JD Vance blames Israel and Iran war for GOP’s crushing defeats
Vice president deems the Middle East conflict ‘the real reason’ for the massive losses.
(JTA) — Vice President JD Vance blamed the Republican Party’s massive midterm losses on the country’s connection to Israel and the war in Iran in a social media post early on Wednesday.
“The real reason we lost is obvious to almost everyone,” Vance wrote on X, as results from Tuesday’s midterm elections showed that Democrats had wrested control of Congress from his Republican Party.
https://twitter.com/JDVance/status/2118004988433641835
The vice president then listed four strategies to persuade those voters who abandoned the GOP “to come back to our team”: end the war in Iran; focus on the cost of living and inflation; put America first and “Change our relationship to Israel.”
“The reason we lost is the war. The president himself said so last night,” Vance added, referring to interviews President Donald Trump gave on Tuesday about the influence of the war on gas prices.
Addressing the defeats, Trump told Fox News that “a part of it was Iran,” while also doubling down on the importance of the war itself. Similarly, he told The Wall Street Journal that “Iran was a piece of it.”
Asked specifically about Vance’s statement on Wednesday, Trump told reporters, “I think it’s largely true because it drove the gasoline up a little bit short term.” Trump added, however, that “he would do it again” because, from a long-term perspective, “You can’t let Iran have a nuclear weapon.”
Meanwhile, Rep. Hakeem Jeffries — who is poised to become Speaker of the House — told CNN on Wednesday that Democrats, after flipping the House and Senate, will seek to end the Iran war as part of a broader affordability agenda.
The president’s son, Donald Trump, Jr., backed Vance’s statement with a re-post on Wednesday, simply adding: “Every word of this is 100 100 100.”
Jonathan Greenberg, director for combatting antisemitism at Defending Education and a former staffer for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, described Vance’s comments as “nonsense.”
“The same Islamist-communist alliance that’s infiltrating our schools and teaching our kids to hate America is the same alliance that Israel is fighting,” added Greenberg, who ran for state office in Illinois as a Republican in 2012 but is now unaffiliated.
“The idea that we’re going to take an ally in that fight and feed them to the same ogre that’s coming after us makes absolutely no sense to me,” he said. “I think the vice president’s wrong.”
Asked whether he thought Vance would be a suitable presidential candidate in 2028, Greenberg responded that he’s planning to “wait to see what the field looks like.”
Daniel Di Martino, a fellow at the conservative think tank the Manhattan Institute, wrote on X that polling data did not back up Vance’s claims.
“Nothing on tariffs? Nothing on deportations? Nothing on corruption? Really?” he wrote.
Tom Malinowski, the former Democratic congressman in New Jersey who lost a high profile race this year after AIPAC spent on ads attacking him, said that Vance’s tweet “doesn’t admit backlash” to those same three factors.
Vance was apparently in agreement with the New York Young Republican Club, a group that has generated controversy for inviting white nationalists and far-right German officials to its 2025 gala. The organization wrote, “The Iran War is the worst policy choice since Iraq. A big fat mistake,” just after midnight on Wednesday, as House and Senate control had already been called for the Democrats.
“End the conflict, put America First,” the group wrote.
CNN’s Jake Tapper wrote that, while much of the focus in response to the vice president’s tweet has been on Vance listing ending the Iran war, changing the U.S. relationship to Israel would be “far more longer lasting as a policy decision and arguably more consequential as a GOP policy change.”
Democrats in both the House and Senate have voted for measures to cut military aid or block weapons sales to Israel, while Republicans have rejected those measures almost across the board. On Election Day, however, Trump said that he would cut military aid to Israel at the end of this year, one year before the current Memorandum of Understanding expires. PJC
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