Is Vance 2028 over before it started?

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.