How Deep Is the Democratic Bench, Really?

Amid a near-constant stream of negative poll numbers this summer, Democrats are trying to put on a brave face about their party’s prospects in 2028. On the surface there are reasons to be cautiously optimistic. Several of the more likely contenders for the presidential nomination, such as California governor Gavin Newsom and former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, are already prominent national figures, while at least four other possible candidates—Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer, Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro, Kentucky governor Andy Beshear, and Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff—hail from states Donald Trump won last November, rather than the party’s coastal bastions.

Nearly every one of them would herald a much-needed generational change for a party verging on gerontocracy. Even those who acted as Joe Biden’s surrogates would mark a break from the dynastic gatekeeping (the Clintons, the Obamas, and the Bidens) that has characterized the party for thirty years. The limits of identity politics might also be sinking in. Most potential candidates are emphasizing the importance of ramping up investments in infrastructure, creating good-paying jobs, and curbing high costs for housing and health care over other positions that have driven away working-class voters. And most are skillful, telegenic communicators who are careful to jab at Trump’s overreach and hypocrisy, not his blue-collar supporters.

As progressive pundits have insisted in recent years, the Democratic Party ostensibly enjoys a remarkably “deep bench” of rising stars. This is a comforting thesis indeed. Although the fallout from Joe Biden’s cognitive decline in office continues to afflict the party’s standing, it would seem that brighter days are around the corner. Especially once Trump’s tariffs eat into Americans’ purchasing power—leaving many who are living paycheck-to-paycheck to choose between more credit card debt and fewer goods and services—party activists expect disappointed voters to give Democrats a second hearing. And once grassroots excitement over the nominating contest gets underway (hopefully stoked by a morale-boosting victory in the House in the 2026 midterms), the party’s next leaders should be able to put the missteps and humiliations of the Biden era firmly behind them.

If only the road to redemption were that easy. The Democratic Party certainly has no shortage of personalities adept at dominating social media and cable news, from Newsom to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a perennial favorite of urban progressives. But a growing field of elected officials hoping to be the next Barack Obama is not the same thing as a deep bench of tested leaders. Nor is it evidence that Democrats have had any sort of reckoning over what went wrong for the party in the Biden era. They have struggled in vain to project unity, and though some House Democrats have honed their critique of monopoly power in the last year, core supporters have only a vague sense of the party’s agenda and strategy going forward.

Little seems to be happening in terms of freely debating the party’s top priorities and errors. Depending on the issue, the party’s image is one of disarray, obliviousness, or self-flattery. Abortion excepted, Americans tend to believe elected Democrats hold niche priorities. Countless articles report ex-supporters conveying that Democrats either equivocate or maintain unwise stances on a host of sociocultural issues. Meanwhile, the party’s fecklessness in opposition has left much of its base incredulous and demoralized. Strategists angling for top campaign posts should thus prepare for a slog. Although it is early, the depth of this dissatisfaction is showing up in poll numbers for top Democrats. According to CNN analyst Harry Enten, this is the first time since 1992 in which there is no “national early poll leader” claiming the support of 25 percent or more of likely Democratic voters. Democrats may have nationally known figures, but few are well-regarded outside their existing power bases.

The party, moreover, remains largely disengaged from the constituencies it must reach to prevail in 2028. To the extent the party enjoys any strong leadership that might also resonate with Trump-leaning audiences, it is demonstrated by House members like Reps. Chris Deluzio and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, who represent swing districts, and former administration officials such as Lina Khan, who served as Biden’s razor-sharp FTC chair but has never held elected office. (None of these Democrats, to be clear, are tipped to launch a dark horse bid for the nomination.) This protracted impasse over how to compete in difficult regions hardly leaves the impression that the party, at this stage, can boast of a determined and daring bench ahead of the 2028 primary.

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Of course, six months into Trump’s second term, Democratic strategists naturally want to put Kamala Harris’s defeat behind them and highlight the party’s assets. Some of the potential contenders in the 2028 primary have bona fides when it comes to spurring development and winning over independents and skeptics; notably, Whitmer and Shapiro significantly outperformed Biden’s 2020 results in their respective reelection campaigns. Most also seem to grasp that the Biden administration’s inadequate response to the cost-of-living crisis amplified the party’s losses among working-class voters. While none of the governors expected to run exude the economic populism of former Senator Sherrod Brown or Bernie Sanders, the field as a whole seems to recognize it must tackle the affordable housing crisis, out-of-control junk fees, and other sources of economic pain that Trump cleverly exploited on the campaign trail.

There are glimmers, too, that a couple top contenders may align with the “monopoly busters” framework gaining traction among House Democrats. Buttigieg’s tenure at the Department of Transportation reportedly transformed his previously uncritical outlook on market power and anticompetitive practices, while Shapiro has a decent track record on consumer protection stretching back to his time as Pennsylvania’s Attorney General. If Rep. Ro Khanna, probably the party’s most prominent critic of monopoly power after Elizabeth Warren, jumps into the race, the primary could move more decisively in an economically populist direction. That might well solidify a commitment to winning back blue-collar voters who feel as though they’ve been endlessly thrashed since the China Shock and the Great Recession.

Still, there is a sense that at this ripe moment to speak frankly about economic power and outright corruption, not a single voice from inside the Democratic-progressive tent is truly setting the party’s agenda—at least not in a manner that promises to fundamentally shake up national politics and challenge the underlying assumptions about the battle lines of the 2028 election.

