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00:00:03
Speaker 1: From The Australian, here's what's on the front. I'm Claire Harvey. It's Monday, November 9, 2026. J.D. Vance thought he had a Donald Trump-endorsed golden ticket to the White House. But after the Republicans got hammered in the midterms, it looks more like golden handcuffs. So can J.D. still be president? And with the Democrats riding high... Could Kamala Harris really try again? Or is it time for someone else to have a go? That's today's story. A political earthquake in Texas and across the country.
00:00:44
Speaker 2: A historic double blow to President Trump's Republican Party in these crucial midterm elections. I mean, if I were on the ballot, we would have won.
00:00:55
Speaker 1: Cameron Stewart is the Australian's chief international correspondent. And because we're journalists, we're already going to start looking forward two years, almost exactly two years from now, when Americans will be voting in 2028 for the next president of the United States. Cameron, the Republicans have suffered not just a correction, an absolute rout in the midterm elections, both in the House and the Senate. And we've seen various favourite Donald Trump candidates totally rejected by the voters. Let's talk about J.D.
00:01:24
Speaker 2: Vance.
00:01:25
Speaker 1: He obviously wants to be president. I feel like that's the end game for him all along. Is he going to be the Republican nominee in 2028?
00:01:33
Speaker 2: There's no doubt that he wants to be president. And he's paved the way. He's done everything properly so far to get himself into the box seat. He's widely considered to be the successor to the MAGA movement, effectively. But the disaster with these results is that Trump is now very much on the nose of If he continues to be on the nose, he will drag J.D. Vance down with him. I mean, you may as well consider it like Vance has golden handcuffs attached to Trump's wrist. Where Trump goes, he will go. That's just what happens with vice presidents. We saw it happen with Kamala Harris when Joe Biden stepped down. She couldn't separate herself enough from him because it looks disloyal. And this is the great conundrum facing any vice president is that if they try to distance themselves too much from the president, people look at it and say, well, hold it. You were in the room as well when these decisions were being made. And if they distance themselves too much from someone like Trump, He is the first person to whack someone who he considers to be disloyal. So Vance is in a very, very delicate and tricky position.
00:02:49
Speaker 1: The ego of Trump is something that is really hard to grapple with. I mean, the day after this midterm walloping, we saw him showing people around the ballroom as if nothing had happened. There's a way in which this result is kind of.
00:03:02
Speaker 2: Good for Trump.
00:03:03
Speaker 1: It shows that he's a once in a generation politician. As he says, I wasn't on the ballot. If I had been, this wouldn't have happened.
00:03:10
Speaker 2: And if I was on the ballot, we would have won. We weren't able to transfer the love to candidates.
00:03:18
Speaker 1: What's your interpretation of that? Was this actually a rejection of Donald Trump? Or does it show that the Republicans without Trump are just going to go back to where they were before?
00:03:29
Speaker 2: I think it shows that, well, it definitely is an absolute repudiation of Donald Trump's style and his agenda. Obviously, there were the sore points which turned the vote, such as cost of living, gas prices, the Iran war, etc. But I think also it was very much a referendum on his actual style. And look, that at the moment is being rejected. The electorate, Claire, goes up and down on this in America. I mean, no one would have imagined that Trump could have been re-elected as president after January 6, 2021, with the invasion of the Capitol building, he was. You know, American voters are fickle. But it's a long way back for Trump at this point in time. I mean, he's really very unpopular. We're talking polls in the early 30s. That's the worst of either term of his presidency. But, you know, Trump is Trump. Trump will get on with things and do things his own way. I don't think we're going to see him be that sort of lame duck president that most presidents tend to be after the midterms. He loves executive power. He ignores Congress as much as he humanly can, and he certainly will ignore Congress as much as he possibly can, given it's controlled now by Democrats, or will be from January the 1st. So I think that Trump could still be quite a maverick and powerful candidate president in these last two terms, I don't think you'll see him go quietly over the horizon.
00:04:51
Speaker 1: We're still waiting for the real JD Vance to stand up. He started out as an author of lyrical reflections on poverty. I wrote this book because I've achieved something quite ordinary, which doesn't happen to most kids who grow up like me. Then he was an anti-Trump Republican. Then he became very much Trump's number one cheerleader. Then he became Charlie Kirk's best friend. Now he's sort of distancing himself from Trump, or at least from this result, saying the Iran war is the reason that we lost. Clearly, he's backgrounding journalists about how he was opposed to the Iran war all along. And Trump gave a very kind of mild response to that, kind of saying he could see where J.D.
00:05:31
Speaker 2: Was coming from.
