Vance Says Republicans Lost Midterms Due to Iran War, US Relationship With Israel

 

by Dave DeCamp | November 4, 2026 at 12:47 pm ET | Iran

Vice President JD Vance acknowledged on Wednesday that the US war with Iran and its relationship with Israel were the top reasons for the Republicans getting crushed in the midterm elections.

Vance made the comments in a long post on X, where he said he spoke with a pollster whom he described as “one of the smartest people I know in politics.” He said that the pollster told him that “a lot of Trump 2024 voters were angry and planning to vote for Democrats” and asked those “who had abandoned us what would cause them to come back on our team.”

The top four responses were:

1. End the war
2. Focus on cost of living/inflation
3. Put America First
4. Change the US relationship with Israel

“The reason we lost is the war. The president himself said so last night,” Vance said. “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. And any honest conversation about where we go from here must start there.”

Vance attends a US military capabilities showcase at Elmendorf Air Force Base in Anchorage, Alaska on October 6, 2026. (Official White House Photo)

While President Trump also acknowledged that the war was related to the Republican loss, he still defended his decision to launch it. “Well, I think it’s largely true, because it drove the gasoline up a little bit, short term,” he told reporters when asked about Vance’s comments that the war was to blame.

“But at the same time, if I had it to do again, I’d have to do it again because long term, it’s the only answer … You have no choice, you have to do it. You can’t let Iran have a nuclear weapon, or everything that you see here, someday might not exist,” Trump added.

While Trump has continued to frame his war with Iran as necessary to prevent the country from obtaining nuclear weapons, there was no evidence either before the June 2025 war or the current conflict that Tehran had decided to pursue a bomb, and that was the consensus of US intelligence agencies at the beginning of Trump’s second term.

Throughout the war, leaks from the administration have presented Vance as the leading skeptic of the conflict, though he played a leading role in pushing war propaganda in the days leading up to the US-Israeli bombing campaign.

“The principle is very simple: Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon,” Vance said on February 25, three days before the US and Israel launched the war with a sneak attack that involved killing Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his family and the bombing of an elementary school that killed at least 120 children.

“If they try to rebuild a nuclear weapon, that causes problems for us. In fact, we’ve seen evidence that they have tried to do exactly that,” Vance said at the time.

https://news.antiwar.com/2026/11/04/vance-says-republicans-lost-midterms-due-to-iran-war-us-relationship-with-israel/