How the 1966 Midterm Elections Presaged 2026
Foreign Policy · Julian E. Zelizer ·
Republicans successfully connected wartime spending to the rising price of pork chops.
Republicans successfully connected wartime spending to the rising price of pork chops.
Conventional wisdom in U.S. politics holds that foreign policy rarely matters in midterm elections. When it comes to the composition of Congress, voters care about many issues, but ordinarily, what the United States does overseas is usually not among them. Bread-and-butter concerns (or, in today’s parlance, the issue of affordability) are much more likely to drive voters’ decisions about who should represent them. As Thomas E. Ricks wrote for this magazine in 2012, “Americans frankly don’t give a damn about foreign policy, Scarlett. By a 81 to 9 percent margin, they care more about the economy.”
There have, however, been notable exceptions where politics does not stop at the water’s edge, and 2026 is shaping up to be one of those years. It typically takes extraordinary circumstances for foreign policy to influence voting behavior, whether that concerns a full-scale mobilization, as in the 1942 and 1944 elections, or the deployment of large numbers of ground troops, as in the 1970 or 2006 elections. Yet the connection between military operations and economic conditions can also become politically potent.
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