Strait ballot voting: Iran, the midterm elections, and the war that would not end

On Nov. 3, Americans will elect a new House and one-third of the Senate. By then, the war with Iran will be entering its ninth month. It began before dawn on Feb. 28, when U.S. Central Command opened Operation Epic Fury and Israeli aircraft began the companion campaign Israel called Operation Roaring Lion. A spring of strikes was followed by an interim peace agreement in June, the collapse of that deal in July, and a season of blockades, tanker attacks, and talks that have not produced a settlement. Instead of ending in an unconditional surrender, the war has settled into a staring contest over a strait.That strait, of course, is the Strait of Hormuz. A small but critically significant body of water that few people outside of geopolitics professionals and geography buffs had ever heard of a year ago, it has since become the most well-known strait on Earth, a veritable household name that now rivals the Nile and the English Channel in its news coverage and its fame. As many are now aware, it’s the body of water through which about a fifth of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas moved in peacetime. Iran moved to close it after the February attacks. The United States answered with a naval blockade of Iranian ports, which was lifted under the Islamabad peace agreement and then subsequently restored. On July 8, President Donald Trump declared that the deal was “over.” On July 14, at his direction, Central Command resumed the blockade. By Oct. 5, Central Command said it had redirected the 130th commercial vessel attempting to enter or leave Iranian ports, disabled three ships that refused to comply, and, over the previous 12 weeks, destroyed 13 vessels that were either running the blockade or tied to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’s shadow fleet. War Secretary Pete Hegseth has called the blockade “ironclad.”Iran answered in kind. Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, who heads Tehran’s negotiating team, said on Oct. 4 that the strait will not open until seven conditions drawn from the Islamabad agreement are met, among them an end to the blockade, the release of frozen assets, the removal of oil sanctions, a halt to military action against Iran and its allies, a withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iran’s approaches, and compensation for war damage. Gulf producers have kept crude moving by pipeline, by shuttle around the chokepoint, and through U.S.-protected transits, and maritime trackers reported that Middle Eastern exports excluding Iran briefly exceeded prewar levels in early October. The workarounds remain under fire. U.K. Maritime Trade Operations has logged repeated tanker attacks in and around the strait since late September. Brent crude has hovered near $100 a barrel. On Oct. 1, AAA put the national average for regular gasoline at $4.41 a gallon, after a September monthly average of $4.33, the highest on record for that month. The midterm elections arrive inside this stalemate. A strategy that arrived late Elliot Kaufman, a member of the Wall Street Journal editorial board and co-author, with Yonah Jeremy Bob, of the new book In the War Room: The Inside Story of Israel’s Fight Against Hamas and the Iranian Axis, put the political problem this way: “Almost as damaging as the rise in oil prices has been the pervasive sense that the U.S. war effort has been aimless, flailing, losing. Americans don’t like to lose, and Trump knows that best of all. The stabilization of U.S. strategy with the blockade, and the growing sense that the U.S. can come out on top in the Strait of Hormuz, are important, but it took too many months to get here. Impressions of the war were formed a long time ago; now, they’re more difficult to reverse.”The record matches that sequence. The June peace agreement, brokered principally by Pakistan, with Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Egypt also involved, committed both sides to halt military operations, including in Lebanon, set a 60-day window for a final deal, required the U.S. to end the blockade within 30 days, and required Iran to clear obstacles and reopen commercial passage without charge for 60 days. Trump and Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian signed it remotely on June 17 — Trump at the Palace of Versailles after the Group of Seven summit. Three weeks later, Trump said it was over. The blockade returned. In late September, Iran offered a seven-day plan to restore passage. Trump rejected the conditions. Senior officials, including Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Hegseth, Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Dan Caine, met at Camp David on Oct. 2 to discuss the war and the fight between the Houthis and Saudi-backed forces over the Bab el Mandeb. The public posture afterward was unchanged: The blockade holds, a deal is possible, and force remains available if necessary.(Washington Examiner Illustration/Getty Images) Trump has been explicit about the calendar. On Sept. 9, en route to the Republican midterm convention in Dallas, he said he expected the war to end “immediately after the election” because Iran’s leaders “can’t hold out any longer” and that Tehran was “desperate to try and affect the election so that we can get a nice weak group of people in there and leave them alone and let them have their nuclear weapon.” Gas prices, he added, would take “a little bit longer than the midterm” to fall back down. In a Time interview around the start of October, he said a renewed bombing campaign was possible after the midterm elections, while insisting the U.S. was “stocking up [on munitions] at levels we’ve never done before.”The munitions question As to the pressing matter of those oft-mentioned munitions, in September, Trump said the U.S. had “more munitions than we could ever possibly even think of using” and, on Sept. 22, called reports of shortage “not true.” In the Time interview, he narrowed the claim: “Some forms of ammunition are a little bit lower than other forms.” The Pentagon inspector general, citing the acquisition office, has said that expenditures during Operation Epic Fury produced strategic inventory shortfalls and industrial base bottlenecks and that expanding production requires significant lead time. The Congressional Budget Office estimated that the U.S. had probably used between one-half and two-thirds of certain missile interceptor inventories and put the cost of replacing munitions expended through Aug. 1 at $21.7 billion. Pentagon figures cited in contemporaneous reporting put the cost of expended munitions near $27.7 billion, above the CBO estimate. A Center for Strategic and International Studies assessment described Patriot and Terminal High Altitude Area Defense stocks down sharply from prewar levels, in the