American voters have a long memory for one particular kind of broken promise. Tell them you will keep their sons out of a foreign war, then march them into one, and they will eventually send you a bill. In 1920 the Democrats paid it. On Tuesday, the Republicans did.
On election night 2024, Donald Trump told a cheering crowd, “I’m not going to start a war, I’m going to stop wars.” Fifteen months later came Operation Epic Fury. Eight months after that, CBS News projects that Democrats will take both the House and the Senate. JD Vance, never one to bury the lede, summed it up on X: “The reason we lost is the war.”
Woodrow Wilson would have understood. He ran in 1916 on a slogan that a century of history teachers have never let anyone forget.
He kept us out of war, briefly
“He kept us out of war” carried Wilson to a narrow second term in November 1916. The voters took it as a pledge. It lasted about a month into his second term. On April 2, 1917, Wilson went before Congress and asked for a declaration of war against Germany. Congress obliged four days later.
What followed was not what the brochure promised. The draft came. So did the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918, which made criticizing the war a good way to land in prison. More than 100,000 Americans died in uniform. At home, prices soared.
The voters started sending invoices early. In October 1918, Wilson publicly asked them to return a Democratic Congress as a vote of confidence. They returned a Republican one instead, in both chambers. Then came the hangover: the Senate’s rejection of Wilson’s League of Nations, his stroke in the fall of 1919, a wave of strikes, the Red Scare and a sharp postwar slump.
In 1920 the Democrats nominated James Cox, with a young Franklin Roosevelt as his running mate. The Republicans nominated Warren Harding, a man of no particular distinction who promised a “return to normalcy.” Harding took about 60 percent of the popular vote and 404 electoral votes to Cox’s 127. It was the most lopsided popular-vote margin of its era. Voters were not endorsing Harding so much as firing Wilson’s war.
No more wars, he said
Trump did not have a slogan as tidy as Wilson’s. He had something better: a promise repeated so often that it became the soundtrack of the 2024 campaign. At the Republican convention he boasted, “I don’t have wars.” At a Pennsylvania rally that August he said, “we will have no more wars.” On election night it was “I’m not going to start a war, I’m going to stop wars.” At his inauguration he said success would be measured partly by the wars America never gets into.
Then, on February 28, 2026, the United States and Israel went to war with Iran. Hormuz closed. Brent crude was still around $110 this week, about 50 percent above where it sat before the war. Every voter who filled a tank this year got a reminder.
By June, Trump had found a new position on his old promise. “I didn’t guarantee no war,” he told NBC. CNN’s fact-checkers helpfully listed the times he had done precisely that. Voters were not persuaded either. In a Fox News poll in September, more than 60 percent called the war the wrong decision and 71 percent said the administration lacked a clear strategy for ending it. Trump’s approval going into Election Day averaged about 38 percent.
Tuesday was the bill. CBS projects Democrats will hold somewhere between 251 and 268 House seats and at least 54 in the Senate. James Talarico beat Ken Paxton in Texas. Sherrod Brown is back in Ohio. Troy Jackson took Susan Collins’s seat in Maine. Vance blamed the war. Trump, asked about it, said it was “largely true” that the war cost Republicans seats. Then he blamed the gas prices instead, as though they had arrived from another planet. As for the war itself, Trump’s explanation was “You have no choice.”
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