Politics
Dems hit the airwaves over Iran
Democrats are opening a new front in their midterm offensive over Iran.
VoteVets Action Fund is rolling out a $250,000 ad campaign Wednesday targeting Rep. Derrick Van Orden (R-Wis.) over his support of the war with Iran, according to details shared first with Blue Light News.
It’s one of the first examples of Democrats putting real money behind the issue in the midterms since President Donald Trump’s attack on the country more than a month ago. And it comes as Republicans grow increasingly worried that the war’s impact on prices could hurt the party at the ballot box this fall.
The ad attacks Van Orden, an at-risk Republican and combat veteran, for backing a Pentagon push for $200 billion more for the Iran operation as prices at the pump continue to rise, and after he called last year for cuts to the Department of Veterans Affairs. The ad accuses Van Orden of backing cuts to veterans’ care — though in the hearing referenced, the Republican advocates for slashing bureaucrats to add more doctors.
The spot sheds light on how Democrats are working to weaponize the war: by arguing that Trump is spending big abroad while further pinching voters’ pocketbooks and, in VoteVets’ case, stiffing veterans.
“Look at that gas pump. We’re paying the cost every damn day of this war in Iran. But for Congressman Van Orden, we’re not paying enough. He’s going for another $200 billion dollars to spend in Iran,” a male Marine Corps veteran narrates in the clip.
“This is the same guy who backed big cuts to VA care for vets,” the veteran says, referring to significant staffing reductions at the agency since Trump returned to office, including thousands of medical personnel. “Vets like me, we understand the cost of war. But if we don’t have the money to take care of our veterans, we damn sure can’t afford another war. Call Van Orden on it.”
VoteVets, whose PAC works to elect Democratic veterans, intends to expand its Iran ad campaign into other battleground districts, with a particular focus on GOP veterans who the group argues are blindly following Trump in abandoning his campaign-trail pledge to end endless wars.
“There’s absolutely no doubt that voters throughout the country, and particularly in Rep. Van Orden’s district, are very aware of the fact that every single day we spend billions of dollars [on] this war in Iran is yet another day that not only is the affordability crisis ignored, but it’s getting even worse,” said former Rep. Max Rose, a New York Democrat who serves as a senior adviser to VoteVets. “What this first video represents is our commitment to holding every single Republican veteran in the House of Representatives accountable for their lies, hypocrisy and absence of courage.”
Van Orden, a retired Navy SEAL who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, slammed VoteVets as a “running joke in the veteran community” in a statement to Blue Light News. He expressed support for Trump’s military operation and the supplemental funding plan that the White House has been reviewing. But Van Orden stressed that he continues to oppose putting uniformed troops on the ground in Iran.
“Iran has been at war with the United States for 47 years. When we start putting a price tag on American citizens’ lives, we’ve already lost sight of our responsibility,” Van Orden said. “Every single American murdered by these radical Muslim mullahs is priceless, and every American life we can save is beyond value.”
The 30-second spot will run during NCAA games and other live sporting events, as well as on broadcast, radio, streaming services and social media platforms. It represents an escalation in Democrats’ rhetoric and aggression as the party seizes on growing voter backlash to the now monthlong conflict that Trump is threatening to intensify.
Democrats have already been hammering Republicans over affordability as the average price of a gallon of gas soars over $4. Now they’re eyeing ways to connect other cost concerns to the ballooning spending on the war amid reporting that Republicans are considering further reductions to federal health spending to bankroll the military effort — returning to some of their signature issues of the cycle to argue that the GOP is prioritizing fealty to the president over voters’ pocketbooks.
Other Democrat-aligned groups are joining in. Battleground Alliance PAC flew a plane over a minor league baseball game in Pennsylvania over the weekend with a banner targeting Republican Rep. Ryan Mackenzie that read “Mackenzie: Your Iran Vote = Sky High $$$Gas.” The group is planning similar stunts in more than half a dozen other swing districts across Michigan, Iowa, Nebraska and Ohio.
“We’re in a war of choice, which is spending an enormous amount of money, and we’re going to get more health care cuts and oil price increases,” said Andrew Grossman, a senior adviser to the labor-backed Battleground Alliance PAC. “And so the cost of living — like the chaos and the Republican Congress just saying yes always to President Trump — is hitting Americans in our pocketbooks, and that is the single most important issue of our moment.”
