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 of the GOP's devastating 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 .

"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."

Vance kicked off the debate Wednesday morning with a roughly 600-word postmortem on X, blaming President '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," 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 MAGA and America First mantle, argued that defections from the party's successful 2024 coalition of voters, rather than a lack of GOP turnout, fueled the Republican collapse in the midterms.

Kochel called Vance's assessment "the most striking because it appears to say 'hey, we made a mistake with the war in Iran,' and that's about as far as I've seen a vice president go, not as a criticism of Trump but as a criticism in the policy."

Asked about Vance's post, Trump told reporters, "I know how he feels about it. I think it was fine. I thought it was good."

The president acknowledged that the war and the high gas and diesel prices it spurred hurt his party at the ballot box but insisted it was worth the cost.

"If I had to do it again, I'd have to do it again," he said. "As far as that war is concerned, I would have done nothing different."

, the president's eldest son and a prominent figure in the MAGA movement, quickly gave Vance's postmortem a thumbs-up, writing on X, "Every word of this is 💯 💯 💯."

Hours after Vance posted his assessment, Cruz posted his own scathing take on the midterms.

The conservative firebrand senator from Texas, who was runner-up to Trump in the bruising 2016 Republican presidential primaries and has made no secret that he may run for the White House again, described the midterms as a "blue tsunami" and warned that his party had lost touch with voters, particularly in the Lone Star State.

"2026 was not simply a blue wave; it was a blue tsunami. It was an a-- kicking," . "It was not simply a bad 2006 midterm election. It was a Watergate-level repudiation."

"Nowhere are the con