Vance blames Iran war as Republicans open race to succeed Trump
Republicans lost both chambers of Congress in the November 3 midterm elections as Democrats stormed territory once considered impregnable, taking Kansas and South Carolina in what the Guardian’s analysis of the results called the most sweeping midterm repudiation of a sitting president since the Watergate election of 1974. The losses ran well beyond the usual swing districts and suburban pockets, reaching deep-red strongholds, suburban corridors and rural heartlands alike. Election-night events on 3 November included one for Gina Hinojosa, the Democratic gubernatorial candidate in Texas, in Austin, and one for Ashley Hinson, the Republican Senate candidate in Iowa, in Cedar Rapids. “Anyone who says that they were not surprised is lying,” said Patrick Gaspard, a former official in Barack Obama’s White House. “This busted all of the models across all demographics and geography.”
Texas supplied the emblem. James Talarico won a US Senate seat there — the Democrats’ first in the state since 1988, the year before Talarico was born — leaving Senator Ted Cruz as the last statewide Republican still standing. The victory, the analysis said, symbolised a nationwide “blue-nami” that swept away Trump’s Maga coalition. Round Rock, Talarico’s birthplace and once a reliably Republican suburb north of Austin, sat at what the analysis described as the epicenter of the week’s electoral tremors.
An Associated Press voter poll found Republicans lost most of the gains Trump made with Latino voters in 2024. Only about one in 10 Black men voted Republican in their local House races, down from roughly one in four who backed Trump two years earlier, and voters under 30 — roughly evenly divided between Trump and Kamala Harris in 2024 — backed Democratic House candidates by about seven-to-three. Gaspard noted that the collapse extended to Trump’s prized demographic strongholds: men split 50/50 between the parties, a result he called “a death knell for the manosphere, the bro platforms that they saw as their firewalls.”
The short answer for the collapse, the analysis concluded, is that rising costs, corruption and the conflict with Iran left Trump supporters feeling betrayed. Frank Luntz, the veteran pollster and strategist, hosted a focus group on the eve of the election with people who voted for Trump in 2024 but would vote Democratic in 2026. Affordability, he said, was “hurting Trump voters more than others because they are more likely to be paycheck-to-paycheck voters.” Such voters, he said, “are more likely to have no money at the end of the week, and very little money at the end of the month, and so they were susceptible to food and fuel prices more than the average voter.”
Luntz said those voters had been promised in 2024 that prices would come down, that there would be no “forever wars” and that the swamp would be drained. “They looked in 2026 and they felt not nearly enough had been accomplished on this and so they wanted to punish Republicans,” he said. “This is not about rewarding Democrats. This was about holding Republicans accountable for these voters believing what they were promised.”
Gaspard, a distinguished senior fellow at the Center for American Progress in Washington, agreed that the Maga coalition fractured because Trump violated every pledge made to working-class voters — from sweeping tariffs on foreign goods and an unpopular military conflict in Iran to cryptocurrency self-enrichment schemes and federal immigration overreach that he said terrorized local communities. “Donald Trump can’t act as if he wasn’t present at the scene of the crime,” Gaspard said. “He personally picked the candidates in Texas and South Carolina. His fingerprints are all around it, and he can’t proclaim his innocence.” The result, he believes, has broken the psychological hold Trump exerted over his party: “We’re seeing it already. When your approval hits the low 30s, politicians think about survival,” he said, describing what happened as creating “a permission structure finally for Republicans to develop a spine to move away from him on their political choices, their policy choices and how they navigate their cultural choices as well.”
The analysis argued that instead of focusing on the economic pressures hurting many of his own supporters, like farmers struggling to pay for diesel and fertilizer, Trump diverted his public commentary toward vanity projects, legal grievances and high-profile spats. His late-campaign schedule included an event in San Antonio on 7 October and a Lubbock rally on 27 October, where he passed out Maga caps. On the trail, the president heaped praise on Ohio senator Jon Husted’s “ass” — his party received, in Cruz’s words, an “ass-kicking” — and Florida governor Ron DeSantis called the outcome “close to an extinction-level event for Republicans in many parts of the country.” Luntz said the president “lost the plot”: “He was talking about topics that they didn’t fully understand and didn’t care about. He wasn’t talking about the things that mattered most to them and in the end they took it out on the Republican party.”
The morning after the vote, Trump appeared at the construction site of a new White House ballroom and signed a structural beam rather than addressing the defeat; an official White House social media post declared “Trump is still your president” over an image of the 80-year-old. He has previously weathered controversies, impeachments, assassination attempts, criminal charges and electoral defeats, is not yet halfway through his second term, and has more than 800 days remaining in office. This week’s national reckoning, the analysis suggested, showed that a president who pulled off a comeback for the ages in 2024 had squandered his last shreds of political capital.