00:05:33
Speaker 1: What's going on there between these two wily old foxes, Ken?
00:05:37
Speaker 2: Exactly. And that's a great way to describe them. I mean, Vance is playing in that narrow shaft of sunlight where he wants to just separate himself slightly from the president without going too far. And I think he did it okay. He covered himself slightly. When he said Iran was the main reason why the wave came against the Republicans, he said the president said that too because Trump did make mention of that
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being a factor. So he was sort of safe in that respect. And Donald Trump Jr. actually came out and tweeted and said, yeah, absolutely, J.D. Vance is 100% right. And maybe that gave the president some pause in actually deciding how he would respond to Vance's comments. Because, I mean, you can interpret Vance's comments as being disloyal to Trump. Depends how you want to interpret it. Trump was okay. He said, I think, quote, I was fine with it. And the impression I get, Claire, is that Vance got away with it this time. He wouldn't want to push his luck on a regular basis saying things like this because I think Trump, I mean, look how Trump turned on his former vice president, Mike Pence. That was pretty spectacular. Mike Pence had a chance to be great. He had a chance to be, frankly, historic. But Mike did not have the courage to act. And I think Vance cannot afford for Trump to disown him. That would be political suicide for Vance. But Vance is just going to have to really, I mean, frankly, suck it up and just see how it goes, because he's put himself in this position, which he thought would be the catapult to the presidency in 2028. Now it looks like a ball and chain. He can't do anything about that. I guess the thing that he might do is if he feels that Trump is just too on the nose as president in the next two years, he may choose not to run this time around. He may sit it out and then go four years later. He's still a young guy. He could do that. That's a possibility. But at this point in time, his options are very limited. The Republicans will.
00:07:45
Speaker 1: Of course, hold a primary to work out or a series of primaries to work out who is their candidate. And these are hard fought contests. You know, Trump had to win the nomination himself against some pretty good rivals. But how the Republicans actually choose candidates in the post-Trump era is really interesting. Like in Texas, for example, there was a safe multi-term incumbent, John Cornyn. Trump pushed him out in favour of Ken Paxton, someone who voters already had decided wasn't right. They lost the seat to the Democrats, to James Tallarico, a seat that the Republicans kind of had no business losing.
00:08:18
Speaker 2: Democrats have been waiting for this moment for more than three decades. Texas turning blue. James Tallarico wins the US Senate race. Gina Hinojosa unseats. Governor Greg Abbott and Democrats Vicky Goodwin and John Rosenthal also claim victory.
00:08:38
Speaker 1: Are the Republicans capable of actually choosing a candidate who can win the election?
00:08:42
Speaker 2: Well, I think the Republicans are going to have to not listen to Donald Trump as much. I mean, Trump will still try and put forward candidates. But I mean, quite clearly, as you just illustrated, there's a disastrous record of late in doing that. I think one of the things about this loss is the Republican Party is just going to have to, if they want to survive, carve some sort of independence from the president. And I think that will be seen in pre-selections, in primaries, where they're going to have to go with the person who's most likely to actually win as opposed to the person who's the closest to Donald Trump because otherwise they will continue to choose bad candidates and they certainly can't afford to do that come the presidential race in 2028. They need to put up the best possible candidate regardless of what Trump thinks about them.
00:09:25
Speaker 1: It's not uncommon to have to have several cracks at a nomination before you actually get the nomination to become the candidate. Now people are talking again about names like Ron DeSantis, Nikki Haley, Vivek Ramaswamy, Marco Rubio. Do any of them have a chance to get the nomination?
00:09:41
Speaker 2: It's hard to say. I mean, for example, DeSantis was considered a frontrunner last time and he just flamed out almost immediately. Nikki Haley was a much better. Now she's, of course, much more in the traditional Republican mould. Will they go that way after Trump? I mean, it's hard to see. I think she would be a smart choice. for the Republicans if they want to sort of get back to where they were and make themselves more electable post-Trump. Another possibility, of course, is Marco Rubio. However, he's also connected with the administration. And for him to have a fair chance of running, I think you'd have to see him resign in the next 12 months. and then create some distance so that he can go back and he can be critical of aspects of the administration. Not sure whether he will. He's just said in the last 24 hours that he intends to stay there as Secretary of State, so who knows what's going to happen there. And there'll be other ones in the wind, Mike Pompeo, for example, and maybe there'll be a new one. I mean, maybe what the Republicans really need is pretty much what the Democrats need, and that is a bright, young, bold, new face that comes out of nowhere.
