Potential Vance challengers smell blood in the water after brutal GOP losses

Ambitious Republicans were already sizing up JD Vance ahead of the 2028 presidential primary. Tuesday night’s GOP bludgeoning has only emboldened some of them.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis embarked on a media blitz in recent days as he prepares a potential run, according to three people briefed on his plans. Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp is weighing a bid, said a person with knowledge of his plans. And Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas is planning to work with longtime consultant Jeff Roe of Axiom Strategies if he enters the race, said two people with knowledge of his thinking.

The people, like others interviewed for this story, spoke on the condition of anonymity to detail private conversations.

With the future of President Donald Trump’s party in question and Vance forced to differentiate himself from an unpopular president, his potential rivals see even more reason to challenge the sitting vice president, a fight that will determine not just who becomes the next GOP standard-bearer, but what the party looks like after Trump.

“I think the caucuses and that presidential process started on Wednesday morning, if not Tuesday night,” said Bob Vander Plaats, a longtime conservative activist in Iowa and president of the evangelical group the Family Leader, who endorsed DeSantis in 2024. “Because if you believe you have a case to be made of why you’re the messenger of the future, this would be your time.”

Vance has not decided whether to run in 2028 but was quick to publicly distance himself last week from Trump’s unpopular war with Iran and approach to affordability — a key step to remaining a viable candidate, allies of the vice president say. Vance leads early Republican primary polling and remains the betting market favorite for the GOP nomination. He also brought in significant funds as the Republican National Committee’s finance chair.

Despite Tuesday’s poor outcome, his allies are still laying the groundwork for a run. Over the weekend, the Rockbridge Network, a political donor and advocacy group Vance co-founded, gathered in Texas for a long-planned midterm postmortem, according to four people with knowledge of the event. Vance did not attend, though his political future was among the topics discussed.

But the midterm drubbing has intensified interest among some prominent Republicans to have an earnest presidential primary, rather than a Vance coronation. Vance always expected to face a competitive presidential primary, people around him have long said. A person close to the vice president said Vance winning a hard-fought primary would be better for him than being anointed, anyway.

Donors have continued to urge Secretary of State Marco Rubio to jump into the race. But Rubio has said he intends to support Vance if he runs, and has privately signaled little interest in a 2028 bid in recent months.

Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s former director of national intelligence, wants to play a role in 2028 but not as a candidate if Vance runs, according to a person with knowledge of with her thinking. Gabbard, who ran for president as a Democrat in 2020, would like to work with Vance if he launches a bid, though the two have not discussed it, the person said.

Lesser-known Republicans eyeing long-shot runs, like Sens. Rick Scott of Florida and John Kennedy of Louisiana, have made their own treks to early presidential nominating states this year in support of Republican candidates. Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders and former Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin are also seen as contenders, as is former Vice President Mike Pence, who has been growing a policy organization to push the GOP back toward some of its past principles.

“Lanes” as Republicans have thought of them in recent years — MAGA candidates vs. anti-Trump conservatives — may be scrambled in the 2028 primary, according to a strategist working with a potential contender, making it difficult to predict what coalitions will emerge.

“When we lose the Texas governor’s race, when we lose the Mississippi Senate race, weird [stuff] is happening with the electorate right now,” the strategist added.

Cruz, who has traded barbs with Vance recently, has sought to position himself as a pro-Israel candidate wanting to strengthen the U.S. ties with the country. DeSantis, once seen as a more hawkish traditional Republican with a focus on culture-war issues, has recently sought to establish himself as an opponent of the Iran war and an advocate for strict limits on data centers and AI companies.

“Everything is being reassessed everywhere after Tuesday,” said Steve Deace, a national conservative radio host based in Iowa who earlier this year expressed support for a Vance 2028 campaign. Deace endorsed DeSantis ahead of the 2024 caucuses.

Deace said Trump needs “to hear the American people and change course the way Bill Clinton did after 1994,” when Republicans took control of both chambers in an election seen as a damning referendum on the Democratic president.

