WASHINGTON—At the beginning of October, alumni of JD Vance’s Senate and vice-presidential offices gathered for a networking dinner on the rooftop of the Hay-Adams, the historic hotel blocks from the White House.

Over dessert, Luke Thompson, a longtime political adviser who ran a pro-Vance super PAC, stood up to thank the dozens of former Vance staffers in the room. “Who knows,” he quipped, according to people who attended, “maybe in the future we’ll get to work together.”Less than a month later, Vance was at the White House on Election Day alongside President Trump as a historic blue wave washed over the country. The vice president’s phone buzzed. A longtime confidant texted with some advice: perhaps Vance should consider sitting out the next presidential election.

Tuesday’s brutal midterm drubbing—the most far-reaching Republican wipeout since Watergate—is scrambling Vance’s political future, with the vice president and his allies privately grappling with hard questions about whether to mount a 2028 campaign for the White House.

Some political allies have told the vice president that they no longer believe any Republican could win a presidential election in two years. Before and after the election, Vance has told associates that he hasn’t made up his mind about running, according to six people close to him.

On Tuesday, Democrats dramatically remade the political landscape. They flipped seven Republican Senate seats, including Vance’s old Ohio seat, and took back governorships in deep-red strongholds such as Georgia and Texas. States that were once considered safely Republican are now up for grabs, further complicating the map for the 2028 presidential election.

The Trump coalition that Vance would seek to re-create if he runs is increasingly fragmented, with Hispanic voters supporting Democrats and antiwar Republicans frustrated with an administration that promised no new wars.

Now as Republicans search for answers after the catastrophic midterm election, some longtime Trump donors are beginning to look outside the administration for the Republican Party’s future.

Within 24 hours of the election, one veteran New York fundraiser began fielding calls from deep-pocketed donors voicing the same complaint: we can’t back Vance in 2028. Those donors instead floated Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and others as alternatives. They fear that a candidate from inside the administration might be too tied to Trump and too battered by the midterms, said the fundraiser, who was frustrated that Vance couldn’t help the GOP keep his home state of Ohio. Other donors privately expressed similar concerns.

Two people close to Vance described the midterm losses not as a rejection of Trump, but as a rejection of the war in Iran, predicting that when the conflict is over the president’s coalition can be rebuilt. Any future Republican presidential candidate who attacks Trump, the people added, would risk having their political career destroyed.

Donors were always going to gripe about Vance, the people said, because of their preference for more traditional, old-guard Republicans. The losses in Ohio, meanwhile, demonstrated how difficult the political climate was for the GOP, the people argued, not that Trump or Vance didn’t try hard enough.

Vance tried to make sense of the midterm losses in a lengthy essay posted on social media this week. He blamed the war for the GOP’s poor performance and said Republicans needed to change their relationship with Israel. He noted that the Trump coalition did turn out to vote, but not for Republicans. The essay was widely seen by Republicans in Washington as a first step toward distancing himself from some of his boss’s unpopular policies, an early indication that Vance hasn’t given up on his presidential ambitions.

As Republicans attempt to pick up the pieces, some Vance allies have charted out an alternative political future for the vice president—one that doesn’t include a 2028 White House bid.

Two people close to Vance asked him in recent weeks if he would consider returning to the Buckeye State to win his old Senate seat back. One of those people floated the idea of running for governor. Vance rejected both proposals, the people said. The fact that some confidants feel comfortable raising unconventional alternatives to his White House ambitions underscores just how much his future is now in flux.

Despite the political forces pulling against him, Vance still enjoys a considerable political advantage over the other Republicans who are weighing a 2028 presidential bid. His perch as vice president has granted him enormous name recognition among voters and he consistently leads in polls against potential GOP challengers. He has the support of powerful Republicans, including Donald Trump Jr., the president’s son, who publicly endorsed Vance’s postelection social-media essay that blamed the war for the midterm outcome.

Those close to Vance say the 42-year-old Marine veteran has never been all in on running for president in 2028. If he chooses not to run, the vice president would avoid subjecting his wife and four children to a brutal campaign, but at a heavy cost. One person who knows him predicted the ambitious vice president would be haunted by the thought that perhaps he could have been president.

Vance admitted during a CBS News town hall in October that “there’s a chance” he never runs. “The way that I think about life—big life decisions—my wife will tell you this…I’m a procrastinator,” the vice president said.

