Iran conflict was 'crucial' factor in Republican rout: Exit polls

The lengthy and unpopular conflict in Iran has evidently had an outsized impact on the midterm election.

Exit polling conducted by NBC News and other media outfits showed that when thinking about their vote for Congress, 34% of voters said that the conflict in Iran was "crucial"; 40% said it was a "major factor"; and 19% said it was a "minor factor."

'The Iran War is the greatest political blunder in the last two decades at least.'

Twenty-seven percent of those who said the conflict was "crucial" and 42% of those who said it was a "major factor" were Republicans.

Weeks ahead of the election, a Gallup survey indicated that Iran was a top issue among voters, with 47% of respondents stating that the situation in Iran was "extremely important" and 30% saying it was "very important."

After Republicans lost the U.S. House and Senate in a landslide on Tuesday, President Donald Trump acknowledged in a phone interview with Fox News that "part of it was Iran." He also admitted that the conflict drove up gasoline prices and that price increases hurt Republicans at the polls.

The president suggested, however, that historically, the military operation in Iran is "going to be much more important than this evening because you can't let the number-one state sponsor of terror have a nuclear weapon." He also said that he "had no choice," in part because the nuclear deal brokered by former President Barack Obama "was the road to a nuclear weapon."

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Trump was long a critic of his predecessors' costly foreign entanglements, stating both that he would end "the era of endless wars" and that it was not the job of American forces to "solve ancient conflicts in faraway lands that many people have not even heard of."

After brokering numerous peaceful resolutions between warring parties, Trump kicked off a conflict with Iran on Feb. 28.

While there were clear indications that such a military operation would be unpopular, a chorus of interventionists inside and outside Congress suggested it was worthwhile. The Washington Post's Marc Thiessen, for instance, penned an op-ed in January titled "There is no U.S. downside to striking the Iranian regime."

Support for the unresolved conflict — the projected cost of which the Pentagon told Congress last month was roughly $47.1 billion — currently sits at 35.9%, according to the Silver Bulletin's polling average. Opposition sits at 56.5%.

Despite the unpopularity of the joint U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran and the apparent backlash by voters, Trump told the Wall Street Journal on Tuesday that he "did the right thing" and if afforded a do-over, he "would have done it again."

"The Iranian regime is evil. Few people have been as consistently vocal on this issue as I have," BlazeTV host Steve Deace wrote in an aftermath reflection. "But it’s one thing to use American air power to ensure Iran does not develop a nuclear weapon and quite another to drag our military and economy into a months-long quagmire with no end in sight and no clear definition of victory."

BlazeTV host Auron MacIntyre tweeted, "The real retard right were the people who told you the war wouldn't matter."

Conservative commentator Matt Walsh wrote, "The Iran War is the greatest political blunder in the last two decades at least. A catastrophically stupid decision. An unforgivable betrayal of America First principles."

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