In some respects, politics is just like sports. They’re both copycat businesses. When one team achieves success with a particular strategy, others will inevitably seek to emulate it. The same is true with political parties. Since many if not most of those who make their living in both professions only really care about winning, they tend to assume that what works for one will work for others.
But there is a problem with that assumption. In football an approach that produces touchdowns for one team could, in theory and with proper execution and enough talent on the field, do the same for its rivals. But that isn’t always the case for politics.
And that’s why Vice President JD Vance’s post-mortem on the Republican Party’s midterm disaster is problematic. Attacking Israel may work for Democrats. But if Vance thinks Republicans will profit from emulating that approach, not only will it not help the GOP recover its 2026 losses in future elections, it will definitely not help elect him president in 2028.
In an X post that landed the morning after the GOP rout, Vance was seeking to get out ahead of the intraparty circular firing squads that always follow any election disaster. He wanted to get on record an “I told you so” explanation for the defeat of Republican candidates that would remind the public that he was the most prominent critic of the conflict with Iran earlier this year.
In the post, he focused on the decision to go to war and the subsequent rise of gas prices while linking that to Israel. He ignored other factors that contributed to the electoral rout. In this way, Vance sought to set himself up as the only national Republican figure who couldn’t be blamed for the devastating losses suffered by his party.
That was important for him because the veep, and not Trump, had the most to lose in the midterms.
With Secretary of State Marco Rubio seemingly ruling himself out of the running to succeed Trump, Vance had already secured the status of frontrunner for the GOP 2028 presidential nomination. But having positioned himself as effectively seeking to serve a third term of the Trump administration, the repudiation of the administration hurts him a lot more than a president that never has to face the voters again.
It wasn’t just the war
Some of the post was devoted to attacking a straw-man argument about “amnesty.”
By that he was referring to critiques of the Trump administration’s efforts to enforce immigration laws and deport those who are in this country without permission. It’s true that the deportations created a lot of images that those who advocate for a return to the Biden administration’s open borders policies sought to depict as emblematic of a heartless policy.
But Trump’s success sealing the border and halting the invasion of millions of illegals—along with a flood of illicit drugs and human trafficking—that flowed across it while the Democrats were in power was one of his greatest achievements and was largely popular.
Nobody of significance in the 2026 Republican Party is seeking to revive the ruinous liberal immigration policies of the GOP led by George W. Bush or Mitt Romney which were backed by corporate interests that want to depress the wages of working-class Americans. The Trump era party is one that has little appeal for Wall Street and the credentialed elites and depends on those blue-collar voters.
But what Vance ignored is that Trump’s polling first began to head south not when he ordered a joint attack with Israeli forces in February 2026, but in March 2025 when he began instituting punitive tariffs. The rise in gas prices during the Iran war was politically damaging and exacerbated the administration’s political problems. But his extreme protectionist policies contributed more to higher prices of many other products and convinced the GOP base that they weren’t benefiting from Trump 2.0.
The perception that this White House was every bit as corrupt as that of Joe Biden’s, and perhaps far more so, also contributed to the administration’s problems. The fact that Trump’s family, including his son Donald Jr. and son-in-law Jared Kushner, were profiting from international deals that were aided by their connection to the president makes the outrageous grifting of Hunter Biden and other Biden family members look like small change.
On top of that, the president has clearly been spending too much time trolling his opponents by renaming bodies of water or the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C. Doing so delighted him and some of his followers, but the broad multi-ethnic coalition that allowed him to win the popular vote in 2024 has no interest in such shenanigans.
Iran war mistakes
The war on Iran wasn’t popular, but most Americans supported Trump’s foreign policy coups, such as his arrest of Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro and the demolition of Iran’s nuclear facility, which the Israeli destruction of Tehran’s air defenses facilitated in June 2025. The same can be said of an effort to prevent Iran from continuing to pursue its nuclear ambitions, the main purpose of the 2026 campaign.
But understandably, Americans don’t like long, inconclusive wars, and they can’t be expected to get behind a conflict when the president never bothers to make a full case for it, which Trump never did. Nor did he state clear goals for the campaign, such as ending its nuclear program, missile production and terrorism or regime change to end the Islamist repression that led to the murder of tens of thousands at the beginning of the year.
Trump bears responsibility for those mistakes. But part of the reason that clear goals weren’t articulated to the public was that this was a government divided against itself on the issue. Elements within his administration, led by Vance, were in favor of appeasement of a regime that has been at war with America since 1979 and has killed hundreds of Americans.
Rather than support a military effort that had great successes in wiping out Iran’s ability to wage war and threaten both its neighbors and the West, Vance pushed hard for a premature halt to the war. Instead of continuing until any of the possible goals were achieved, Trump listened to Vance’s counsel and agreed to a ceasefire. He then empowered Vance to reach some sort of agreement with Tehran.
