Vice President J.D. Vance is issuing a midterm warning to Republicans to better motivate the voters who helped bring President Trump back to the White House.
J.D. Vance says he’s ready to take office, but Trump is ‘in good health’
Vice President J.D. Vance said in an exclusive interview that although he is ready to take office, President Donald Trump is in “excellent health.”
WASHINGTON – J.D. Vance is very excited about next November’s midterm elections.
The vice president is seen as the front-runner for the next Republican nomination for the White House, but faces the immediate challenge of becoming one of the party’s main messengers as Republicans seek to maintain their six-seat majority in the House.
For the Republican Party to succeed, Vance has warned at-risk lawmakers that they need to energize working-class voters who helped retake President Donald Trump’s White House and who don’t typically come to vote for anything other than the president. This challenge is reflected in Republicans’ poor results in recent gubernatorial races in Virginia and New Jersey, where Democrats won by larger margins than they won in those states in the 2020 presidential election.
“I think one of the lessons we learned in Virginia and New Jersey is that when Donald Trump isn’t on the ballot, you have to give people something to actually believe in and something to be inspired by to actually go out and vote,” Vance said at a recent Breitbart News event. “Just because you have an ‘R’ next to your name doesn’t mean you’re going to vote.”
A national Republican victory would be a useful springboard for Mr. Vance’s expected White House campaign, and he has said he would talk to Mr. Trump after the midterm elections.
“I think he’s right to be worried about next year,” said Matt Bennett, a former senior adviser to former Vice President Al Gore and executive vice president of the center-left think tank Third Way. “What we don’t know after next year, into 2028, is whether the Trump administration can survive without him. And there’s evidence that it won’t.”
If President Trump’s coalition collapses next fall, it will pose a major challenge for the 41-year-old Vance, who is preparing for the expected 2028 presidential election. He is a new politician who has had less time to build up a track record than his recent predecessors. He will rely heavily on Trump’s legislative success and involvement in his campaign for high office.
The former Ohio senator served for two years before being elected vice president. He has molded himself as someone with the ability to unite conservative Republicans and MAGAs and unite voters without alienating any constituency. It will test his current and future ability to lead the administration’s mid-term message on domestic policy and serve as the Republican National Committee’s finance chairman.
Trump cannot do it alone, Republican strategists say. He says Republicans will have to campaign in areas where they need a large number of voters to vote.
TW Arrighi, a former spokesperson for the National Republican Senatorial Committee and several members of Congress, told USA TODAY that in his comments to Breitbart, “I think JD hit the mark in a way.” “But I also think Donald Trump needs to be more involved. Even if he enters a lame duck era, he will have a big role to play.”
Vance has been warning Republicans about complacency since last summer. In an interview with Lara Trump on Fox News in early September, he said the president’s pollsters told him that anger often wins in midterm elections.
This will be a problem for Republicans next year, he noted, because “our people are not angry.” The left is “very angry right now, and they’re very motivated,” he reflected.
This motivation gap was also seen in Virginia, New Jersey, and California, where ballot measures backed by Gov. Gavin Newsom were passed. Democratic socialist Zoran Mamdani won with a high turnout in New York City, where left-wing energy was evident.
Republicans have branded Mamdani a “communist” over his pledge to provide free services to New Yorkers and are promoting him as the face of the Democratic Party in hopes of energizing their base.
President Trump undermined that approach by hugging Mamdani in the Oval Office during a joint press conference with the rising progressive star. President Trump said, “If things go well, I think we’ll have a really great mayor.”
Vance faces an uphill climb
Since his election defeat in early November, the White House has waged a messaging war aimed at convincing a skeptical public that President Trump is committed to lowering prices, including cutting some tariffs. He is considering expanding the Affordable Care Act subsidies that were at the center of the government shutdown that ended earlier this month.
“We understand that and we’re listening to you, and we know there’s a lot of work to do,” Vance said at a Breitbart event. “Even though we’ve made a lot of progress, it’s going to take some time for Americans to realize it.”
