US strikes Iran's Qeshm Island as midterm elections start

Let's discuss all the latest then. Oliver Fowrie from our International Affairs desk is here. Oliver, first of all, these strikes in Iran, what do you read into that? Well, there is a temptation to link them with the U.S. midterms, and this is mainly because the Wall Street Journal who reported on them initially said that the U.S. Central Command confirmed to them that these limited strikes have actually been carried out for several weeks now, but the U.S. military has only now decided to go public with them. Why exactly, we do not know. Certainly, the U.S. military does not do politics. It has no leeway whatsoever to make these declarations unilaterally, and its commander-in-chief is none other than the President of the United States. So you imagine that Donald Trump sees some reason, perhaps even some benefit, in announcing them on the eve of the midterms. I'm sure there are... There's certain military reasonings behind them, but as I said, there could have been any benefit beforehand, before now, to go public with them. Donald Trump, of course, has just said there is no war going on. He reiterated it just hours before news of these strikes came out. And Vice President J.D. Vance also expressed his optimism of a peace deal. And the Iranians seem to be singing for the same hymn sheet there. Yet we have a fairly precisely timed announcement, which serves as a reminder of a war that is, quite frankly, fairly disastrous for the United States and also extremely unpopular with U.S. voters. So why exactly Donald Trump is doing this, we don't know. It's certainly not going to benefit the Republicans in today's election, who probably would prefer not to have people reminded of the reason behind this high fuel prices, which is driving so much. That said, this announcement is probably not going to move the needle either way, coming so late in the day, and indeed, an awful lot of American voters would probably already have cast their ballots in early voting. Well, let's sum up the midterms where we stand there. I keep checking the clock because it's just over 45 minutes now until the first polls open at 5 a.m. local time in Vermont. The polls, of course, are saying the Democrats are going to benefit greatly from anger at the Trump administration in these elections. Quite how much, though? I mean, it still remains very uncertain. Yeah, there's a lot of very granular stuff that is going in under the hood, so to speak. So it's really hard to extrapolate statewide races This is from the. The overall unpopularity of Donald Trump. We do know that Donald Trump's unprecedented unpopularity withstands it. A negative 27 at the moment is harming the Republicans. Thank While 32 to 34 percent of voters still approve of the president, only 26 percent approve of his handling of the economy. you And the economy, as Bill Clinton famously once said, is really all that matters in U.S. elections. very This doesn't necessarily mean that discontent will convert into electoral gains across the board for the Democrats. much. They will certainly pick up. A number of states in the Senate, whether it's enough to actually flip the Senate is another thing. And of course, these Senate races, there were only 33 of them up for grabs, are much harder to win for either party than, for instance, the. House of Representatives races are because they're statewide. And also we've seen in some of our own reports over the past week, traditional Republican voters who are unhappy with Trump are going to opt for Democrats or independents in these elections. But they also say that they will vote for Republicans down ballot in state elections and so to speak. So this is far from a generational switch that is going to be heard for years to come. And there are certainly more states in play than might otherwise be the case. Texas is one of them, as we've just seen there, where James Tallarico could very well win the first Senate seat for the Democrats in over three decades, in fact, almost four decades since they won an election. And even in deep red states such as Kansas, he is potentially up for grabs. The incumbent Republican Senator Roger Marshall has been backed into a corner by Democratic attacks over his business practices. When he was an obstetrician gynecologist in rural Kansas, where he allegedly used debt collectors to recover money from poorer patients, charging up to 18 percent interest on unpaid late payments. So Marshall's final campaign video yesterday was rather defensively addressing those and those accusations in a regular election year. Somebody in a safe red state. Like him, probably would have just completely ignored these attacks. But the fact that he is addressing them now means that he may really be nervous that his Democratic opponent, Adam Hamilton, could parlay them into election gains. That's a measure of how... close this election might be in these so-called battleground states, but really it's too soon to say. Each state will be judged more or less on its own merits. All to follow, of course, we will have all the results here on France 24. Our special programming begins at 3 a.m. Paris time and we'll be covering all those results as they come in. And of course, hopefully by this time tomorrow, we should have a pretty good idea of where things stand. Oliver, thanks very much.