JD Vance breaks with Trump, blaming the Iran war for Republican losses
Speaker Mike Johnson of Louisiana will not seek reelection as the top House Republican, according to reporting by NPR’s Barbara Sprunt, leaving the chamber’s Republican majority to choose a new leader after Democrats won both houses of Congress. Congressional reporter Eric McDaniel said the decision sets up a battle between at least two possible successors: Jim Jordan of Ohio and Steve Scalise of Louisiana.
McDaniel described Jordan as “pugnacious” and “a brawler,” and said he could be “dispositionally well suited” to counter Democrats’ investigation-heavy agenda. Scalise, he said, is “sort of a party man” — a committed Trump ally generally seen as less pugnacious than Jordan. McDaniel stressed that his own analysis was speculation, but said there is “probably an appetite for someone willing to take a more Trump-skeptical stance as a party leader,” given the “mollywhopping” voters just delivered the party because of the president.
NPR White House correspondent Emily Feng reported that the midterms amounted to a big rebuke of Trump himself. Trump has been quick to point out he was not literally on the ballot, but voters rejected his policies — his economic policies and tariffs, and the war in Iran, Feng said. Even his own vice president broke with him: JD Vance wrote on X that he thinks one of the primary reasons behind Republican losses was the war in Iran.
Reporters asked Trump — as he celebrated the last steel ceiling beam going into place in the East Wing ballroom project — whether he regretted, perhaps, the Iran war costing the GOP the House and the Senate. “Probably it’s true, 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,” Trump said. “You can’t let Iran have a nuclear weapon.”
Feng reported that Trump seemed to soften his stance a little. He said he could end the war “anytime” he wanted. On Fox & Friends he said he would still strike Iran if Iran “does not behave,” but also that the two countries could have a diplomatic ending — that they could sign something to end the war. He has warned that any new major strikes would happen after the midterms, but he has already said he will not use nuclear weapons, and he told Politico he does not need to use nuclear weapons against Iran.
On whether the polls could be trusted, NPR senior political editor and correspondent Domenico Montanaro told host Mary Louise Kelly that in the end they “did do OK” — they pointed in the right direction and, if anything, underestimated Democratic support. Polls predicted Democrats plus 8 on the generic congressional ballot; the result wound up bigger, closer to plus 13, which he called “massive and no one would have believed it beforehand.” The pre-election caution was warranted, he said, given “the polling errors we’ve seen over the past decade that had underestimated Republican support.” No one knows how many people decided late, after the polls were conducted, he said, and things usually break in one direction in midterms — as they did in 2006 and again in this election. “It’s just very difficult in this age, when there’s been such a major political realignment, to poll,” he said.
As for whether Democrats won or Republicans lost, Montanaro said it was “not really an either-or.” The overriding factor was Donald Trump, he said: his unpopularity, the war in Iran, rising prices and the growing gap between the ultra-wealthy and the middle class. “Some $12 billion spent on this election while other people are struggling to buy gas,” he said. “All of that together created a huge backlash, maybe call it a Trump-lash.”
Democrats also recruited candidates who fit their states, he said. “You don’t win in places like Iowa, Texas, Kansas as Democrats without candidates who can make the most of the moment and be good fits for their states,” Montanaro said. They showed, in his words, a “real level of authenticity” — and that gives the party “a big opportunity to show what Democrats did wasn’t just a big midterm asterisk.”
The outcome itself: Democrats won majorities in both houses of Congress, picking up at least seven seats in the Senate, where two races in Mississippi and Alaska remained too close to call. Democrats took control of the House, flipping more than two dozen seats with races yet to be called, and picked up five governorships and control of at least nine state legislative houses. Republicans still control the House and Senate for the next couple of months, and McDaniel said it “only gets harder” for them from here: with a narrow House majority and a small Senate majority, there is “not a lot of incentive” for members who lost their seats to come back to Washington and pass legislation on a party-line basis. Still awaiting action, he said: government funding and more money for the Iran war.
When Democrats take their majorities in January, McDaniel said, they will act on what they campaigned on: cost of living — “from healthcare to housing” — and perceived political corruption. With Trump still in the White House, he does not expect those bills to become law. On corruption, he expects bills on lawmaker stock trading and “investigations into investigations into investigations — every part of Trump’s life from his administration’s agenda and the extent of his relationship with the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.” The likely incoming House oversight chair, Robert Garcia, Democrat of California, posted on Twitter, simply: “lawyer up.”
Feng, reporting from the White House, described the mood there as quiet but also “surreal.” Trump’s one public event was not about the election: he brought in hundreds of the construction workers building his East Wing ballroom and spent most of the event discussing the quality of the marble and his new helipad. The night before, a White House official told NPR that the mood watching the results come in was “defiant at the White House.” Trump’s Truth Social account later shared a picture of a red hat bearing the word “veto,” matching his stated intention to veto most bills a Democratic Congress sends him. The broader mood in the Republican Party, Feng said, is one of confusion and soul-searching.
McDaniel said Democrats can send bills to the president’s desk but “can’t make him sign.” They can, however, “make a real stink” about changes they say would benefit the American people and about the president standing in the way, and that kind of public pressure could matter, he said: “The president wants to be liked,” and he has signaled some openness to dealmaking. There is leverage — government funding, getting rid of the filibuster, confirming the president’s picks to various posts — that could help grease the wheels of dealmaking. But “it’s not going to be easy for Democrats,” McDaniel said, while “I don’t want to pretend like movement is impossible either.”
Asked whether voters gave Democrats a mandate, McDaniel said he does not know “that there is such a thing as a mandate in today’s political environment.” The election was about the president, he said: a 38% approval rating, 70% of the public peeved about the war in Iran and gas prices up 40% year over year. Democrats, he said, “had the right message about how to address it” — but their favorability rating as a party is still minus 14, and Chuck Schumer is among the most disliked men in America. Election night brought huge swings across demographics, among groups that had swung to Trump in 2024, and Democrats now have to do the hard work of convincing those voters to stay in their corner. “This isn’t a captured electorate, by any means,” he said.
Montanaro warned that Democrats are now “the dog that caught the car.” They can block judges and cabinet members and stop Trump’s legislative agenda — whatever that winds up being — but they must be careful in how they message the win and avoid overpromising and underdelivering, he said. It is unlikely, he added, that Democrats will have “a real good-faith negotiating partner” in Republicans, and it is looking like Trump is “not wanting to be a Bill Clinton, Newt Gingrich-style triangulator.” That points to the states: Democrats flipped a number of state legislatures and will hold trifectas in state governance in some key places, so while Washington may be mired in inertia, “it’s the states that will be the incubators for policy,” with the test coming in how those policies are received by voters, particularly in purple and red states.
McDaniel also pointed to a “fresh-faced class” of new nonvoting members headed to Congress from the Virgin Islands, Guam and Washington, D.C., to advocate for civil rights for the people they represent. More than a million Americans, he noted, lack voting representation in Congress.
The next campaign is already beginning, Montanaro said: “2028 starts now.” Announcements of presidential candidacies are likely in January and February, and the open question is how Trump and the “Trump-lash” reshape the Republican field. “I guarantee you there’s going to be more people running now” than would have before, he said.
Feng closed with two things to watch. Because the economy and gas prices drove voter concern, “the easiest way to address that would be to end the war with Iran” — the question is whether serious diplomatic negotiations with Iran resume. And in about two weeks, Trump heads to China, where he will meet the Chinese leader again and perhaps Russia’s Vladimir Putin; Feng wondered whether, now that he is more constrained at home, Trump will try to make “some kind of grand foreign policy bargain abroad.”