The race for 2028 is on as Republicans unpack midterm disaster

WASHINGTON – Vice President JD Vance blamed the midterm shellacking on the war in Iran. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz said an "economic disconnect" also led to sweeping Republican losses. And Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis boasted that his state was the only GOP stronghold to survive the blue tsunami.

After Democrats' midterm rout, the race for 2028 on the Republican side is on.

Top contenders eyeing the 2028 Republican primary to replace Donald Trump worked to unpack what went wrong for their party after a decisive repudiation of Trump in the Nov. 3 midterms. And in their respective critiques, Vance, Cruz and DeSantis started to look beyond the term-limited ‒ and now lame-duck ‒ president who has dominated their party for a decade.

"Let's be clear about what happened last night: This is as close to an extinction-level event for Republicans in many parts of the country as we have seen probably in the last 100 years," DeSantis said.

In a historic rebuke of the party in power, Democrats took control of the House of Representatives and Senate, winning reliably red states such as Texas, South Carolina and Kansas, and flipping House seats across the country that voted for Trump by double digits in 2024.

Vance, in a Nov. 4 postmortem analysis on X, said MAGA voters turned out to the polls in solid numbers, but he observed that "many people who voted for Trump/Vance in 2024 voted for Democrats in 2026." Above all, Vance blamed the war on Iran, which the president defended throughout the campaign, even as gas prices spiked as a result of the conflict.

"The reason we lost is the war. The president himself said so last night," Vance said, referring to Trump telling Fox News "a part of" the midterm collapse was because of Iran. "If you'd like to argue it was worth it, that losing the Senate for the next 6 years was worth it, then do so. Argue it was a worthwhile cost to pay. Agree or disagree, that's at least honest."

"But everyone knows why we lost," said Vance, who has taken on a leading role in negotiations to end the war. "And any honest conversation about where we go from here must start there."

Trump on Vance: 'Maybe he won't run'

In an appeal to Republicans upset with the midterm outcome, Vance said, "Let’s take that anger and get back to the work of saving our country."

Although they've not formally entered the 2028 Republican primary, Vance and Cruz are widely expected to run for the party's nomination, while DeSantis is considered a potential candidate as well. Any announcements on candidacies may not take place until 2027. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who is also considered a possible 2028 contender, has yet to publicly weigh in on the midterm results.

Former Republican House Speaker New Gingrich, in a post on X, suggested that the blowout midterm victory for Democrats ruined any chance for Vance to put an early lock on the party's nomination.

"The scale of the Republican defeat is so great that it makes the race for the GOP presidential nomination wide open," Gingrich said. "If the administration had won a big victory, Vice President JD Vance would have had an enormous argument to be the inevitable nominee."

Trump told reporters said he thought the vice president's post-election assessment was "good." Asked about a potential Vance run in 2028, Trump said "we'll see what happens," and suggested that many others could also run. "Maybe he won't run," Trump said. "I don't know who's going to run. But I can tell you, as far as that war's concerned, I would have done nothing different."

Cruz: 'Understandably, people were pissed off'

Cruz framed Republicans' losses in historic terms after Democrats won the midterm popular vote by 13 percentage points ‒ the greatest margin in a midterm election since 1976 ‒ and he confronted a new reality in which he's "the only statewide elected Republican who remains in Texas."

"2026 was not simply a blue wave; it was a blue tsunami," Cruz said in a lengthy analysis on social media. "It was an ass kicking. It was not simply a bad 2006 midterm election. It was a Watergate-level repudiation. What happened, and why? What are the consequences, and where on earth do we go from here?"

Cruz blamed Trump's tariffs for "making everything too expensive." He said the war in Iran has "dragged on too long" and "should have been brief, decisive, and over." He also said a "very real economic disconnect" hurt Republicans, pointing to expanding wealth for the super rich like Elon Musk and new data centers that are "turning billionaires into centimillionaires," while average Americans struggled with utility payments

"Understandably, people were pissed off, and elected Republicans didn’t do enough to address their very real pain," Cruz said, though he predicted that Democrats will "overshoot" and "overreach" by advancing policies that only drive up costs further.

Cruz, who is up for reelection next in 2030, vowed that Republicans will "rebuild as a true blue-collar party" and win back Texas.

'Fighting yesterday's battles,' DeSantis says

After their sweeping midterm losses in Texas ‒ where Republicans lost every statewide election, including for U.S. Senate ‒ the GOP can no longer bank on winning Texas and its 40 electoral votes in the next presidential election. Midterm wins for Sen.-elect James Talarico and other Texas Democrats instantly makes the Lonestar State a top battleground in 2028, giving Democrats a chance to severely hamper Republicans' electoral path to victory.

While Texas turned blue in the midterms, another Republican stronghold, Florida, remained in the Republican column ‒ a point that DeSantis was quick to emphasize as he sized up the midterms at a Nov. 4 press conference.

"So the question is, why did Florida hold up?" DeSantis said. "And I think the answer is that we've built up a record of achievement. We earned trust from a number of our voters, that even in the worst situation that you can imagine politically, we were able to hold the line."

Florida Republican Sen. Ashley Moody held off Democratic challenger Angie Nixon in Florida's Senate race, and Rep. Byron Donalds defeated Democrat David Jolly for governor to replace the term-limited DeSantis.

Nationally, however, DeSantis described a disastrous situation for Republicans, predicting that Democrats' strong majorities in the House and Senate could be so large that Republicans retaking either chamber in 2028 isn't even an option.

"We just have to be very clear-eyed. This is probably the worst-case scenario for a midterm election," DeSantis said.

DeSantis said he "knew Republicans were in trouble" when he saw Republican candidates were spending hundreds of millions of dollars on ads attacking transgender issues ‒ long a go-to cultural wedge issue for Republicans that they ran on successfully in 2024.

"Four years ago, we were in the peak 'woke era,'" DeSantis said. "It alienated a lot of people, rightfully so. It alienated me. So we were fighting back against that. Well, now the issues are different. And Republicans, it seemed like, in some of the ads I was seeing, they really were fighting yesterday's battles."

As for whether he will run in 2028, DeSantis said he will address that question after his term as governor ends in January.

"We'll talk about anything I'm doing on the other side of this," he said. "I've still got more work to do."

Reach Joey Garrison on X @joeygarrison.