Your 2028 Democratic Presidential Contenders!

I am underwhelmed.

Judging from the early days of the Trump administration there should be no dearth of contenders for the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination. It definitely looks like a prize worth having. Trump’s approval ratings have dropped rapidly, including on the all-important area of the economy, formerly his greatest strength. Public support for his trade war is weak and the outcome potentially dire. While there’s a long way to go it does look like the GOP and whoever their nominee is in 2028 will be eminently beatable, even if the administration moderates from its current “shock and awe” approach.

Beatable, but hardly a sure thing. Democrats are quickly forgetting that we still live in a populist age and that there is a working-class sized hole in their coalition. It’s much more fun and emotionally satisfying to think and talk about how much you hate Donald Trump and everything he stands for. There’s certainly a lot to be upset about but that does not help you win elections—not just the presidency but all those Senate races in red-leaning working-class states where Democrats have been getting walloped and where, if they don’t improve, they will be a Senate minority indefinitely.

With that in mind, let’s take a look at possible Democratic presidential contenders for 2028 and how they are approaching this challenge. I’ll sort them into five general categories; I hesitate to call them “lanes” at this early date when differentiation is still so fuzzy.

Let’s do it all over again! The most prominent politician in this category is of course Kamala Harris. As the most recent Democratic presidential candidate, Harris has 100 percent name recognition among potential Democratic primary voters and residual good will among some of these voters for taking on Trump. Her average support in polling on the 2028 Democratic nomination is far ahead of any other potential candidate: 27 percent say they’d prefer her compared to 16 percent for Pete Buttigieg, 13 percent for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortes (AOC), 9 percent for Cory Booker, 7 percent for Gavin Newsom, and 5 percent for Josh Shapiro, Gretchen Whitmer, and Tim Walz.

Harris also has a significant fan base in the party that could be activated on her behalf if she decided to enter the race. They and she would argue that she was a great candidate who was dragged down by Joe Biden and handicapped by her late entry into the 2024 presidential race. And wasn’t everything she said about Trump, the fascist, true? Give her the chance to have a proper campaign, they’ll maintain, and she’ll have the GOP on the run. Plus, did we mention that she’s a black woman?

Despite all this, Harris’s road to getting the nomination, much less winning the 2028 general election, would be quite difficult. A lot of her current advantage is just name recognition. And Democrats have not historically nominated losers to run again for president. Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, Al Gore, Michael Dukakis…the list goes on. The last loser who got run to again was Adlai Stevenson in 1956 and he lost.

If the historical record for election losers is not encouraging neither is the likelihood that Democrats will be absolutely desperate to defeat the Trumpian GOP in 2028 and turn the page from a generally losing era. That will predispose Democratic primary voters to look for a fresh face to finally vanquish their foe. Kamala will not qualify.

Others in this category: Pete Buttigieg, Tim Walz. Buttigieg has daringly suggested that perhaps diversity trainings have gone too far to the point where they are sometimes “like something out of Portlandia.” This seems unlikely to be enough to dissociate him from the Biden-Harris administration and its cultural and economic record. As for Walz, he recently averred in a town hall in Texas with repeat loser Beto O’Rourke:

We've been talking about this for years as a country of immigrants, and we let them define the issue on immigration. We let them define the issue on DEI, and we let them define what woke is….We got ourselves in this mess because we weren't bold enough to stand up and say “you damn right we're proud of these policies. We're going to put them in, and we're going to execute them”.

‘Nuff said.

All resistance, all the time. This will be a big category. Indeed, it will likely be the “Great Attractor” for the 2028 Democratic field. The level of animus toward the Trump administration is off the charts among college-educated Democratic partisans, exactly the voters most likely to show up in Democratic primaries. For many candidates, the temptation will be irresistible to cash in on these feelings by offering the most flamboyant possible denunciations of Trump and the GOP and downplaying more nuanced approaches.

A leading “resister” is California governor Gavin Newsom. After Trump was elected, he immediately declared a special session of the California legislature. His office said:

The special session responds to the public statements and proposals put forward by President-elect Trump and his advisors, and actions taken during his first term in office—an agenda that could erode essential freedoms and individual rights, including women’s rights and LGBTQ+ rights…A special session allows for expedited action that will best protect California and its values from attacks.

A steady stream of denunciations of Trump administration actions from Newsom and the governor’s office has followed. Intriguingly, Newsom has tried to titrate his resistance persona will a little bit of outreach to the other side. He started a podcast, This is Gavin Newsom, where his guests have include conservative activist Charlie Kirk, head of Turning Point USA, and Steve Bannon. Famously, in his podcast with Kirk he agreed that trans-identified biological boys in girls’ sports seemed “unfair” to him. But under intense blowback he has since walked back any implication that he would back a policy to change that situation in California or any other place.

That dynamic will likely affect any other resisters who attempt to nuance their approaches. The intense push among fervent partisans to give no ground on any issue, not to mention being attacked by competitor candidates eager to position themselves as the “real” resistance, will herd these candidates toward all resistance all the time and nothing else.

Others in this category: JB Pritzker, Chris Murphy, Cory Booker. These candidates stand ready to push Newsom and anyone else who strays from strict resistance orthodoxy out of the way and take their place. They will not complicate their profiles even as much as Newsom has done. And, as noted, militant resistance is sure to suck more candidates in as time goes on because of the large potential payoff among likely primary voters.

