Republicans suffered a historic defeat in the midterm elections and are now digging into where exactly things went so wrong. The answer, unfortunately for them, seems to be everywhere.
President Donald Trump and the rest of his administration seem to think “it’s the war, stupid.” But a whole lot more has gone wrong with the second Trump administration than that, and voters rejected it. Republicans need a fundamentally different approach, rather than scapegoating one issue for their electoral woes.
No one in the administration has blamed war for the loss more forcefully than Vice President JD Vance, who made his case in a lengthy post on X.
Vance says a pollster told him that 2024 Trump voters who planned to support Democrats would come back to the
GOP only if the party did four things:
- "End the war.
- Focus on cost of living/inflation.
- Put America First.
- Change our relationship to Israel."
“The reason we lost is the war,” Vance put it simply.
It's not just the war. It's Trump
Vance has the most work to do to distance himself from the administration’s record if he wants a shot at the presidency in 2028. He needs an answer for the losses and a direction forward.
Blaming the war in Iran gives Vance and the rest of MAGA exactly what they need: a scapegoat.
The vice president has never been sold on Trump’s interventionist foreign policy or his relationship with Israel – Trump himself acknowledged Vance was less enthusiastic about attacking Iran – but he has lived with it because keeping quiet was politically convenient. Now he is selectively blaming the war for the administration’s failures when the reality is much more dire.
Blaming the war lets Vance and his populist allies avoid confronting their other bad policy ideas. In October, 71% of Americans said the country was on the wrong track. Trump’s tariff regime is, by some accounts, even less popular than the war itself, and about two-thirds of voters said the tariffs had hurt them financially.
Yet Vance’s election postmortem doesn’t mention tariffs at all. He nods to the cost of living but pins it on the war rather than on the entirety of Trump’s poor economic policy. And about 6 in 10 voters said the administration’s immigration enforcement has gone too far.
The problem is that Vance and his ilk agree with the president on trade and immigration, while most Americans don’t. In the same post, Vance warned that “anyone pushing amnesty is lying to you.” Turning around on the war won’t suddenly bring voters back without other radical shifts alongside it.
The Trump administration is deeply unpopular, with the president’s approval rating at a second-term low of 34% weeks before the election. The few salvageable accomplishments it can claim, such as extending the Trump tax cuts and securing the border, have been completely overshadowed by a self-inflicted failing economy and incompetence nearly everywhere else.
You can’t just blame the war for how generationally unpopular Trump is. Doing so will only repeat the mistakes that led us here: protectionist trade policy, cruel immigration enforcement and overreaching off a relatively slim election victory. The war was a factor, maybe even the largest one, but the wave that hit on Nov. 3 was a wholesale rejection, not tepid dissatisfaction.
The GOP needs 2028 to be something fundamentally different
To move on, Republicans need a fundamentally different approach. The party remade itself around Trump and wrote its platform to his liking. It purged sensible voices that were inconvenient for the president and elevated voices with nothing to contribute but blind praise for him.
The cancer of Trumpism that has infected the Republican Party will take time to work itself out. Thanks to Trump’s influence, plenty of state legislatures and party organizations are filled with empty shells whose only credential is attaching themselves to his name. Hopefully the fallout from this election is the first step in purging them from the party.
There are, however, places where competence still exists.
Florida remains a bastion of competent conservative governance, and Gov. Ron DeSantis has proved that serious conservatism with a hint of populism can work. As a first step forward, Republicans should look to the state parties that do things right. Florida weathered some of the national blue wave, and the answer to why should be the Republicans’ answer to “what now?”
Trumpism has run its course, even if much of the party hasn’t accepted it yet. The best time to abandon Trump would have been a decade ago. The second-best time is now. Republicans have finally received an electoral result that leaves them no option but to move on.
Vance is sure to respond to Election Day’s catastrophic results with an isolationist turn. Other Republicans would be wise to reckon with voters’ complete dissatisfaction with the Trumped-up Republican Party and build something wholly different and actually conservative.
Dace Potas, a law student, is an opinion columnist for USA TODAY. Follow him on X: @DacePotas
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Blaming Iran won't save the GOP. Dumping Trump might | Opinion
