After President Donald Trump’s party suffered a broad rebuke in Tuesday’s midterm elections, several top Republicans have already begun positioning themselves for the 2028 presidential race as the GOP assesses how to recover.
Almost none have directly criticized Trump, despite the GOP’s historic drubbing Tuesday widely being seen as a repudiation of the president and his policies, handing Democrats decisive control of the House and Senate. Some potential 2028 candidates have targeted Vice President JD Vance, who, had the midterms gone differently, likely would have been the presumptive successor to Trump to lead the party after his second term.
With Vance’s path to the nomination now less clear, several Republicans have put forth their own diagnoses of the problems within the party — implicitly suggesting that they could be in the best position to fix them.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) has made some of the most overt moves toward distancing himself from the GOP’s failures Tuesday, holding a news conference Wednesday to tout Florida as the only state out of the 10 largest in the country that would be controlled by Republicans after the midterms.
DeSantis, who ran in the 2024 GOP presidential primary, did not explicitly criticize Trump or other Republicans by name, but described the midterm elections as “close to an extinction-level event for Republicans” and suggested that his governance was why the Florida GOP had been spared.
“We’ve built up a record of achievement,” DeSantis said. “We’ve earned trust from a number of our voters that, even in the worst situation that you can imagine politically, we were able to hold the line.”
In a Wall Street Journal op-ed Thursday, former vice president Mike Pence (R) criticized the Trump administration for racking up record debt and spending, imposing “unconstitutional tariffs on friend and foe alike,” and for botching its approach to Iran.
“This midterm election wasn’t a rout, it was a reckoning,” Pence wrote. “The American people have rejected our party’s shift toward economic populism. … When conservatives fail to sound a clarion call for our principles, voters become discouraged and confused.”
Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-New York) described the GOP’s shellacking as a “reckoning and a reset” but also continued to praise Trump in an interview with “CBS Mornings” on Wednesday.
“There was a tone-deafness this election cycle from Republicans,” said Stefanik, who did not seek reelection this year. She later also pointedly noted that she had never lost any of her seven elections and said she had worked hard to raise money for and boost Republicans over the last decade.
Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo (R) declared that Tuesday’s election results meant Americans voters wanted “more opportunity.”
“The [Democratic Socialists of America] and open-borders liberals can’t deliver that,” Pompeo wrote Wednesday on X. “Nor can Big Government ‘conservatives’ who seek to simply grow government for their pet projects. Much work to do.”
And almost all, including Vance, have criticized the Iran war.
“The reason we lost is the war. The president himself said so last night,” Vance wrote in a lengthy X post Wednesday, referring to remarks Trump made Tuesday night in which he also said he did not regret taking military action against Iran.
“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. … But everyone knows why we lost. And any honest conversation about where we go from here must start there,” Vance added.
In an even longer X post, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), who ran in the 2020 GOP presidential primary, also cited tariffs, the Iran war and a “very real economic disconnect” for why his home state, among others, saw a blue wave Tuesday.
“We will rebuild as a true blue-collar party, not by embracing socialism, but by being real free-market conservatives,” Cruz wrote. “The way we built the Texas economic miracle in the first place, and we will build and rebuild America as well.”
Secretary of State Marco Rubio (R), who has often been discussed as a potential 2028 presidential candidate, has remained noticeably quiet. A State Department spokesman dismissed multiple reports Thursday that Rubio was considering stepping down from the Cabinet to launch a presidential bid, calling it “completely baseless fake news.”
Former New Jersey governor Chris Christie (R), who has long been a vocal critic of Trump, chose to target Vance directly. Christie slammed the vice president for defending a controversial campaign ad by Republican Vivek Ramaswamy that many Republicans, including Ohio’s sitting GOP governor, said went too far.
On Wednesday, Christie said Ramaswamy would be “sent to the dustbin of history” after his loss in the Ohio governor’s race — but that it was Vance’s legacy that would be stained by his support of Ramaswamy.
“JD Vance will be remembered for standing behind Vivek and his ad. A man who wrote a book about Catholicism. It’s a disgrace,” Christie wrote Wednesday on X.
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