I regret to inform you that we are now one week into the 2028 presidential election cycle.
This is the stage where various factions try to shape the conventional wisdom to support their particular agenda. For Democrats, that’s a difficult process, because they so wildly overperformed in the midterms that every faction has a favorable story to tell. For Republicans, it’s tougher and uglier.
Enter Vice President JD Vance. In a lengthy social media post the day after the election, Vance offered an explanation for the carnage that was gobsmacking in its intellectual dishonesty, brazenness and rhetorical restraint. The tone was corporate PowerPoint presentation, the content was balderdash, but the intent was deeply cynical.
Claiming to have consulted dispassionate experts, Vance insisted that, “the main problem is that many people who voted for Trump/Vance in 2024 voted for Democrats in 2026.”
Let’s pause here to note that there were very, very few “Trump/Vance” voters in 2024. There were millions of Trump voters. Vance just tagged along.
But that’s nitpicking. More importantly, Vance is gussying up convenient hogwash as data-driven conclusions. Of course, some Trump 2024 voters defected to the Democrats. But that was a relatively small number. Roughly 7% nationally, about the same number that stayed home.
In short, the “Blue Tsunami” was powered by massive Democratic and independent turnout combined with the disintegration of Trump’s 2024 coalition. Tellingly, the word “independent” doesn’t appear in Vance’s autopsy, perhaps because they don’t vote in GOP primaries.
Moreover, few would dispute that the Democrats’ best issue was Donald Trump. When a profoundly unpopular president asks voters to pretend he’s on the ballot, it amounts to an in-kind donation to Democrats. Trump’s closing argument about men’s butts, the reflecting pool, his ball room and the affordability “hoax” was icing on the cake.
Vance’s most absurd claim is that his expert pollster found that voters who “abandoned us” would all come back if Republicans did four things: “1. End the war 2. Focus on cost of living/inflation 3. Put America First 4. Change our relationship to Israel.”
I call B.S.
Obviously, voters want an end to the wildly unpopular Iran war and to see their economic circumstances improve. Duh. They probably also want to “put America first,” whatever that means. No doubt some want to change our relationship with Israel.
But the whole thing is a farrago of lies, mostly of omission. For example, Vance doesn’t mention corruption, even though according to Fox News’ exit poll, 90% of voters considered “government corruption” to be a “major” or “crucial” factor. Weird that Trump’s handpicked “Fraud Czar” left that out. Vance was also utterly silent on the wildly unpopular tariffs he supports that landed so hard on Trump 2024 voters and started Trump’s slide in favorability.
If you look at Vance’s four issues in the broader political context, they boil down to basically two, the economy and Israel. His well-publicized opposition to the Iran war is grounded in his desire to pander to the people who largely define America First foreign policy as cutting Israel loose. Yes, they claim to have a broader philosophical opposition to foreign military adventures. But that didn’t stop them from cheerleading Trump’s unconstitutional and illegal “take the oil” adventure in Venezuela that inspired him to replicate it in Iran.
Vance flatly says, “The reason we lost is the war. The president himself said so last night.” Not really. Trump actually said, "I don’t think it’s the war, I think it’s the gasoline prices."
Vance wants to imply it was the decision to go to war, not the high gas prices the war resulted in, that cost the GOP election. He wants to leave that impression because he thinks it’s more important to win over anti-Israel voters who think the war was launched for Israel in the first place (it wasn’t). This is particularly odd, given that 61% of the Republican voters who did show up said America’s current relationship with Israel is “about right” and another 16% said it’s “not strong enough.”
In other words, Vance cares more about the mythical 7% of anti-Israel GOP voters who cost the GOP the midterms than he does the 77% actual pro-Israel voters who showed up.
Note: I don’t think many Republicans voted on Israel one way or the other. But Vance thinks he can use animosity to Israel to win the nomination by solidifying the nationalist faction in a crowded GOP field, then force the rest of the party to hold their nose and back him as the nominee. And to do that, he first needs to get suckers to buy his theory of why the GOP lost.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast.
