Virginia is proud to host the largest Navy base in the world. Naval Station Norfolk is home to 149,000 military-related personnel. There are 75 ships and 134 aircraft based there. Many of those sailors and pilots have been or may soon be deployed to the Persian Gulf region to take part in ongoing military actions against Iran. That war registered with voters. In the final Gallup poll before the election, 47% of voters nationwide said Iran was “extremely important” to their vote, making it the No. 3 issue in the survey. Gas prices, which the conflict drove from $2.77 per gallon before the war to $4.13 per gallon last month in Virginia, came in fifth in this poll, with 42% of voters saying the issue is “extremely important.” However, Virginia voters—even those paying close attention to the midterm elections—didn’t hear much about Iran from Republicans on the campaign trail this year. In the month before the midterms, the Daily Signal attended or watched rallies held by three Republican incumbents: Reps. Rob Wittman in the 1st District, Jen Kiggans in the 2nd District, and John McGuire in the 5th District. Former Gov. Glenn Youngkin spoke at all of these rallies, and House Speaker Mike Johnson spoke at two of them. The Daily Signal also spoke one-on-one with Wittman, McGuire, former Rep. Tom Perriello, who lost to McGuire in the 5th District, and author Beth Macy, the Democrat who lost to Rep. Ben Cline in the 6th Congressional District. None of the Republican candidates or the surrogates who were campaigning with them used the word “Iran” during their October rallies. Republicans used the word “war,” but only to refer to conflicts such as the Revolution, World War II, or the Cold War, not the ongoing conflict in the Persian Gulf. McGuire came closest to discussing Iran. In his remarks to a crowd in Charlottesville on Oct. 24, the congressman said, “When you have hurricanes, gas prices go up. When you have conflict in the Middle East, gas prices go up.” However, he indicated that he thinks the real problem is that companies have closed too many refineries in the U.S. “I did the math with our secretary of interior. He said that if those 250 refineries were open today, even with hurricanes, even with what’s going on in the Middle East, we would still have energy abundance.” During a rally for Wittman on Nov. 2, Johnson, the outgoing speaker, said that the incumbent is “the leading, senior figure on the House Armed Services committee. People look to him to defend our nation in dangerous times.” But the rest of Johnson’s speech focused on domestic achievements and promises to fight communism at home, rather than mentioning the war abroad. “We see what’s happening there in Iran,” Wittman told the Daily Signal in an exclusive interview on Oct. 17. He called for lawmakers to pass a supplemental defense bill in the upcoming lame duck session to fund high-tech weapon systems that can protect American forces from Iranian weapons. However, when Wittman spoke at the Nov. 2 rally, he said only that one of the reasons he is running is “making sure that we modernize our military to make sure we keep up with the threats around the world, that we do even more with the resources that we devote to our brave men and women that serve this nation. We owe it to them.” But, during that appearance, he didn’t provide any details about the fighting in Iran, or the weapons upgrades, or what Americans owe to service members. Democrats, on the other hand, brought up the war frequently. “We’re going to bring costs down by ending this war, by voting to remove the president’s authority on the war,” Perriello told the Daily Signal on Oct. 26. “I think we need to negotiate a peace in that war. I think the war was started as a distraction from the Epstein files, and now we’ve got distractions from the distraction, because the war is going so badly,” Macy told the Daily Signal on Oct. 4. “Probably about 25,000 people from our own community are going to have to deploy in support of this war,” former Rep. Elaine Luria, who toppled Kiggans in a rematch in Virginia’s 2nd Congressional District, said during a rally on Oct. 31. Both women are Navy veterans. “Jen Kiggans continues to stand firmly with Trump in support of this war,” Luria said. For her part, Shannon Taylor told reporters in Henrico on Oct. 29: “Unlike Rob Wittman, I would vote to end the war on Day One.” She ended up beating Wittman in the 1st District. Perhaps the Republican candidates were just following the lead of President Donald Trump. “We’re not fighting a war,” he told Fox News on Nov. 2. “When was the last time we fired anything? This isn’t a war; this is a very soft war.” However, that same day, American military forces launched limited military strikes against Iran. If more attacks come after the midterm elections, many Virginians will be involved, but many others may be surprised.