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Democrats weren’t the only ones celebrating amid shattering defeats for Republicans in the midterm elections — Iranian leaders also took a victory lap Wednesday.
Iran cast the results — where Democrats made gains even in traditional Republican strongholds — as a rejection of President Donald Trump’s war and a decisive referendum on the economic toll it took on American voters in the months before the election.
“The process of the US’s collapse has accelerated,” Iran’s current Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, posted on an official English language account on X.
“Conscience or the cost of living, Americans said NO TO WAR, and we endorse this message,” Iranian Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, who has also served as Tehran’s chief negotiator in talks with Washington, posted on X.
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In this picture obtained from Iran’s ISNA news agency, Mojtaba Khamenei (C), son of Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, walks along a street in Tehran on May 31, 2019. (Hamid FOROUTAN / ISNA / AFP via Getty Images)
“If the US govt betrays their public will to serve international paymasters and blackmailers, it will learn our NO comes with a Nightmare,” Ghalibaf added.
Khamenei, meanwhile, appeared to signal Iran would dig in its heels rather than negotiate with the U.S.
“The Great Satan [the US] wants the surrender of the Iranian nation. The slightest inclination toward submission would cause the immense capital acquired through the blessings brought by the blood of our martyrs and the sacrifices of the entire Iranian nation to be lost,” he wrote in another post on X.
“It would embolden the enemy to launch more wars, and carry out its next acts of aggression.”
The declarations came after Democrats seized control of Congress Tuesday night in a political bloodbath for Republicans, delivering a major rebuke to Trump after a campaign dominated by concerns over affordability and the months-long war with Iran that the president repeatedly promised was nearing its end.
When the attacks began earlier this year, Trump said it would last a weeks — maybe a bit over a month. It has now been raging for more than eight months.
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Iran was hardly the only issue driving voters to the polls — but the conflict became increasingly intertwined with Americans’ economic concerns as the war sent energy prices higher and impacted the costs of gas and most goods.
Polling ahead of Election Day showed deep public dissatisfaction with the Iran conflict.
Iranian Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf speaks during a press conference in Tehran, Iran, Nov. 27, 2024. (Majid Asgaripour/WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS)
Trump himself acknowledged after the results came in that Iran “partly” played a role in Republicans’ losses, even as he continued to defend his decision to go to war.
Vice President JD Vance was much more blunt, writing in a lengthy X post: “The reason we lost is the war.”
“If you’d like to argue it was worth it, that losing the Senate for the next 6 years was worth it, then do so,” he continued. “Argue it was a worthwhile cost to pay. Agree or disagree, that’s at least honest.”
Other voices in Tehran also claimed vindication in the wake of the results.
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Iranian Deputy Parliament Speaker Ali Nikzad called the Republican losses the “aftershocks” of what he described as Trump’s defeat at the hands of Iran, while a senior official in Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian’s office claimed the war and U.S. support for Israel had brought Republicans an historic electoral defeat.
Trump entered the conflict predicting a short war.
In the opening days of Operation Epic Fury, the president repeatedly said the campaign would take roughly four to six weeks and soon declared U.S. forces were running “substantially ahead” of schedule. American and Israeli strikes quickly eliminated senior Iranian military leaders and battered Tehran’s military infrastructure.
But the war proved far easier to start than to end.
Iran retaliated by choking commercial traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow waterway that before the war carried roughly a fifth of the world’s oil supply, while launching attacks on energy infrastructure across the Persian Gulf. Shipping through the strait nearly ground to a halt in the early weeks of the conflict, removing millions of barrels of oil from global markets and sending energy prices sharply higher.
Iranian attacks damaged oil and energy facilities in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and elsewhere in the Gulf, further squeezing supplies. By the end of May, more than 1.1 billion barrels of crude that would ordinarily have reached global markets had been disrupted, according to the International Monetary Fund.
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What Trump initially described as a matter of weeks instead stretched across much of 2026, as the administration struggled to secure lasting freedom of navigation through Hormuz and Iran retained the ability to threaten commercial shipping and its Gulf neighbors.
A satellite image shows the Strait of Hormuz, a key maritime passage connecting the Persian Gulf to the Gulf of Oman, vital for global energy supply. (Amanda Macias/Fox News Digital)
The economic consequences followed Americans home.
Oil prices surged after the war began, feeding through to gasoline and other consumer costs just as Republicans headed into a midterm election already dominated by concerns over affordability.
Even after U.S.-led operations restored much of the traffic through Hormuz by the fall, oil flows remained below prewar levels and Iran continued attacking commercial vessels.
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The prolonged conflict also complicated Trump’s effort to argue that the war had already accomplished its central objectives. By October, the president was disputing that he had ever promised the entire conflict would end within four to six weeks, saying that timeline referred only to eliminating Iran’s nuclear threat.