Blue Tsunami: Americans Punish Trump Over Prices and the Iran War

What Republicans lost

On Tuesday, Americans took both houses of Congress away from Donald Trump's Republicans, and they did it in states that voted for him two years ago.

Democrats took seven Senate seats from Republicans, in Kansas, Texas, South Carolina, Maine, Ohio, Iowa and North Carolina. Trump won six of those states in 2024.

Of course, the president's party usually loses seats halfway through a term. Yet it does not usually lose a Senate seat in Kansas, a state that had not elected a Democratic senator since 1932.

Republicans had redrawn the House maps to win more seats. An internal Republican assessment, reported by the BBC, said the new lines had created about 10 extra Republican-leaning seats. It made no difference. With 21 seats still to call, NBC News counts a Democratic gain of 41, as many as in the 2018 blue wave.

The races for governor went the same way. Gina Hinojosa threw out Texas's Republican governor, Greg Abbott, and in Georgia, Keisha Lance Bottoms became the first Black woman elected governor of any US state.

Halfway through Trump's term, his party lost seats it had held for decades. That is a verdict on Trump, and he asked for it himself.

What Americans voted on

Trump wanted this election to be about him. "Please pretend I'm on the ballot, because in a way I am on the ballot," he told a rally in Greenville, North Carolina, on 20 October.

Americans did exactly that. In NBC News's exit poll, 43% said one reason for their vote was to oppose Trump. Only 16% said it was to support him.

And they were clear about what they were holding him to account for. The cost of living was a crucial or major factor for 89% of voters, and the war on Iran for 74%. Most blamed Trump's policies for high prices, and most said the attack on Iran he ordered was the wrong decision.

Voters looked at their bills and at the war, and they held Trump responsible for both.

What the war cost at the pump

The bills and the war are the same story. The United States and Israel attacked Iran on 28 February. A ceasefire agreed in April collapsed in July, and the two sides are still trading strikes. Americans have paid for it every time they filled up.

Petrol averaged $2.81 a US gallon in January, before the attack. By October it was $4.31. Diesel went from $3.52 to $6.25 over the same months, and in the week of 21 September it hit a record $6.53.

The BBC traced the rise back to the White House. Food and fuel prices, it reported, "have soared in part due to the president's aggressive tariffs and unpopular war with Iran".

A war fought thousands of miles away ended up in Americans' petrol tanks and on their food bills.

What Trump tried instead

Faced with voters worried about fuel and food, Trump reached for the politics he has relied on for ten years.

He launched his first campaign in 2015 by calling Mexican immigrants rapists and criminals. Six months later he called for "a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering" the United States. In 2019 he told four Democratic congresswomen of colour, "Why don't they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime-infested places from which they came." In 2024, in a televised presidential debate, he said of Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, "they are eating the dogs" and "they are eating the cats". The claim was baseless.

None of it stopped him. He won the presidency in 2016, and again in 2024. So this year, he and his allies tried it again.

In Texas, Trump gave James Talarico a nickname. "'Talafreako' they call him because he is a little freaky," he told reporters in August. Elon Musk's America PAC put more than $45m into the race to elect Ken Paxton. Talarico won by about 12 points.

In Ohio, Vivek Ramaswamy, the Republican candidate for governor, ran an advert in which Amy Acton's birth mother called her "a liar". Even Ohio's Republican governor, Mike DeWine, said, "It's wrong to run this ad." Trump backed it anyway. "Amy Acton's mother said horrible things about Amy Acton," he said, and "she's fair game." Acton won.

In Michigan, Trump went after Abdul El-Sayed, who was running to become the first Muslim elected to the Senate. He told a rally he was there "to keep a jihadist Muslim Brotherhood member from becoming a United States senator", a claim for which PolitiFact found "no evidence". At another he told voters to "send him back to where he came from", the line he used on four congresswomen in 2019, aimed this time at a man born and raised in Michigan. That is anti-Muslim bigotry. El-Sayed won by about seven points.

Every one of these attacks failed. A nickname does not bring down the price of diesel, and calling a Muslim candidate a jihadist does not lower anyone's grocery bill. With petrol up by half since January and the war still going, the same politics did not save his party this time.

What won instead

El-Sayed made the same point himself after Trump's rally in Port Huron. "They think that by pointing at my name and my faith, that somehow you're going to ignore the fact that you can't afford your gas or your groceries, can't see a doctor," he said.

In Iowa, a state Trump won by 13 points in 2024, Josh Turek campaigned on what the war had done to fuel and fertiliser costs, and he won.

Zohran Mamdani, now New York's mayor, showed the way a year ago, when he ran on childcare and free, faster buses, and won. Voters want to hear about the things that decide how they live, and on Tuesday they rewarded the candidates who talked about them.

Even Trump accepted on election night that the war had cost his party. "Iran was a piece of it," he said.

Trump told Americans to pretend he was on the ballot. They did.