When Republicans Won on an Antiwar Platform—and Delivered
In 1952, the GOP ran on ending war and inflation. Sound familiar?
In their final poll ahead of the 2026 midterms, NYT/Siena found that the Democratic Party holds an 11-point lead over Republicans on the generic congressional ballot, suggesting the GOP is all but certain to lose its congressional majorities. The same poll found that President Donald Trump’s approval rating has dipped to a new low of 34 percent.
A rebuke of this magnitude should be understood as more than the cyclical expression of displeasure at an incumbent. Rather, it represents a deep rejection of the direction the second Trump administration has taken since the heady days of spring 2025.
Earlier this month, AP-NORC polled Americans about their top issues going into the midterms. To no one’s surprise, the most significant was the economy and cost of living at 84 percent. But not far behind is the war with Iran, cited by 64 percent of respondents—20 points more than the number who said immigration, and five times more than said transgender issues.
On February 28, the United States, together with Israel, launched a surprise attack on Iran. This failed to produce regime change, but it did lead to the closing of the Strait of Hormuz and the destruction of Gulf energy infrastructure. Voters are reminded how intimately this war of choice impacts the cost of living every time they visit the pump, where (as of writing) a gallon of gas averages $4.26 per gallon nationally and diesel an unsustainable $6.32.
Backtracking on a core campaign promise of “no new wars,” unilaterally launching an aggressive war without a vote by Congress or public debate, and allowing it to continue for eight months and counting without a clear exit strategy are decisions that have irrevocably split Trump’s winning 2024 coalition and reenergized what had been an aimless Democratic Party.
As many have pointed out, including in The American Conservative, war with Iran was a destructive but deliberate policy choice, not an inevitability or a response to an urgent national security crisis. The coming massacre of the GOP did not have to happen.
There once was an era, in the not too distant past, when Republicans campaigned against endless war and unnecessary military spending with huge electoral dividends (and then kept their promises).
In 1952, the country was aching after 20 years of Democratic presidents. The Korean War was then in its third year, victory still out of reach despite tens of thousands of American casualties. Corruption scandals plagued officials in the Truman administration. And Truman himself, facing polling numbers even lower than Donald Trump’s, had bowed out of the Democratic primaries and was not running for reelection.
Under these circumstances, the Indiana Republican State Central Committee produced a brochure proclaiming that “THE ONE ALTERNATIVE to the warmongering, Socialistic scandals of the Truman administration is to vote straight Republican on November 4!” (Emphasis in original.)
The brochure encouraged support for every Indiana Republican under this antiwar, Old Right framing, but spotlighted the top of the ticket and statewide races. It urged voters to give former Supreme Allied Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower “the assignment of pulling America out of her mad, rocketing inflation… and of developing for America a foreign policy that is sane and secure, instead of rash and reckless!”
How many voters today would use that same terminology, “rash and reckless,” to describe the decision to outsource decision-making to the Israeli prime minister’s office?
The brochure, issued officially by the state party, also demanded an end to chronic overseas intervention in terms that will be familiar to the generation that came of age during the Global War on Terror:
3 WARS IN 35 YEARS (!) is the tragic record of the 3 Democrat Presidents of this century. Death, destruction and despair for millions of Americans. The unprecedented peacetime draft continues. More and more young Americans into bloody foreign battles. And at a cost which is bankrupting us all.
As a horrifying mirror image, in the past 35 years the last three Republican presidents have all entered wars in the Persian Gulf.
And while today the Trump White House attempts to dodge the economic fallout of the Iran War, which has cost taxpayers over $43 billion as of September and worsened inflation by roiling global energy markets, the Republican Party of 1952 had no trouble discerning the connection between government spending on empire and economic woes at home:
THE WAR BOOM continues only because the war is extended. This unholy conflict, producing only inflated dollars soaked in our young men’s blood, pushes our high prices, soaring taxes and monstrous national debt higher and higher and HIGHER!
No hesitation in recognizing the gruesomeness of war, or in emphasizing how dire a political issue becomes when you begin measuring the cost in blood. Contrast that healthy emotionalism with the distant obtuseness presented by today’s Republicans.
When a man whose wife was killed in action in March questioned Vice President J.D. Vance during a CNN townhall about the “failure in the leadership” responsible for his loss, the man tasked with publicly defending the administration pleaded ignorance.
After offering condolences, Vance said, “When you talk about failures that we were—the administration, the Department of War, whoever you want to say—was implicated in, I want to know about that stuff. Because if there were failures, and I don’t doubt that there were, I just, literally the first time I’ve heard about this is this conversation, and I want to fix that stuff.”
The differences in Republican messaging between 1952 and 2026 are not purely reducible to the distinction between incumbent and challenger. Donald Trump and his surrogates used similar language campaigning in 2024 against Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and their involvement in the Ukraine War. And after his election—again, by an 11-point margin—Dwight D. Eisenhower, while admittedly an internationalist, did achieve an armistice in Korea and a decrease in military spending.
The Republican Party may have changed, but the American voter hasn’t. When presented with a clear choice, and given the opportunity to vote for less war overseas and a prioritization of American concerns, he takes it, no matter which party makes the promise.
That is why anti-war conservatives won in 1952, and it’s why pro-war conservatives will lose today.
The post When Republicans Won on an Antiwar Platform—and Delivered appeared first on The American Conservative.