JD Vance can't escape MAGA's shadow

As MAGA scrambled to make sense of its crushing midterms defeat, Vice President JD Vance offered a blunt assessment, pointing squarely to the Iran war. "Everyone knows why we lost," he wrote in a lengthy X post. "And any honest conversation about where we go from here must start there."

Vance's diagnosis is largely correct. Poll after poll reinforces his point about the political damage inflicted by the Iran war and its impact on the cost of living. Inflation and gas prices spiked as a direct consequence of the conflict, and the famously anti-interventionist Vance is wise to point this out.