Who’s Winning 2028?

Donald Trump darkly jokes about it. Steve Bannon is promoting it. Democrats shudder at the thought of it. But Trump cannot run for a third term under the Constitution. Which means the presidential primaries in both parties will be truly wide-open contests — with no incumbent president, former president or quasi-anointed front runner largely clearing either field — for the first time since 2008.

And whether you like it or not, the 2028 presidential primary is effectively underway, with ambitious politicians in both parties already jockeying for advantage.

Formal campaign announcements may come sooner than you think. Recall that John Delaney launched his 2020 presidential campaign in July 2017, six months after Trump was inaugurated the first time. But even short of official campaign kickoffs, anyone interested in making the big run has to start laying the groundwork for a campaign — raising name identification, staking out ideological and policy turf, building donor networks — or risk falling behind before the campaign starts in earnest.

As 2024 comes to a close, it’s clear that some potential 2028 candidates made the most of the year, while others squandered opportunities.

Here’s who emerged best positioned for a White House run, with contenders tapped from the incoming and outgoing administrations, the Senate, governors’ mansions and the House.

Kamala Harris

OUTGOING ADMINISTRATION WINNER

Yes, she just lost. But perhaps more than any other Democratic presidential loser since Adlai Stevenson, she appears to retain a significant reservoir of devout support.

Her performance in her lone debate with Trump was dominating. (One of Trump’s smartest strategic decisions was avoiding a humiliating rematch.)

Her gaffes on the campaign trail were few and less scandalous than her Democratic predecessors. (Remember “Basket of deplorables”? “Cling to guns or religion”? “I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it”?)

In turn, a November poll from The Economist and YouGov found that only 6 percent of Harris voters blamed her for the loss, while 24 percent blamed Biden and 53 percent said it was “just a bad year for Democrats.” Another November poll by Echelon Insights asked Democrats for their 2028 preference, and Harris led the pack with 41 percent. No one else reached double digits. And a December poll from Echelon asked of Democrats, “Would you like to see Kamala Harris continue to be the leading voice for Democrats?”; a 49 percent plurality said yes, while 36 percent wanted someone new.

Early presidential primary polls should be treated gingerly, as they are mainly about name recognition. It is doubtful that Harris would bring enough support to a 2028 campaign to clear the field. And she may not run at all. There are reports that her inner circle is debating whether to make another run for president in 2028 or pursue the seemingly safer option of running to be California governor in 2026.

But if she does run for president again, she will likely start in the pole position, especially if she maintains a public presence, as expected, over the next two years.

Also retaining a hardy band of fans is outgoing Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, who continues to delight left-leaning cable TV watchers with surefooted appearances in the lion’s den of Fox News. And despite previous challenges with airline cancellations, no major disruptions have happened on his watch in the last two years.

Democrats who believe aggressive antitrust enforcement is critical to wooing working-class Americans who have soured on the party also increasingly view Buttigieg as a fellow traveler, as noted in a recent POLITICO Magazine profile.

But whether Buttigieg, whose prior job was mayor of South Bend, Indiana, has enough of a resume to mount a strong presidential bid is a lingering question. It’s possible that he sees the Michigan governor’s office as a crucial first step on the path to another White House run further down the line.

JD Vance & Donald Trump, Jr.

INCOMING ADMINISTRATION WINNERS

As I have noted before in previous year-end analyses of the invisible primary, current and former vice presidents have an incredible track record in the modern era of presidential primaries, with Walter Mondale, George H.W. Bush, Al Gore and Joe Biden each winning nominations. So simply by becoming vice president, JD Vance has almost surely punched his ticket to at least the top tier of the 2028 Republican presidential primary.

However, we do have two cautionary tales.

The only vice presidents to have come up short in primaries over the last 50 years each had the misfortune of running against someone with the last name of their former running mate. In 2000, Dan Quayle — who suffered a reputation as an intellectual lightweight — was sidelined by Bush’s namesake son. And in 2024, Mike Pence could not overcome grassroots Republican fealty to his old boss, who had branded him a traitor for refusing to overturn the 2020 election results.

Trump himself was given the opportunity to make a nod toward a successor in his Time magazine “Person of the Year” interview, when he was asked if there will be a “Trump dynasty.” To Vance’s potential chagrin, Trump said, “I think there could be.”

