I'll be honest with you. Until about three weeks ago, I was barely tracking the midterms. Eight months feels glacial in a news cycle that measures itself in minutes.

Then I started paying attention to what Jim Rickards has to say about Iran, oil prices and November.

The war in Iran is as much a midterm election story as it is a Mideast story. But most people aren’t reading it that way.

Here’s Jim’s framing:

Higher energy prices raise the price of everything, not just gas at the pump. The resulting price increases help Democrats because they play right into the Democrat campaign theme of affordability.

The pain at the pump — the thing you curse under your breath every time you fill up — is a political asset for the party that didn’t start the war.

It doesn’t matter that inflation under Biden’s presidency was the original wound.

Voters feel what’s right in front of them. And right now, that’s $4.89 for a gallon of regular.

Your Rundown for Wednesday, March 11, 2026...

Follow the Fuel

The mechanism isn’t complicated. Iran conflict tightens oil supply. Oil prices spike. Everything that moves — and everything moves — costs more to move.

Diesel in the truck, jet fuel in the plane, natural gas in the power plant. Jim has been tracking these kinds of cascading effects for decades.

“Practically everything you buy is delivered by ship, plane, truck or railroad. All of those systems run on some carbon-based fuel,” he adds.

Your grocery bill. Your Amazon delivery. Your heating bill in March — just when you thought winter was finally over. It all goes up.

And when it goes up, people want to know who’s responsible. The answer they land on is rarely nuanced.

Now layer in the political scenario if Democrats flip the House in November. Jim calls it predictable — and not in a good way for Trump.

They will impeach Trump (again), hold endless hearings on ICE and DHS, possibly impeach other Trump administration officials, hold up spending on Trump priorities and lay the groundwork to attack potential Trump successors like JD Vance and Marco Rubio.

That’s not speculation. That’s a predictable playbook. And the wild card that makes it more likely is a conflict 6,000 miles away that most Americans couldn’t find on a map last year.

None of this is written in stone. Jim is careful about that too — eight months is a long runway, and wars have endings. A quick resolution changes the calculus dramatically.

But the longer the conflict drags, the more the economic pain compounds. And economic pain, historically, is the single most reliable predictor of midterm bloodbaths for the party in power.

So, a military campaign in the Middle East is quietly setting the table for committee assignments in Washington.

Keep your eye on the gas station sign. It’s telling you more about November than the polls are.

Market Rundown for Wednesday, March 11, 2026

S&P 500 futures are down 0.15% to 6,780.

Oil is up 4.10% to $86.85 for a barrel of WTI.

Gold’s down 0.85% to $5,198.60 per ounce.

And Bitcoin’s down 2% to $69,290.