Vance, Cruz and DeSantis diagnose GOP's midterm disaster as battle over party's future begins
The 2028 Republican White House race may be getting its first battle lines, as Vice President JD Vance, Sen. Ted Cruz and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis quickly offered competing assessments of the GOP's devastating midterm election losses, potentially previewing their visions for the party's future.
The three high-profile Republicans, all viewed as potential contenders for the party's presidential nomination, used their postmortems to weigh what went wrong and what Republicans must do differently — a debate that could help define the GOP's direction heading into 2028.
"I think everybody's trying to figure out where to position themselves in the aftermath. Where were you on the day after," longtime Republican strategist and presidential campaign veteran David Kochel told Fox News Digital. "I think these are all moves designed to look towards 2028."
Oil drilling CEO and prominent Republican donor and bundler Dan Eberhart told Fox News Digital that "the early moves have started" in the 2028 Republican presidential nomination race. "These guys are going to go a couple of rounds before Christmas."
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Vance kicked off the debate Wednesday morning with a roughly 600-word postmortem on X, blaming President Donald Trump's war with Iran for Republicans' worst ballot-box drubbing in decades as they lost control of Congress, along with a slew of governorships and state legislatures.
Fueled by anger over high costs and the war with Iran, voters delivered a repudiation of Trump and his agenda, boosting Democrats to large majorities in the House and Senate.
"The reason we lost is the war," Vance wrote as he appeared to put daylight between himself and his boss on foreign policy and America's relationship with Israel. "Any honest conversation about where we go from here must start there."
Vance, in what some pundits viewed as an early pitch to eventually claim the MAGA and America First mantle, argued that defections from the party's successful 2024 coalition of voters, rather than a lack of GOP turnout, fueled the Republican collapse in the midterms.
CLICK HERE FOR THE LATEST MIDTERM ELECTION RESULTS AS THE VOTES CONTINUE TO BE COUNTED
Kochel called Vance's assessment "the most striking because it appears to say 'hey, we made a mistake with the war in Iran,' and that's about as far as I've seen a vice president go, not as a criticism of Trump but as a criticism in the policy."
Asked about Vance's post, Trump told reporters, "I know how he feels about it. I think it was fine. I thought it was good."
The president acknowledged that the war and the high gas and diesel prices it spurred hurt his party at the ballot box but insisted it was worth the cost.
"If I had to do it again, I'd have to do it again," he said. "As far as that war is concerned, I would have done nothing different."
Donald Trump Jr., the president's eldest son and a prominent figure in the MAGA movement, quickly gave Vance's postmortem a thumbs-up, writing on X, "Every word of this is ???? ???? ????."
Hours after Vance posted his assessment, Cruz posted his own scathing take on the midterms.
POLLSTERS MISSED THE MARK, BUT THIS TIME IT WASN'T REPUBLICANS THEY UNDERCOUNTED
The conservative firebrand senator from Texas, who was runner-up to Trump in the bruising 2016 Republican presidential primaries and has made no secret that he may run for the White House again, described the midterms as a "blue tsunami" and warned that his party had lost touch with voters, particularly in the Lone Star State.
"2026 was not simply a blue wave; it was a blue tsunami. It was an a-- kicking," Cruz wrote. "It was not simply a bad 2006 midterm election. It was a Watergate-level repudiation."
"Nowhere are the consequences of this election greater than Texas," Cruz wrote. "In the Lone Star State, we lost every single statewide election...Texas is blue. That is a hard sentence to utter."
Cruz blamed the losses on the high cost of living and pointed to Trump's tariffs and the war in Iran.
"Food is too high, gas is too high, diesel is too high, insurance is too high, life is too high," he wrote. "Understandably, people were pissed off, and elected Republicans didn't do enough to address their very real pain."
DeSantis, the term-limited conservative governor who ran for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination before being decisively defeated by Trump, held a news conference Wednesday morning where he called the midterm election results "close to an extinction-level event for Republicans across the country."
"Let’s just be clear, that is going to hurt — not just for the next two years... That is something that can reverberate for the next decade or more," he said. "We knew it could be worse. I don't think most of us thought it would be this bad."
But DeSantis repeatedly highlighted that "the one state that was able to hold the line and withstand that is right here in the free state of Florida."
While most pundits view Cruz as a likely 2028 contender, the jury's been out regarding DeSantis.
But Eberhart, who's Florida-based, argued that "the first bullet in 2028 contest was Ron DeSantis throwing cold water on Trump's $5,000 dividend," referring to the president's early September pledge at the GOP midterm convention to make a cash payment to every adult U.S. citizen if Republicans retained the House and Senate.
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Looking at the postmortems, Kochel said, "I think that we're going to be digging through the rubble for a while...The party going to have through this post apocalyptic period here and figure out what's the message going forward."
He cautioned, "It's going to be really hard to hold the coalition together. I think Trump was uniquely able to do it with the power of his celebrity but I think there's going to be a lot of machinations here going forward."