The push has done little to improve voters’ feelings about President Trump or the economy. President Trump’s approval rating of 41% in a November Fox News poll was the lowest of his second term and lower than former President Joe Biden’s 44% approval rating during the same period of his term.
More than three-quarters of voters view the economy negatively, according to a Fox News poll. Among Republicans, 42% say President Trump is to blame for the current state of the economy, compared to 53% who say Biden, the administration’s regular boogeyman, is to blame.
None of that bodes well for Republicans. When Trump last took office in 2018, Democrats gained a net gain of 40 House seats, giving them control of the House. Republicans won a net gain of nine seats in 2022 under President Biden. Democrats performed better than expected that year, and Biden’s party narrowly maintained a majority in the Senate.
Bennett said Biden’s subsequent decision to run for re-election turned out to be a “fatal mistake” and the result was a “false positive” for Democrats.
“The results of the midterm elections are related to the next president, so it could be easily interpreted in a wide way,” he said. “But losing badly is not good for Vance.”
Jahan Wilcox, a longtime Republican strategist in the first Trump administration, said the same could be said of Virginia and New Jersey.
“I think if Republicans run against Trump, he has the ability to get people to the finish line,” Wilcox said. “And in 2018, which is often forgotten, he expanded his majority in the Senate.”
That year, Republicans gained two seats in the Senate. Republican strategists say there’s a good chance the party will repeat that performance in 2026.
But their House majority is in serious jeopardy. The Democratic Party needs to win three more seats to take control. A majority in the House would be able to block most of Trump’s policies.
“The investigation will be non-stop and administration officials will be at risk of being charged with contempt of Congress if they do not testify,” said William Galston, a senior fellow at Brookings University who worked on Mr. Gore’s presidential campaign. “So he has every reason to jump off his feet.”
Arrighi, a Republican strategist, said Democrats “could be shooting themselves in the foot” with an investigative approach and could end up becoming a foil for Vance. “Donald Trump may be willing to negotiate on a number of very big issues to preserve his legacy,” he said.
But he added: “We don’t want to go down that path if we can avoid it.”
Internal strife divides President Trump’s support base
Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, one of the president’s most powerful allies, felt threatened and abruptly resigned from Congress on Nov. 21 after feuding with President Trump over his opposition to releasing government files on the late disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein. She criticized his policy of granting visas to foreign workers with certain skill sets and the amount of energy he devotes to international issues.
MAGA influencers seen as potential challengers to Vance are linking her resignation to the possibility of major Republican losses in the midterm elections. He said he was wasting his parliamentary majority and said, “If we are likely to lose in the midterm elections, there will be an all-out and complete political war and stalemate.”
“What is the compelling message for 2026 and perhaps 2028?” she asked in a Nov. 24 social media post. “Americans are going to be asking candidates, ‘What tangible thing have you done for me? How has it improved my life, or will it make my life better?'” And they’re actually trying to get them to vote after both parties have rejected it. ”
Green was not alone in his frustration. Controversy within the conservative movement over Tucker Carlson’s interview with Nick Fuentes, a far-right white supremacist with a history of racist and anti-Semitic comments, and the Trump administration’s proposals to end the Russia-Ukraine war, which have been criticized as too favorable to Russia, have also divided supporters.
Neither Trump nor Vance disavowed Fuentes. In a recent post on X, Mr. Vance attacked the “Gulf Republicans” and “political class” in Washington, saying they should be more diligent about American crime, health care and housing costs than about the war in Eastern Europe.
At the Breitbart event, Vance said Republicans should debate on podcasts and op-ed pages, but urged them to “focus on the enemy” rather than internal divisions.
In subsequent remarks, he argued that the working-class voters who joined the coalition didn’t care about the Republican Party’s orthodoxy from 25 years ago and were pushing the party in a different direction.
“We need to lean into this new coalition, and we need to do a better job for it, so we can get it to deliver in the midterm elections so we can win,” Vance said.
