"If You Lie to Voters About Not Starting
a New War, the Voters Make You Pay"
by Larry C. Johnson
"American voters have a long memory for one particular kind of broken promise. Tell them you will keep their sons out of a foreign war, then march them into one, and they will eventually send you a bill. In 1920 the Democrats paid it. On Tuesday, the Republicans did.
On election night 2024, Donald Trump told a cheering crowd, “I’m not going to start a war, I’m going to stop wars.” Fifteen months later came Operation Epic Fury. Eight months after that, CBS News projects that Democrats will take both the House and the Senate. JD Vance, never one to bury the lede, summed it up on X: “The reason we lost is the war.” Woodrow Wilson would have understood. He ran in 1916 on a slogan that a century of history teachers have never let anyone forget.
He kept us out of war, briefly: “He kept us out of war” carried Wilson to a narrow second term in November 1916. The voters took it as a pledge. It lasted about a month into his second term. On April 2, 1917, Wilson went before Congress and asked for a declaration of war against Germany. Congress obliged four days later. What followed was not what the brochure promised. The draft came. So did the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918, which made criticizing the war a good way to land in prison. More than 100,000 Americans died in uniform. At home, prices soared.
The voters started sending invoices early. In October 1918, Wilson publicly asked them to return a Democratic Congress as a vote of confidence. They returned a Republican one instead, in both chambers. Then came the hangover: the Senate’s rejection of Wilson’s League of Nations, his stroke in the fall of 1919, a wave of strikes, the Red Scare and a sharp postwar slump.
In 1920 the Democrats nominated James Cox, with a young Franklin Roosevelt as his running mate. The Republicans nominated Warren Harding, a man of no particular distinction who promised a “return to normalcy.” Harding took about 60 percent of the popular vote and 404 electoral votes to Cox’s 127. It was the most lopsided popular-vote margin of its era. Voters were not endorsing Harding so much as firing Wilson’s war.
No more wars, he said: Trump did not have a slogan as tidy as Wilson’s. He had something better: a promise repeated so often that it became the soundtrack of the 2024 campaign. At the Republican convention he boasted, “I don’t have wars.” At a Pennsylvania rally that August he said, “we will have no more wars.” On election night it was “I’m not going to start a war, I’m going to stop wars.” At his inauguration he said success would be measured partly by the wars America never gets into.
Then, on February 28, 2026, the United States and Israel went to war with Iran. Hormuz closed. Brent crude was still around $110 this week, about 50 percent above where it sat before the war. Every voter who filled a tank this year got a reminder.
By June, Trump had found a new position on his old promise. “I didn’t guarantee no war,” he told NBC. CNN’s fact-checkers helpfully listed the times he had done precisely that. Voters were not persuaded either. In a Fox News poll in September, more than 60 percent called the war the wrong decision and 71 percent said the administration lacked a clear strategy for ending it. Trump’s approval going into Election Day averaged about 38 percent.
Tuesday was the bill. CBS projects Democrats will hold somewhere between 251 and 268 House seats and at least 54 in the Senate. James Talarico beat Ken Paxton in Texas. Sherrod Brown is back in Ohio. Troy Jackson took Susan Collins’s seat in Maine. Vance blamed the war. Trump, asked about it, said it was “largely true” that the war cost Republicans seats. Then he blamed the gas prices instead, as though they had arrived from another planet. As for the war itself, Trump’s explanation was “You have no choice.”
Not 1894, but not nothing: Before the Democrats start carving Tuesday into marble, some perspective. This was not the worst beating a ruling party has ever taken. It was not even close. In 1894, after the Panic of 1893, Grover Cleveland’s Democrats lost about 125 House seats. In 1932, with the country sinking into the Depression, Herbert Hoover’s Republicans lost roughly 100 House seats and 13 Senate seats. Ulysses Grant’s Republicans lost 96 House seats in 1874, after the Panic of 1873. Benjamin Harrison’s lost 93 in 1890.
This year Republicans look set to lose something over 40 House seats. On the all-time list, that lands somewhere in the high teens, next to Trump’s own 2018 loss and Lyndon Johnson’s Vietnam-era beating in 1966. The Senate tells the same story. A loss of eight or nine seats hurts, but it falls well short of 1932 and 1958, when the ruling party lost a dozen or more. It was a rout, not an extinction event.
Look at what sits at the top of those lists. The real catastrophes were economic. Panics and depressions did what no single policy blunder ever has. Voters will forgive a great deal, but not an empty wallet.
That is what makes 2026 worth studying. Trump did not need a depression to lose Congress. He needed one broken promise, and the war made that promise expensive. The war shut Hormuz. Hormuz pushed up oil. Oil pushed up gasoline, and gasoline put the war into every family’s monthly budget. Wilson’s Democrats learned the same lesson in 1918, when they lost both chambers, including seven Senate seats, with the war still on. Tuesday’s result is smaller than the great economic wipeouts. It is still the clearest demonstration in a generation of what happens when a president promises peace, delivers war, and hands the voters the bill.
Where the parallel bends
History rhymes, but it does not plagiarize, so here are the differences. A promise, not an oath. Neither man swore to stay out of war. The oath of office binds a president to the Constitution. What both broke was a campaign promise, which voters treated as a contract anyway.
Wilson’s slogan was written for him. “He kept us out of war” was a Democratic campaign line, and Wilson himself was careful never to promise that the peace would last. Trump made the promise personally, in the first person, over and over.
Who started it. Germany’s return to unrestricted submarine warfare and the Zimmermann telegram pushed Wilson into war in 1917. No U-boats were sinking American ships off New Jersey in February 2026. Trump chose this war. War was not the only issue. In 1920 voters were also punishing inflation, strikes and a slumping economy. In 2026, Gallup found voters rated the economy and health care slightly ahead of the war. The catch is that the war is what drove up prices, as Trump himself conceded.
Normalcy, anyone? The lesson of 1918 and 1920 is that voters do not need a long memory, only an accurate one. Wilson’s Democrats lost Congress in the middle of the war and the White House when it was over. They then spent twelve years in the wilderness. Republicans are now where Wilson’s party stood in November 1918. They have lost Congress, the war is still on, and the president insists he had no choice.
There are two years until 2028. Trump could take the 1918 result as the warning it is, end the war and let the oil start moving again. Or he could listen to the people urging him to finish the job with another round of strikes on Iran. If he picks the second option, I suspect some Republican in 2028 will discover the political value of the word “normalcy.” Somebody has to run on it. Harding did, and he was not even trying very hard."
Nima and I discuss the Democrat sweep, but it ain’t history breaking:
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