Trump's 2028 Republicans split over who to blame for midterm wipeout

Republicans are still reckoning with a historic midterm wipeout, but the fight to assign blame and inherit Donald Trump’s political movement is already underway, CNBC reported.

Vice President JD Vance faults the war in Iran. Secretary of State Marco Rubio defends it. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis says Republicans fought the wrong battles. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz blames Trump’s tariffs and the prolonged conflict. Their competing explanations expose divisions within the MAGA coalition that the midterms cracked open.

All face the same dilemma: how to convince voters the party can change course without alienating Trump or the base they need to win a primary.

Trump has shown little appetite for a political retreat. On Monday, he made a surprise appearance in the White House briefing room, declaring the Iran war “militarily is effectively over” while maintaining that the U.S. remains prepared to resume strikes. He has questioned the legitimacy of the Republican defeat, suggesting without evidence that voting machines were responsible. He has replaced Chief of Staff Susie Wiles with immigration hard-liner Stephen Miller and backed RNC Chairman Joe Gruters against a challenger demanding an accounting of the party’s losses.

Trump is also keeping his would-be successors guessing. In a CBS interview Sunday, he praised Rubio alongside Vance but suggested he might stay out of the 2028 Republican primary. “Maybe I’m better off not getting involved,” he said, while emphasizing the weight his endorsement could carry.

That dynamic leaves Vance in a precarious position. He entered the midterms as the clear political heir, but now faces a question that has no good answer: can he inherit MAGA without inheriting the blame for Trump’s presidency?

In a post on X as results were still coming in, Vance challenged Trump’s explanation for the defeat. “The reason we lost is the war,” he wrote, arguing that voters who backed the Trump-Vance ticket in 2024 abandoned Republicans in 2026 over Iran.

The argument allows Vance to criticize a defining administration decision without repudiating the broader MAGA movement, and it echoes his longstanding opposition to foreign interventions. But the election results complicate the case. Just 34% of House voters called the war a major factor in their vote, versus 49% citing the cost of living and 55% citing government corruption, according to the CNBC Voter Poll.

“You can’t campaign against a war from within an administration you serve,” conservative commentator Joel Pollak wrote on X, questioning how Vance could distance himself from a conflict he had publicly defended.

Vance also has losses of his own to explain. He spent months fundraising and campaigning as RNC finance chairman, and Democrats won both marquee races in his home state of Ohio. Amy Acton defeated Vance ally Vivek Ramaswamy for governor. Former Sen. Sherrod Brown claimed Vance’s former Senate seat, defeating incumbent Republican Jon Husted.

Rep. Randy Fine, R-Fla., said Sunday he would not support Vance in 2028 due to his war criticism, calling it a betrayal of Trump. “You have to be loyal to those people who brought you to the dance,” Fine said in an interview with LiveNOW from FOX, naming Rubio and Cruz as alternatives.

Rubio is making a different bet: defend the Iran war while distancing himself from the electoral defeat. “Sometimes, when you do the right thing, you don’t know whether it’s popular or not, but it’s still the right thing to do,” Rubio told reporters Sunday before departing for France.

Rubio has denied he plans to run in 2028 and largely avoided the campaign trail. But his dual role as secretary of state and national security advisor ties him directly to Trump’s foreign policy record, which will face renewed scrutiny when Democrats take control of the House. The House may vote this week on articles of impeachment against Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, a rebuke of the administration’s foreign policy.

DeSantis, who is not in the Trump administration, is questioning the party’s entire playbook. The outgoing Florida governor called the midterms “close to an extinction-level event” for Republicans at a news conference in Tallahassee, accusing Washington of failing to deliver on its promises while fighting culture wars that no longer resonated with voters.

“Republicans really were fighting yesterday’s battle,” DeSantis said. It was a striking critique from a governor who built his national profile on those same fights.

DeSantis can point to Florida as evidence he knows how to win. Republicans retained control of the state even as Democrats flipped longtime GOP strongholds elsewhere. But Republican Byron Donalds won the governor’s race by just 1.3 points, and Democrats gained ground in the Legislature.

The scramble to succeed Trump extends beyond the top three. Cruz called the midterms a “Watergate-level repudiation” in a post on X. Other potential 2028 contenders include Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders and former Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin. All face the same challenge of moving beyond Trump without alienating his base.

Some wealthy Republican donors are already looking beyond Vance, weighing DeSantis and other alternatives amid concerns that a candidate from Trump’s administration would inherit the political baggage of his second term. The divisions extend to Trump’s own coalition: younger Republicans were far more skeptical of the Iran war and U.S. support for Israel than older voters, according to exit poll data.

“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,” Vance said Wednesday. “Agree or disagree, that’s at least honest. But everyone knows why we lost.”

What I think

Vance is right about the war, and he is wrong about the politics. The Iran war was the most visible failure of the Trump administration, and voters punished the party for it. But 34% of voters calling the war a major factor means 66% did not. The cost of living and government corruption mattered more, and those are things Vance spent two years defending as vice president. He cannot run against the war without running against the administration he served in, and he cannot run against the administration without running against Trump.

Rubio has the cleanest position, which is that the war was right and the election was about something else. That lets him keep his foreign policy credentials and his Trump ties without owning the defeat. But Rubio was invisible during the campaign, and invisibility is not a strategy for winning a presidential primary.

DeSantis has the strongest case, which is that he won Florida while the rest of the party was losing everywhere else. But he ran for president in 2024 and collapsed, and the party has not forgotten. The donors who are looking for an alternative to Vance are not looking for DeSantis. They are looking for someone who can win without Trump and without the war, and that person does not exist in the current Republican Party. The 2028 primary is going to be a fight between people who cannot win, and the winner will be the one who loses most gracefully.