The dust is still settling, but it’s already clear that this year’s midterm elections brought about as thorough a rebuke of a president, his policies and his governing philosophy as the country has seen in two generations. The 2006 rout for the GOP under George W. Bush was bad, but not as brutal as losing in such states as Texas, South Carolina and Kansas. The message on Tuesday came from far and wide: The public is sick of Donald Trump and his vision of the Republican Party.
Which makes me think of Vice President JD Vance. He can run for the GOP presidential nomination in 2028. Maybe if things break his way, he’ll be nominated thanks to the Republican Party’s primogeniture instincts — the sense that it’s Vance’s “turn.” Who knows? But why, two years after abandoning the Grand Old Party so decisively, would enough voters in enough states to reach 270 electoral votes say, “Yes, let’s put Trump’s vice president in the Oval Office for four years”?
By Wednesday morning, Vance was test-driving a new message: End the war, focus on the cost of living and inflation, put America first and change the U.S. relationship with Israel. That is apparently what a whip-smart pollster suggested to the vice president this week. Voters who abandoned the GOP would “come back on our team,” Vance wrote, if the Republicans changed course on those four issues. In other words, Americans voted for everything Vance already believes in. Nice.
That interpretation — that the electorate opted for Democrats because they wanted more of the vice president’s agenda — is almost as delusional as Trump’s shtick that if he had been on the ballot, the GOP would’ve won in a landslide. Never mind prevalent concerns about the administration’s corruption, tariffs, handling of ICE deportations and much else.
As for the other man in contention: Secretary of State Marco Rubio is doubtless a better orator than the president and vice president. He brings a rare sense of professionalism and serious-mindedness to his job. Rubio wasn’t the one announcing tariffs on Truth Social, obsessing about the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool or going on at unnerving length about the backside of soon-to-depart Ohio GOP Sen. Jon Husted.
But there is a strange wrinkle. Whenever this administration has a high-stakes foreign policy negotiation, the president sends his son-in-law Jared Kushner and longtime real estate pal Steve Witkoff instead of his secretary of state. The good news is that this means Rubio has left few fingerprints on some of the administration’s worst diplomatic stumbles, like the short-lived memorandum of understanding with Iran or the gushing praise offered to Vladimir Putin for being a humanitarian.
The bad news is that voters may wonder where Rubio was when the president was making such significant decisions as going to war with Iran. The running joke is that he is the guy who is asked to do everything in this administration. But on the 2028 campaign trail, Republican primary voters will want to know: What did Rubio do in this administration after all?
Nominating either man would amount to telling the electorate: “Let’s try a modified version of what you vehemently rejected in 2026.” Anything is possible in politics, but that sounds like an especially hard sell. Easier, then, may be to examine leaders who haven’t been in this administration’s orbit.
Consider Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who is getting noticeably more vocal and more critical of his party. On Stephen A. Smith’s podcast on Monday, he said: “Some of these Republicans are saying, ‘Oh, well, the gas, don’t worry. It’s no big deal,’ or they’re trying to blame Biden. No, no. Listen, we’ve just got to be honest. Gas is higher. It hurts people, working-class people, and it’s higher because of [the Iran] conflict.” The term-limited former Trump challenger continued: “If you can’t admit that to voters, then you’re gaslighting them, and they’re not going to listen to you on other things.” He also ripped into former Homeland Security secretary Kristi L. Noem: “She wanted these conflicts … because it created news and created conflict. That’s not the way you do it.”
If Republicans are smart, they’ll opt for such a nominee in two years. The list includes others such as New Hampshire Gov. Kelly Ayotte, outgoing Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp and former Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin. The chosen one might then find a buttoned-down, no-nonsense, accomplished retired general or admiral as a running mate. The message could be that the circus has left town and the adults have arrived to clean up the mess.
The old adage, after all, is right: If you keep doing what you’ve been doing, you’ll keep getting what you’ve been getting. Instead of some moderated, delicately tweaked version of Trumpism in 2028, Republicans might consider giving the Etch a Sketch a vigorous shake and starting anew.
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