Updated November 6, 2026, 12:25 p.m. ET
WASHINGTON – Vice President JD Vance blamed the midterm bombings on the war in Iran. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz said an “economic disconnect” had also led to considerable losses for Republicans. And Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis boasted that his state was the only Republican Party stronghold to survive the blue tsunami.
After the defeat of the Democrats in the mid-terms, the race for 2028 is launched on the Republican side.
Leading contenders in the 2028 Republican primary to replace Donald Trump have been scrambling to expose what went wrong for their party following Trump’s decisive rejection in the Nov. 3 midterms. And in their respective critiques, Vance, Cruz and DeSantis began looking beyond the term-limited — and now lame-duck — president who 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’ve probably seen in the last 100 years,” DeSantis said.
In a historic rebuke of the ruling party, Democrats took control of the House and Senate, reliably winning 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 Vance mostly blamed the war on Iran, which the president defended throughout the campaign, even as gas prices soared in the wake of the conflict.
“The reason we lost was the war. The president himself said that last night,” Vance said, referring to Trump telling Fox News “part” of the midterm collapse was due to Iran. “If you want to argue that it was worth it, that losing the Senate for the next 6 years was worth it, then do it. Make the case that it was worth paying for. Agree or disagree, that’s at least honest.”
“But everyone knows why we lost,” said Vance, who played a leading role in negotiations to end the war. “And any honest conversation about where we go from here has to start there.”
Trump on Vance: ‘Maybe he won’t run’
In an appeal to Republicans unhappy with the midterm outcome, Vance said, “Let’s take this anger and get back to the work of saving our country.”
Although not officially entered in the 2028 Republican primary, Vance and Cruz are widely expected to run for the party’s nomination, while DeSantis is also considered a potential contender. Candidate announcements may not occur until 2027. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, also considered a possible 2028 candidate, has not yet publicly commented on the midterm results.
Former Republican House Speaker New Gingrich suggested, in an article on
“The scale of the Republican defeat is so great that it renders 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 a huge argument to be the inevitable nominee.”
Trump told reporters he thought the vice president’s post-election assessment was “good.” Asked about a possible 2028 run by Vance, Trump said “we’ll see what happens” and suggested many other candidates could also run. “Maybe he won’t show up,” Trump said. “I don’t know who’s going to show up. But I can tell you that when it comes to this war, I wouldn’t have done anything different.”
Cruz: “Naturally, people were upset”
Cruz described Republican losses in historic terms after Democrats won the midterm popular vote by 13 percentage points — the largest margin in a midterm election since 1976 — and he was faced with a new reality in which he is “the only statewide elected Republican left in Texas.”
“2026 wasn’t just a blue wave; it was a blue tsunami,” Cruz said in a lengthy analysis on social media. “It was a kick in the ass. It wasn’t just a bad midterm election in 2006. It was a repudiation on the scale of Watergate. What happened and why? What are the consequences, and where do we go from here?”
Cruz blamed Trump’s tariffs for “making everything too expensive.” He said the war in Iran “has lasted too long” and “should have been brief, decisive and over.” He also said a “very real economic disconnect” was hurting Republicans, pointing to rising wealth for the super-rich like Elon Musk and new data centers that are “turning billionaires into centimillionaires” while average Americans struggle to pay for utilities.
“Understandably, people were angry and Republican elected officials did not do enough to address their very real suffering,” Cruz said, while predicting that Democrats would “overstep the mark” and “overstep the mark” by advancing policies that would only further increase costs.
Cruz, who is up for re-election in 2030, promised that the Republicans would “rebuild themselves to become a true working-class party” and win back Texas.
“Fight yesterday’s battles,” says DeSantis
After their heavy midterm defeats in Texas — where Republicans lost every statewide election, including the U.S. Senate election — the Republican Party can no longer count on Texas and its 40 electoral votes winning the next presidential election. The midterm victories of Sen.-elect James Talarico and other Texas Democrats instantly make the Lonestar State a prime battleground in 2028, giving Democrats a chance to seriously hamper Republicans’ electoral path to victory.
While Texas turned blue in the midterms, another Republican stronghold, Florida, remained in the Republican column — a point DeSantis was quick to emphasize when assessing the midterms during a Nov. 4 press conference.
“So the question is: Why did Florida resist?” » DeSantis said. “And I think the answer is that we’ve built up a record of success. We’ve earned the trust of a number of our voters, because even in the worst political situation you can imagine, we’ve been able to stay the course.”
Florida Republican Sen. Ashley Moody held off Democratic challenger Angie Nixon in the Florida Senate race, and Rep. Byron Donalds defeated Democrat David Jolly for governor to replace term-limited DeSantis.
However, nationally, DeSantis painted a dire situation for Republicans, predicting that Democrats’ strong majorities in the House and Senate could be so large that taking back either chamber in 2028 would not even be an option for Republicans.
“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 that Republican candidates were spending hundreds of millions of dollars on ads attacking transgender issues – a long-standing cultural corner issue for Republicans on which they ran successfully in 2024.
“Four years ago, we were at the height of the woke era,” DeSantis said. “It alienated a lot of people, rightly so. It alienated me. So we fought against it. Well, now the issues are different. And the Republicans, it seemed like in some of the ads I was seeing, they were really fighting yesterday’s battles.”
As for whether he will run in 2028, DeSantis said he will address that issue after his term as governor ends in January.
“We’ll talk about everything I do on the other side,” he said. “I still have work to do.”
Contact Joey Garrison on X @joeygarrison.
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