If Trump doesn’t, “this will spill over to 2028,” Deace said, “and it won’t matter who we nominate.”

Vander Plaats, the longtime Iowa evangelical leader, said that since Tuesday, he has heard increased interest in DeSantis. The Florida governor, whose campaign and aligned super PACs spent $160 million on his presidential bid, lost the caucuses to Trump 51% to 21% and dropped out just before the New Hampshire primary.

DeSantis has not built out infrastructure for a campaign or met with donors, according to a person close to the governor, but if he runs, he is expected to continue to use his pollster, Ryan Tyson. DeSantis’ unsuccessful 2024 run resulted in bitter infighting between his campaign aides and his outside super PAC. DeSantis wrote on social media Friday that he has “not reached out to anybody about running for anything.”

Kemp, whose interest in a run has not previously been reported, has kept a relatively low profile in recent years, passing on a 2026 Senate bid despite GOP leaders’ entreaties. He has repeatedly stood up to Trump, and defeated a Trump-backed primary challenge against him by more than 50 percentage points in 2022, cementing his reputation as a popular conservative governor who keeps Trump at a distance. Kemp is also considering running for Senate in 2028, said the person with knowledge of his thinking.

In the final week of the midterms, Kemp campaigned in South Carolina, an early presidential nominating state, on behalf of Republican Alan Wilson, who went on to win the state’s governor’s race — despite other unexpected GOP losses there.

Cruz, meanwhile, campaigned for and spent money on Republican candidates in South Carolina, Iowa, Michigan, North Carolina, Alaska, and Georgia, many of whom lost in the Democratic wave. He invested significant time seeking to boost Ken Paxton’s Senate run in Texas, though Republicans were delivered painful blows there up and down the ballot.

January to April 2027 is most likely when serious contenders will enter the primary race, said the strategist working with one of the potential candidates.

Sanders, the Arkansas governor, would bring on-the-ground experience in Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina to a presidential bid, having campaigned in those states for her father, Mike Huckabee, said Hogan Gidley, a longtime friend who has worked for both Sanders and her father.

He said Sanders, based on her father’s experiences, has also seen how quickly a chance to run for president can pass. “She would know the perils of letting an opportunity go by,” he said. “I don’t know if she wants it or not,” Gidley added.

Jordan Powell, Sanders’s gubernatorial campaign manager, said she “looks forward to serving the people of Arkansas for the next four years.”

Youngkin, the former Virginia governor who was seen as a rising GOP star after his 2021 victory, has long played coy about his ambitions for higher office. But those close to him during his time as governor said privately that he was thinking about the presidency from the beginning.

Though he appeared with Trump at two rallies in Virginia before the 2024 presidential election and sat with Trump during the GOP convention that year, Youngkin never took a role with the administration, preserving some of the distance he had maintained from Trump when running for office in blue-leaning Virginia.

Beyond the question of who runs is uncertainty over what kind of Republican can hold together Trump’s coalition.

Alex Bruesewitz, a Trump adviser who helped spearhead the Trump campaign’s 2024 social media strategy, has not endorsed Vance but said a Republican who is “not in touch with the populist movement” will struggle to win over a key faction of Trump’s coalition in 2028.

“If the Republican Party goes in the direction of a candidate like Ted Cruz as the nominee in ’28, millions of Trump voters, including myself, will not be there for the party in 2028,” Bruesewitz said.

The electorate has increasingly soured on some traditional GOP pillars, including financial aid for Israel, involvement in foreign wars, and tax cuts for corporations. Americans, meanwhile, have also largely rejected Trump’s tariff policies — an issue traditional, free-market Republicans have used to criticize Trump and Vance.

Some Republicans see 2028 as an opening to return to the party’s conservative roots.

Voters repudiated “a party that put one person over all sorts of policy and principle,” said Tim Chapman, the president of Pence’s think tank, Advancing American Freedom.”

“There is a majority coalition for a limited government party if that party can actually develop policies that are good for the economy,” he argued.

Pence’s “energy and focus,” said Marc Short, his former chief of staff, are on reshaping the conservative movement.