The race to succeed him opened at once. Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker, wrote on social media that the scale of the defeat “makes the race for the GOP presidential nomination wide open.” Vance posted an essay-length message on X identifying the war in Iran as the catalyst — “The reason we lost is the war” — in what many read as an attempt to align himself with right-wing podcasters and put daylight between himself and the president.
Tara Setmayer, a former Republican communications director on Capitol Hill, said the position “is going to be very challenging for JD Vance, because he’s hitched his wagon to Donald Trump so closely as his vice-president. But he’s going to try: he’s a professional political chameleon. I don’t think he has the chops to do it. He’s not very good at this.” Other potential contenders include DeSantis, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, former UN ambassador Nikki Haley, Utah Governor Spencer Cox and former Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin; winning the nomination, the analysis noted, may depend on harnessing Maga populism while also presenting a new vision. “Trump is a toxic brand, underwater with every demographic, including his own base,” Setmayer said. “It’s fair to say it’s the end of Maga as we know it under Donald Trump. Be prepared for it to morph into something else with the same basic foundation.”
Charlie Sykes, the conservative author and broadcaster, argued the movement was wounded, not dead. “As long as Donald Trump is in the White House, it’s still a danger,” he said. “But it’s been badly wounded and, like a cornered ferret, it can still be quite dangerous.” He called the result “a collapse of generational significance across the map” that delivered “a massive shock to a Republican party that has been enthralled to Donald Trump for 10 years.” Sykes, author of How the Right Lost Its Mind, added: “It takes a massive defeat like this for a political party to come to its senses. That’s what history tells us. It’s not because of op-ed pieces or commentators, or critical podcasts. It’s losing on this kind of epic level.”
The repudiation was not confined to the United States. The populist right had recently lost contests in Brazil, Serbia and Hungary — where Trump’s close Maga ally Viktor Orbán was defeated — but it had hardly lost the war: its leaders remained in power from Argentina to India, and its movements challenged the established political order in France, Germany and Britain. Bill Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, cautioned against declaring the American movement finished. “I would hesitate to say that it’s the end of Maga, any more than the defeat of Viktor Orbán means the permanent defeat of illiberal democracy, any more than Donald Tusk’s comeback in Poland means that the forces arrayed against him have gone away,” he said. “Maga has deep social roots in the American population. It expresses something that’s real and isn’t going away.”
The open question, Galston argued, was whether Maga remains as dominant inside the Republican Party as it has been for more than a decade — and there, he said, “I think the answer to that question is no.” He said the defeat created a vacuum and an opening for a reform candidate to challenge Maga orthodoxy before 2028 — the route, he noted, by which Trump himself took the party from the Reaganites. “These questions are never settled in the abstract,” Galston said, adding that they are settled when a candidate steps forward with a different agenda and convinces enough people to follow it. “I don’t think we’re going back to the status quo ante, but is somebody going to stand up with a coherent counter-agenda?” he said. “I don’t know who that would be but there’s a market opportunity.”
Democrats emerged from the sweep with a new generation of prominent figures: Talarico, Jon Ossoff in Georgia, and Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, a progressive who became the first Muslim elected to the Senate. The analysis suggested El-Sayed’s victory could encourage Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to run for president in 2028. Galston said wins across deep-red states had rendered the party’s traditional arguments over “electability” moot. “There was something for everyone,” he said. “Different kinds of Democrats can win in different kinds of places.” The next task, the analysis noted, is converting an anti-Trump coalition into a governing program of its own.
Back in Round Rock, voters described the shift in their own words. Tarik Bakir, a 41-year-old financial adviser who served with the US military in Afghanistan, voted for Barack Obama in 2008 and Trump in 2024 — and for Democrats this month. “I’m not happy with the Iran war,” he said. “The economy’s OK, but not great. This election was a rebuttal to Trump. This time people said they didn’t like him, or his policies.” Billy Joe Wilson, 47, who runs bars and restaurants in the area, said: “The guy’s given us six years now of who he is and we keep believing him, and yet everything he says is going the opposite way: gas is up, diesel is up, cost of goods is up. Our economy’s hurting.” Wilson said Texas had been a big supporter of the Republican party and Trump, adding: “My generation got tired of realising that we’re getting screwed in the deal. We want to make sure that our kids or grandkids are set up to be successful, not living under a rule where the rich eat the poor.”