For the next two weeks, Vice President JD Vance’s job is to save Congress for Republicans. But then he’ll turn to another political project — himself.

Vance’s 2026 closing arguments on the Iran war, high energy prices and immigration are becoming an early test of whether and how, as a 2028 presidential contender, he might handle the tumultuous legacy of his boss, President Donald Trump. It’s not an easy task.

Vance’s performance at a CBS town hall that aired this weekend showed he’s finding it tough to navigate the grim midterm environment set by Trump’s unpopularity and policy choices. His inability to promise imminent relief on gas prices; his pleas for more time for an economy that voters hate; and his fuzziness on an end to the Iran war highlighted why the odds seem to favor Democrats two weeks out.

“Fundamentally, we are where we are,” Vance said. His comment specifically responded to Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed’s critique of Iran policy, but it also captured the helplessness of GOP candidates caught in Trump’s political undertow.

The tough questions also foreshadowed a momentous decision looming for Vance over whether to run for president in 2028. A GOP drubbing on November 3 would hand whoever becomes the president’s heir the task of reinventing the party’s message and appeal in two years — with Trump peering over their shoulder.

Vance rather gingerly grappled with how to defend Trump’s immoderate approach on key issues such as immigration that might please the MAGA base but that often seems to alienate a more general audience.

“We’re trying to strike the right balance,” Vance said when asked by a nun why Immigration and Customs Enforcement separation policies appeared to lack compassion and were traumatizing children.

And another of Vance’s flexes — blaming former President Joe Biden — figures to be an even more questionable strategy in two years than it’s proving in the midterm campaign. Yet Vance is also an intriguing political figure.

At the town hall, he came across as articulate and intelligent. He was more conventional, courteous and empathetic than Trump. And after a decade of presidential leadership by elderly men, his youthfulness raised the possibility of a generational shift in American politics.

Vance, who has a young family and tales of a hard-knocks upbringing, seems more relatable than many in the gilded bubble of billionaires and millionaires that surrounds Trump at the White House and Mar-a-Lago.

The vice president also made apparently sincere efforts to connect with audience members, including one whose wife, Master Sgt. Nicole Amor, was killed in the Iran war and who poignantly wanted answers about what he said were operational failures before her death.

But Vance is not yet Bill Clinton when it comes to feeling others’ pain. He sometimes betrayed the clumsiness of a politician who in his lightning rise has run only a single campaign in his own right — for the Senate in 2022. This could become an issue in the always-on glare of a presidential election race.

Vance’s greatest challenges came in explaining Trump’s decisions on the war and the economy, which are deeply unpopular and have created a tangible link with voters’ own economic struggles, according to almost every opinion poll. His answers were a study in miniature of the entire midterm season.

“I recognize that gas prices are too high right now,” Vance said, showing more candor than Trump normally does and exemplifying his more direct rhetoric on the economy in general. But his explanation that Iran had held the Strait of Hormuz hostage didn’t account for the fact that this was an obvious outcome of Trump’s war of choice that the White House seemingly failed to anticipate. And Vance’s warnings that Iran must not have a nuclear weapon might have hit home more had Trump tried to make that case to the nation before launching the war. After Vance blamed Biden for high gasoline prices, CBS anchor Tony Dokoupil jumped in to point out: “It’s almost been two years. At a certain point, it becomes your economy, not Joe Biden’s economy.”

Vance also struggled to square Trump’s repeated declarations of victory early in the war with an opaque reality nearly eight months later. “I would say in some ways we have won decisively, but the Iranians, the enemy gets a vote here,” he said. Neither of these answers seems likely to appease voters angry with Trump’s administration.

A Washington Post/ABC News/Ipsos poll on Sunday put the president’s approval rating at only 33%, weighed down by deeply negative perceptions of his policies on the economy and the Iran war. Polls two weeks out cannot predict the results of elections.

But Republicans have been pouring money into red states in a way that supports the perception that Democrats have a good chance to win back the House. The Senate is a tougher ask, however. Democrats would need a net gain of four seats on a tough map featuring key races in states that Trump won easily in 2024. Vance is hardly alone in laboring to make a strong election message.

Michigan Republican Senate nominee Mike Rogers showed Sunday on “State of the Union” how hard it is for candidates to deal with Trump’s looming shadow. Asked about Trump’s controversial sanctions-busting diesel deal with Russia that shocked even many Republicans last week, Rogers replied: “Well, that’s just not where I would be.”

He told CNN’s Dana Bash that Trump had made investments that would benefit his state when the war ends. But he implicitly admitted that talking to voters about the long term doesn’t help much now. “Most people I talk to are frustrated with the costs, you bet. Who isn’t when you’re paying over four bucks a gallon?”Rogers said.

Energy Secretary Chris Wright had little help for Republican candidates facing voters’ wrath over high gas prices. Back in March, he predicted that it would take weeks, not months, for prices to come down. Asked about that assessment by Bash on Sunday, he said, “Of course I’m not comfortable, but I’m happy they’re coming down. They have gone down the last few weeks, as have diesel prices, and they will continue to come down.”Drivers, however, are still paying an average of $4.30 nationally for gasoline and up to $6.32 a gallon for diesel.

Handed this bleak reality, Republicans can do little but warn that things would be worse if Democrats win control of Congress. Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson claimed on Fox News’ “Sunday Morning Futures” that Democratic climate policies would raise prices. “You have to keep the grown-ups in charge, steady hands at the wheel,” Johnson argued. But calling for continuity when angry voters want change is a tough sell.

And unless Trump somehow slays the affordability curse in the next two years, any GOP presidential candidate will confront the same issue.

Vance, as vice president, is widely seen as Trump’s likeliest successor. But he told CBS he hadn’t decided whether to go for it. “You know, anything can happen, man. Anything,” Vance said. Another supposed contender, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, has repeatedly said that he’s not planning to run and that he’d back Vance.

But CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan reported Saturday that he found little enthusiasm for Vance among a couple of hundred members of the president’s base he spoke with over the last six months. The alternative name he heard most frequently was Rubio.

Successful election campaigns are usually about the future. So the next Republican standard-bearer must conjure a vision that is more compelling than the one Vance offered in the town hall.

At one point he was asked by a small-business owner why Trump’s promise of a “golden age” for the economy hadn’t panned out.

After a lengthy reply stressing a long-term dearth of investment and the positive potential of Trump tax cuts and factory-opening projects, Vance concluded: “I’ll be the first person to tell you that just as this country wasn’t broken in one presidential term, it’s going to take more than 18 months to fix things and turn them around.”That’s not going to cut it in 2028.