By On election night, JD Vance stood beside President Donald Trump at the White House as Democrats picked up seven Republican Senate seats, including the one Vance used to hold. A longtime confidant sent the vice president a text with some advice for 2028. He ought to consider sitting this one out, according to The Wall Street Journal.
A month earlier, the talk among Vance’s former staffers had been considerably more cheerful. Alumni of his Senate and vice-presidential offices gathered for dinner on the rooftop of Washington’s Hay-Adams hotel, where longtime adviser Luke Thompson rose to thank them. “Who knows,” he quipped, according to people who attended, “maybe in the future we’ll get to work together.”
By the morning after the election, Republican donors were already shopping around. A veteran New York fundraiser told the Journal that callers who had ruled out backing Vance were asking about Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. Democrats had won the governorships in Texas and Georgia, but Ohio especially bothered the fundraiser. Vance had gone home to campaign, and Republicans still lost his old seat. Two people close to the vice president offered a different reading. Traditional GOP donors had never much cared for Vance, they said, and the war in Iran could explain plenty about what happened in Ohio.
Vance’s decision also matters to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who has said he would back the vice president if he runs. As the New Conservative Post noted last week, a Rubio ally told The Independent that the secretary should leave the administration and put some distance between himself and the Iran war. The ally even put Rubio ahead of Vance. Republican voters had them in the opposite order. Vance led Rubio by about 15 points in the October RealClearPolling average. The White House blasted the report, and Rubio has given no public indication that he intends to resign.
Vance had his own doubts about Iran well before Republicans lost an election over it. In January, while privately urging Trump to give diplomacy more time, he asked Rasmussen Reports pollster Mark Mitchell to find out how much support there was for a war aimed at changing the Iranian regime. The public split almost evenly on going to war, 44 percent to 43 percent. On whether Trump should go to Congress first, voters had a much clearer answer. Sixty-five percent said he should.
After the election, Vance publicly blamed the war for the GOP’s losses and urged Republicans to reconsider the party’s relationship with Israel. Donald Trump Jr. backed his assessment. The president acknowledged the political cost and told the Journal he would make the same call. “I don’t think about it. I did the right thing,” he said on election night, “I would have done it again.”
DeSantis, meanwhile, can make his case every time somebody fills up the tank. “We just got to be honest. Gas is higher. It hurts people, working-class people, and it’s higher because of this conflict. That’s just a fact,” he told Stephen A. Smith on SiriusXM. Vance has watched those interviews, according to people familiar with his thinking, and has privately questioned how much room he has to split with the administration over a war he tried to head off.
Vance has already turned down two suggestions from people close to him about what he might do instead. He has little interest in running for governor of Ohio or trying to win back his Senate seat. As for the White House, the father of four gave voters a fair warning at an October town hall. “The way that I think about life—big life decisions—my wife will tell you this…I’m a procrastinator,” the vice president said.
Trump could save Republican donors, and perhaps his secretary of state, a good deal of guesswork by naming his preferred successor. On Wednesday, he left them guessing. “Maybe he won’t run,” the president said of Vance. “I don’t know who’s going to run.”
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