US President Donald Trump’s explanation for the Republican midterm defeat was revealing. Voters disliked the Iran war. Gasoline prices had risen. Some Republican candidates had failed him. And, he added, there was “a great dislike – incredibly – for Israel.” In one breath, the president acknowledged the costs of his own decisions and then reached for a familiar escape hatch: blame the ally.
The exit-poll figures tell a less convenient story. In the national poll graphic, 55% of voters said government corruption was “crucial” to their vote and another 36% called it a major factor. Cost of living came close behind, at 49% crucial and 40% major. The sharpest distinction is in the “crucial” category, where corruption leads by six points.
Taken together, the figures show two issues occupying almost the entire electorate’s field of concern. They do not prove that corruption alone decided the election, but they make it impossible to pretend Israel was the central explanation.
The concerns of American voters
These are not abstract anxieties. Voters saw a government that appeared increasingly preoccupied with the interests of its president, his family, donors, and political loyalists. The AP’s post-election analysis found that many voters believed Trump was obsessed with his own interests, amid questions about cryptocurrency ventures, business dealings, and the privately funded White House ballroom.
A president can call himself a fighter for ordinary Americans. When the public sees power being used for personal advantage, the slogan begins to sound like a punchline.
The cost-of-living figures are just as devastating. In 2024, Trump promised economic relief. By the midterms, voters were telling pollsters that prices and household finances were hurting them. Tariffs, inflation, fuel costs, and the war all fed that judgment. This was not a mysterious rejection caused by an exotic foreign-policy issue. It was a verdict on what people were paying at the checkout, at the pump, and in their bills. The governing party owns that record.
The Iran war mattered. It would be foolish to deny it. In the same poll, 34% called the war crucial to their vote and 40% said it was a major factor. Many Americans opposed the decision, and the conflict helped drive up gasoline prices. But that is precisely the point. The war was a decision of the Trump administration. Israel did not cast the American vote, launch American policy, or promise American voters that their country would avoid another costly conflict. Trump and Vice President JD Vance did.
And their prosecution of the war has clearly been less than optimal. It took no great crystal ball to know the Iranian strategy of closing the Strait of Hormuz would inflict pain on gas prices and stalling negotiations with America to drag out the conflict would affect the midterms.
So it is possible to read Vance’s account of disaffected Trump voters in two ways. While placing Israel fourth, after ending the war and addressing the cost of living and putting America first, it also reads that Israel cost Republicans the election. Vance has his own political incentives, and his post reads as much like an effort to position himself after defeat as a sober diagnosis of it.
Either way, he is scapegoating Israel, and it will have long-term consequences for the US-Israel relationship. The end aid to Israel, for example, is a knee-jerk reaction to all this but is self-defeating in many ways for America.
The issues for Israel
There is a real problem that should not be waved away. Israel’s conduct under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has badly damaged its standing among younger Americans, particularly under-35 voters. The post-October 7 war and the images from Gaza have widened a generational divide that will shape American politics for years. Pew’s polling shows that young Americans, especially young Democrats, are far more sympathetic to Palestinians than to Israelis. Israel’s government has helped create this crisis, and its leaders should face that reality without defensiveness.
But acknowledging that damage is not the same as making Israel the scapegoat for a Republican rout. A declining public image is a strategic challenge for Israel and for those who care about the alliance. It does not erase the evidence that voters were chiefly preoccupied with corruption and the cost of living, nor does it absolve the president who chose the war and presided over the economy.
When leaders lose, they can examine the causes or search for a convenient culprit. Trump and Vance have chosen both: They admit that voters were angry about the war and prices, then point toward Israel as though the alliance itself were the offending decision. That is not accountability. It is an attempt to move responsibility across the ocean.
Israel should take the generational warning seriously. Netanyahu’s policies have made the country harder to defend to younger Americans, and pretending otherwise would be self-deception.
But America’s midterms were not a referendum on Israel. They were a referendum on a government voters believed was serving itself, on an economy that was failing them, and on a war whose costs they were being asked to bear. Trump did not lose because Israel was on the ballot. He lost because his own record was.
The writer is a podcaster, businessman, and Australian Jewish activist.
