Vice President JD Vance blamed President Donald Trump’s agenda for Republicans’ sweeping midterm losses, writing that “everyone knows why we lost.”
Vance made his case in a lengthy post on X on Wednesday, the day after Democrats flipped control of both the House and Senate, as CNN reported.
“The reason we lost is the war,” Vance wrote. “The president himself said so last night.”
“I think a part of it was Iran, but at the same time, people understood the importance of what I’ve done with Iran,” Trump told Fox News on Tuesday night, according to CNN, which reported that he has continued to defend the war he started.
Until Wednesday, Vance had never publicly blamed Trump for a Republican defeat.
Before the first strikes on Iran in late February, Vance made his reservations known inside the administration, ABC News reported.
In public, he told The Washington Post less than two days before the war began that there was “no chance” of a years-long Middle East war.
After Republicans lost key races in the 2022 midterms, Vance, then a senator-elect, wrote an op-ed titled “Don’t Blame Trump” that called blaming Trump “counterproductive.”
Vance claimed this year’s turnout as his party’s, even as he wrote that many of those voters crossed over to Democrats.
“And despite polls that showed a Democrat blowout, the data kept on telling us the same story: in some states turnout was merely OK, in other states it was downright amazing, and in no state was it catastrophic,” Vance wrote.
“Our voters did show up,” he wrote. “In Florida, for example, the electorate was 9 points more Republican than Democrat, just a couple points worse than 2024. Undoubtedly there were places we could have done better on turnout.”
“But the main problem is not turnout,” Vance continued. “The main problem is that many people who voted for Trump/Vance in 2024 voted for Democrats in 2026.”
In the weeks before the election, Trump told voters more than 41 times to act as if the midterms were a vote on him, The Washington Post found.
By Vance’s account, many of Trump’s 2024 voters backed Democrats in an election the president had asked them to treat as a vote on him.
Vance’s own analyst warned him that Trump’s 2024 voters might not vote Republican, but by Vance’s account, he didn’t hear how big the loss could be until Election Day.
“Our voters are turning out, but they may not vote for us,” Vance recalled “the smartest data guy I know” telling him, a warning he wrote “looks prophetic now.”
“Another pollster—one of the smartest people I know in politics, told me yesterday we’d lose the generic ballot [the nationwide vote for Congress] by 13 points,” Vance wrote. “I felt negative going into Tuesday, but even I was shocked by this.”
Vance tied the defections to what those voters told the pollster would win them back.
“He asked those voters who had abandoned us what would cause them to come back on our team,” Vance wrote. The top four answers were “End the war,” “Focus on cost of living/inflation,” “Put America First” and “Change our relationship to Israel.”
“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,” Vance wrote of the war. “Argue it was a worthwhile cost to pay. Agree or disagree, that’s at least honest.”
“But everyone knows why we lost,” he added. “And any honest conversation about where we go from here must start there.”
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