US Vice President JD Vance has said the war with Iran is the reason the Republican Party lost the midterm elections, breaking publicly with President Donald Trump, who said hours earlier that he had no regrets about launching the conflict.

Vance set out his position in a long post on the social media platform X, Hiru News reported, citing the BBC.

“The reason we lost is the war. The president himself said so last night,” Vance wrote, according to Al Jazeera. “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.”

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

Vance cited a pollster he described as “one of the smartest people I know”. According to that polling, among Americans who voted for Trump in 2024 but backed Democrats this week, ending the Iran war and “changing our relationship with Israel” were two of the four most common reasons given for the switch.

Trump: “I would have done it again”

The President’s account of the defeat is different. Al Jazeera reports that Trump said he had no regrets about the war: “I did the right thing. I would have done it again.”

He did concede an electoral cost, but located it at the petrol pump rather than in the war itself: “People agree with what I’m doing on Iran, but they really probably weren’t willing to do the short-term consequence of paying more for gasoline.”

Trump otherwise declined to accept the result as a verdict on the conflict, calling it “just a point in time. There was a mood in the air, I guess,” and attributing the losses to his own absence from the ballot and to weak candidates. He made the remarks in a televised telephone interview with Fox News late on Tuesday, in interviews with the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, and in a post on Truth Social.

The two statements are not quite a contradiction, but they are a visible gap. Trump accepts that higher fuel costs hurt his party and denies the war was the decisive factor; Vance says the war was the whole of it, and says the President had already conceded as much the previous night.

Al Jazeera describes Vance as a likely 2028 presidential candidate and the heir apparent to Trump’s Make America Great Again movement, which gives the break added weight. Neither filing records any formal White House or Republican Party response.

Vance was also, during the campaign, among those who attacked Michigan Democrat Abdul El-Sayed over his faith — and El-Sayed, who won his Senate race on Tuesday, noted in his victory speech that Vance will be constitutionally obliged to swear him in.

How it is being read from Colombo

The result is being read in Sri Lanka as a warning about the politics of economic pain. In an editorial published on Thursday, the Daily FT wrote that “the economic woes faced by the US public caused largely by the Iran war led to heavy losses for Trump’s party”.

The paper argued that Democratic control of Congress may not change US policy drastically, but that if it leads to more negotiation to settle the conflict with Iran, it “would be a great sigh of relief for the world” — noting that Sri Lanka is among the countries that have borne the brunt of the Trump administration’s tariff and foreign policy decisions.

That is the Daily FT’s editorial position rather than reporting of Vance’s statement, and is recorded here as such. Opposition Leader Sajith Premadasa made a related argument in Parliament on Wednesday, which this desk reported separately.

Democrats won control of both chambers of Congress in Tuesday’s vote.

Sources