Donald Trump’s vice-president flew this month to Iowa, the state that traditionally kicks off the fight for the White House.Officially, JD Vance was in Des Moines to aid a Republican congressman facing a tough re-election fight in November’s midterms. But as supporters sat down in rows of folding chairs in a steel-grille-guard manufacturing plant they spoke of a different contest – the 2028 presidential race.April Melton (59), who chairs the Republican Party in Iowa’s Black Hawk County, said she had come to hear the “next president of the United States”.“He’s like Donald Trump,” said Patricia Lage (65). “He wants to see America great again.”Vance has been seen as the heir apparent since Trump named him as his running mate in 2024.A fierce defender of the president, he has stepped up his domestic travel in recent months, criss-crossing the country in support of Republican congressional candidates and touting the Trump administration’s record.All the while, Vance has appeared to lay the groundwork for a future presidential campaign of his own, fundraising for the Republican Party and visiting key early-voting states such as Iowa, whose caucuses mark the official start of the presidential nomination process.But with Trump’s approval ratings sliding to new lows and the Republican Party facing an uphill battle to maintain control of Congress in November’s midterm elections, Vance’s claim on the prize may no longer be so certain. Secretary of state Marco Rubio – whom the vice-president once called his “best friend in the administration” – appears to be making ground, both with Trump and the party grassroots. At stake is whether Vance’s mix of economic populism and isolationist foreign policy will prevail, rather than Rubio’s more orthodox brand of Republican politics.JD Vance and Donald Trump in the White House earlier this month. Photograph: Kent Nishimura/AFP/Getty Recently, the president himself publicly questioned whether his 41-year-old number two was ready for the top job.“Who is it going to be? Is it going to be JD? Is it going to be somebody else? I don’t know,” Trump said at a dinner in the White House Rose Garden. “Who likes JD Vance?” the president asked. Attendees cheered.Then he said: “Who likes Marco Rubio?” The crowd applauded again.Preparing the ground – and the fundsVance has not yet said whether he will run for the 2028 Republican nomination, as Trump’s Make America Great Again movement begins to contemplate life after the president has left office.“There are few topics that I want to talk about less than what office I am going to run for years down the road,” Vance said last week after being pressed by reporters. “If I was the American people, there are few things that I would hate more than a person who’s barely been in one office for a year and a half ... angling for a job two and a half years down the road,” he added. “Let’s do a good job now.”People close to him say he will make a firm decision later this year, after his wife gives birth to the couple’s fourth child in the summer.A Marine Corps veteran and Yale Law School graduate who left corporate law to work for PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel’s venture capital firm, Vance has had a national profile since his 2016 memoir Hillbilly Elegy.[ Donald Clarke: I am partly responsible for JD Vance’s rise to be Donald Trump’s running mate. SorryOpens in new window ]Next month, he will publish a sequel on his conversion to Catholicism, titled Communion.And while Vance and his advisers are wary of appearing as if they are paving the way for any future political campaign, he has served since March last year as finance chair of the Republican National Committee – entrusted with leading the party’s fundraising efforts across the country.Vance is no stranger to wealthy political donors – Thiel bankrolled his successful Senate bid in 2022 – and he is the first vice-president to take on the role of RNC finance chair, which has historically gone to long-time campaign contributors. It is a position, campaign veterans say, that can only bolster his future plans.The post allows him to travel the country and forge relationships with high-powered and deep-pocketed donors who could fund a future presidential campaign.Hours before landing in Des Moines this month, he stopped in Oklahoma City for a private lunch that local reporters said was expected to raise $2 million for the RNC.It was the latest in a string of closed-door breakfasts, lunches, dinners and drinks parties across the country in which Vance has raked in tens of millions of dollars for the Republican Party, building up his contact book in the process.Last summer, he raised millions at exclusive resorts such as Nantucket, Massachusetts, Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and Big Sky, Montana.In March, he met donors from the Rockbridge Network – a secretive group the vice-president cofounded with Chris Buskirk, who runs a venture firm that employs Donald Trump jnr – in Nashville, Tennessee.Among the attendees were Rebekah Mercer, the Renaissance Technologies hedge-fund heiress and Republican Party megadonor, and Chris LaCivita, the veteran political consultant and architect of Trump’s winning 2024 campaign.Lanhee Chen, a fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and former adviser to former Republican presidential candidates, including Rubio, says Vance’s position at the RNC is a “tremendous advantage”.“When you talk to donors, they have interacted with the vice-president. They have gotten to know him. They regard him highly in many cases,” Chen adds.“He has basically been blessed at this point ... How much of that blessing continues? That is the president’s decision, ultimately. But I just do not see a world where JD Vance is not the Republican nominee in 2028.”US secretary of state Marco Rubio and vice-president JD Vance in the Oval Office. Photograph: Doug Mills/The New York Times JD and Marco – friends or foes?Hours before Vance took the stage in Iowa this month, Rubio, a former presidential candidate in 2016, appeared at the lectern in the White House briefing room.Filling in for White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, who is on maternity leave, the secretary of state confidently fielded a range of questions from reporters.His optimistic and seemingly improvised answer to a question about his “hope” for the United States was promoted by both the White House and Rubio’s own social media accounts and set to swelling orchestral music.“Are we going to pretend like that’s not a presidential candidate?” Republican strategist Josh Holmes later asked on Ruthless, a popular conservative podcast.