WASHINGTON – JD Vance has a lot riding on next November's midterm elections.

The vice president is seen as the front-runner to be the next Republican nominee for the White House, yet he faces the more immediate challenge of being one of his party's leading messengers as the GOP tries to hold its majorities in Congress.

Vance is warning endangered lawmakers that, to be successful, Republicans need to motivate the working-class voters who helped President Donald Trump take back the White House and don't typically show up in non-presidential elections. That challenge was reflected in Republicans' poor showing in the recent Virginia and New Jersey gubernatorial races, which Democrats won by wider margins than their 2020 presidential victories in those same states.

"I think that's one of the lessons that we learned in Virginia and New Jersey ‒ is that when Donald Trump is not on the ballot, you've got to give people something to actually believe in, something to be inspired by, to get out there and vote,” Vance said during a recent event with Breitbart News. “They're not going to vote just because you have an R next to your name.”

Republican victories nationwide would be a useful springboard for Vance's expected White House campaign, which he has said he will discuss with Trump after the midterm elections.

“I think he's right to be worried about next year,” said Matt Bennett, a former senior adviser to former Vice President Al Gore and an executive vice president at the center-left think tank Third Way. “What we don't know beyond next year, when we get to 2028, is whether that Trump coalition holds together without Trump. And there's evidence that it will not.”

A collapse of Trump’s coalition next fall would present a major challenge for Vance, 41, just as he begins to gear up for his anticipated 2028 presidential bid. He's a newer politician who’s had less time than his recent predecessors to develop a record to run on. He’ll be heavily reliant on Trump’s legislative successes and his involvement in them in a campaign for higher office.

The former Ohio senator was in office for two years before being elected vice president. He has fashioned himself as someone with the ability to bind old-guard Republicans, MAGA and swing voters together without alienating any one constituency. His ability to do so now and in the future will be tested, as he leads the administration’s midterm messaging push on domestic policy and acts as the finance chair for the Republican National Committee.

He can’t do it alone: Trump has to campaign in areas where Republicans need a heavy turnout from his supporters, GOP strategists say.

“I think JD sort of hit the nail on the head there," in his comments to Breitbart, T.W. Arrighi, a former press secretary for the National Republican Senatorial Committee and several House lawmakers, told USA TODAY. "But I also think Donald Trump is going to have to be more involved. He's going to have a big role to play, even though he's going into his sort of lame duck years.”

Vance has been cautioning Republicans about complacency since last summer. He said in an early September interview on Fox News with Lara Trump that a pollster for the president told him that anger often wins midterm elections.

That presents a problem for Republicans next year, he indicated, because “our people aren’t angry.” The left is “very angry right now, and they’re very motivated,” he reflected.

That motivation gap could be seen in Virginia, New Jersey and California, where a ballot measure backed by Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom passed. In New York City, energy on the left was visible in the high-turnout victory of democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani.

Republicans have branded Mamdani a “communist” over his pledges to provide free services to New Yorkers and held him up as the national face of the Democratic Party in hopes of energizing their base.

Trump undercut that approach when he embraced Mamdani in the Oval Office during a joint press conference with the rising progressive star. "I think you’re going to have, hopefully, a really great mayor," Trump said.

Vance faces an uphill climb

Since the early November election losses, the White House has waged a messaging war aimed at convincing a skeptical public that Trump is doing everything in his power to bring down prices, even rolling back some of his tariffs. He’s been weighing an expansion of enhanced Affordable Care Act subsidies that were at the center of the government shutdown that ended earlier this month.

“We get it and we hear you, and we know that there’s a lot of work to do,” Vance said at the Breitbart event. “As much progress as we’ve made, it’s going to take a little time for Americans to feel that.”

The push has done little to improve voter sentiment about Trump or the economy. Trump's 41% approval rating in a November Fox News survey is the lowest of his second term and below former President Joe Biden’s at this same point in his term, when it was 44%.

