Few Republicans have been as reactive to the party’s electoral drubbing this month as Vice President J.D. Vance. From releasing a personal midterms post-mortem to signaling support toward MAGA’s more isolationist wing, Vance has made the moves a sitting vice president might make ahead of a presidential run of their own. But given the GOP’s midterm losses and subsequent Republican frustrations, Vance’s nascent 2028 momentum may have stalled before it ever started.
As vice president, Vance occupies the “unenviable position of being the presumptive favorite” for the GOP’s 2028 presidential nomination, said Moira Donegan at The Guardian. With Democrats about to assume a congressional majority, Vance is “trying to spin the catastrophic results for his party into a beneficial outcome for him personally.” Unfortunately for the veep, Vance’s electoral diagnosis “reveals his profound weakness as a candidate at the outset of the 2028 cycle.” The midterm results are “scrambling Vance’s political future,” said The Wall Street Journal, with the VP’s camp “privately grappling with hard questions” about running in 2028 at all.
A bloc of Republican voters wants candidates willing to “distance their campaign from the current administration’s failures,” said Jonathan Chait at The Atlantic. To accomplish that “without forfeiting Trump’s support,” Vance has “shrewdly, if disingenuously” blamed everything on the Iran war. Doing so — while at the same time “subtly pointing the finger” at Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu for “tricking the president”— offers Vance the “shortest and straightest path to holding together the MAGA coalition and his place within it.”
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But Vance’s brand “did not emerge from the midterms unscathed,” said Jacob Bogage at Reuters. Not only did Republicans lose states in which he campaigned, but certain strategies he “endorsed” — including Ohio GOP gubernatorial nominee Vivek Ramaswamy’s now-infamous campaign ad casting doubt on Democrat Amy Acton’s childhood sexual abuse — may have “swung races away from Republicans” overall.
What next?
That members of Vance’s camp “feel comfortable raising unconventional alternatives to his White House ambitions underscores just how much his future is now in flux,” said the Journal. At the same time, some “longtime Trump donors” have begun looking “outside the administration for the Republican Party’s future.”
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