India, Nov. 8 -- The war was an inflation story as much as a foreign policy one, and polling is rarely this clear. Nine in ten voters said the cost of living was a major concern as they headed to vote.

Every electoral defeat produces a thousand post-mortems, and the commentariat is certainly busy with this bloodbath. The Democratic wave has been blamed on tariffs, on corruption, on the chaos of the administration and on the sheer fatigue of a country that has spent a decade arguing about one man with an enormous ego. Some of these explanations are fair. A large number of Americans connect Trump's self-enrichment to their economic decline. Gallop recently found that 89 percent of Americans agree that corruption is widespread in government...