Yesterday, I wrote about JD Vance’s push to make the 2026 midterm a referendum solely about the Iran War. Things were going great, he claims, substantively and politically, until the Iran War brought everything crashing down. We’re seeing that a number of Democrats, albeit for different reasons, want to push this line too. Yesterday Eric Levitz at Vox interviewed data guy David Shor who said something similar. If you’re not familiar with him, Shor’s in the group who argue that Democrats need to jettison hot-button social and cultural issues that make them unviable with big parts of the electorate — immigration, gender and sexuality, guns, policing, etc. This is one of these claims that is demonstrably accurate to a significant degree in electoral terms, but more complicated when it comes down to applying it to the practicalities, commitments and mutabilities of the actual world. In this case it leaves him wanting to place overwhelming emphasis on the Iran War since Democrats put up the biggest midterm landslide in half a century and mostly didn’t avoid hot-button issues, or at least not as much as people with this viewpoint said was required, for most of the 2026 campaign.
Here’s the discussion of this issue …
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