By Wednesday morning, the scale of what had happened was impossible to deny. Democrats had taken the House. They had taken the Senate. They had flipped Senate seats in Texas and Kansas and both Carolinas. In Texas, Gina Hinojosa beat Greg Abbott by seven points and became the first Democrat to win the governor’s office in more than three decades. It was the kind of rout neither party has suffered in a midterm in half a century.
And Vice President JD Vance logged on to X to explain it all.
“The real reason we lost is obvious to almost everyone,” he wrote in a long post. “The reason we lost is the war. The president himself said so last night.”
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Read the post closely and you’ll see what it really is. It isn’t analysis. It’s the first move of a 2028 campaign. Vance is trying to put a little daylight between himself and the wreckage, and he picked the one issue where he thinks he has an alibi.
It’s too little, and it’s much too late.
The Alibi
Here’s why he chose the war. For months, there have been reports that Vance was the one person in Trump’s inner circle who had doubts about attacking Iran from the beginning. If the war is the reason Republicans lost, then the one Republican who privately questioned it starts to look like the smart guy in the room.
There are a couple of problems with that story.
The first is that it isn’t what most voters said. An ABC News poll of House voters found Americans were more focused on other things, starting with the cost of living, than on the war in Iran. The war made everything more expensive, sure. But voters didn’t reject one decision. They rejected an entire administration: the prices, the corruption, the chaos, the cruelty. Vance defended all of it.
The second problem is that private doubts don’t count for much when you stay quiet in public. We’ve seen this movie before. When administration officials discussed bombing Yemen in that infamous Signal chat last year, Vance typed out his reservations. “I think we are making a mistake,” he wrote. And then he went along with it anyway. That’s the JD Vance pattern. He knows better, he says so where it’s safe, and then he does what he’s told.
For eight months, while American service members died and gas prices soared, the Vice President of the United States did not stand up and tell the country this war was a mistake. He waited until it had cost his party the House and the Senate. And even then, he made sure to note that the President agreed with him. Meanwhile, Trump was telling reporters he “would have done nothing different.”
You don’t get to own the parts of an administration you like and disown the rest after the votes are counted. Vance is the Vice President. He owns this war. He owns this record. He owns Tuesday night.
How He Got Here
None of this should surprise anyone who’s watched JD Vance’s career.
In 2016, he called himself “a Never Trump guy.” He described Trump as “cultural heroin.” In a private message to a friend, he wondered whether Trump might be “America’s Hitler.” Then he looked around, saw where the power was, and made a different choice. He embraced Trump, won Trump’s endorsement for the Senate, and rode it all the way to the vice presidency. Every step of the way, he traded something he once believed for something he wanted.
Now he has to spend two more years as the Vice President to a lame duck President whose agenda was just rejected in historic fashion, and whose behavior, judging by the last few months, is only going to get more erratic. Every midnight post, every bizarre AI video, every lashing out at allies and enemies alike, Vance will be asked to defend it. He’ll have no new accomplishments to point to, because a Democratic Congress isn’t going to pass the Trump agenda. He’ll just be the guy standing next to it.
And even if he manages to escape that, his version of MAGA has always been a harder sell than the original. It has all of Trump’s extremism without any of the charisma that made people overlook it. Donald Trump could fill an arena and make people laugh. JD Vance is the weird kid in the corner that nobody wants to hang out with. That’s why all his closest allies are chronically online and totally disconnected from reality.
The Math
Here’s the cold political reality for 2028. Republicans can’t win the White House without Texas. Its 40 electoral votes are the foundation of every Republican path to the presidency.
On Tuesday, Greg Abbott, a popular three-term governor who had beaten every previous opponent by double digits, lost Texas by seven points. James Talarico beat Ken Paxton for the Senate by about twelve. If Greg Abbott can’t hold Texas, JD Vance doesn’t have a prayer.
I want to be fair. Two years is a long time in politics, and a lot can change. But some things don’t. Voters now know exactly what a Trump and Vance administration looks like, and they have delivered their verdict. If the Republican base is somehow determined to nominate the man most tied to that record, it will be nominating the face of the worst midterm defeat in modern history. They’ll get crushed again, and they’ll deserve it.
What Profit
JD Vance and his Christian Nationalist allies love to quote Scripture. He once cited St. Augustine to defend the administration’s immigration policies, and he’s spoken often about his Catholic faith. So I’ll leave him with a verse he surely knows.
“For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” (Mark 8:36)
The tragedy for JD Vance is that he didn’t even gain the world. He gained two more years as the understudy in an administration the country has just repudiated, and a political future that may already be over before it began. He gave up everything he once believed in, and what he got in return was temporary.
That’s the lesson for anyone watching, in politics or anywhere else. Power you get by betraying your own values is always temporary. Your character is what you’re left with when it’s gone.
— Adam
YAYE!! THIS WHOLE ADMINISTRATION MUST GO!!!! SO MANY HEALTHY CHANGES NEED TO HAPPEN!!!!
Couldn’t happen to a more deserving person