While Ivanka Trump and her husband Jared Kushner were the most prominent family members in the first Trump administration, Donald Trump Jr. has played the largest role in shaping the second. He hasn’t taken an official post, but he’s played a gatekeeper role, ensuring only loyalists and ideological true believers populate the executive branch. And he appears poised to continue to be a major voice. To Time, Trump doled out some praise to several of his children, saying of his namesake, “I think he’d do very well.” (Ivanka, he said, would be a “superstar,” but “she’s so family-oriented, Ivanka, and I understand that also it makes it more difficult.”)

Trump also talked up his daughter-in-law Lara Trump as “amazing,” crediting her work as Republican National Committee co-chair for getting the “cheating … down to a minimum.” (Fact check: There was no real cheating in 2020 or 2024.) He even lobbied Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis to appoint her to the Senate seat about to be made vacant by Marco Rubio. But apparently DeSantis was not going to oblige, so Lara took herself out of the running, leaving Don Jr. as the Trump family member closest to the seat of power.

Rubio’s attacks against Trump flopped in the 2016 presidential primary, but he has played the loyalist well enough in the subsequent eight years to win the high-profile Secretary of State job. South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem thought about running for president in 2024, but took a pass and later won the appointment to lead the Homeland Security Department. Both may still have the presidential bug. And both have portfolios critical to the Trump agenda, including foreign policy and immigration. But their political future remains uncertain; just ask Rex Tillerson and Kirstjen Nielsen what happens when highly controversial and unrealistic Trump agenda items go sideways.

The former presidential candidate with the easier gig is Vivek Ramaswamy. He didn’t get a formal cabinet post, but a slot alongside Elon Musk leading an ad hoc commission dressed up to sound like a cabinet post: the Department of Government Efficiency. Ramaswamy can propose a slew of unrealistic agenda items without having any responsibility to carry them out.

So Ramaswamy ends the year with a higher profile than when he began, which is not nothing for a political neophyte who dropped out of the 2024 primary after a fourth place Iowa finish. But he has a long way to go before becoming top-tier material in 2028.

One politically hungry former Trump administration member couldn’t find her way back in and will struggle to remain a player going forward: Nikki Haley. She stayed in the 2024 GOP primary longer than any other Trump challenger, marking her in TrumpWorld as disloyal. Her belated endorsement of Trump for the general election proved insufficient to earn a speaking role at a campaign event, despite her overt interest, let alone a cabinet post. After futilely trying to rally conservative critics of Trump without alienating MAGA die-hards, she ends the year with a confused political brand and the tiny media perch of a weekly SiriusXM radio show.

Ruben Gallego

SENATE WINNER, DEMOCRAT

Four Democrats won Senate races in states that Kamala Harris lost. But only Gallego won with a majority, not plurality, vote. Only Gallego outpaced Harris in vote share by more than half of a percentage point. Two of the four won despite earning fewer votes than the party’s standard bearer, but Gallego won over 90,000 more.

According to exit poll data, Gallego scored higher than Harris with both white and Latino voters, and both men and women. But his outperformance was particularly strong with Latino men, with whom Harris won by 12 and Gallego won by 30.

As The New York Times reported, Gallego campaigned hard for Latino voters with an understanding of the political and cultural nuances that shape their community. For example, a Mexican-style campaign song recorded by an out-of-state group was deemed too “techno, Florida-esque” and rejected in favor of a song by an Arizona band. On immigration, Gallego successfully walked a tightrope, criticizing both Trump and Biden administration policies.

Incumbents not on the ballot this year didn’t have the same opportunity to prove their political savvy. But Pennsylvania’s quotable John Fetterman has been working overtime to lay out a path toward the electoral middle, notably going on Fox News to pin some of the blame for Harris’ defeat on immigration: “One area where we kind of lost ourselves was the border. … We need a secure border.” His bottom-line advice, in an interview with Semafor: “Don’t subtract, do addition.”

However, he may have subtracted some of his own progressive support thanks to his brusque approach on the war in Gaza. Over the past year, Fetterman has been an unapologetic defender of the Israeli government’s military response to the Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attack by Hamas, explicitly opposing a cease-fire, when most Democrats pressed for either a more targeted approach or an immediate cease-fire.

Moreover, in a late December interview on ABC, Fetterman lectured Democrats to “chill out” about the incoming Trump presidency, and claimed political retribution as threatened by incoming FBI Director Kash Patel were “never going to happen.”

Moderates can overcome progressive complaints to win Democratic primaries — ask Joe Biden — but Fetterman probably burned more bridges than necessary in 2024.

