Vice President JD Vance didn’t mince words on Wednesday about why his party suffered a stunning defeat at the ballot box: It was the war that President Donald Trump launched.
Vance, a potential 2028 presidential contender, broke sharply with Trump in owning the failures of the administration’s policies.
While Trump and his top White House advisers blamed Republican candidates and tried to wash their hands of any responsibility for the GOP’s massive losses, Vance pinned the blame on the Trump administration’s decisions.
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“The reason we lost is the war,” Vance wrote in a lengthy post on social media, noting that Trump himself admitted Iran was a part of the reason voters rejected Republicans – though Trump on Tuesday insisted the war was the correct decision and that he would do it again.
Vance’s response signalled an awareness of the deep distrust from some of the voters who put him and Trump in office – and whose support he will need should he choose to run for president.
“If you’d like to argue it was worth it, that losing the Senate for the next 6 years was worth it, then do so,” he continued. “But everyone knows why we lost. And any honest conversation about where we go from here must start there.”
Vance said that while there was mixed data on how bad the midterms would be for Republicans – giving the White House some cause for hope – a trusted pollster earlier Tuesday had warned him “a lot of Trump 2024 voters were angry and planning to vote for Democrats.”
Those voters reported that they wanted Trump to end the war, focus on the cost of living and inflation, put America first and “change our relationship to Israel,” Vance shared.
“Our voters showed up,” Vance wrote. “And the above four reasons are why many of them voted for Democrats.”
© 2026 , The Washington Post
