The outcomes of America’s many wars usually loom large in subsequent elections. The opposition of the Federalists to the War of 1812 led to that party’s collapse. The 1848 war with Mexico emboldened Southern slaveholder interests, just as the Civil War relegated the Democrats to second-party status from 1865 until the coming of the New Deal. The stalemate in Korea kept Harry Truman from seeking re-election in 1952, just as it helped propel Dwight Eisenhower into the White House—in much the same way that the bloody stalemate in Vietnam drove Lyndon Johnson from the White House and enabled Richard Nixon to slink in.
In 2006, the Bush administration’s floundering in Iraq led to the election of a Democratic Congress. Two years later, it was largely Barack Obama’s opposition to the Iraq War that gained him a crucial advantage over Hillary Clinton, who’d initially supported the war, in the Democratic presidential primaries, even as support for that war (and any wars yet to come) helped doom the candidacy of Obama’s Republican opponent, John McCain.
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