There’s no such thing as being too progressive. There is a considerable part of the Democratic Party that does not believe Democrats moved too far left in any way. The problem instead was not being sufficiently progressive, especially about economics. Currently, Bernie Sanders and his heir-apparent, AOC, are out on their nationwide “Fighting Oligarchy” tour and drawing large crowds to their rallies. There’s clearly an appetite for unapologetic populist economics that sees the Democrats’ problem as not hitting the “billionaire class” hard enough.

Since Sanders is too old to run, the leading potential candidate in this category is of course AOC. She has a built-in national profile and legions of potential supporters ready to be activated should she declare. While her uncompromising progressive history on, well, everything would make her a fatally easy target for Republican attack ads in a general election, it’s much less of a liability for her in Democratic primaries where ultra-progressivism and blaming the rich sells a lot better than admitting progressive mistakes.

Others in this category: Ro Khanna. Khanna, a fellow member with AOC of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, also believes that the Democrats have not been progressive enough on economics and has a fairly substantive set of populist economic ideas to reach the left-behind working class that he retails as the “new economic patriotism.” He has also shown some interest in moderating his standard-issue progressive profile on cultural issues but has yet to venture a clear break with orthodoxy on these issues. If an appetite develops for more substance and less flash in this category he’d be well-positioned. But the intra-party dynamic shall we say is unlikely to trend in this direction.

Moderation is a beautiful thing. If there is to be a strong competitor to all resistance all the time, it would be a pragmatic strain that recognizes resistance is not enough. Voters want politicians that can govern well and, in a primary context, may especially value candidates who can win. This is an assignment that politicians with a moderate profile generally fit better than those who are all-in on resistance. It worked for Biden in 2020 and perhaps it can work for some other candidate in 2028.

Josh Shapiro is a good example of a candidate who fits this category. The popular governor of Pennsylvania, his tenure in that office has been marked by a well-publicized commitment to getting stuff done and fast. Shortly after taking office, he presided over the repair of a collapsed section of the vital I-95 highway artery in just 12 days. Other bread and butter governance tasks have received similar treatment. And he took aggressive action to eliminate college education requirements for many state government jobs.

Shapiro has also shown a willingness to bend pragmatically on some issues that the progressive wing of his party feels strongly about. In deference to Pennsylvania voters, he has been generally pro-police and tough on public safety, as well as unapologetic in his support of the fracking industry and opposition to the bans pushed by progressives. However, like other moderates, he has been very careful not to stray much from party orthodoxy on cultural issues that hurt Democrats among swing voters but are dear to the hearts of party progressives. Whether he can continue this dance all the way through the Democratic primary process is an open question. He’s a skillful politician but there are limits.

Others in this category: Gretchen Whitmer, Andy Beshear. Whitmer in particular has a similar profile to Shapiro in terms of pragmatic governance. But if anything she is probably even more reluctant than Shapiro to test the limits of Democratic orthodoxy. And as with Shapiro the danger is real that she will be herded toward the all resistance all the time camp by the exigencies of intra-party competition. The flack she recently took for temporizing about tariffs rather than just denouncing what Trump has done illustrates this dynamic.

Let’s try something different. This is an under-populated category for the simple reason that the Democrats most likely to participate in the primary process are those least likely to want to do anything really different. So there is not much demand there for Democratic politicians to respond to.

One politician who could fit into this category is Ruben Gallego. His support in the 2024 Arizona Senatorial election far outran Harris’s performance in that swing state, both overall and among key problem demographics for the Democrats. Gallego has been outspoken in his opposition to ridiculous locutions like “Latinx” and has clearly separated himself from the party mainstream on immigration where he criticized the Biden administration for lax border enforcement and immigration advocacy groups for convincing Democrats that Latinos supported illegal immigration when they did not. One Latino analyst went so far as to describe this as Gallego’s “Sister Souljah moment.”

Gallego is also unafraid to highlight the non-woke priorities of Latino working-class men who all want, as he put it, a “big-ass truck”. It remains to be seen if his apostasy on the priorities of the Latino working class could extend to questioning the Democratic approach writ large to the working class.

Others in this category: Rahm Emmanuel, Jared Polis. Emmanuel has been particularly vociferous in denouncing the Democrats’ obsession with identity politics and tolerance of social disorder to the point where they have become the “party of permissiveness.” His sojourn in Japan during the Biden-Harris administration gives him some distance from the foibles of that administration which otherwise might undermine the credibility of his critique.

It is possible others like Buttigieg, Shapiro—even the consummate opportunist Newsom—will start leaning toward this category if the political payoff appears higher than it is now. But the “Great Attractor” of all resistance all the time seems likely to be more powerful than any demand for a different kind of Democrat. That will tend to make all candidates in all categories resemble each other over time, rather than stand out.

That may not matter in the end if the Trump administration becomes unpopular enough. Any Democrat, even AOC, might be able to beat the Republican nominee in such as situation. But the Democrats should be looking for a candidate who could maximize their chances of victory in any situation and rehabilitate their image among working-class voters and in vast areas of the country where their brand is currently toxic. I am not optimistic that is happening or is likely to happen.

Editor’s note: This is a slightly longer version of an essay that originally appeared in The Free Press, where Ruy is a contributing writer.