I try to keep these conversations focused on rural issues, but the war with Iran is one of them. Gas prices are a rural issue. So in this conversation, John walked me through what he’s seeing in the polling, and it’s pretty striking.
Iran is at the top of basically every list his firm tracks, polling at or above inflation and jobs in battleground states, and nobody believes the ceasefire is real because people’s day-to-day experience is telling them otherwise.
Prices at the pump are up 20 to 30 percent in parts of the country. What really got me was this finding: more Americans say we’re in Iran to distract from the Epstein files than say we’re there because of Iran’s nuclear program. That is a really bad place to be if you’re trying to sustain public support for a war, and John’s numbers show opposition is still going down with no sign of stopping.
The other thing we spent a lot of time on is what this all means politically heading into 2026.
The social media figures who normally run cover for the administration are turning on Trump because their audiences are the people who would actually have to fight this war. That cushion is gone. Meanwhile Republicans like Vance are already maneuvering for what comes next, watching the polling, doing the long form interviews, positioning themselves as the ones who saw this coming.
I think the political fault lines are being redrawn faster than I’ve seen in my career. We’ll be digging into all of it again next week.
