Wes Moore Tells Brian Tyler Cohen JD Vance Is an 'Ineffective' Vice President

Maryland Governor Wes Moore said Vice President JD Vance had the war in Iran right only after it cost Republicans the midterms. In an interview with Brian Tyler Cohen on Wednesday's episode of No Lie, Moore said Vance should have used his office to stop the war before it started.

"J.D. Vance is proving to be a brilliant pundit and a completely ineffective vice president," Moore said. "I'm glad that J.D. Vance is doing a great postmortem. It would have been great if he did a premortem."

Moore, a Democrat who chairs the National Governors Association, was answering Cohen's question about Vance's diagnosis of Tuesday's results. Cohen said Vance had treated the war "as if he's just a spectator." That description is Cohen's. Vance's own words came in a long post on X.

What JD Vance Said About the Iran War and the Midterms

"The reason we lost is the war. The president himself said so last night," Vance wrote on Wednesday, according to CBS News. He also named the cost of living, the America First agenda and the U.S. relationship with Israel as reasons voters who backed the Trump-Vance ticket in 2024 turned to Democrats.

"If you'd like to argue it was worth it, that losing the Senate for the next 6 years was worth it, then do so," Vance wrote, Military Times reported. "But everyone knows why we lost."

Democrats flipped at least seven Republican Senate seats and more than two dozen House districts, Fox News reported, taking control of both chambers. Donald Trump told reporters that Vance's assessment was "largely true" but said the war was necessary to keep Iran from getting a nuclear weapon. On election night, Trump had also said "I wasn't on the ballot."

Vance's Earlier Record on the War

Vance's public record before Wednesday supports parts of both his account and Moore's. In March, Trump said his vice president had been "philosophically a little bit different than me" and "maybe less enthusiastic about going," Fortune reported. In public, though, Vance defended the strikes. He told Fox News host Jesse Watters that "the president has clearly defined what he wants to accomplish."

Vance led U.S. negotiators in talks aimed at ending the conflict for much of the spring, CBS News reported. The agreement they reached soon fell apart.

Wes Moore: Vance Should Have Spoken Up 'Behind Closed Doors'

Moore said the war was wrong on both political and moral grounds. "It would be great if he actually uses authority as vice president and actually told people before they started bombing people that, you know what, this could not work out well, guys," he said.

Moore also drew on his own service. "I say that as a ... veteran myself and a veteran of one of these foreign forever wars, like we do not want this," he said.

Polling on the Iran War

The war, which began February 28, lost support steadily through the summer. A Reuters/Ipsos poll released in late August found 31 percent of Americans supported it, down from 37 percent in March, Al Jazeera reported.

An AP-NORC poll conducted July 23-27 found 28 percent approved of Trump's handling of Iran, down from 34 percent in June. About two-thirds of adults said the war had not been worthwhile, PBS NewsHour reported. Trump's overall approval stands at 38.3 percent in PolitiKool's polling average.

What Comes Next for JD Vance

Vance leads the 2028 Republican field with 38.9 percent in PolitiKool's polling average, well ahead of Secretary of State Marco Rubio at 16.3 percent. His break with Trump over the war could help him with voters who turned on the GOP this week. It could also hurt him with the president's base.

Moore also pointed to Congress. He said the incoming Democratic majorities should use the power of the purse to check the president's ability to "fight wars and start wars without going to Congress." That fight will not begin until the new Congress is sworn in in January.