Vance, Cruz and DeSantis diagnose GOP's midterm disaster as battle over party's future begins
The 2028 Republican White House race may be getting its first battle lines, as Vice President JD Vance, Sen. Ted Cruz and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis quickly offered competing assessments...
By Fox News · Fox News
The 2028 Republican White House race may be getting its first battle lines, as Vice President JD Vance , Sen. Ted Cruz and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis quickly offered competing assessments of the GOP's devastating midterm election losses, potentially previewing their visions for the party's future. The three high-profile Republicans , all viewed as potential contenders for the party's presidential nomination, used their postmortems to weigh what went wrong and what Republicans must do differently — a debate that could help define the GOP's direction heading into 2028 . "I think everybody's trying to figure out where to position themselves in the aftermath. Where were you on the day after," longtime Republican strategist and presidential campaign veteran David Kochel told Fox News Digital. "I think these are all moves designed to look towards 2028." Oil drilling CEO and prominent Republican donor and bundler Dan Eberhart told Fox News Digital that "the early moves have started" in the 2028 Republican presidential nomination race. "These guys are going to go a couple of rounds before Christmas." HEAD HERE FOR FOX NEWS LIVE UPDATES ON THE MIDTERM ELECTIONS Vance kicked off the debate Wednesday morning with a roughly 600-word postmortem on X, blaming President Donald Trump 's war with Iran for Republicans' worst ballot-box drubbing in decades as they lost control of Congress, along with a slew of governorships and state legislatures. Fueled by anger over high costs and the war with Iran, voters delivered a repudiation of Trump and his agenda, boosting Democrats to large majorities in the House and Senate. "The reason we lost is the war," Vance wrote as he appeared to put daylight between himself and his boss on foreign policy and America's relationship with Israel. "Any honest conversation about where we go from here must start there." Vance, in what some pundits viewed as an early pitch to eventually claim the…