US Vice President JD Vance has blamed the Iran war for Republicans’ defeat in the 2026 US midterm elections, saying many voters who backed Donald Trump in 2024 turned out on Tuesday but voted for Democrats. The losses handed Democrats control of both chambers of Congress for the final two years of Trump’s term.

“The reason we lost is the war,” Vance wrote on X on Wednesday. “The president himself said so last night.”

His assessment came a day after Democrats flipped Senate seats in Republican strongholds including Kansas and Texas and picked up more than two dozen House districts. Some of those districts had backed Trump by double digits in 2024.

Vance said Republican analysts had spent the run-up to the election tracking whether the people turning out resembled the coalition that carried Trump to the White House two years earlier. Turnout varied from state to state, he said, but enough Republican voters appeared to be showing up to give the party reason for optimism.

One analyst warned him that the numbers concealed a problem. Some Trump voters were angry and intended to vote for Democrats. Vance pointed to Florida, where he said the electorate was nine percentage points more Republican than Democratic, a margin only slightly smaller than in 2024. He acknowledged that turnout could have been stronger in some places.

“Our voters showed up,” Vance wrote. But many of them, he added, “voted for Democrats.”

Vance said a second pollster had forecast a 13-point Republican deficit on the generic congressional ballot, a measure of which party voters prefer before accounting for individual candidates. The pollster also asked former Trump voters what would bring them back. Vance said four answers accounted for nearly all the responses. They wanted an end to the war, action on inflation and the cost of living, a return to “America First” priorities and a change in Washington’s relationship with Israel. Vance did not name the pollster in the post.

The AP Voter Poll, which surveyed about 80,000 voters across all 50 states, found that the economy and the state of US democracy were leading concerns nationally. The cost of living and government corruption weighed heavily on voters. The survey also found that voters under 30 and Hispanic voters were less likely to back Republican candidates than they had been to support Trump in 2024.

Vance accepted a pollster’s criticism that the party’s economic message had lacked focus in the closing stretch of the campaign. He nevertheless put the war at the centre of his assessment and defended calls by television host Rachel Campos-Duffy for a diplomatic resolution to the conflict. The US and Israel launched the war against Iran in February.

Decision Desk HQ’s live tally showed Democrats with 54 Senate seats to Republicans’ 44 and put Democrats above the 218 seats needed for a House majority. The Associated Press reported that Democrats flipped at least seven Senate seats, including in Iowa, Ohio, Maine, North Carolina and South Carolina, while holding on to Georgia and Michigan.

Control of both chambers gives Democrats more leverage over government spending and the legislative agenda. A Democratic Senate will also decide whether to confirm Trump’s nominees, while the party’s House majority can set committee priorities and open investigations into the administration.

Vance urged frustrated Republican voters to channel their anger into electing candidates who share their views. He also challenged defenders of the war to say whether they thought it was worth the political cost of losing the Senate.

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