Affordability has been, understandably, the watchword for Democratic candidates over the last year. After downplaying inflation under Joe Biden, the party learned a brutal lesson when Donald Trump rode the cost-of-living crisis back to the White House in 2024. In 2025, Zohran Mamdani put affordability at the center of his own campaign and surged from the back of the pack to City Hall. Now it’s all national Democrats want to talk about, even if they’re sometimes unsure of how, exactly, to make housing and groceries and health care suddenly much cheaper.

The midterms will be about affordability — that much is clear with most Americans pessimistic about Donald Trump’s economy. Democrats have learned to stick to bread-and-butter issues at the expense of the culture-war battles that tripped them up in the early part of the decade. But if the war in Iran drags on, costing more American lives and sowing greater chaos in the Middle East, it will — or at least it should — become a core issue for the midterms and 2028.

The Democrats have the opportunity to convincingly become the antiwar party once more.

It’s been a long time since foreign policy was at the center of a midterm or even a presidential race. The 2024 contest was defined by immigration and inflation. Though Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, that midterm chiefly revolved........

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