The Iran war was a central point of tension in Senate debates Tuesday night. As the issue becomes harder to avoid, Republican candidates in Iowa and Maine have signaled a break with President Donald Trump and his war
Now, they are being pressed on something tougher than whether they want the conflict over: what they would actually do to end it.
Iowa is one of the typically red states now playing host to a razor-close race in 2026. The war’s economic fallout has been a particularly potent political issue in Iowa, perhaps because the state’s gas prices have jumped 69% — tied for the nation’s largest increase, according to AAA data from late August — and because it is among the country’s most farming-dependent states. Two of the state’s Republican U.S. representatives, Mariannette Miller-Meeks and Zach Nunn, recently became the sixth and seventh members of their party’s House caucus to support Iran war powers resolutions, which would limit Trump’s ability to go to war without congressional approval.
Rep. Ashley Hinson (R-Iowa), the GOP nominee for an open Senate seat, once supported the war but has changed her tune, saying Iowans “shouldn’t have to foot the bill at the pump or the checkout line for the war in Iran.” But she has not joined her colleagues in voting to pressure the president to end the war.
Shortly after her pivot last month, one Iowa voter told MS Now that he had noticed the contradiction. “Hinson is all of a sudden portraying herself as the person who's always opposed the war and who wants all these good things,” he said. “But you check her votes and she doesn't.”
Challenged on her voting record Tuesday by her Democratic opponent, Iowa state Rep. Josh Turek, Hinson said “we don’t need another resolution on the House floor” in order to end the war. Instead, she said, “the president and the U.S. military can bring it to the end.”
Turek blamed the war, and his opponent’s continued support for it, for the increase in gas prices, along with diesel and fertilizer prices that affect Iowa’s farmers as they go into harvest season.
In Maine, the Republican candidate, incumbent Sen. Susan Collins, has voted in favor of nine of the 14 Senate efforts to constrain Trump’s ability to continue the war. Collins defended her five earlier votes against war powers resolutions because they fell within the first 60 days of conflict, during which, she said, the commander-in-chief has “widespread discretion” to conduct war.
However, her challenger, former President of the Maine Senate Troy Jackson, still pressed her for not doing enough from her perch as the chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee to bring the conflict to a swift end.
“Senator Collins would like to school us on how this all works,” Jackson said. “I know very well how appropriations works. If she wants to stop the funding for it, she has the ability to.”
Some Democratic Senators have stated that, if they reclaim the Senate in November, they will leverage their majority to block future funding to the Defense Department until the war is over.
A Democratic takeover of both chambers of Congress is looking increasingly possible. Dissatisfaction with the war in Iran and its economic ramifications have played a meaningful role in shifting the midterm landscape toward the Democratic Party.
As Washington Examiner executive editor Jim Antle wrote in RS this week, the GOP could face a “major wipeout” in November because of the war’s fallout. Politico reported Wednesday that House Republicans have “privately concluded” that holding on to their majority in the lower chamber is “likely impossible.” In his latest projections, political analyst Nate Silver gives the Democrats a 73% chance of taking control of the Senate.
This leaves Republican candidates in tight races, like Hinson and Collins, in an uncomfortable spot of trying to distance themselves from the war’s costs while resisting the tools Congress could use to constrain it.