Breitbart Business Digest: It Wasn’t the Tariffs. It Was the Forever War.

What Really Drove the GOP Midterm Losses?

The fanatical foes of tariffs have been loudly announcing their explanation for the much larger-than-expected Republican election losses in this week’s midterm elections to anyone who will listen. Naturally, it’s the tariffs.

This was inevitable. Economists and pundits who spent the past year and a half wedded to their disastrous forecasts that President Donald Trump’s trade policies would wreck the economy were hardly going to let an election defeat go to waste. They had been frustrated at every turn of the economic data as productivity improved, tariffs contributed almost nothing to inflation, employment rose, output soared, and investment boomed. In the midterm election rout of the GOP there was, at last, something they could blame on tariffs.

There’s just one problem. The polling data doesn’t fit their story any better than the economic data did.

The Economist/YouGov poll has tracked Trump’s economic approval throughout his second term. After an early decline, his net approval—the share approving minus the share disapproving—settled around minus 10 in June of 2025. By October 2026, it was minus 36.

That’s a deterioration of 26 points. If tariffs did that, we should be able to find some evidence that…

Original source: https://www.breitbart.com/economy/