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By Michelle Curran
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Former Vice President Mike Pence on Sunday called for a competitive Republican presidential primary in 2028, arguing that the party must return to traditional conservative principles to recover from the sweeping midterm election losses that cost the GOP control of Congress.
Appearing on NBC News' Meet the Press, Pence declined to endorse the idea that Vice President JD Vance is the presumptive frontrunner for the next GOP nomination, instead urging a debate over the party's ideological direction.
"I'm not a political pundit. I'll leave that speculation to others. But I would hope that we have a very vigorous debate going forward about the leadership of the party,” Pence, who was President Donald Trump's vice president in his first administration, told moderator Kristen Welker.
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Vance has not confirmed whether he will seek the presidency. At a CBS News town hall in Michigan prior to the midterms, he acknowledged there was "a chance" he would not run, citing his family and four young children.
"The way that I think about life, big life decisions—my wife will tell you this—is I'm a procrastinator. I hate thinking about it," Vance said, adding he'll "have to think about it."
Pence, meanwhile, said on Sunday the GOP has a "terrifically deep bench," adding that his current calling in his life is to "challenge people in our party to focus on what we're for before we focus on who we're for."
"As Republicans, as I've said, I think if we don't get our party back to that traditional conservative agenda and values that's defined the Republican movement for 50 years, it won't matter who we nominate in 2028," he said.
Dispute Over the Iran Conflict
Pence's remarks exposed a deepening rift within the party over why Republicans lost majorities in the House and Senate in this year's midterm elections. The morning after the election, Vance attributed the defeat to the ongoing conflict with Iran.
“The reason we lost is the war. The president himself said so last night,” Vance wrote on X. “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. Argue it was a worthwhile cost to pay. Agree or disagree, that's at least honest.”
Pence rejected Vance's assessment, arguing that voters were frustrated not by U.S. military intervention, but by the administration's decision to halt operations prematurely.
“He’s a good man but Vice President Vance is wrong," he said. "We didn't lose this midterm election because of the war. I think part of the reason why voters were turned off was because after seeing our military respond brilliantly in Operation Epic Fury, and in the strike against Iran last year, for inexplicable reasons, we stopped after five weeks.”
“We sunk their navy, we had complete air superiority, took down 15,000 military sites in Iran. And then we paused and began to embrace the politics of appeasement," Pence said. "There's an old saying that you don't make peace with your enemy, you make peace with your defeated enemy. And you need look no further than Bahrain in the last 24 hours, where Iran is still firing on U.S. targets, on our base there, to see that the Iranians certainly don't give evidence of feeling defeated. I believe they are.”
The former vice president said rising fuel prices also compounded voter dissatisfaction at the polls.
"I think the frustration that many Americans had was seeing gasoline prices rise, diesel prices rise, was the fact not that we went to war, not that we took the fight to the world's leading state sponsor of terrorism, but that we stopped short. And I have to believe that that was a reflection in some respect of some of the voices of isolationism on the populist right that have gained some purchase with this administration,” Pence said.
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The 2028 Landscape and Midterm Fallout
The debate over the party's future follows a historic midterm setback for the GOP. Provisional results tallied Thursday by Popular Vote Analytics showed Democratic candidates capturing 56.1 percent of the nationwide vote compared with 42.4 percent for Republicans—the largest Democratic midterm share since the post-Watergate election of 1974, when Democrats won 57.1 percent.
“Democrats did what they needed to do in this election. But like millions of Republicans, I'm deeply disappointed to see so many men and women of great caliber and leadership turned away and turned out in this massive defeat in the midterm election,” Pence said.
Calling the results "not just a rout, it was a reckoning," the former vice president pointed to tariffs, a $41 trillion national debt, foreign policy toward Russia and Iran, and "the whole era of self-dealing and corruption around this administration" as factors that alienated conservative voters.
“As I traveled across [the] country in the last week, I'm convinced our voters didn't turn left, I think they were turned off. But I have faith. I truly believe, as I wrote in my book this summer, that if Republicans will turn back to our commitment to fiscal responsibility, a strong defense, traditional values, and carry that across the country, that just like we did in 2006, we can win it all back again. But it's going to take some doing. And I look forward to being a part of that conversation,” Pence said.
The 2028 Republican primary field remains unsettled. Earlier this month, Trump said in a 60 Minutes interview that he may stay out of the primary and refrain from endorsing a successor.
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Vance have long been seen as the two front-runners to succeed Trump in 2028.
When asked by a reporter last week whether he still stood by his past promise to be the first to support Vance if he ran for president, Rubio said: "I'm not going to discuss 2028. I'm not going to discuss it in any form or fashion." A reporter tried 2032 instead.
"Not even," Rubio said, laughing.
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Would Pence Run for President Again?
When asked by Welker on whether he has ruled out another White House bid of his own, Pence declined to commit either way, saying his focus remains on his foundation and promoting traditional conservative policies.
“I would tell you all of my energies are really focused on what I wrote about in my book last summer, about what conservatives believe, on the work of our foundation advancing American freedom. Now, my faith teaches me that we're not promised tomorrow. That my life is not my own. I'm going to leave the future to take care of itself,” Pence said.
“For right now, for me, for my family, for the people around us, we're going to continue to champion those broad and mainstream conservative principles in the hope that we'll see a standard-bearer in a party return. Because it's not just good for the Republican Party, these are the principles that have always made Americans strong and prosperous and free,” he said.
Pence ran for president in the 2024 Republican presidential primary and suspended his campaign in October 2023.
“It’s become clear to me, this is not my time,” he said at the Republican Jewish Coalition Conference in Las Vegas.
Contact Newsweek editors for this story: Steve Mollman and Anthony Murray.
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