Former Trump VP Pence Is Positioning Himself As A Staunch Interventionist. Does A 2028 Run Beckon?

Mike Pence, who served as vice president in Donald Trump's first term in office, offered an unorthodox diagnosis of why the GOP lost the midterms in an interview on Sunday: the former high-ranking government official claimed that Washington's "appeasement" of Iran, alongside a slew of other factors, was to blame for the Republicans' landslide losses.

"I do believe, in many respects, our voters rejected President Trump's embrace of protectionist tariffs, a $41 trillion national debt that continues to rise, the embrace of appeasement with regard to Russia and now even Iran," Pence told NBC's Meet the Press show in an interview on Sunday.

When Meet the Press host Kristen Welker pressed Pence on the relationship between the Iran war and the Republican defeat at the ballot box, the former vice president said that "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 ... for inexplicable reasons we stopped after five weeks."

In particular, Pence disagreed with current Vice President JD Vance's assessment of the electoral drubbing. In the immediate aftermath of the elections, Vance explicitly attributed the loss to the war and has since been engaged in diplomatic efforts to negotiate a peaceful resolution to the conflict.

The polls seem to support Vance's arguments, as opposed to Pence's: exit polls conducted by NBC show 64% of voters surveyed saying that the U.S. made the "wrong decision in taking military action against Iran," and a further 74% said that the conflict in Iran was either a "crucial" or "major" factor in influencing their vote.

Given that pressuring the Trump administration to end the Iran war was a key campaign pledge of the vast majority of House and Senate Democratic candidates, voters influenced by the Iran war seem to have largely opted to support the anti-war camp.

Nevertheless, Pence also mentioned other, more widely-cited reasons, for the GOP's loss. 66% of voters felt that Trump's "protectionist tariffs" hurt the U.S. economy, while the "air of self-dealing and corruption around this administration," which Pence mentioned later on in the interview, also appears to have had a tangible effect.

Approximately 9 in 10 Americans said that was a "crucial" or "major" factor in determining their vote, and Democrats beat Republicans by a margin of eight percentage points on the question of which party could better handle government corruption.

Given Pence's clearly stated ideological separation from Vance and embrace of a more neoconservative agenda - which he described as restoring a Republican belief in the "principles of American leadership in the world" - speculation about the former Trump deputy running for the Republican presidential nomination in 2028 has grown.

Welker asked Pence whether he would rule out a bid, and he responded the following:

"My faith teaches me that we're not promised tomorrow, that my life is not my own, and so I'm going to leave the future to take care of itself, for right now ... we're going to continue to champion those broad and mainstream conservative principles."

In a previous interview on Friday, Pence suggested to Fox News Digital that people had reached out to him regarding a potential run in two years, and he again refused to rule the possibility out.