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 around abortion since Roe v. Wade had fallen just a few months prior. In 2020, Joe Biden battled Trump as the pandemic raged, and the anti-Trump midterm of 2018 was far more focused on domestic political uncertainty than anything occurring abroad. In some sense, the 2016 presidential race might have been the last time when foreign policy played a sizable role in the Republican and Democratic primaries. Trump, then, was the antiwar candidate, and his stated opposition to the Iraq War helped to separate him from a field of hawks, including Marco Rubio, his future secretary of state. On the Democratic side, Bernie Sanders ultimately couldn’t defeat Hillary Clinton, but, like Barack Obama in 2008, he successfully used her past support for Iraq against her. He pilloried her, too, for backing the disastrous military intervention in Libya.

Iran might bring foreign policy to the forefront again. For Democrats, it makes sense to keep talking about the war because it’s so deeply unpopular with their own base and a large share of independents. This is starkly different than Iraq, which had a great deal of national support in 2003; George W. Bush was able to invade because so many Americans believed, wrongly, this was the proper retribution for 9/11. Many prominent Democrats, including Clinton and Chuck Schumer, were early war supporters, and Bush was able to win reelection in 2004. The American public only began to sour on the war in Bush’s second term.

This time, there is no honeymoon for Trump, no rallying around the flag. There is no 9/11-style mass-casualty attack to galvanize Americans. Israel’s desire to preemptively attack Iran, its sworn enemy, means little to most ordinary voters, and they are rightly wondering what’s in it for them as Benjamin Netanyahu, in tandem with Trump, relentlessly bombs the country and retaliatory rockets set the Gulf states on fire. The Strait of Hormuz is throttled, and gas prices are surging. After paying less than $3 a gallon on average at the pump lately, Americans could be confronted with prices over $5 by the end of March. This is how wars lose support.

In the House, most Democrats voted for the War Powers Act resolution, which would have required the Trump administration to halt strikes against Iran. The measure failed because nearly all Republicans opposed it (Democrats did find an ally in libertarian Trump critic Thomas Massie). But the vote accomplished the goal of putting Republicans on the record for their support of an unpopular war. For the Democrats contesting House seats this fall, the messaging should be stark and simple: We will not send your friends and loved ones to die in a pointless conflict thousands of miles away. We will focus on making your lives better here. A vote for us is a vote for stability, not violence. You deserve peace.

This could be, in some sense, the easiest antiwar campaign Democrats and the American left, broadly, have waged in many decades. Prior wars had far more of the public behind them. The Iraq opponents had to contend with the fear of terrorism and the jingoism that had enveloped the country. Lionized in retrospect, the antiwar movement of the Vietnam era alienated many ordinary Americans because it was so dominated by the college educated; it was the working class — the children of those who had, in many cases, fought in World War II — who were forced to risk their lives in the jungle so a kid with a B.A. could spit at them when they got home. Eventually, the American public did turn against the Vietnam War, but it took many years and tens of thousands of casualties. Going back even further, Harry Truman was able to wage the entire Korean War without congressional authorization because Cold War mania had silenced so many antiwar voices.

Today’s Democrats have no excuse. They have the public behind them. They can be the party of peace and return to power that way — if they choose.

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