Mike Johnson, the speaker of the US House of Representatives, said on Sunday that Republicans can win November's midterm elections even if the war with Iran is still being fought. Asked directly whether his party could prevail in that case, he answered: "Absolutely." He was speaking on Fox News, as reported by Al Jazeera.

He also allowed that it "would be helpful to get that thing resolved" before the vote on November 3.

The two halves of the answer

Those are the two halves of a party's position on an unpopular war it owns: we can win regardless, and we would rather it were over.

Johnson defended the decision to fight in the terms the administration has used throughout. "People know we took the head off the snake," he said. "We had to make sure the largest state sponsor of terrorism did not have a nuclear weapon."

Numerous public opinion polls show most voters, including a significant share of Republicans, want the fighting to end. Al Jazeera does not give percentages, and we have not supplied any.

What voters are actually feeling

One number in the piece is doing quiet work: gasoline is above $4 a gallon, having been under $3 before the war.

That is roughly a third more at the pump, and it is the mechanism by which a war fought thousands of miles away becomes a domestic political fact for people who have no view on Iranian centrifuges. Fuel prices are unusually legible to voters. They are posted in large numbers by the roadside and paid weekly.

The timeline

The war began on February 28. A ceasefire followed in April but the fighting resumed. The election is on November 3, which leaves a little over two months.

That interval is the whole of Johnson's calculation. A resolution inside it lets his party run on having ended something; no resolution means running on having started it, with prices where they are.

The other side

We would normally set out the Democratic response here. This account contains none, and we have not invented one. What can be said is that the polling described cuts across party lines, which means the pressure Johnson is answering is not only coming from his opponents.

What we could not establish

We could not establish the polling figures behind the reference to public opinion, the current state of the fighting, or which specific races Johnson had in mind. We verified this account from a single publication.