Mackenzie’s campaign manager, Andres Weller, dismissed the move in a statement as “the same political stunts that people are tired of. An outside group did the same thing at the same place in 2024, and all it accomplished was annoying people who were trying to enjoy a baseball game with their family and friends.”
Democrats’ ramp-up comes as Republicans are increasingly fearful a prolonged war will hurt their chances of holding onto power in the midterms. The conflict is already fracturing the MAGA coalition. And polls show a majority of Americans are against the operation in Iran, including an Ipsos survey released Tuesday that found two-thirds of Americans want the U.S. to end its involvement even if the president does not achieve all his goals, and that 56 percent expect the conflict will have a negative impact on their personal financial situation.
Voters are “going to look to their members of Congress to see if they double down or be an independent voice [on Iran],” Samuel Chen, a Pennsylvania-based GOP strategist, said. “If they’re doubling down on it in these tight seats in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and other places, that could be the difference.”
Daniel Lurie is already imagining the scene at Levi’s Stadium on July 1.
The San Francisco Democrat — who, according to at least one recent poll, is the most popular mayor in America — was circulating around his city ahead of Levi’s Stadium hosting Turkey vs. Paraguay tonight, when he began to wrap his head around his good fortune.
The venue is scheduled to host the Round of 32 match featuring the Group D winner on July 1, and that’s very likely to be the U.S. team.
“It’ll be incredible,” Lurie, a no-nonsense technocrat, told Blue Light News. “It’ll be a thrilling moment for San Francisco, and for our region.”
He beamed in to a FaceTime interview from Southern Station, having already been at two watch parties that capture the new San Francisco he’s trying to build: the East Cut neighborhood, and then Fieldwork Brewing at China Basin.
And Lurie knows ball: Not only has he attended five World Cups, he is also an investor in 49ers Enterprises, which purchased Leeds in 2023.
He drew a parallel to his English club’s own turnaround this season: newly promoted and expected to go straight back down, Leeds instead finished safely mid-table. Lurie is trying to engineer a similar revival in San Francisco, using major events like the World Cup and February’s Super Bowl to project competence and attract visitors and families.
In San Francisco, such a turnaround means restoring a sense of competence to city government — and managing large events like the Super Bowl and the World Cup are key to that effort.
“We are managing for results here in San Francisco, and what’s critical about those results is keeping people safe, making sure that people want to be here in San Francisco, that they have a great time, and that they want to come back,” Lurie said.
His turnaround effort will be vastly aided by Open AI’s expected IPO, which will expand his tax base but also pose challenges.
“We got Anthropic. We got Open AI. We have a company that’s four years old in Cursor that just got acquired by Elon Musk’s company for $60 billion and hardly anyone’s talking about that,” Lurie said. “I think we want these companies here. We want them paying their taxes here, and we want them being engaged in the community. We want them involved in civic life, we want their employees involved and engaged in their neighborhoods, but we also want an economy, and we want an economy that works for everyone — that lifts up the entire community, and isn’t just for the select few.”
Lurie said he is laser-focused on affordability.
“We are every day focused on building more housing, building more affordable housing, making child care more affordable,” Lurie said. “We are the first city in the country to provide access and opportunity to free early childhood education, [age] zero to five, for any family of four making $210,000 a year or less.”
The aim? Draw more families within the city’s confines.
“We’re gonna hopefully keep more working families here in our city, and we want them to believe that they can build a life here long term, so people don’t get priced out — so we have a lot of work to do.”
Lurie largely avoids the national spotlight — the rare exception coming when he netted a jumper on “The Pat McAfee Show” early this year — and feverish culture war issues in favor of a get-shit-done approach to governing.
“Our number one industry is tourism,” Lurie said. “And when people visit our city or when they take their kids to school each day, they don’t care if their mayor is a Democrat or a Republican.”
As of Friday evening, as he prepared to watch Turkey vs. Paraguay, Lurie couldn’t fully allow himself to contemplate what it would mean for Levi’s Stadium to play host to a U.S. squad that’s rocking and rolling over opponents.
“We cannot jinx it,” Lurie said. “But it’s looking very much like we will host USA in the first knockout round. My hope: I’ll be there to root on USA.”
Brazil has won a record five World Cups, but the most important match it has ever played may have been an exhibition match against Haiti that was meaningless in sporting terms but has had a long influence on each country’s politics.
