How foreign policy, Iran war drove the midterm vote

Welcome back. Most Americans ranked cost of living, not foreign policy as their top issue and the run-up to the midterms. But a poll from the Chicago Council on Global Affairs finds 86% of people that were surveyed see the U.S.-Iran war as bad for the cost of living. Here to talk about how all this may have factored into the ballot decisions is Council Director of Public Opinion and Foreign Policy, Craig Kafura. Craig, thanks for joining us this morning. Were you shocked at all with how much cost of living played a factor in last night's election. I wouldn't say I was surprised by how highly voters ranked that as a priority. I mean, that's a thing that all of us deal with every single day when we fill up the car or go to the grocery store. But I will say I was quite surprised by the scale of the Democratic victory last night. I think a lot of the polls that I was looking at were predicting Democrats winning fairly comfortably, but we're seeing a 14, 15-point shift in some of these races, the North Carolina seat going by 20 points. I mean, this is a really, really stunning result for the Democratic Party. There's a lot of discussion ahead of this that Iran was just trying to hold out until after the midterms. They were hoping that President Trump's candidates would not win so that perhaps the U.S. would back off. Do you think that's a possibility? I know we've got a lot of the candidates or a lot of the now winners talking about the War Powers Act and how they're going to push that initiative through. It will be tricky for Congress to force the Iran war to an end, but I do think that this does pressure the president to deescalate in Iran rather than potentially seeking to escalate further. As we've heard some rumors about, there's rumors of increased bombing or a resumption of hostilities. This might push the president to be a bit more conciliatory. I do also think now that Democrats will have more investigatory powers. There's going to be a lot of interest in exactly what damage Iran has done to American bases in the Middle East. A lot of that information has been kept very tightly under wraps with Democratic senators not being allowed to visit US military facilities, which is rather unprecedented in our history. Now that the Democrats control the Senate and control the House starting in January, they're gonna be able to open up the black box and figure out exactly how much damage has been done to the United States. And do you, I mean, obviously you can't give us an exact, but do you have an estimate or an idea of when the voters, when the American public will get access to that information? My guess is that they'll get access to it pretty soon after Congress does because the Democrats will want to make that information public. Some of it will be classified of course, but in terms of just the scale of damage, if it's things that the administration has been hiding, that's something Democrats will have an interest in making some political What do you think this all means for Israel? I know that before the election, the president said the U.S. would not be sending the $4 billion it typically does in aid. So what does it mean for them? I do think you're going to see a push from Congress to cut back on the foreign military financing that we currently provide to Israel so they can buy weapons from the United States. That's been an issue in Democratic primaries this year. It's been an issue for some of these Democratic candidates. My guess is that Senator El-Saeed is not going US weapons to Israel, for example. But that's also reflective of a broader shift in the democratic public. Our polls have found that majorities of Democrats oppose sending weapons to Israel. They want restrictions placed on those weapons. And in general, Americans are not happy with how the Israeli government has conducted itself in the last three years. Now, perhaps we'll get a new government in Israel. Perhaps that new Israeli government would make some changes that would put the US-Israel relationship back on a better track. But if Netanyahu stays in power, I'm not hopeful about that. And can we talk a little about Russia and Ukraine as well? Because the way that has been framed recently has been a little different, especially the dropping the sanctions on Russia. Do you think any of that will be put back into place or that will be kind of reframed towards the American public? I do think that the Russia-Ukraine issue could be a very interesting one to watch in Congress because there are some Republicans who Are more of the Cold War era Republicans who have that desire to support Ukraine. With a president now clearly in a lame duck period, getting rebuked by the American public in the midterms, I would be curious if you might find some bipartisan coalition building around providing more support for Ukraine on making some of the Starlink capabilities more clearly accessible to them and rolling back some of this openness to Russia. A lot of this does depend on the president. The president does have a lot of discretion on foreign policy issues, so we'll see how it goes. Yeah, and what happens to these tariffs as the new Congress takes over? Do they have any power in repealing those? So, sort of as the president has gone through different tariff authorities, he's been sued and has been found to have been using them illegally, and so every so often he goes out and puts new tariffs on. As the court system works out, he's told he has to pull them off, he has to issue refunds. At some point, I do wonder if Congress gets sick of this and says, okay, you have this authority because we've given you these powers. We're going to take that back for a while, right? You're not playing right with the toys. We have to take the toy away. So Potentially, I do also know the tariffs have been very unpopular with the public, and it's impacted those things that Americans care about the most, right? Cost of living. It's been very unpopular for the public, for Democratic candidates. It's something they've run against. I know there's been some talk about tariffs continuing on because of the revenue income, but there's just not that much money coming in, given the refunds that are having to go out now. And bringing it back to you that Congress wants to pass legislation to rein in executive power when it comes to military conflict. We've heard multiple candidates run on that as well, but what does that actually look like? What would they be limiting in terms of executive power? I think where Congress really has the most power on this is going to be on the budget and the power of the purse. And I also think there's going to be some very strong calls for impeaching the Secretary of Defense. Hegseth has not done a particularly great job in that role, according to most congressional Democrats. They have a lot of questions for him about how he's managed things, personnel decisions that he's made, decisions he made in the sort of how you manage the personnel of the US military, the extended deployments of US forces, and again, potentially covering up damage done to bases in this war with Iran. So I think as Democrats start to exert some of that investigatory power, as they start start to flex some of the financial power. They can put conditions on how the president, how the Department of Defense can use those resources. We saw this in the first Trump administration with restrictions about abilities to draw down troops from certain allied countries. My guess is we'll see that come back as well. Craig, thank you so much for your time this morning.