Vice President JD Vance admitted he could skip the 2028 presidential race altogether, citing his wife’s discomfort with politics and the demands of raising four young children.
“Of course there’s a chance,” Vance responded when the possibility came up during a CBS News town hall Saturday. “We’ve got four little kids, my wife has never loved politics. She loves public service.”
The admission came from a 42-year-old vice president whose name already figures prominently in conversations about who might succeed President Donald Trump.
But Vance isn’t prepared to commit his family to another national campaign while Republicans are still fighting for control of Congress.
He intends to wait until after November’s congressional elections before confronting the question of a presidential run.
“The way that I think about life, big life decisions — my wife will tell you this: I’m a procrastinator. I hate thinking about it,” Vance confessed.
Even when the midterms are finished, he isn’t ruling out an unexpected development.
“You know, anything can happen, man,” he added.
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Polling of possible Republican contenders has repeatedly put Vance ahead of Marco Rubio, although neither man’s placement settles who will ultimately enter the 2028 contest.
Iowa and South Carolina have already figured into Sen. Ted Cruz’s (R-TX) travels as he campaigns and raises money for fellow Republicans.
Both states have an important place in the presidential nomination process, while Cruz’s own Senate term extends through 2030.
The two men previously served together in the Senate, and Cruz entered the national presidential arena well before Vance became Trump’s running mate.
In 2016, Cruz outlasted Trump’s other major Republican opponents before abandoning his own nomination campaign.
Vance has offered his own assessment of those activities. “It is really obvious to me that, at this very moment, Ted Cruz is running for president,” Vance told NBC News on October 1.
“At this moment, I’m not. I’m trying to help elect Republicans. That’s what I’m going to keep on doing.”
Vance’s work on behalf of his party has also put him face-to-face with Americans questioning whether the current administration has delivered the financial relief they expected.
That frustration surfaced in Michigan when Keyshawn, a Detroit voter who supported Trump twice, confronted the vice president over what he was spending to fill his vehicle.
Keyshawn’s current gasoline bill reflected a price of $4.33 per gallon, a dramatic difference from the $1.17 he remembered paying during Trump’s first presidency.
“What aren’t we doing that we could be doing to obtain the previous Trump administration’s gas prices?” he asked.
Vance accepted that fuel was costing Americans too much, but his explanation drew another challenge from CBS host Tony Dokoupil.
The moderator questioned how much longer the administration could blame gasoline prices on Joe Biden when Trump had already spent nearly two years back in the White House.
“At a certain point, it becomes your economy, not Joe Biden’s economy,” Dokoupil countered.
Vance defended his assessment by pointing to refining capacity lost during Biden’s presidency.
“When Joe Biden was president, we had about 20 percent of American refining capacity that went offline,” he argued.
Iranian attacks on commercial vessels were another part of the vice president’s explanation, with Vance arguing that instability around the Strait of Hormuz was affecting energy costs.
Dokoupil reminded him that he had previously characterized the March price increase as a “temporary blip” and demanded a clearer indication of when the problem might subside.
Vance supplied no date, instead maintaining that the disruption of international energy markets could not be resolved by Washington alone.
Keyshawn’s dissatisfaction extended beyond gasoline. He told the vice president he intended to vote for Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed (D-MI) and challenged him to justify supporting Republican Mike Rogers (R-MI) instead.
Vance presented Rogers as a candidate concerned with household expenses, employment and housing, and praised his willingness to differ from Republican colleagues over the conflict affecting global energy supplies.
During a Thursday appearance in Monroe, Michigan, Vance defended his late grandfather against a suggestion he believed unfairly portrayed the man who helped raise him.
The disagreement originated with an August post on X in which El-Sayed questioned whether Vance would have taken his wife, Usha, back in time to meet his grandfather.
Vance interpreted the remark as suggesting that his grandfather’s racial attitudes would have prevented him from accepting Usha.
“He said my papaw, one of the greatest men that I have ever known, the man who raised me when my own mom and dad struggled … was incapable of loving my darling wife and our amazing second lady for the simple fact that he was white and she is not,” Vance told the Monroe audience.
The vice president also disputed El-Sayed’s presentation of his Michigan background and criticized his response to the attack on Temple Israel in West Bloomfield Township.
His criticism focused on El-Sayed’s use of the phrase “Hurt people, hurt people” when discussing the attack. Vance interpreted those words as sympathy for the perpetrator at the expense of the victims.
El-Sayed answered the political attacks by making fun of Vance’s turnout in Monroe, referring to the appearance as “a cute little rally” attended by only a handful of admirers.
He also refused to accept the vice president’s challenge to his loyalty to the country, invoking how profoundly his American upbringing had shaped his understanding of what citizenship meant.
“Let me tell you, nobody understands how deep and profound the gift of this country is like a kid who was born here but for the accident of history that allowed that to happen,” El-Sayed declared.
