For the past week, I have been thinking constantly about someone who I do not know the name of. This person is the Iranian government’s designated advisor on American electoral politics.
I know that this person exists because nothing about the country’s recent behavior in its war against the United States can be explained without their existence. Ever since the country effectively took control over and closed the Strait of Hormuz back in early March, it has enjoyed a nearly unprecedented level of power over an American presidency, one only matched in recent history by its own taking of American hostages nearly half-a-century ago in 1980. More than the White House, more than the DNC, more than any individual candidate or even any megadonor, Tehran and Tehran alone has been deciding the basic contours of this midterm election.As one would expect, this has resulted in much more uncertainty than we are used to in an American election cycle. For almost half a year, the very nature of the most important issue for the most important voters in the country has been in the hands of a foreign power operating on its very own set of considerations—considerations that could plausibly go in any direction imaginable.
Would Iran, as would be entirely within their right, help Republicans politically in exchange for concessions in a favorable pre-midterms deal? Would they do what they did in 1980 and attempt to maximize the political pain in order to humiliate a despised opponent and send a message? Or would they, as the Trump administration reportedly hoped they would, simply ease up on the economic noose as a sign of good faith for post-November talks? Only those at the highest levels of the Iranian government could be said to know, and that was assuming that they had actually made a decision at all. As the conflict ping-ponged from escalation to de-escalation and ceasefire to open hostilities, it was impossible for even the most informed to confidently declare what approach Tehran would take—and, to that end, how bad the cost-of-living crisis would actually be by November 2026.
But time brings clarity, and clarity is exactly what we got just last week. What happened was not just that the Iranian side of the conflict, as anyone with a car can tell you, escalated the conflict in such a way that sent energy prices shooting upwards to some of their highest levels of the conflict. It was that they did so at the precise time they did. Iran specifically chose to escalate during the week of Labor Day, the unofficial start of general election campaign season in American political folklore. It is precisely at that moment that any notion that any events or scandals are “too early” to matter electorally are laid to rest, both because of the amount of voters that start paying attention around then and the lack of time for things to change between then and Election Day. It is very, very difficult to imagine that Iran escalating by as much as it did in the way that it did at that precise moment is a coincidence of any kind. It was a calculated move—the kind of move that could have only been made in consultation with that in-house IRGC expert on the American political calendar who I can’t stop thinking about. It is one that puts the Trump administration in a horrific, utterly unwinnable political situation, where its best-case scenario is a hurried unconditional surrender that doesn’t occur quickly enough to reduce price pressures and the most likely scenario is an ever-spiraling cost-of-living catastrophe that only gets worse before peaking in November.
This isn’t the sort of thing that traditional handicappers account for or statistical models can project. Even strict opinion writers haven’t been confident enough to fully factor it in. But it may be the most important piece of new political information we have received since the shutting down of the Strait of Hormuz earlier this year, and it comes, in a remarkable coincidence, as Democrats are already surging as a result of post-Labor Day polling adjustments. As things stand, we aren’t just on track for a mere Democratic win this year or even a simple blue wave. We are on course for something genuinely historic beyond anything we have seen before in the Trump era, courtesy of an entire nation choosing to put humiliating Trump above everything else. Here’s what it looks like when the party in power has lied to everyone, failed at everything, and is left with no outs on the road to oblivion.