More than three-quarters of voters view the economy negatively, according to the Fox News poll. Even among Republicans, 42% said Trump was responsible for the current economic conditions, compared with the 53% who blamed Biden, the administration’s frequent boogeyman.

None of that bodes well for Republicans. Democrats had a net gain of 40 House seats in 2018, when Trump was last in office, and they took control of the lower chamber. Republicans won it back in 2022, during Biden’s presidency, with a net gain of nine seats. Democrats performed better than expected that year and Biden’s party narrowly retained control of the Senate.

Biden’s subsequent decision to run for reelection turned out to be a “catastrophic error,” Bennett said, calling the results a “false positive” for the Democrats.

“You can easily overinterpret the results of midterms, as they relate to the next presidential,” he said. “However, it's not good for Vance if they lose big.”

The same could be said of Virginia and New Jersey, said Jahan Wilcox, a longtime Republican strategist who worked in the first Trump administration.

“I think if Republicans run with Trump, he has the ability to help get people across the finish line,” Wilcox said. “And often forgotten is that in 2018 he expanded his majority in the Senate.”

Republicans gained two seats in the Senate that year. GOP strategists say that in 2026, the party has a good chance of repeating that performance.

But their House majority is in serious jeopardy. Democrats need to win an additional three seats to win control. With the majority in the House, they’d be able to stymie most of Trump’s agenda.

“There will be nonstop investigations and administration officials will have to testify or risk being charged with contempt of Congress,” said William Galston, a senior fellow at Brookings who worked for Gore's presidential campaign. “So he has all sorts of reasons for jumping in feet first.”

Arrighi, the GOP strategist, said Democrats “could shoot themselves in the foot” with an investigation-heavy approach and end up being a foil for Vance. “There's also a chance that Donald Trump would be open to negotiating on a number of really big issues to sort of sew up his legacy,” he said.

But he added, “We don't want to go down that road if we can avoid it.”

Internal fighting divides Trump's base

Sensing danger, one of the president’s most prominent allies, Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, abruptly quit Congress on Nov. 21 after fighting with Trump over his opposition to releasing the government’s files on the late disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein. She was critical of his policy of issuing visas to foreign workers with certain skill sets and the amount of energy he was putting toward international affairs.

The MAGA influencer, who's viewed as a possible challenger to Vance, tied her departure to a potential blowout for Republicans in the midterms. She said they wasted their legislative majority, and when they "likely lose the midterms, it will become total and complete political war and gridlock."

“What is the convincing message for 2026 and likely 2028?" she asked in a Nov. 24 social media post. "It will be the American people asking candidates, 'what tangible thing have you done for me and how did it or will it make my life better?' And then actually trying to get them to vote after both parties have failed them."

Greene was not alone in her complaints. A dispute within the conservative movement over Tucker Carlson’s interview of Nick Fuentes, a far-right white nationalist with a history of making racist and antisemitic remarks, and a Trump administration proposal to end the Russia-Ukraine war that has been criticized as too favorable to Moscow, have also divided the base.

Neither Trump nor Vance has disavowed Fuentes. In a recent post on X, Vance assailed the “beltway GOP,” and “the political class” in Washington, who he said should be more fired up about crime in America or the cost of healthcare and housing than a war in eastern Europe.

At the Breitbart event, Vance said Republicans should have their debates in podcasts and op-ed pages, but he urged them to “focus on the enemy” rather than internal divisions.

He argued later in his remarks that working-class voters who have joined the coalition don't care what Republican orthodoxy was 25 years ago, and they are pushing the GOP in a different direction.

“We need to lean into this new coalition,” Vance said, “do a better job serving them, and that's how we get them to show in these midterm elections, so that we can win.”

(This story has been updated with more information.)

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: What 2026 means for 2028: Why JD Vance cares a lot about the midterms

Reporting by Francesca Chambers, USA TODAY / USA TODAY

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