Vance Blames Trump's Iran War: Republicans Lose Both Chambers of Congress, and the Vice President Names the Man Responsible

JD Vance has made an astonishing discovery after the Republicans' election defeat: A war can cost you elections. And now, of all things, the war against Iran, launched by his own president's administration, is supposed to explain why millions of Americans have turned their backs on Republicans. The vice president is saying it publicly, at length, and with a level of openness that usually only emerges in Washington once the political wreckage is already spread across the table. The administration waged the war. Now someone else is supposed to explain the price.

Before the election, Vance's team still had reason to be hopeful. Its data analysts examined whether the makeup of the electorate resembled that of 2024. Trump and Vance had won back then. This time, too, Republican supporters turned out in large numbers. In some states, turnout was decent, while in others it was exceptionally high. Nowhere did the numbers suggest a catastrophe. While the polls had long been pointing toward a Democratic landslide, people around the vice president were still counting on a surprise. The numbers looked friendly enough. The people behind them, apparently, not so much.

A data analyst had warned Vance before the election. Republican voters were indeed showing up at the polls, he said, but many were angry and planned to vote for Democrats. Republicans had effectively mobilized their own supporters, only to end up counting the votes those supporters cast against them. In Florida, for example, the electorate had a 9-percentage-point Republican advantage over Democrats. Just a few points worse than in 2024. But that makeup didn't help. Vance acknowledges that people who voted for Trump in 2024 voted Democratic this time.

His account of another survey is even more revealing. A pollster he holds in particularly high regard had predicted that Republicans would trail Democrats by 13 percentage points on the nationwide generic ballot. Even Vance had been surprised. The pollster had asked former Trump voters what it would take to bring them back to the Republican Party. Their answers were uncomfortably specific.

First, they wanted the war to end. Then came the cost of living and inflation. They also demanded that America be put first again. Finally, they wanted a change in America's relationship with Israel. Those 4 answers reportedly accounted for nearly all the responses. Vance provides no independently verifiable publication of the survey. But his account describes an electorate that feels betrayed by the very political promises it was given. The president had promised to put America first. His supporters are now demanding that he remember that.

Vance's defense of Rachel Campos-Duffy is especially revealing. She had called for a diplomatic solution to the Iran conflict and was attacked by fellow Republicans for it as recently as Monday. Now the vice president says her political advice was right. The opponents of a diplomatic solution have since lost an election. Apparently, some politicians find it easier to think about peace once their Senate majority is already gone.

At the same time, Vance wants to keep the infighting within his party from heading in another direction. In the coming months, politicians from the Republican establishment will try to use the defeat to push for amnesty for people without legal immigration status, he warns. He calls such claims lies. There could be a discussion about changing how immigration laws are enforced, such as cracking down harder on businesses that employ people without work authorization. But he intends to stick with the fundamental toughness of his immigration policy. The war can be treated as a mistake. Other political convictions remain untouched.

The most important passage in his post concerns the price. Losing the Senate majority for the next 6 years could be defended as a justified consequence of the war, Vance writes. But those who support the war should be honest enough to say so. Trump himself also blamed the war for the defeat on election night, according to Vance. The vice president thus places a White House decision at the center of the Republican disaster while carefully avoiding the question of why that decision was allowed to go forward within the administration in the first place.

At the end, Vance urges his disappointed supporters to vote for Republicans who share their beliefs. They should bring friends along and send a clear message to the radical left. He even talks about the mission of saving the country. The appeal sounds like a campaign speech accidentally published after the votes had already been counted. The vice president wants to channel voters' anger back into the very party whose administration they have just turned against.

Election Day is already over. Political responsibility cannot be put to a vote after the fact. Vance has identified the war as the cause of the defeat. Naturally, he has nothing comparably clear to say about his own role in the policies he now considers so disastrous. The political irony: Vance is part of the very administration whose decisions have now cost Republicans their majorities in both chambers of Congress. He indirectly blames Trump while preferring to remain silent about his own share of the responsibility. You have to have character in the first place before you can show it.