Obama-style appeasement
The result of that was a memorandum of understanding that replicated the disastrously weak policies of both Presidents Barack Obama and Biden. The ceasefire quickly collapsed. The United States lost the initiative and a stalemate continues as Trump rightly refuses to agree to a new appeasement of the Islamist regime while also not resuming a conflict that has become even less popular because it is obviously not successful.
Vance not only deserves a good deal of the blame for this misguided policy, but he has also gone out of his way to blame Israel for everything that has gone wrong.
By regurgitating this position now, he not only hopes to distance himself from the war’s unpopularity. He’s also seeking to persuade Trump not to resume the war. Only a week ago, he proposed restarting “peace talks” with Iran, while again showing that he is as clueless about a fanatical Islamist regime, which is bent on war against the West and destroying Israel, as Obama and Biden were.
Trump promised no new wars during his presidential campaigns, but he has always been a foreign policy realist. His definition of “America First” was based on the idea that it was incumbent on Washington to confront and defeat threats to the West, not to ignore them. That’s why, even as he deplored failed “forever” wars, like those in Afghanistan and Iraq, he’s always been a hawk when it came to the existential threat from Iran. By contrast, Vance’s isolationism is just a warmed-over version of the Democrats’ embrace of weakness abroad.
Unfortunately, Vance’s Israel-bashing is also a matter of mimicking the Democrats.
The Tucker Carlson factor
Most Republicans, including some Jews, have been trying to downplay or ignore an egregious moral failing on the vice president’s part over the past year..
By that I don’t solely refer to Vance’s refusal to break ties with his close friend Tucker Carlson. The former Fox News host turned podcaster has become one of the country’s most prominent and dangerous antisemites and conspiracy-mongers. He’s obsessed not just with demonizing Israel but Jews. Yet while Vance claims to disagree with some of what he says, he clings to him as a friend, saying to do otherwise would be disloyal and a spineless concession to political correctness.
But Jew-hatred of the kind that Carlson promulgates on his popular podcast is not something about which moral people should feel obligated to agree to disagree. Yet that is Vance’s position as he demonstrated a year ago when he spoke at a Turning Point USA conference.
There, he publicly declared himself to be neutral in the debate about antisemitism between Ben Shapiro and Carlson and said that the conservative “big tent” must not exclude those who agree with the latter.
That was a moral disgrace. But that stand cannot be seen as unrelated to his willingness to pile on Israel or to claim that Republicans must agree to “change” America’s relationship with the Jewish state.
Why it works for Democrats
It didn’t hurt the Democrats in the midterms to have embraced candidates who welcome and platform antisemitism. Indeed, perhaps in certain races it may have actually helped them. Those who spew blood libels about Israel committing “genocide” in Gaza or who argue for chasing Jews, who support the Jewish state, out of the public square by demonizing the AIPAC lobby—as Dr. Abdul El-Sayed has done—were merely repeating the same lies normalized by liberal media outlets like The New York Times.
The mainstreaming of Jew-hatred that has come with the victory of El-Sayed and many other Democrats is not merely troubling but a historic low point in American public discourse. The notion that Republican mimicry of this indecent betrayal is part of a winning political strategy, however, misreads the views of the GOP base and the electorate.
The reason why antisemitism works for Democrats is that it fits in perfectly with the Left-wing ideas that they have embraced in recent years, like critical race theory, intersectionality and settler-colonialism. That makes sense for those who have been indoctrinated in the racialist idea of dividing humanity into two impermeable groups locked in perpetual conflict—people of color, who are always victims and in the right no matter what they do, and white oppressors who are always in the wrong. The reason why leftists demonize Israel and adopt antisemitism is that they falsely label Jews as white oppressors.
But it makes no sense for conservatives and Republicans, who rightly reject these toxic doctrines as part of a war on Western civilization. For Vance, who correctly opposes these ideologies and believes in the West, to nonetheless make an exception for Israel and the Jews is not just wrong. It’s illogical and bad politics.
That he does so seems, for lack of a better explanation, to reflect the continued influence of Carlson, a man to whom he owes a great deal due to the commentator’s role in helping get him elected to the Senate in 2022 and then being picked as Trump’s running mate in 2024. It also explains his willingness to use his election post-mortem to defend Fox News host Rachel Campos-Duffy for her Israel-bashing, rationalizing of an antisemitic ad for El-Sayed and advocacy for appeasement of Iran.
Republicans have an uphill path back to electoral success after this week’s midterm disaster. But they aren’t going to turn out their base or win elections in the future by sounding more like Democrats on foreign policy, Israel or antisemitism.
The 2026 Republican primaries contradict the Vance-Carlson thesis about the electorate. The “groyper” antisemitic vote which Vance is eager to embrace is, unlike the situation on the Left for the Democrats, insignificant. Most Republicans, including some who may challenge Vance in 2028, know this.
By taking this position, Vance is demonstrating that he is far more vulnerable in the GOP’s 2028 presidential race than he may think he is.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS. Follow him: @jonathans_tobin.
