Presidential hopeful Vance appears to question Iran war after polls debacle

US Vice President JD Vance has blamed the war on Iran for his party’s withering midterms defeat, suggesting that the conflict may not have been worth ceding control of the United States Congress to Democrats.

“The reason we lost is the war. The president himself said so last night,” Vance wrote in a lengthy post on X. “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.”

“Everyone knows why we lost. And any honest conversation about where we go from here must start there.”

Mark Pfeifle, who served as deputy national security adviser under President George W Bush, told Al Jazeera that Vance was owning up to a political failure of the administration’s own making.

“If you mess up, fess up!” he said, saying Vance was speaking up to convey that “my name was on the ballot two years ago. I have to take responsibility for this”, in a sign of political maturity and readiness to tackle Republicans’ biggest political liabilities.

Vance, a likely 2028 presidential candidate and heir apparent to US President Donald Trump’s Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement, has been a key negotiator as the US and Iran search for a way out of the eight-month conflict, which has dented their economies and pushed global fuel prices up.

His statements on Tehran have been more dovish than those of other key members of the administration, and his post-election note appears to mark the closest he has yet come to publicly diverging from Trump on an issue that looks set to dog Republicans as the war continues.

“Vance is definitely trying to distance himself from Trump, as many other respectable Republicans will do over the next several weeks and months,” said Nick Rahall, a former Democratic member of Congress. “The people have spoken.”

“It had even leaked before that JD was the only one in Trump’s inner circle who had questions and was hesitant about Iran [war] from the beginning,” Rahall added.

Citing a pollster he describes as “one of the smartest people I know”, Vance said he was told ending the Iran war and “changing our relationship with Israel” were two of the top four answers given by Americans surveyed who had voted for Trump in 2024 but were planning to vote for Democrats in the 2026 midterms.

In stark contrast, Trump said, in the wake of the rebuke at the ballot box , that he had no regrets about launching the conflict.

“I did the right thing. I would have done it again ,” he told the Wall Street Journal.