00:10:49
Speaker 1: Yeah, speaking of bright, young, bold new faces, they might choose Kamala Harris. I've got PTSD just thinking about that, Cam. I mean, we have seen what Kamala has to offer. And despite the endorsement of rock stars and celebrities and the Obamas, she could not get there in the last election. Would they choose her again?
00:11:08
Speaker 2: I think absolutely not. In fact, so much so you wonder whether she would run, I think. I'm not sure Kamala would have actually won the primary had the Democrats done a primary selection last time. The only primary that she did do was many years earlier and she flamed out very early in the piece. No, look, I don't think the Democrats would go back to Kamala. I think They will be looking for a fresh young face, and that may be John Ossoff, the Georgian senator, who is attracting a lot of attention at the moment with talk about Iran in 2028. He's sort of a little bit like a Bill Clinton or a Barack Obama. I mean, he's come from sort of nowhere. He's quite young. He's very
eloquent. He's a good speaker. He's quite aggressive in attacking the Republicans. He's from the South. Ticks a lot of boxes, which would work for the Democrats. Very early days, he hasn't been properly tested, but he seems to me to be a more obvious candidate because he hasn't got crosses against him. I mean, all the other ones, Claire, they've all got crosses against him. Kamala, who flamed out last time. Gavin Newsom, the straight-teethed governor from California, you know, looks the part, but he's Californian, and the rest of the country hates Californians, so.
00:12:15
Speaker 1: His teeth are too white and too straight as well. He's just gone and commuted every death sentence as his last move. Late last week, he commuted every death sentence on the books. And, I mean, that will rule him out for the entire kind of Midwest, won't it now?
00:12:29
Speaker 2: You know, exactly. So that sort of stuff comes back to haunt you. Pete Buttigieg, who I spent quite a bit of time in the campaign trail with when I was the Washington correspondent, He's very impressive. I think he's excellent. He's gay. I don't know if that will work because the African-American community doesn't vote very strongly for gay candidates. So I don't think he's likely to be a big show, but I mean, he's very impressive as well. Democrats have a few choices, better, more obvious ones than the Republican ones. But, you know, will the Democrats go for someone who's, you know, what will it be? Will they choose a centrist candidate or a left candidate? You know, would... AOC, for example, actually put her hand up this time. And that would be really interesting because the left of the party would absolutely congregate around her. But you'd have to ask questions about whether she is electable because, you know, the left wing of the party of the Democrats is not where the American electorate is.
00:13:29
Speaker 1: Trump managed to build a sort of populist revolution around kind of to the right, really, of the establishment Republican Party. That would require someone with the force of personality to build a sort of insurgent left of the Democrats movement, wouldn't it? I mean, that's a huge ask. But then Trump did it to the Republicans, didn't he? Like, who could have imagined that someone would be able to kind of totally reshape and wrong foot the Republican Party from its own base?
00:13:55
Speaker 2: That's right. I mean, it's hard to see that happening in the Democrats. Democrats seem a lot more structured in the way they approach them. And Trump is just a once-in-a-generation... You know, you can't even characterize him as a conservative, really, in lots of ways. He's not. He's really just a true populist and a one-off sort of person. political freak, really. I mean, that's the best way to put it, you know. And this is one of the problems, of course, for his MAGA movement, if you like, is where do they go after Trump? Trump is so singular. You know, there's no one to obviously replace him. J.D. Vance, if he did replace him, may have aspects of the MAGA movement. But J.D. Vance, as you pointed out before, is effectively a weathervane. He'll just move to where the votes are. He's not a conviction politician in the same way Trump is. Well, Trump just has ideas and pushes them through regardless. And I just think he's a character who can't be replaced. And so I think the MAGA movement, especially after this result, will really struggle to maintain the presence it has now.
00:14:59
Speaker 1: Maybe if the Democrats go super woke, this would be an opportunity for the Republicans to come back to the sensible centre, to present themselves as the old style Republicans who most Americans, even if they're kind of progressively inclined, could vote for.
00:15:13
Speaker 2: And after this result, there'll be a lot more support for that concept, Claire. The Republicans look at this electoral map and think, geez, how on earth are we going to get back here? The Republicans always saw themselves as the global policemen, you know, going out and prosecuting conflicts across the world to promote democracy. Is that the case now? You know, Trump's got himself into the Iran war. It's hugely unpopular. He can't really get out of it. So it will be really interesting to see how the Republicans remake themselves after this disaster.
00:15:43
Speaker 1: Cameron Stewart, thank you very much.
00:15:45
Speaker 2: Pleasure.
00:15:53
Speaker 1: Cameron Stewart is The Australian's Chief International Correspondent. You can read the sharpest reporting and analysis of this seismic shift in American politics anytime at theaustralian.com.au.