Vice President JD Vance blamed Republicans’ sweeping midterm losses on the Iran War, which Israel and the U.S. jointly launched in February, in a statement Wednesday morning.
“The reason we lost is the war,” Vance wrote on X. “The president himself said so last night.”
Video above: White House official calls election night mood “defiant”
In a post of more than 600 words analyzing the midterm election results, the vice president played down the role of the economy in the overwhelming Democratic wins across the country.
“One of the pollsters I really respect told me that our economic messaging wasn’t sharp enough down the stretch. I’m sure that’s true,” Vance said. “But the real reason we lost is obvious to almost everyone.”
For his part, Trump said Wednesday that Vance’s take was “largely true, because it drove up the gasoline a little bit short-term.”
In his remarks the morning after Election Day, after spending several minutes discussing his White House ballroom project and signing a beam, Trump reiterated multiple times that the U.S. couldn’t let Iran have a nuclear weapon, or “everything that you see here someday might not exist.”
When asked if he believed the Iran war was worth losing the Senate, Trump said he did, saying he’d pursue the war again if he had to.
As recently as Monday, Trump had downplayed the situation, saying “this isn’t a war” with Iran. “There’s no war raging,” he said on Fox News.
The most recent U.S. military action against Iran, in the form of what appeared to be a limited strike on islands in the Strait of Hormuz and in the nearby mainland area of Bandar Abbas, came just hours before the midterm elections. Just days before then, the Pentagon had provided an updated estimate to Congress that the Iran war had cost taxpayers $47.1 billion so far.
“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,” Vance said in his Wednesday post. He attributed Democrats’ successes to 2024 Trump voters opting to vote for Democrats in 2026. Besides the Iran War, Vance listed “Focus on cost of living/inflation,” “Put America First,” and “Change our relationship to Israel” as other critical issues that drove people to, by and large, elect Democrats in key races, giving them a majority in the House and Senate.
Vance has been tied to the unpopular war in Iran in the public’s eye because of his role in negotiations and policy decisions, which Trump tasked him with. He was initially a critic of joining Israel’s war with Iran, having built his political brand in part on opposing wars like the current one. Vance was reportedly concerned about the conflict ballooning across the region and about America’s munitions being depleted. The New York Times called him “the figure inside the White House most opposed to a full-scale war” before he deferred to Trump’s decisions.
In June, Trump joked that he would blame Vice President Vance if a preliminary deal with Iran fell through.
“I like that idea, sure,” Trump said when Fox News’s Peter Doocy asked if the vice president would take the fall if the deal failed. “If it works out, I’m going to take the credit. If it doesn’t work out, I’m blaming JD. You better be careful, JD.”
The 60-day window established in that deal ended in August 2026 without a final formal peace treaty. The prospect of a return to full-scale fighting has left the Middle East uneasy in recent weeks as peace talks resume. Trump has alternated between embracing diplomacy and threatening to use the “mother of all bombs” on Iran in public comments in recent weeks.
The New York Times reported last week that Vance had sent a letter to a top Iranian political and military official to propose renewed “comprehensive peace negotiations,” citing a senior U.S. official and an Iranian official.
“To the people who are pissed off and want to say, ‘I told you so’: you’re right, you did tell us so. Take that energy into electing Republicans who share your worldview,” Vance wrote.