Patriot case by well more than half. Early October reporting, citing people familiar with Army inventories, said the Army Tactical Missile System and Precision Strike Missiles had been largely expended in theater.What the vote is about The Chicago Council’s 2026 survey found that only 2% of Americans named the Iran war as their most important midterm issue. Inflation and the cost of living led, at 37%. The same survey found that 86% thought the war had been bad for the cost of living, and that 68% thought it had not been worth fighting. Sixty-three percent of Republicans thought it had. An Emerson College poll in September placed the war among the top issues it tested. An Associated Press-KFF survey of rural voters found 42% calling it extremely important that candidates discuss the conflict, against 69% who said it was extremely important for candidates to discuss the cost of living. Reuters and Ipsos have put approval of Trump’s handling of the war in the mid-30s. Michael Faulkender, a former Treasury official now at the America First Policy Institute, has made the point that when asked how the economy is doing, voters will frequently answer by pointing to the price of gasoline.Democratic candidates have treated that connection between the war, the economy, and the price of gasoline as a potentially election-swinging link. Perhaps due to their concerns that this link could indeed be an election-defining connection, a number of Republicans in competitive seats have called for the fighting to stop. Nonetheless, on Sept. 24, the Senate rejected a war powers resolution, though by the narrowest of margins, 50-49, that would have directed the president to remove U.S. forces from hostilities against Iran absent a declaration of war or a specific authorization. Sens. Rand Paul (R-KY), Susan Collins (R-ME), Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), and Thom Tillis (R-NC) voted with Democrats and Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) with Republicans. Tillis, who is leaving the Senate, said he switched because 60 days had passed since the July notification that military action had resumed. The resolution failed. These defections will matter even more if the Republican majority narrows after the midterm elections.Tehran’s bet As for the other capital that will be watching what happens here on Nov. 3, Kaufman told me that “the Iranian regime has been very clear in its own publications that it seeks to punish Trump in the midterm elections. But it isn’t clear that this will achieve what the regime seeks. presidents on their way out, losing power at home, have been known to focus their energies abroad in their final years. Do Iran’s leaders really want to be on Trump’s mind for the next two years?”Tehran has not been subtle. Restriction of the strait and attacks on shipping have been read by analysts, including Ali Alfoneh of the Arab Gulf States Institute, as an attempt to raise the war’s cost in the weeks when that cost can move congressional elections. The bet is that a Democratic House or Senate will constrain funding, multiply hearings, and press for an exit closer to the June peace agreement than to Washington’s current demands. Trump’s September remarks treat the bet as real and the conclusion as wrong.The pattern Kaufman describes cuts both ways. A president who has lost Congress can become more dependent on a deal, because appropriations and war-powers votes grow harder. He can also become less interested in one, because a foreign confrontation is one of the few arenas in which a lame-duck executive still holds the initiative. Trump has already said both things: that the war will end after the elections because Iran will break and that the bombing can resume if it does not. The latter option will come with slightly less friction if the midterm elections result in Congress staying in Republican hands. A Democratic House would not stop a president from ordering strikes, but it would make the defense of those strikes, and the replenishment of the magazines they consume, a fraught fight through 2027 and 2028.Israel’s own elections Israel votes on Oct. 27, a week before the American elections. The partnership that opened the war has not quite survived it intact. Through the spring and early summer, the two governments clashed over operations in Lebanon and over whether Israel would be bound by a deal it had not written and in which it was not a negotiating partner. Trump publicly rebuked Israeli strikes on Beirut while talks were underway. Reported calls in June, described by Axios and others, were angry enough that the disagreement did not stay private. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has called it a relationship between partners who agree often and sometimes do not. Trump has continued to say Iran must not obtain a nuclear weapon, has hosted Netanyahu repeatedly, and has pressed for a pardon in the prime minister’s corruption case. But in an early October interview, he declined to endorse him for another term.THE WAR ON EUROPEAN JEWS AND THE NEW REALITY OF AMERICAN JEWISH LIFETheir divergence is somewhat, though not entirely, more about process and sequence. Israel’s government has treated pressure on Iran and Hezbollah as a requirement that should not be traded for a shipping arrangement. The Trump administration has treated a reopened strait as the nearer necessity. A Netanyahu defeat would not hand Washington a compliant partner. It would remove the leader whose aims have most often cut across the timetable Trump has attached to Nov. 3. A victory would return the same friction, whether the next phase is a deal or another round of strikes.The midterm elections by themselves will not reopen the Strait of Hormuz. But what they may decide is how much room the administration will have for the two paths still open: a return to something like the June framework or a renewed offensive fought with interceptor stocks that oversight bodies, and the president in his more careful moments, describe as reduced. Kaufman is right that the blockade gave the war a clearer shape than it had in the spring and that the shape arrived late for an electorate that had already priced the confusion into a gallon of gasoline. He is also right that Tehran’s plan to punish Trump at the polls contains a risk that the regime may be underestimating. Whichever government we return to Washington next month has to decide how hard to press the president to return to the negotiating table or whether another round of bombardments will be necessary to reopen the strait on America’s terms.Daniel Ross Goodman (@DanRossGoodman) is a Washington Examiner contributing writer and teaches theology and religious studies at St. John’s University. His next book, Dante’s Guide to Life: How The Divine Comedy Can Change Our Fortunes, Our World, and Ourselves, will be published this fall by Angelico Press.