JD Vance's account of the Republican midterm loss, checked against the vote counts

Vice President JD Vance (R) wrote on X on Wednesday morning that Republican voters turned out on Nov. 3 and that the party lost because “many people who voted for Trump/Vance in 2024 voted for Democrats in 2026,” chiefly over the war with Iran. In the five states Hesitation Media has checked, the vote counts show a larger drop in Republican turnout than the post accounts for. Republican candidates received 53 to 66 percent of the votes Donald Trump (R) received in 2024, while Democratic candidates, and in Nebraska the independent Dan Osborn (I), received 86 to 97 percent of Kamala Harris’s (D). The NBC News Exit Poll found that 6 percent of 2024 Trump voters backed Democratic House candidates. If that national rate held in these states, switching accounts for a small part of the gap, and most of the gap between Trump’s 2024 vote and the Republican vote this year came from people who did not vote for either party’s candidate.

The post, published at 10:38 a.m. Eastern on Nov. 4, had been viewed more than 31 million times by the afternoon. In it, Vance blames the war that Trump started, relays a pollster’s finding that defectors want a change in the country’s relationship with Israel and says anyone pushing amnesty for people in the country illegally “is lying to you.”

Each party’s vote against 2024

Midterm electorates are smaller than presidential ones, so both parties fall short of their 2024 totals in an ordinary year. In Georgia in 2022, Raphael Warnock (D) received 78.7 percent of Joe Biden’s (D) 2020 vote and Herschel Walker (R) received 77.5 percent of Trump’s. This year the drop fell mostly on one side. Jon Ossoff (D) received 96.7 percent of Harris’s Georgia vote and Mike Collins (R) received 64.3 percent of Trump’s.

In Georgia, Trump received 2,663,117 votes in 2024 and Collins received 1,711,322 this year, 951,795 fewer. If 6 percent of Trump’s Georgia voters, the national exit-poll rate, voted for Ossoff, that is about 160,000 people, an upper bound, since the exit poll measures only Trump voters who turned out this year. The remaining 790,000 or so did not vote, skipped the Senate race or voted for a third candidate, and new Republican voters in 2026 would make that number larger. County returns and exit polls cannot settle the split exactly, and the exit poll is national and will be reweighted as the count finishes.

The post’s other claims

“In Florida, for example, the electorate was 9 points more Republican than Democrat.” Florida’s unofficial count of ballots cast by party registration shows 3,561,765 from registered Republicans and 2,834,557 from registered Democrats, a gap of 8.7 percentage points among the 8,326,814 ballots. That fits the claim, though the count sorts ballots by the voter’s party registration rather than by how the voter voted, and we have not verified the post’s comparison to 2024.

A pollster expected Republicans to lose the generic ballot by 13 points. The final public averages had Democrats ahead by 8.8 points (RealClearPolling) and 8.8 points (Silver Bulletin). The national House vote is not final.

The four reasons defectors gave. Vance did not name the pollster or release the poll. In the NBC News Exit Poll, 63 percent of voters said the United States made the wrong decision in taking military action against Iran, and 39 percent named the economy as their top issue.

“The president himself said so last night.” Trump said on election night that “a part of it was Iran,” and on Wednesday said the war hurt Republicans because it “drove the gasoline up.”

What is still being counted

Every 2026 figure here is unofficial. Pennsylvania’s count was about 91 percent of its 2022 total when these figures were pulled, so its shares will rise, for both parties, as counting finishes. This page updates when the states certify.