“JD is going to have to work for it,” replied co-host John Ashbrook. “He’s going to be very hard to beat, but the reality is there’s a race on.”The 54-year-old secretary of state has played an increasingly central role in the second Trump administration as a driving force behind the president’s interventionist foreign policy agenda, from Venezuela to the Iran war.Vance, by contrast, has suffered foreign-policy setbacks.Last month, he sought to rally support for Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, who suffered a landslide defeat in parliamentary elections days later.An economic populist, Vance built his political brand in part on opposing military intervention across the world, from Ukraine to the Middle East. He endorsed the president’s bid to return to office in January 2023 with a Wall Street Journal article titled “Trump’s Best Foreign Policy? Not Starting Any Wars.”But this year the Iran conflict has created awkward moments for the vice-president, as the man who campaigned against foreign entanglements has been forced to defend the president’s war of choice in the Middle East.Trump himself, who sent Vance last month on an ill-fated attempt in Islamabad to broker a lasting agreement to end the hostilities in Iran, has acknowledged that the vice-president is “maybe less enthusiastic about going” to war and “philosophically a little bit different”.Despite their apparent differences in ideological outlook, Rubio has suggested he will defer to Vance if the vice-president launches a 2028 bid. In an NBC interview at the weekend Rubio called Vance a “phenomenal candidate”.“I’ve said publicly, and I’ll say it again, I’ll be the first person to sign up and support him,” the secretary of state added. “I think JD would do great.”But he sidestepped questions about whether he would like to be president or vice-president himself. “I want to be the secretary of state and I’ll worry about the future in the future,” he said.Vance was asked by reporters last week why the president appeared to be pitting the two men against each other.The vice-president replied that he and Rubio were “very much focused on accomplishing the American people’s business right now”.But, pressed further, he deadpanned: “I just don’t think it sounds like the president of the United States to have a televised competition for who would succeed him as his apprentice. I just think that’s not at all what you would expect the president to do.”JD Vance in Budapest with Viktor Orbán last month days before the latter's ouster as Hungarian prime minister. Photograph: Jonathan Ernst/Getty An uphill struggle?With Trump’s approval ratings on the slide, Republicans across the US are bracing for what could be a difficult midterm election cycle – and already contemplating the presidential campaigns that will start in earnest immediately after the November 3rd vote.Vance is widely seen as a talented debater, although he is still a relative newcomer to electoral politics, having been picked as Trump’s running mate when he was a first-term senator for Ohio. He has at times stumbled on the stump, including in Iowa this month. On one occasion he lost his place in his notes and struggled to recall the name of a local Democratic congressional candidate.“Marco Rubio has far more natural political instincts than JD Vance,” said Whit Ayres, a Republican pollster who played a central role in Rubio’s 2016 presidential campaign.Vance nevertheless remained the top choice among conservative voters to be the Republican 2028 presidential nominee at this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference, a high-profile annual gathering held just outside Dallas in March. But a straw poll of attendees suggested he faces a growing threat from Rubio.The CPAC survey found Vance had the support of 53 per cent of conference attendees, with 35 per cent backing Rubio.Last year, by contrast, Vance won the straw poll with 61 per cent while Rubio came in a distant fourth, at just 3 per cent.Other surveys give Vance a similar lead over potential rivals. A RealClearPolitics average of national polls shows Vance enjoys the backing of roughly 40 per cent of likely Republican voters in a potential primary, about twice the share who said they would support Rubio.Trump is barred under the US constitution from seeking a third term in the White House.But critics and allies alike expect him to loom large over the entire 2028 presidential election – and withhold any formal endorsement for Vance, Rubio or any other hypothetical Republican candidate for the foreseeable future.“[Trump] is not a typical lame duck president who feels that the process ... should be something that he is not involved in,” says Kevin Madden, a senior partner at the consultancy Penta who was a top adviser to Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign. “He is going to cast a very long shadow over this entire ... process.”“The president is not going to want to pass the baton,” says Marc Short, chief of staff to vice-president Mike Pence during Trump’s first term. “This is going to drag out for quite some time.”'These midterms will determine: is JD clearly the heir apparent?' Photograph: The White House/AP/PA Faithful to TrumpThe Iowa caucuses are still a year and a half away.But with the midterms on the horizon and the expectation that Democratic presidential hopefuls will officially launch their own presidential bids later in the year, Republican Party grandees in Des Moines are ready to talk about the future.Jeff Kaufmann, chair of the Iowa Republican Party, says Vance has shown he is a “team player” by campaigning for Republican candidates across the country.Bob Vander Plaats, president of the Family Leader, an influential conservative Christian organisation, praises the vice-president as a “huge talent”. Kaufmann and Vander Plaats both met Vance privately before the rally in Des Moines.But Vander Plaats warns that in what is likely to be a challenging year for Republicans, Vance has much to gain – or lose – from the party’s performance in November.“These midterms will determine: is JD clearly the heir apparent?” he said after the meeting. “It will eliminate a ton of competition if [Republicans] are successful.”The strategy is not without its risks. Trump’s approval rating with the wider electorate is declining, and the latest RealClearPolitics average found just 40 per cent of Americans approve of the job he is doing as president.While Vance remains popular among the Republican base, his overall approval ratings have also been weighed down as the broader electorate sours on the Trump administration.For now, Vance remains faithful to Trump and has recently taken on a new domestic portfolio as chair of the administration’s anti-fraud taskforce.Allies insist standing by Trump is the only viable strategy in a political environment dominated by a president who rewards loyalty above all else.“JD rightfully knows that his future is going to rise and set on how successful the Trump presidency is,” says one Republican consultant close to the White House.In the ranks of the Des Moines faithful, support for Vance still seemed strong – as did backing for his potential rival.Asked who should be the Republican Party’s standard bearer after Trump, David Lage – a 66-year-old wearing a red baseball cap embroidered with the message “Jesus Is My Savior, Trump is My President” – replied: “I would say Vance is next in line. Rubio’s a real close second.” – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2026