When Donald Trump enjoyed a narrow victory in the United States’ 2024 election, the economy was cited, in many polls, as a key factor. And many voters, frustrated over inflation, were willing to give Trump a second chance as president.
But according to i Paper reporter Kieron Monks, the very thing that propelled Trump to victory in 2024 — the economy — could be a major liability for Republicans in the 2026 midterms. And the Iran war’s economic impact, according to Monks, is fueling widespread frustration among 2024 Trump voters, including farmers and rural voters.
“Few professions have been as reliably supportive of Donald Trump as farmers, and few U.S. states voted for him by a greater margin than Mississippi,” Monks explains in an article published by the UK-based publication on April 30. “But now, agricultural workers in the southern Republican stronghold say they are suffering from the effects of the President’s war on Iran.”
The war and the blocking of the Strait of Hormuz — a Middle Eastern waterway crucial to the flow of oil — are creating major hardships for farmers, according to Monks.
“The national average of gasoline prices hit a four-year high of $4.23 (£3.14) on Wednesday, (April 29), a 40 per cent surge on pre-war prices, according to the AAA motor club,” Monks reports. “Economists say that some demographics key to Trump’s electoral success could be among the most affected by war-related price rises, with some of the worst impacts yet to come.”
According to Bernard Yaros, lead U.S. economist at Oxford Economics, lower-income Americans and residents of rural areas — both of whom were critical to Trump’s victory in 2024 — could be hit especially hard economically.
Yaros told the i Paper, “Typically, this is going to affect lower-income households much more because they spend a greater share of their budgets on gasoline, on energy, goods and services. Negative energy price shocks are regressive in that they hit those lower on income distribution…. In terms of geography, this is going to affect folks in the South and Midwest much more than the West and Northeast. These are more rural areas where people drive a lot more.”
According to Monks, red states with a lot of rural areas have “seen some of the sharpest rises in petrol prices during the war” — a factor that could sway the outcome of the 2026 midterms.
Yaros told the i Paper, “We’re expecting that gasoline prices in the U.S. are going to stabilize, but some of the spillover effects into non-energy commodities will take time to play out. We’re going to see food prices gradually grind higher as a result of the higher cost of diesel, the workhorse fuel for the agriculture industry, which powers the tractors that work the fields.”