In 2024, President Donald Trump won his second term and Republicans took control of the Senate by campaigning on “America First.”
Two years later, some Democrats are trying to steal that thunder.
“Everywhere I go, I get somebody who comes up and says, ‘Look, I voted for Trump two, three times, and I’m voting for you,” said Democratic Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed on NBC’s Meet the Press on Oct. 11.
“And I ask why,” he continued. “They say, ‘It’s because you really want me to have healthcare.’ I really want them to have healthcare. ‘It’s because you really are America first.’ I really am America first.”
Real Clear Politics polling average currently has El-Sayed three points ahead of former Republican Rep. Mike Rogers, who is endorsed by Trump and who the president also called an “America First Patriot.”
Along with healthcare and other issues, central to the battle over which candidate prioritizes their own country most has been the Iran war and U.S.-Israel relationship. The war in particular has been faring so badly for Republicans that the habitually hawkish Rogers has seemingly gone into survivor mode, saying last month, “The war with Iran needs to end and end quickly.”
In August, Rogers even asked Israel lobby group AIPAC to stop running ads promoting him, worried that associating with them could hurt his election chances. (He has since changed his mind.)
“I don’t have AIPAC behind me,” El-Sayed assured Detroit Public Radio back in May. In reference to sending more U.S. military aid to Israel, he said, “we should be using our tax dollars here to invest in health care here and education here, rather than sending it over there to buy bombs and tanks that get used to drive apartheid and genocide there.”
Democrat Josh Turek is running against Rep. Ashley Hinson (R-Iowa) to replace retiring Republican Senator Joni Ernst. Hinson is endorsed by Trump and also Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), who calls her a “staunch America First conservative.”
The war looms as large in Iowa as it does Michigan. Turek went after Hinson in their debate last week for voting for the Iran war seven times. He doesn’t think that’s America First.
Turek is an Iowa state representative, a wheelchair bound basketball player who calls himself a moderate Democrat and a “prairie populist.”
“We're spending a billion dollars a day in this conflict with Iran. A real America first approach, a real Iowa first approach, is let's take care of our citizens,” Turek said at a candidate forum in May.
“In the United States Senate, I will do everything that I can to prevent us from going into these unnecessary forever wars,” Turek vowed. “A real America first approach, a real Iowa first approach, is let's take care of our citizens here and I would be fundamentally against the war.”
Real Clear Politics’ polling average currently has Turek one point ahead of Hinson.
Democratic-aligned Independent Dan Osborn is in a tight race with former governor and incumbent Sen. Pete Ricketts (R-Neb.).Trump has endorsed Ricketts, saying he “will always put Nebraska first and he'll always put America First.”
Osborn, a Navy veteran and labor union leader, doesn’t buy it. “We need to be putting America First, not Israel First,” he posted in late July. “We can't undermine the independence of the American military for any ally, much less an untrustworthy one that’s already forced us to throw money at a useless forever war overseas.”
Osborn claims that Ricketts has voted against ending the Iran war thirteen times. The Senate voted 14 times on War Powers Act resolutions related to Iran; he missed one.
These aren’t the only invocations of “America First” by Democrats or independents in this election cycle against Republicans. In Wisconsin’s third district, Democrat Rebecca Cooke is battling incumbent Rep. Derrick Van Orden (R-Wis.), who is endorsed by Trump and also called an “America First Warrior” by the president.
"You look at this war in Iran which I think is on the hearts and minds of a lot of people,” Cooke said in a forum last week. “The increased cost of diesel prices, fertilizer prices — those input costs are really screwing people across the board."
Trump won this district by seven points in 2024, and Van Orden also defeated Cooke in that congressional election.
Cooke said two weeks ago, “I think the thing with this administration is they promised a lot of folks an America First agenda, and then this is the opposite of an America First agenda."
The New York Times reports that Cooke is currently leading Van Orden by four points.
Pediatrician and Democratic candidate Annie Andrews is in a tight South Carolina race with incumbent Sen. Darline Graham (R-S.C.), who was appointed in July to finish out the term of her late brother, uber hawk Sen. Lindsey Graham.
Andrews consistently ties the price of diesel and other costs to the Iran war, and also notes that in Graham’s relatively short time in office, the senator has voted against ending the Iran war three times. “Darline Graham has voted multiple times to continue this war that is directly responsible for the $6 diesel,” Andrews said in late September. On her campaign website you can purchase an “America first!” t-shirt.
Meanwhile, in their only debate Sunday, Graham continued to defend her support for the war.
In an election where the party that dominated the last cycle did so by promising no new wars only to deliver a seemingly endless one in Iran — a war so unpopular that it could lead to a "major wipeout” for Republicans in November — it’s not surprising that Democrats are appropriating “America First.”
The question will be, if they prevail in November, whether they will pursue an end to the war and to Israel aid they say is not “America First” — or simply leave these vows behind, like many others, as empty campaign slogans.