Ben Shapiro wasted no time handicapping the next presidential race after Republicans got buried.

His side would rather talk about anything except what sank the party.

And Laura Ingraham answered him with one question about a foreign leader his crowd never wants asked.

Shapiro Started Picking Winners Before Anybody Counted the Losses

Democrats grabbed both chambers of Congress in the midterms, and the Right split into two camps almost before the concession calls ended.

One camp wanted to study the wreckage.

The other wanted to talk about 2028, and Ben Shapiro planted himself firmly in that group. The Daily Wire co-founder went live the morning after the vote and started sizing up the Republican bench like a horse trader leaning on the paddock rail.

He predicted Ron DeSantis will run. And he told his audience not to bet on Marco Rubio, laying out the reasoning in plain terms. “Number one, 2028 is likely a poison chalice, number two, if he runs against JD and JD runs and he loses to JD, he’s toast,” Shapiro said.

“If you’re Rubio, every math ends with you’re not going to run,” he added.

The betting markets played along. DeSantis’ odds of winning the nomination on Kalshi jumped from about 5 percent to 18 percent in a single day, though JD Vance still held the top spot at 31 percent.

Laura Ingraham saw the clip and asked about something else entirely.

“So was Iran still worth losing everything over? And if you really care about Israel then you have to admit how bad last night was for its future, too. Did Netanyahu not game this out?” the host of The Ingraham Angle wrote on X, posting her question right on top of the Shapiro video.

The Hawks Promised a Stronger Ally and Delivered a Colder Congress

Most of the post-election talk about the war centered on the gas pump, and with good reason.

The fighting drove up fuel and shipping costs for families who were already pinching pennies. An Echelon Insights poll of Trump 2024 voters who now disapprove of the President found 15 percent pointing to wars and Iran as the reason. Just 3 percent blamed tariffs.

But Ingraham aimed at a softer spot. She went after the one cause the war’s loudest cheerleaders swear they care about above everything else.

Israel’s own politicians read the returns the same way she did. Former Prime Minister Yair Lapid said the results showed “Israel cannot afford” to keep Netanyahu in office. Yair Golan, who leads a center-left party in the Knesset, said the outcome revealed “just how toxic Netanyahu is among both Democrats and Republicans.”

Netanyahu tied himself to one American party more openly than any Israeli leader before him. President Trump endorsed him ahead of Israel’s late October election, and his coalition still lost its majority in the Knesset. He now holds the job as a caretaker.

The American sweep landed a second punch. A Democrat Congress makes it far harder for Netanyahu to pull the United States into another round of strikes on Iran, which is exactly what he had hoped for.

And the polling explains why his rivals sound so alarmed. Gallup found in February that 65 percent of Democrats now sympathize more with the Palestinians, while just 17 percent side with the Israelis. As recently as 2016, roughly half of Democrats leaned toward Israel.

The Republican number should worry anyone who calls himself pro-Israel even more. Seventy percent of Republicans still sympathize more with the Israelis, but that figure dropped 10 points after 2024 and now sits at its lowest level since 2004.

Now look at who takes the gavels in January. Back in April, dozens of senators, nearly all of them Democrats, voted for a failed motion to block certain weapons sales to Israel. Lapid praised two Democrat allies for voting with Israel even when most of their caucus went the other way.

The incoming class drags that caucus further left. Michigan just elected Abdul El-Sayed, a Medicare for All progressive who accused Israel of genocide on the campaign trail, and the Democratic Socialists of America doubled its House delegation. A party sprinting toward government-run medicine and socialist economics at home won’t spend much energy defending an ally overseas.

And Trump saw the danger coming. On Election Day, the President called into Fox & Friends and announced a deal with Netanyahu to end roughly $4 billion a year in American funding to Israel after this year, while still selling Israel weapons.

He asked why Republicans should “suffer the slings from lunatics like an El-Sayed when they don’t need it.”

Netanyahu himself said in January that he wanted the aid tapered to zero at some point, though the current memorandum of understanding runs into 2028. When the most pro-Israel President in memory has to defuse American aid as a campaign liability on the morning of an election, somebody’s grand strategy went sideways.