Why haven’t Democrats accepted the twin imperatives of surmounting their regional weaknesses and reining in market abuses and crony capitalism? One simple reason is that top Democrats are trapped in a time warp in which the same attacks that worked against Trump and the GOP in the 2018 midterms are just as effective today. Newsom and Illinois Governor JB Pritzker, another likely presidential contender, personify this approach. They are extremely wealthy partisan warriors who reliably bash Trump’s character and executive orders but have never had to fight close elections. Until very recently in Newsom’s case, both have enthusiastically backed the talking points and goals of vanguard cultural progressives. These actions may burnish their image with the most tribal segments of the Brahmin left. But they won’t appeal to the 11 percent of working-class Trump voters that the Center for Working Class Politics recently concluded the next Democratic nominee needs to revive their party’s fortunes.

The positions taken by dominant figures like Newsom, Pritzker, and Harris, which have heavily shaped the party’s national image, also tend to muzzle independent-minded but less powerful Democrats. Indeed, another reason no Democrat appears capable of changing the state of play nationally is that even the most sensible ones are afraid of rebuking the positions that have saddled the party with such a dismal reputation. Obviously, Democrats tempted to buck identity-based orthodoxies don’t want to be assailed as heartless, opportunistic, and throwing the vulnerable “under the bus.” Yet it is worth pondering who stands to truly gain from maintaining the ideology of neo-progressivism. Identity politics hasn’t alleviated wealth, income, and regional inequalities, and Democrats are increasingly distrusted by those without a college degree. Put another way, perhaps it is actually rent-seeking consultancies and heavily funded advocacy groups—not the poor, disenfranchised, and dispossessed—who might be disadvantaged by a frank discussion of why the party is hemorrhaging working-class voters of all backgrounds.

That kind of showdown could spark an intraparty battle not seen since the 1970s. But it is a necessary step to becoming a viable majority party once more. The groups that have profited handsomely from a maximalist form of identity politics are no doubt circling the wagons, equating their political stakes with those of ordinary wage-earners. At this point, however, it takes a certain amount of delusion to believe identity politics has been especially beneficial to working-class minorities or has ever been, for that matter, smart politics. Fearful of MAGA’s most extreme voices and activists, Democratic supporters have been careful not to dissent, lest it embolden their opponents. Yet ebbing enthusiasm for identity politics suggests many loyal Democratic voters have quietly grown fatigued by the litany of declarations required of “right-thinking” people.

Alas, no emerging party leader has confronted why a growing number of minorities and even young women have drifted from the party since Trump’s first election. Plenty of evidence indicates that Democrats have floundered by prioritizing sometimes quite fringe cultural positions over economic security, better life chances, and social cohesion. But as the experience of Democratic Rep. Seth Moulton last November showed, one can get publicly mauled for expressing the “wrong” point of view. And so, the party’s air of hypocrisy continues. The party purportedly doesn’t want to “alienate” anybody—including insider groups with disproportionate veto power—even as some of its most prominent leaders and influencers have cast the other half of the electorate as teeming with neo-Confederates and troglodytes.

Simply exploring a different tack from “Resistance”-style politics can also result in scorn and ostracism. After the 2022 midterms, Whitmer was feted by progressives for her reelection victory and securing a Democratic trifecta in Michigan (since lost). She was recognized as a deft politician who mobilized voters over abortion rights but also stressed the importance of advancing Michigan’s long overdue economic rebound. In a long-sought victory for organized labor, Whitmer helped repeal the state’s right-to-work law in 2023. However, two ill-executed appearances with Trump this past April that were focused on regional issues nearly consigned her to pariah status in the eyes of appalled progressives. The effect on Whitmer seems to be limited, as she again visited the White House this past week to press for tariff relief on behalf of Michigan’s auto sector. Still, the judgment of progressives critical of Whitmer and other “wayward” Democrats appears unchanged: deviate from the script and you’ll be penalized.

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This is the quandary rumored presidential hopefuls face as they attempt to devise a fresh strategy for the Democratic Party. Hewing to a narrow interpretation of what it means to “fight back,” professional activists and pundits evidently prefer the theatrics of leaders like Newsom, Pritzker, and Sen. Cory Booker to anything that smacks of “moderation” and “triangulation,” even if it might, ceteris paribus, strengthen the hand of labor-friendly Democrats in tough-to-win states and districts. That inflexibility severely constrains how Democrats may court red state voters; ditto working-class voters in blue cities who defected from the Biden-Harris coalition. It likewise compromises the ability of the party’s more promising leaders to take the long view and act shrewdly under difficult circumstances.

Finally, it perpetuates an atmosphere of suspicion and persecution at the exact moment the Democratic Party needs to reinvent itself as the true champion of the American dream, workers’ rights, and intellectual freedom—the last a precondition of preserving a literate society capable of self-government.

Democrats eyeing the 2028 nomination have roughly eighteen months to get clear about what it will take to win. Perhaps with voices like Lina Khan and Dan Osborn, the Nebraska independent, generating more grassroots excitement than the current crop of Democratic honchos, the party will rediscover what it means to build a broad but powerful coalition. As even Ocasio-Cortez, that original darling of neo-progressivism, seems to be learning, dogma is the death knell of social-democratic change. For now, long-suffering loyalists can only hope the party’s presidential hopefuls reach that epiphany—or that an unexpected challenger emerges to redefine the possible.