How Israel, Tariffs, and Immigration Impacted 3 U.S. Midterm Races

Republicans’ historic defeat in the U.S. midterms made clear that voters are unhappy with President Donald Trump’s Iran war quagmire and high tariffs, both of which are blamed for worsening the affordability crisis.

Beneath those top-line takeaways, however, there are other lessons to be learned. Three races in particular offer vital insight into how American voters view key planks of Trump’s global agenda—from Israel to tariffs to immigration—and what that could mean for the future of U.S. foreign policy.

Republicans’ historic defeat in the U.S. midterms made clear that voters are unhappy with President Donald Trump’s Iran war quagmire and high tariffs, both of which are blamed for worsening the affordability crisis.

Beneath those top-line takeaways, however, there are other lessons to be learned. Three races in particular offer vital insight into how American voters view key planks of Trump’s global agenda—from Israel to tariffs to immigration—and what that could mean for the future of U.S. foreign policy.

Progressive Democrat Abdul El-Sayed bested former Republican Rep. Mike Rogers in the Michigan Senate race, where Israel took center stage throughout the campaign.

El-Sayed has accused Israel of carrying out a genocide in Gaza and apartheid in the West Bank. He wants unconditional U.S. military support to end for not only Israel but also other Middle Eastern countries such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia.

This summer, El-Sayed narrowly defeated establishment Democrats’ preferred candidate in Michigan—moderate Rep. Haley Stevens—in a primary contest where U.S. policy toward Israel was the major dividing issue. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) spent at least $30 million to boost Stevens in the primary and then spent millions more trying to help Rogers in the general election.

By winning the race, El-Sayed showed that strong opposition to U.S. support for Israel is not only no longer a political third rail, but also that it can even be part of a successful campaign message. His victory demonstrates just how radically formerly staunch U.S. support for Israel has soured among not only liberals and progressives but also even with some Republican voters.

U.S. attitudes toward Israel have been colored by the country’s brutal war in Gaza as well as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s perceived role in convincing Trump to launch the Iran war in February. Among Democrats, Israel’s favorability rating out of a score of a possible 100 has slipped from 52 in 2022 to just 30 today, according to an October opinion survey by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. And among Republicans, favorable views have fallen from 69 to 62 points.

Now, even Republicans seem to be waking up to the vibe shift. Trump abruptly claimed on Tuesday that nearly $4 billion in annual U.S. security assistance to Israel would end this year. “The left uses the $4 billion payment—that everybody knows about, it’s no secret—as a signal of unfairness, and we can’t allow that to happen,” Trump said in making the announcement.

And on Wednesday, U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance listed “change our relationship to Israel” as one of the four major policy adjustments that Republicans should make to win back voters who chose Trump in 2024 based on messaging from pollsters he spoke with.

The trade war that Trump instigated with Ottawa in 2025 has been felt across the United States, but especially in the northern states where the lengthy border with Canada has long been seen as an opportunity for integrating local economies, especially in the energy and automotive sectors.

Canada designed its retaliatory tariffs for massive political impact, targeting states that are heavily reliant on exports to Canada and had competitive midterms. In Michigan, exports to Canada fell by about $3.5 billion from 2024-2025 while the state lost more than 15,600 jobs, according to the Globe and Mail. And Canadian imports to Maine decreased by 8 percent from January 2025 to this August.

Republicans have largely backed Trump’s shifting explanations for why he was imposing steep tariffs on Canadian exports, including aluminum, steel, timber, and copper. Former Republican Sen. John E. Sununu, who unsuccessfully attempted on Tuesday to flip the New Hampshire Senate seat held by retiring Democratic Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, was among them.

Early on, Sununu defended Trump’s tariffs on Canada and other countries. “If they want access to the American market, they’re going to have to either change those nontariff barriers or face some form of tariff. I think that message is an important one,” he said in an October 2025 interview at the start of his Senate campaign.

But as New Hampshire’s businesses suffered from retaliatory Canadian tariffs (the country is the state’s second-largest export market), Sununu eventually changed his tune. Retaliatory tariffs are estimated to have cost New Hampshire $1.1 billion since January 2025, according to the National Taxpayers Union Foundation.

In an October debate with his rival, Democratic Rep. Chris Pappas, Sununu acknowledged that the trade war with Canada was a “huge mistake” and said that he hadn’t meant to minimize the economic impact of the tariffs on New Hampshire’s businesses and consumers.

Yet it was apparently too little, too late. Pappas made hay over Sununu’s shifting stance on Trump’s tariffs, drawing attention to his own legislation in Congress that would exempt small businesses from tariffs on Canadian goods.

Pappas soundly defeated Sununu by a nearly 14-point margin.

“We’re in a big hole right now, and I’m hoping the Democrats, everything that they said, that they’re going to work for better for us, for prices of food—everything, gas, whatever it takes,” a New Hampshire voter named Donna said in a local television interview.

Latino voters helped drive Trump’s return to power in 2024. He received 42 percent of the national Latino vote that year, a record for any Republican presidential candidate. But after nearly two years of his sweeping mass deportation agenda, as well as trade and war policies that worsened an affordability crisis felt heavily by Latino voters, many of them appear to have turned against the U.S. president.

That was evident Tuesday in a district in Miami-Dade County in South Florida that is more than 70 percent Latino. At time of writing, three-term Republican Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar was barely hanging on to the lead in her race, which could head to a recount. In contrast, Trump carried her district by 15 points in the 2024 presidential contest.

The district comprises an interesting grouping of Latino voters—including many whose families fled communist Cuba and who support Trump’s efforts to economically squeeze Havana so hard that the regime capitulates to U.S. demands or topples over. It also has a large population of Venezuelan Americans who fled the authoritarian regime of former Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and who credit Trump for capturing and arresting Maduro in a January military raid.

Yet for many Latino voters in the district, those welcome policy moves were overshadowed by the fear and economic disruption caused by Trump’s aggressive immigration and deportation strategy.

An October survey of Cuban Americans by Florida International University found that 61 percent backed continuing the U.S. embargo on trade with Cuba, but 76 percent disapproved of Trump’s deportation of Cuban nationals without a criminal record; 48 percent disapproved of his handling of the U.S. economy.

Evidently sensing the electoral peril that she was in, Salazar in September released an ad in which she addressed Trump, telling him that “some of your immigration enforcement efforts have gone too far.” Though she was criticized by the MAGA wing of the Republican Party, her campaign efforts to triangulate her positions on immigration with support for Trump may well save her seat.

But the warnings for Republicans on falling support with Latino voters are clear. Republicans largely rested their redistricting efforts in Florida on the assumption that Trump would be able to maintain his 2024 share of Latino and other nonwhite voter support. That assumption proved false on Tuesday, with Democrats winning three heavily Latino Florida House seats that Republicans had redrawn.

“The voters have spoken loud and clear all over District 27, Florida, and the rest of the country, that my party—my Republican Party—needs to course-correct on the economy and on immigration,” Salazar told supporters on election night.