How foreign policy ended up on the kitchen table: Elections 2026

KYIV — A rare thing happened at the polls yesterday — Americans voted based largely on foreign policy.

Traditionally, Americans are more concerned about what’s going on in their own backyards than they are about what the State Department is doing abroad. The combination of self-focused human nature and what scholars call “the tyranny of distance” — or security by geography — typically discourages voters from caring about what’s going on beyond their borders.

Instead, they care about kitchen-table issues: Can I afford to feed my family? How high are my taxes? What’s the price of gas?

But what happens when those bread-and-butter questions are inextricably linked to foreign policy?

My sources are saying that’s what we saw last night with America’s overhaul of Congress, flipping both chambers from Republican to Democratic control.

During President Trump’s presidency, affordability has been more closely associated with international issues such as the massive deployment of tariffs across the world.

While Trump’s stated goal was to encourage more reliance on domestic markets, take more money from foreign sales and build the economy that way, the reality never quite got there.

Instead, the price of even basic necessities increased. If an American company suddenly has to pay more for imported products, that price is passed on to consumers.

If an American company chooses to buy American, it’s paying a premium — because this is an expensive country — that is yet again passed on to consumers.

And it’s not like the White House wasn’t aware that affordability was the key issue driving voters to the polls. After last year’s gubernatorial races shifted blue, Trump went on a months-long “affordability tour,” returning to his famous rallies to convince Americans that his policies were working to lower prices.

Instead, much of what came out of his mouth amounted to seemingly out-of-touch denials that Americans were struggling financially — confusing even his own supporters, whose experiences didn’t align with what he was saying.

“You know, they always have a hoax. The new word is affordability,” Trump said during a speech in Mount Pocono, Pa., about a month after the 2025 Democratic sweep, mocking the argument he believed the left made up.

And when he did admit there was an affordability crisis, he tried to convince Americans that in the end, the same policies that had caused a rise in prices would eventually bring them down and that the pain they were experiencing now was temporary.

We saw this particularly when it came to soaring gas prices, which Americans largely (and correctly) associated with Trump’s choice to start a war with Iran to destroy a nuclear program that he claimed he “obliterated” less than a year earlier.

Americans weren’t expecting high gas prices under Trump. That’s never been his thing. Even last year, Trump would openly speak about the need to reduce the price of oil to put pressure on U.S. adversaries who rely on energy sales for their economies.

He has long pushed to make the U.S. energy independent, and it’s a big reason why he had support in rural areas built on the oil industry and the use of diesel trucks.

But producing enough oil and gas for our own use doesn’t change the global price of oil, especially when traffic through the Middle East’s main oil chokepoint — the Strait of Hormuz — slows to a crawl for months on end.

My point is that Americans may have thought they were voting on kitchen-table issues (and largely, they were), but those issues were so deeply impacted and largely created by foreign policy decisions by the administration that in reality, they did something they rarely do: they voted on the handling of international issues.

That’s why I fell in love with foreign reporting — because Americans often don’t understand how decisions made about and by the world hit home, and it’s my job to explain that for them.

Looking back in history, there are just a handful of elections in recent memory that were impacted by foreign policy.

Former President Jimmy Carter’s 1980 reelection campaign is one example. His bumbling of the Iran hostage crisis hurt his popularity as Reagan projected a stronger approach to international issues.

But foreign policy can also win elections for incumbents, as former President George W. Bush’s reelection campaign benefited from his handling of the aftermath of 9/11 and his successful (if brief) portrayal of the invasion of Iraq and the fall of Saddam Hussein as national security issues.

Whether the new Democratic majorities can actually change any of Trump’s foreign policy is still questionable, but the election results and polling on what motivated voters suggest Americans disapprove of many U.S. foreign policy decisions — and want to see their lives improve.

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