JD Vance has offered Republicans an explanation for their election defeat that challenges the White House: Americans who voted for Donald Trump two years ago turned against his party because of the conflict.
“The reason we lost is the war,” the US vice president wrote Wednesday, after Democrats seized control of both chambers of Congress in the November 3 midterms.
Vance rejected the argument that Republican voters simply stayed home. Instead, many who backed the Trump-Vance ticket in 2024 showed up again, this time to vote Democratic.
“The main problem is not turnout,” he wrote. “The main problem is that many people who voted for Trump/Vance in 2024 voted for Democrats in 2026.”
He cited a pollster who asked disaffected Trump voters what would bring them back. Four answers dominated: end the war, tackle inflation and living costs, put America first, and change Washington’s relationship with Israel.
That last answer placed a sensitive alliance in the Republican Party’s post-election reckoning. Vance did not propose breaking with Israel or specify what a different relationship would mean.
But he challenged supporters of the Iran campaign to confront its price. “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,” he wrote.
Trump offered a different emphasis. He acknowledged that Iran contributed to the losses but defended launching the war, saying he would make the same decision again.
Vance also warned against blaming the result on immigration policy or using it to argue for an amnesty. The voters, he insisted, had already explained what drove them away.
The remarks came as Vance, a potential 2028 presidential contender, faced the political consequences of a war he had reportedly questioned before it began.
The message from Trump’s own vice president was unusually stark: Republicans did not merely fail to mobilize their supporters. They mobilized voters who then chose the other side.
And among the reasons those voters gave were a war they wanted ended and a US relationship with Israel they wanted changed.