On Aug. 18, 2004, Brazil’s players drove through the streets of Port-au-Prince in armored personnel carriers, World Cup champions greeted like liberators. Two months earlier, Brazil’s military had arrived to lead a multinational peacekeeping force established by the United Nations following a bloody coup d’état.
“We’ve only seen such joy in the eyes, the exuberance of the eyes, when we paraded in Brazil after winning the World Cup,” coach Carlos Alberto Parreira said afterwards. “I will never forget this moment.”
The team was accompanied to the U.N.-hosted friendly match that followed — “They play, peace wins,” went the slogan — by Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, then in his first term as Brazil’s president. More than two decades later, Lula is back in office, now cemented as the most accomplished leader the world’s left has seen in the 21st century. His approach to foreign policy, say observers, was shaped partially on the soccer pitch that day in Port-au-Prince.
“It showed he was trying something different as a diplomatic tool,” said Mauricio Savarese, an Associated press political reporter in São Paulo who has researched the legacy of the 2004 game. “That match at the time was a symbol of Brazil’s soft power. You really showed how Brazil could win hearts and minds with a policy that was not exactly bowing to the United States or to the China or to Russia, but independent.”
The match, designed to build goodwill between a shell-shocked population and its benevolent occupiers, began after players from the two national teams unfurled a pre-match banner that read “Social Justice is the True Name of Peace.” The peacekeeping mission represented an early commitment to “continental solidarity,” as Lula defined it in a speech the following year to up-and-coming diplomats where he cited the Haiti mission as an example of “non-indifference.”
Lula was feeling his way toward a foreign policy centered around South-South Cooperation and the BRICS alliance of emerging markets. Lula has used that role as de-facto leader of the democratic developing world to, with mixed results, position Brazil as a leader on climate change — it hosted last year’s COP30 in the Amazon city of Belém — and a mediator when thorny international conflicts arise. It has a position of official neutrality in the Russia-Ukraine war, so as to serve a potential role as mediator, as it did when partnering with Turkey in 2010 to broker a nuclear-fuel swap with Iran.
That same year, an earthquake hit Haiti, killing over 100,000 people while injuring and displacing millions more. It also destroyed the headquarters of the U.N. Stabilisation Mission in Haiti, even as Brazil led a post-disaster humanitarian relief effort. The experience further deepened ties between the two countries, as Brazil introduced a humanitarian-visa program for the first time to welcome Haitians fleeing the devastation; it has since been extended to Syrian war refugees, as well. One historically Italian neighborhood in São Paulo is now known as Little Haiti.
The broader peacekeeping mission began to resemble a military quagmire in humanitarian garb: Brazilian troops were blamed for human-rights violations and a cholera epidemic, while doing little to improve the overall security situation. For Lula and his protegée Dilma Rousseff, the Haiti project became a political liability, in both Haiti and Brazil.
As the two nations prepare to face off against one another in Philadelphia on Friday, Lula is not expected to be in attendance. Instead his travel schedule this week was built around the G7 summit in France, in which Brazil participated as one of five “partner countries” — a reflection of its increased global standing over the past few decades. If Lula shows up at one of Brazil’s matches later in the World Cup, it will likely be with a domestic audience in mind rather than a foreign one: he is in the midst of a reelection campaign for his fourth term, against a son of his longtime antagonist Jair Bolsonaro.
“I doubt that anyone is going to vote for him just because he’s recognized abroad as a key leader,” said Savarese, Brazilian political journalist who wrote the book “Dilma’s Downfall.” “But of course that helps with some moderates, which are a very thin part of Brazil’s electorate, and they’re going to be decisive in October’s election, that is also one of the things that tips the balance in his favor, as is being seen as this pragmatic leader who can also be respected even when he’s speaking about issues that clearly don’t affect as much in Brazil’s daily life.”
That day in Haiti, not yet a global figure, Lula confronted one limit on his power. He reportedly asked his team not to score too many goals, in the interests of goodwill. The players did not oblige, winning 6-0, including an astonishing solo effort from Ronaldinho.
Blue Light News has been crunching the numbers to see how all 48 of this year’s World Cup participants rank in several other off-field categories, which we’ll share more of over the weekend.
In today’s item, we look at whether GDP per capita has any connection to soccer performance. As you can see, the chart does show some positive correlation — note, for example, wealthy tournament contenders such as France, the Netherlands and Germany all in the upper right corner.
But it’s not a perfect indicator. By this metric, Qatar is the wealthiest country in the tournament — and it lost 6-0 to Canada on Thursday …
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