With former President and now President-elect Donald Trump term-limited and constitutionally barred from seeking the White House again in 2028, Vice President-elect J.D. Vance appears poised to become the heir apparent to the America First movement and the Republican Party’s influential MAGA base. Donald Trump Jr., the president-elect’s eldest son and a key ally of Vance, underscored this point, signaling strong support for the vice president-elect’s future leadership within the party, Fox News reports.
“We are getting four more years of Trump and then eight years of JD Vance!” Trump Jr. said on the campaign trail in Ohio a few weeks ahead of November’s election. Many Republican politicians, strategists, and pundits believe that Vance, who was elected to the Senate in Ohio just two years ago, is likely to be the clear frontrunner in the next Republican presidential nomination race. “The vice president will be in the catbird seat. No question about it,” longtime Republican consultant Dave Carney told Fox News Digital.
Carney, a veteran of numerous Republican presidential campaigns over the past four decades, said Vance “is the guy to beat.” David Kochel, another longtime GOP strategist with plenty of presidential campaign experience, told Fox News that Vance is the frontrunner due to “the size and the scope of last week’s victory and the implied passing of the torch from Donald Trump.” He added: “There will be no shortage of people looking at it. But most people looking at it are seeing the relative strength of the Trump victory and the movement.”
With Trump’s backing in a party fully under his control, the 40-year-old Vance will be very difficult to defeat. However, Kochel noted that “nobody will completely defer to JD Vance. There will be a contest. There always is.” Carney noted as well that “there may be other people who challenge him [Vance]… there’s a lot of people who want to be president, but it will be a very hard lane other than the Trump lane.” Carney went on to say that if Trump-Vance have a tough four years, there will be “opportunities” for other GOP candidates.
That said, he hailed the vice president-elect’s messaging and accessibility on the campaign trail and that “he is the guy to beat, regardless of whether it’s a good four years or a rough four years.” Republican National Committee chair Michael Whatley, a top Trump ally, told Fox News recently that he’s “very excited about the bench that we have in the Republican Party right now.” Highlighting Trump’s reshaping of the GOP, Whatley added that “as we go into 2028, we are in a great position to be able to continue the momentum of this agenda and this movement.”
He also stressed that, despite Vance likely being a frontrunner as 2028 approaches, the RNC will maintain its traditional neutral stance during an open and contested presidential primary. According to Fox, here are some of the other names being bandied about as potential GOP presidential contenders: Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis; Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp; Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin; Texas Sen. Ted Cruz; Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton; Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley; and Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders.
Disclaimer: This article may contain commentary which reflects the author’s opinion.