Washington Already Watched Netanyahu Pick a Party Once

Lapid pinned the slide on a specific moment. Israel, he said, needs to go “back to the rule that worked for us for seventy years and broke in 2015, when Netanyahu went to speak in Congress.”

He’s got a point about the history.

On January 21, 2015, House Speaker John Boehner invited Netanyahu to address a joint meeting of Congress without first telling the Obama White House. Netanyahu accepted. On March 3, 2015, he stood in the House chamber and tore into Barack Obama’s nuclear talks with Iran, two weeks before Israel’s own election.

Conservatives cheered the substance, and the substance held up. Obama’s deal handed Tehran sanctions relief, and Trump walked away from it in 2018.

But 58 Democrats skipped the speech, 50 from the House and eight from the Senate. Rep Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) left saying the address “felt to me like an effort to stampede the United States into war once again.”

Republicans laughed off the boycott at the time. Plenty of it was pure Obama loyalty. And yet the Gallup trend line started bending right around then, and it hasn’t stopped bending since.

Maybe that’s too neat. A whole generation of campus activists turned on Israel without any help from Netanyahu, and the Left’s appetite for blaming the Jewish state hardly needed a speech to get going.

But nobody forced a Prime Minister to stake his country’s standing on one American party twice. The second bet came with a war attached, and the voters who paid for it at the pump just handed the gavels to the other side.

The Heir Apparent Read the Wreckage Before Anybody Else

JD Vance didn’t wait for anybody to game it out.

“The reason we lost is the war. The president himself said so last night,” the Vice President wrote. He added that a Republican pollster told him Trump voters were angry about three things: the war, the cost of living, and the relationship between the United States and Israel.

Then he dared the war’s defenders to make their case out loud. “Argue it was a worthwhile cost to pay. Agree or disagree, that’s at least honest,” Vance wrote.

Donald Trump Jr reposted the message with “Every word of this is” followed by a row of three 100 emojis.

The President didn’t dodge the question either. Touring construction on his White House ballroom, Trump answered a reporter’s question about Vance’s post. “Well, I think it’s largely true, because it drove gasoline up a little bit short-term,” Trump said. He still defends the decision on nuclear grounds. “You can’t let Iran have a nuclear weapon,” he said.

Trump owns the call, and he says so plainly. But the interventionists who spent years lobbying him toward that fight sold it as quick and cheap. They left him holding the receipt at the gas station.

Which brings things back to Shapiro. He refused to back Trump in 2016. He said in January 2024 that he’d vote for DeSantis if the primaries were held that day. He has pushed for confrontation with Iran for most of his career, and when Vance helped broker a framework with Tehran in June, Shapiro brushed it off as “JD’s deal.”

Now he’s the one handicapping 2028, talking up DeSantis, and walking viewers through how a Vance run could box out the rest of the field. Readers can connect those dots on their own.

And Ingraham’s history runs the other direction. She backed Trump during the 2016 primary fight and spoke at the convention that nominated him.

The establishment wing of the party already wants a fight with Vance, the clear America First heir apparent, precisely because he opposes foreign wars and the open-borders policies that undercut American workers. The midterm autopsy just gave them an excuse to start swinging sooner.

Ben Shapiro spent the morning after the election running the odds on who should carry the party into 2028. Laura Ingraham was still waiting for somebody to run the odds on the war that dug the hole.

Sources: Mediaite, “Fox’s Laura Ingraham Fumes at GOP ‘Losing Everything’ Over Iran”; Laura Ingraham on X; Mario Nawfal on X (Ben Shapiro 2028 breakdown); MS NOW, “A bad night for the GOP may have been a good night for one 2028 hopeful”; Tampa Free Press and The Daily Beast on Kalshi 2028 odds; Newsweek on Vance’s X post; Reuters via US News, “Netanyahu Rivals Seize on Democrats’ Sweep of US Congress”; Al Jazeera on Lapid and Golan; The Washington Times on Israeli reactions; The Algemeiner, “Israel Braces for Hostile US Congress”; Reuters and ABC News on Trump’s Israel aid announcement; Jewish Telegraphic Agency on the April Senate vote and Netanyahu’s aid comments; Gallup via the Associated Press, February 2026 sympathies poll; NBC News, PBS, and The Hill on the March 3, 2015 address; AP via The Washington Informer on the 2015 boycott.