The midterm elections served as a 2028 dress rehearsal for Vance as he hosted fundraisers across the country and gave speeches in battleground states. Over the summer, he published a follow-up to his bestselling memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy,” hit the podcast circuit and appeared on “The View” and Bill Maher’s television show. Trump paid careful attention to the rollout and told associates that he enjoyed Vance’s performance.

But Vance also demonstrated some questionable political instincts. He questioned the religious beliefs of Kansas’ Democratic Senate candidate Adam Hamilton, a Methodist minister.

In Ohio, Vance defended an ad backed by Vivek Ramaswamy that featured Democrat Amy Acton’s mom calling her a liar, despite Acton being removed from her mother’s care as a child after her stepfather was charged with sexual abuse. In Michigan, Vance called Abdul El-Sayed “a little weasel who should shut his mouth and show a little gratitude to the country that gave him everything.”In Texas, Vance said of Democrat James Talarico, “You gotta wonder what the internet-search history of a man like that looks like.”All four Democrats went on to win their races.

People close to Vance said he has long been clear-eyed about the prospect of sweeping Republican losses in the midterms. One person who knows him described Vance as a doomer and said he frequently worried the fallout of the war with Iran would create a drag on Republicans even as Trump projected confidence that the GOP could defy history and maintain its majorities.

When a political ally texted Vance in September about the deteriorating political situation for Republicans, the person said the vice president replied that he didn’t know if he would bother with a presidential campaign.

When Trump picked Vance as his running mate, supporters heralded him as the vanguard of the New Right, who would solidify Republican opposition to muscular foreign intervention. A year into the job, the vice president was suddenly confronted with the possibility of another war in the Middle East, the kind he had spent his entire political career opposing.

Trump’s patience with Iran was running short in January and the president was weighing the prospect of a major military operation in the country. Vance privately urged the president not to give up on diplomacy, and he quietly began gathering polling data that would lay out the potential risks of an all-out war, according to text messages from the vice president viewed by The Wall Street Journal and people familiar with the matter.

Vance reached out personally to Mark Mitchell, then the head of polling at the firm Rasmussen Reports, to add questions related to a potential war with Iran to a survey Mitchell was already conducting. According to two people with direct knowledge of the episode, the vice president’s office provided direct input on the topics that should be surveyed and the kind of questions the poll should ask. Vance didn’t pay for the poll.

At the urging of the vice president, Mitchell polled support for a regime-change war with Iran, the number of U.S. casualties that the public would be willing to bear if such a conflict occurred, and whether the president should seek congressional approval before ordering strikes against Tehran.

The results, which were viewed by the Journal, reinforced his belief that the public would be skeptical of military action. While the public was split 44% to 43% on going to war, an overwhelming majority, 62%, said “an acceptable level of combat deaths for U.S. troops” would be under 100. Another 65%, meanwhile, said Trump should ask Congress for approval before sending the nation to war.

Efforts to persuade Trump to avoid a conflict failed, and the president has subsequently acknowledged that the war was partially to blame for heavy Republican losses. But Trump told the Journal that he hasn’t second-guessed the decision. “I don’t think about it. I did the right thing,” he said on election night, “I would have done it again.”

Some Republicans have increasingly spoken out against the war. “We just got to be honest. Gas is higher. It hurts people, working-class people, and it’s higher because of this conflict. That’s just a fact,” DeSantis told Stephen A. Smith during a Monday interview on SiriusXM. The governor, who ran against Trump in 2024 and who could challenge Vance in 2028, later told Laura Ingraham of Fox News that the midterms were “a rebuke of the president and the Congress.”

Vance watched clips of those interviews and has contemplated the possibility of DeSantis challenging him in a primary, according to people familiar with his thinking. The vice president has expressed concerns that it would be challenging to distance himself from the war and the economic fallout it created, the people said.

Trump has consistently declined to endorse a successor. “Maybe he won’t run,” the president said of Vance on Wednesday. “I don’t know who’s going to run.”People close to Vance said that the vice president will make a decision on his own timeline, adding that if he does run, winning a competitive primary would be preferable to being anointed the nominee.

The vice president, meanwhile, has taken initial steps to position himself as the leader of the party. He serves as the finance chair for the Republican National Committee, a role that puts him in constant contact with GOP donors who could support a presidential campaign. He has helmed the administration’s antifraud initiative, a public-facing position that could provide fodder for a good-government pitch to voters. He has reintroduced himself to the nation while stumping for Republican candidates. Vance hasn’t, however, made up his mind on his political future.