kelly and Benny Johnson tend not to be on Fox News. Instead, they run streaming shows on YouTube, Kick or Rumble, and they wield enormous influence. The programme noted that from the start of the Iran war, many of these figures said it was a bad idea.

The speaker read Carlson as probably the most influential and interesting of the group. In this view, these figures understand that Trump is a lame duck: he is 80 years old and his influence is waning, so they are positioning themselves for whatever comes next.

The speaker said the repudiation of the Republicans was complete, and that it was also a repudiation of Trump. Without hyperbole or gloating, the speaker concluded that this marked the end of the Trump era.

Turning to television, the programme said the ratings suggested how the country was feeling politically. At the top were ABC and NBC, channels classified as centrist in the US, although they would probably be considered center-right in most other countries. Fox News, Trump's regular call-in network, placed third, followed by MS Now, seen as left-leaning in the US, in fourth place. CBS News came fifth; the programme noted it had been bought out last year by owners affiliated with the Ellison family.

The programme cautioned that these numbers do not capture the millions who watch YouTube streams of political and news commentary channels.

The programme asked where the relationship between Trump and the media might go, given that he faces an adversarial Congress and has two years left in office. Republican strategist Rob Barlet, who worked with Trump, described his relationship with mainstream media as very divisive, which he attributed to lies that he said had come out of mainstream outlets. He said Trump has called them out.

Barlet said Trump is focused on his legacy for the remaining two years, and that he still believes he won the 2020 election. He said Trump cares mostly about messaging and reaching a large audience, and that American media embraces him because it cares about ratings. In Barlet's view, that dynamic keeps Trump visible and draws viewers.

The programme said there is plenty of reason to be skeptical about what Democrats will do with their power. The party, it argued, is just as dependent on big corporate PAC money as Republicans are, and Democrats have offered very little challenge to the US position on Israel.

Ravi said Democrats had a compelling story during the campaign, with Trump and his handpicked candidates serving as ready-made villains. The party also produced media figures who generated headlines and captured voters' attention, including John Ossoff in Georgia, James Talarico in Texas and Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan.

Despite the excitement around these candidates, the programme said that when it comes to governing, the Democratic establishment remains firmly in place, and the party is not known for bold system-changing politics. Trump has also made clear he will not make governing easy: he has said he would be happy to work with Democrats, but White House social media posts pointed to the presidential veto as a way of blocking the opposition's agenda.

The programme then turns to a new publication, Equator, which was founded by a group of writers and editors from several countries, some of them formerly in mainstream media. They came together in what they called a moment of moral despair. In late 2023 or early 2024, Israel was months into its campaign in Gaza, and outlets were minimising what was quickly becoming a genocide by censoring Palestinian voices. Journalists in that position had several options, including going along, staying quiet, speaking up and risking their jobs, or quitting to try something new, as Equator's founders did.

One year after launch, Equator has published long-form stories and essays on global politics, culture and art, presented with an eye for design. Jonathan Shenker, a former Guardian editor and one of the founders, said the premise of much Western journalism, that it is better to be us than to be them, is no longer widely shared. He argued that the world increasingly does not see America as the default model for its own future.

Shenker said the magazine aims to present places on their own terms rather than as societies on the way to becoming more like the West or America. He described Equator as a magazine for the post-American world, a magazine of ideas that does journalism but is not wholly journalistic. He said its goal is not to compete with the New York Times, the FT or the Guardian on reporting facts on the ground, but to offer analysis and interpretation, since facts do not speak for themselves. He also said the magazine takes art and design seriously and commissions visuals as original as its writing.

Shenker said the magazine aims to publish pieces that no one else would publish, but which other outlets would later wish they had published. One example is a story titled the Xi Jinping School of Journalism, written by a young journalist named Sonbo Bourjin.

The piece is a funny personal account of working at a state-run Mongolian-language newspaper in Hohhot, the capital of the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region. Bourjin taught himself journalism there, and the newspaper was later shut down during protests over the teaching of the Mongolian language. He then went to Columbia journalism school and later wrote reports on human rights violations in the Mongolian areas of China for American human rights organisations. He lost that job when Elon Musk cut the budget for those organisations. The piece runs about 6,000 words.

Equator also published two pieces about the war in Sudan by a Sudanese writer, Makdal Gazuli. The first is an inside account of the war as Gazuli experienced it, drawn in cartoon form. Shenker said it is unlike anything else published on the war, and that it captures a situation much of global media treats as a faceless humanitarian crisis, presenting it as meaningful, urgent and significant to the people living through it.

Shenker said that co-founder Nessarin Malik, who is herself Sudanese, received message after message from other Sudanese readers after publication, saying they had never seen themselves written about like this.

Shenker said he would hesitate to call this a golden age for new media launches, because the circumstances pushing many people to strike out on their own are not necessarily encouraging. He did, however, see a deep hunger for alternatives to legacy media organisations that have, in his view, lost their grip on what is happening in the world.

He also pointed to new possibilities for audiences to participate, support and have a degree of two-way interaction with these outlets. He named Sateo, Drop Site and the American magazine Jewish Currents as examples of outlets with a sense of urgency. He said Equator is part of a lineage of smaller independent publications that emerge at moments of rupture and crisis, built on an audience that exists but does not yet know it is one.

Just before Americans went to the polls, former Fox News host and podcaster Tucker Carlson posted on X that, under pressure from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the Trump administration may be within days of launching a nuclear strike on Iran. Carlson was not alone in raising the possibility: an AI-generated video showing what a nuclear strike on Iran might look like circulated widely on social media, and Iranian state media released an eight-minute video with instructions on how to survive a nuclear attack.

The programme argued that the pounding Trump's Republicans took in the election was partly a result of his war on Iran. However, the presenter said it was probably no comfort to Iranians, since the new Congress will not take office until January, and Trump has already attacked Iran twice without congressional approval. With Netanyahu also fighting for his political future, the programme said it was unlikely that Iran would come off a war footing any time soon.