JD Vance’s first 2028 pitch reveals his profound weakness as a candidate

The potential presidential contender has misread the electorate – and that’s just the start of his problems

The good news is that the dramatic results of last week’s midterm elections mean that Donald Trump and his administration will be much less able to immiserate and impoverish the American people for the next two years, that newly competitive states are likely to see an influx of investment from Democrats, and that states that were once under seemingly unbreakable regimes of Republican control now have Democratic state governments that will hopefully pursue more just, or at least less cruel, policy agendas.

The bad news is that the 2028 presidential cycle has already begun.

No one seems to know this better than JD Vance, the man who is in the unenviable position of being the presumptive favorite for the Republican presidential nomination in 2028.

Ahead of that contest, and in light of Donald Trump’s collapsed approval rating and the decisive rebuke that Republicans faced at the polls in the midterms, JD Vance has set about trying to spin the catastrophic results for his party into a beneficial outcome for him personally.

On Wednesday morning, as the dust settled from Tuesday’s elections and the sheer scale of the Republicans’ defeat became clear, Vance put out a lengthy statement arguing that really, the results showed that Americans favored his worldview all along.

The notion that the sadistic crackdowns by ICE that have terrorized immigrant communities may have spurred the Republicans’ massive losses was “gaslighting”, the vice-president said. Rather, Vance insisted: “The reason we lost is the war.”

Vance’s post signaled his continued commitment to the nationalist and nativist faction of the Maga coalition, which has prized a maximalist immigration policy complete with roundups, camps and masked thugs, and which has objected to foreign wars.

And it served to deepen his rift with the party’s neoliberal wing, which has championed foreign intervention in places such as Iran but also Venezuela, and encouraged ongoing aid to Israel – a faction whose de facto leader, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, is also rumored to have presidential ambitions in 2028.

But perhaps unintentionally, the statement that Vance put out on Wednesday also reveals his profound weakness as a candidate at the outset of the 2028 cycle.

As he pitches himself to voters, he must be simultaneously the new standard bearer of the Trump movement and also a departure from its unpopular excesses; he must cast himself as against the Iran war while serving in the administration that prosecuted it; and he will have to make a case that draconian immigration enforcement is good to a diverse public that can no longer be deceived about what that means.

It is hard to credit the idea that Vance will be able to credibly and meaningfully distance himself from the Iran war; after all, it was launched when he was the vice-president. As a surrogate for the Trump administration, he has defended the war in public, even if he is now condemning it.

His theory of the case seems to be that he can pitch Americans on the idea that he’s always opposed the war, even as his administration launched and continued it – an idea which suggests no one in the Trump administration respected him enough to heed his advice.

His insistence that immigration enforcement is not the cause of any of the electorate’s shifts to the left also reflects a profound misreading of both the 2024 and 2026 cycles.

In 2024, the Trump campaign built a victorious coalition in large part because of the rightward shifts of men of color, particularly Latinos, who were drawn to the Republicans’ focus on economics and promises of an immigration crackdown that was presented as a fight against criminals.

But immigration enforcement against criminals is not what the Trump-Vance administration delivered.

Instead, the American public was subjected to months of a grim spectacle. Masked men snatched children from their parents; ordinary people were kidnapped on their way to work or at their kids’ school bus stops, and disappeared into a network of gulags; some were sent to foreign prisons, or shipped away to third party counties that they had never set foot in before.

The crackdown invaded American cities, paralyzed life in many communities, and had a body count: many immigrants have died in custody, and both foreign- and American-born people have been shot and killed by trigger-happy ICE agents who have shown themselves to be high on malice and low on self-control.

All of this has Vance’s name on it; none of it is something he seems eager to walk away from. In 2026, Republicans faced dramatic losses among Latino and Asian American voters, in particular – people who often have close ties to the immigrants that the Trump administration terrorized, persecuted and kidnapped. One wonders how popular JD Vance really thinks that ICE is with them.

Vance’s bet is that the US is an isolationist country with white nationalist sentiments; that it will punish foreign wars and high prices and reward racism. But what the results of the midterms show is that the US is a pluralist country with a limited appetite for public cruelty, one that has grown impatient with the Trump administration and is weary of being lied to.

Notably absent from Vance’s post-midterms statement was any mention of something that a large majority of voters cited as one of their major concerns: corruption. Even for a craven spin doctor like Vance, trying to distance the Trump administration from that one would be hard to do with a straight face.

Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist