Vice President JD Vance is finally speaking out about his 2028 plans.

The 41-year-old is seen by many – but not all – in MAGA as the natural successor to Donald Trump, having been his running mate in 2024 and taking an active, prominent public-facing role in the second Trump administration that sees him regularly engaging with the press and keeping his name relevant in voters’ minds.

But the question of who will be the Republican nominee in 2028 has always been an uncomfortable topic for Trump’s inner circle, not least because Trump himself frequently jokes that he will run again and the president’s allies know too well the consequences of being seen as overshadowing their boss on the national stage.

Since taking office as vice president in 2025, Vance has been named in two CPAC straw polls where members of the pro-Trump Conservative Political Action Conference, a gathering of MAGA-world akin to a mini-Republican convention, vote on who should lead the conservative movement as the Republican Party’s presidential nominee. Last year, he dominated the poll with Steve Bannon as his closest rival — Bannon, a first-term White House strategist and MAGA celebrity, has long viewed the vice president as a pawn of Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley. This year he was closely followed by Marco Rubio, the secretary of State.

In a new interview airing Sunday, however, Vance made clear that there is one thing weighing on his decision more than anything else: The 2026 midterm elections.

“Usha and I will absolutely sit down and talk about what comes next for our family,” said Vance, saying that decision would take place after November. “The way I make decisions is, I try not to make them until I absolutely must.”

Democrats are eagerly awaiting a chance to end one or both of the twin Republican majorities in Congress after one and a half years of largely unfettered MAGA dominance in Washington, restrained only by the occasional Supreme Court ruling or party defector. November’s midterms look more and more like the moment that will happen, as Republicans have a significant disadvantage in generic ballot polling and Trump’s approval rating continues to drop.

The president’s own interference in GOP Senate primaries has also worsened an election map in the upper chamber which now looks more favorable to Democrats than Republicans would have ever predicted last year, thanks to the defeat of John Cornyn, a Republican incumbent, in the Texas GOP Senate primary and new polls showing GOP candidates losing in Maine and Alaska.

Republicans can afford to lose three seats in the upper chamber and still maintain a majority through Vance’s tiebreaking vote. But a crushing defeat for his party would both diminish Vance’s relevance as president of the Senate as well as narrow the path towards the GOP nomination in 2028, as he could be forced to explain his role in the administration’s crippling unpopularity.

Vance himself, despite being vice president, is only a political novice. First elected to the Senate in 2022, he’d never held elected office before his bid for the upper chamber on the back of his Trump support and background as the author of Hillbilly Elegy. He came from behind to sweep the field only after securing Trump’s endorsement, reportedly at the urging of Donald Trump Jr., with whom he became close personal friends.

Then just a third of a way into that term he was uplifted to become Trump’s running mate, again reportedly at Trump Jr.’s urging. In just a few years, Vance experienced a meteoric political ascension that could continue with a victory in the 2028 Republican presidential primary and his own shot at the presidency.

But he’s likely to be opposed for the 2028 nomination if he runs, even if he manages to lock up his boss’s endorsement early on. Rubio is being eyed as a top contender, and others in the House and Senate are likely plotting their moves for the first presidential election cycle in more than a decade without Donald Trump’s name somewhere on the ballot.

Vance seemed to suggest in his interview that he was confident he’d win that endorsement if it came to it.

“I have no doubt that the president of the United States is going to be very supportive of anything that I ultimately decide to do,” Vance told CBS. “But we really just haven’t talked about what that thing will be.”