Edition · Thu 05 Nov 2026
Politics Desk
'The Reason We Lost Is the War': Vance Breaks Ranks as Republicans Turn on One Another
A day after the worst midterm defeat for a governing party in decades, Vice President JD Vance blamed the Iran war, President Trump said he 'would have done nothing different,' and the Republican Party began a very public argument about who is at fault.
By Rachel · Edited by Chanan Zevin - Chief Editor and Head of Desks
Published
A vice president says the quiet part
The wreckage was still smoking on Wednesday when Vice President JD Vance sat down and wrote the most candid assessment yet to come from inside the administration. "The reason we lost is the war," he wrote in a long post on X, adding that "the president himself said so last night."
A vice president says the quiet part
It was an extraordinary statement from a sitting vice president, hours after Democrats captured both the House and the Senate. Mr. Vance went further than blaming one policy. He said he shared a Republican pollster's view that the party's economic message "wasn't sharp enough down the stretch," a period when Mr. Trump was promising a "golden age" while gasoline and diesel prices soared. He also said he was open to changing the way immigration enforcement works, for instance by focusing more on businesses that hire people illegally.
A vice president says the quiet part
He then listed what the pollster told him would bring disaffected Trump voters back: end the war, focus on the cost of living, put America first, and change the country's relationship with Israel.
The president shrugs
Mr. Trump did not sound like a man who had just watched his party lose its grip on Congress. Touring the half-built White House ballroom with reporters, he talked about chandeliers and marble floors. Asked about Mr. Vance's verdict, he said his vice president was "probably right" that the war had hurt, because it "drove the gasoline up a little bit short term." But he also said, "I would have done nothing different."
The president shrugs
Mr. Vance quickly moved to play down any sense of a rift, posting video of the president calling his statement "good." Still, the two men were not saying the same thing. The president described the war as a sacrifice he had knowingly made. His vice president left open the reading that it had been a mistake. "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," Mr. Vance wrote. "But everyone knows why we lost."
A party starts pointing fingers
Elsewhere, the blame game was in full swing. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis called Tuesday's results "close to an extinction level event for Republicans in many parts of the country" and warned that without Texas as an anchor, the party would not be viable nationally. House Speaker Mike Johnson told colleagues he would not seek to stay on as Republican leader, and two rivals moved at once to replace him.
A party starts pointing fingers
Some Republicans pinned the defeat squarely on the president, who had urged voters to treat the election as a vote on himself. Others aimed lower, at Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and the Pentagon, which ran a war that many in the party now privately call their biggest liability. In conservative media, hosts and commentators traded accusations over who had lost the country.
The 2028 race begins early
Many analysts read Mr. Vance's post as the opening move of the 2028 presidential campaign, a bid to lead the party once Mr. Trump is gone. It came only two weeks after he was criticised for embracing an attack ad that seemed to backfire on Ohio's Republican candidate for governor, Vivek Ramaswamy, who lost on Tuesday.
The 2028 race begins early
Whatever his motives, the vice president said aloud what many Republicans had been saying in private for months. The question now is whether the White House listens. Mr. Trump has hinted that he is prepared to resume strikes on Iran now that the campaign is over, and his own party is no longer sure it wants to follow him there.