JD Vance may be the vice president, but his glide path to the Oval Office is anything but assured, according to CNN’s chief national correspondent.
John King said the midterms will show whether the MAGA movement will survive President Donald Trump—and anoint Vance, 41, as heir to the throne.
King has been going all over Ohio, which the 79-year-old president won with 55 percent of the vote in 2024, and found that voters there are feeling the pinch of the affordability crisis.
“Voters everywhere—in cities, in suburbs, in rural areas—Trump voters are hurting. Democrats think they can win some of them back, if more Democrats come out who stayed home last time, and if some Trump voters might just stay home,” he said Monday night on OutFront.
King warned that the cost of living crisis, when coupled with MAGA figureheads like Joe Rogan speaking out against the administration, could spell trouble for Republicans in the midterms.
“If Republicans get shellacked in the elections, Democrats take the House, maybe if they won Ohio, they get close or maybe they even take the Senate—we’ll see how that plays out—that would be a repudiation of Trump, which of course would hurt JD Vance. He’s Trump’s vice president,” he said.
“If the Republicans get shellacked in the midterms, guess what? There will be more Republicans running in 2028 saying, ‘We need to go in a different direction.’ Sorry, JD Vance. ‘We need to get away from Donald Trump, away from Trumpism, away from tariffs,’” he added.
King pointed out that Ohio used to be a battleground state but has been reliably red in the decade of Trump.
“Ohio is the number one test of whether Democrats can get their act together and make this a battleground state again,” he said. “The other question is, does MAGA survive Trump and do the midterms hurt JD Vance and Vivek Ramaswamy?”
Ramaswamy, 40, is backed by Trump, Vance, and other GOP leaders in the tight race for Ohio governor. In a poll by Bowling Green State University, 48 percent said they would back Ramaswamy, while 47 percent said they would vote for Amy Acton, the presumptive Democratic nominee.
Vance, meanwhile, has so far refused to outright declare an interest in the presidency. In November, he said he planned to sit down with Trump to discuss his future after the 2026 midterms.
“I try to put it out of my head and remind myself the American people elected me to do a job right now,” he told Fox News. “If we do a good job, the politics will take care of itself. If we do a terrible job, the politics will take care of itself in the other direction.”
