Ted Cruz responds to JD Vance as the 2026 midterm campaign narrows to its final 35 days. Vice President JD Vance is being treated as the early 2028 Republican favorite while Cruz and Rick Scott show minimal support in polling.
The split matters because the 2028 presidential campaign is 36 days from beginning, and Republicans are already reading the next race through the losses they expect this fall. Vance told News last week, "Politically, there’s just a recognition that it’s always going to be hard to win a midterm when you have the White House, the Senate and the House."
JD Vance and the midterms
One House Republican told MS NOW, "We’re gonna get crushed." That warning matches the broader picture described by the article: Donald Trump’s average approval ratings have dropped to the mid-30s, Democrats’ lead in the generic ballot keeps growing, and many voters who joined Trump’s 2024 coalition have already left.
The same argument puts Vance at the center of the 2026 fight even though he is not on the ballot. The article says two more years like the past two would doom Republicans’ chances of retaining the White House, so the vice president’s 2028 standing is being shaped now by whether the party can limit the coming damage.
Ted Cruz and polling
Ted Cruz and Rick Scott are named as potential 2028 candidates with minimal support in polling. Marco Rubio has long signaled he will not challenge Vance in 2028, which leaves fewer obvious alternatives if Republican voters keep lining up behind the vice president.
Karl Rove has voiced concern about the party handing Vance the nomination with little opposition. The article points to the cheers of "48" at Trump’s midterm convention as another sign of that support, even as it compares Vance to Dick Cheney as a vice president who could be unpopular with the president yet more difficult in a general election.
Republican Party and 2028
Senate Republicans’ top super political action committee has already pulled out of North Carolina and moved resources to Kansas, where no Democrat has won a Senate race in nearly a century. That move fits the article’s larger view that Republicans are planning around a difficult map rather than waiting for Election Day to settle the matter.
For Cruz, the opening now is not a single speech or endorsement but time. If Republicans absorb the losses many expect in 2026, Vance enters the 2028 race with the strongest early claim inside the Republican Party, and Cruz remains in the field with little polling support to change the hierarchy.