Another swing state Democratic senator with national promise has been Georgia’s Raphael Warnock. But after winning two nail-biter elections in 2020 and 2022, he kept a relatively low-profile in 2024. In the presidential campaign, Democrats looked to Warnock to galvanize the African American vote in the Peach State, and he sounded ready to meet the challenge, telling the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in August, “I’m prepared to barnstorm all across Georgia. I know a little bit, after all, about how to win Georgia.” But while Warnock stumped hard, he didn’t have a political machine strong enough to get Harris over the finish line, finishing the year on a down note.

Marco Rubio

SENATE WINNER, REPUBLICAN

While many senators want to be president, they often have a tough time connecting with voters after years inside the clubby upper chamber. Only three sitting senators have become president in the last 125 years: Barack Obama, John F. Kennedy and Warren Harding. And Obama wasn’t in the Senate very long.

Several Republican senators sought the presidency in 2016, only to be boot-stomped by a celebrity businessman. With so many chastened, as well as terrified of Trump, only Tim Scott tried it in 2024, and he quit before Iowa.

What’s the best move for a senator with an interest in the presidency? Get out of the Senate.

Marco Rubio, one of the 2016 also-rans, did just that by snagging an appointment to be Trump’s next Secretary of State. As noted earlier, he has plenty of challenges ahead. And if he runs in 2028, he will likely face off against another senatorial escape artist: JD Vance. But spinning his wheels in the Senate would have likely been a political dead end.

Andy Beshear

GUBERNATORIAL WINNER, DEMOCRAT

Looming large in the “What If” narratives of 2024 are two charismatic swing state governors: Pennsylvania’s Josh Shapiro and Michigan’s Gretchen Whitmer. Had Harris tapped either of them for VP, would it have made a difference against Trump? We’ll never know. But at least off the ticket, neither was able to prove they had strong enough personal magnetism, or state political machines, to overcome national headwinds and deliver for their party.

Not only did Harris lose both states, but Democrats suffered other down-ballot losses. Republicans flipped two U.S House seats in Pennsylvania and one in Michigan. Bob Casey, who never had a margin of victory of less than nine points in his three Pennsylvania Senate victories, lost by a hair. Elissa Slotkin managed to eke out a victory in her Michigan Senate race, but with fewer votes than Harris, aided by two third-party conservative candidates siphoning off Republican votes.

Most painful for Whitmer: the end of full Democratic control of the state legislature, which had allowed her to enact a slew of progressive laws. Republicans will have a narrow state House majority. (The state Senate, which did not have elections in 2024, will continue to be led by Democrats.) And we can expect the Republican House to make Whitmer’s life as difficult as possible in the last two years of her final term. (Whitmer is term-limited.)

Shapiro, first elected governor in 2022, has only been in office in tandem with a Republican Senate and a Democratic House. He hoped Democrats could take the state Senate in this year’s elections and, to that end, made four endorsements of Senate candidates targeting Republican districts. But only one won, and that flip was offset by a Republican pickup of a Philadelphia seat.

Another Democratic governor who lost a trifecta is Minnesota’s Tim Walz. November’s election results turned the Democrats’ six-seat state House majority into an exact tie, adding insult to the injury of Walz’s vice presidential loss.

In the summer, Walz seemed to be the answer to Democratic prayers — a plain-speaking Midwesterner who sold progressive policies with folksy charm, and who rattled Trump with simple labels like “weird.” But he got sidetracked with biographical embellishments, delivered an underwhelming debate performance against Vance and was little heard in the home stretch of the campaign. He failed to help much in his own state, which stayed blue but with a margin three points narrower than in 2020.

The overtly ambitious Govs. Gavin Newsom of California, JB Pritzker of Illinois and Wes Moore of Maryland had less to prove on Election Day — none were on the ballot or risked loss of their partisan trifectas. But amid the wreckage of the 2024 election, it’s not clear voters will be clamoring for another big blue state politician.

They should not be written off. Few in December of 2004, on the heels of the defeat of John Kerry who personified liberal Massachusetts, would have said that Illinois’ Barack Obama was a sure thing in 2008. But there’s no obvious argument that these contenders improved their 2028 positions in the past year, except for arguably raising their profiles a bit.

Colorado Gov. Jared Polis also kept his trifecta, but riled up many Democrats with his initially effusive praise of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s nomination to lead the Department of Health and Human Services. Polis quickly sought to tamp down the outrage by noting that his own family has received vaccinations, but giving any sense of legitimacy to a vaccine skeptic like Kennedy — a figure now loathed by many Democrats — puts him out of step with most in his party.

The clearest winner out of the gubernatorial bracket is Kentucky’s Andy Beshear, who last year proved his electoral durability in a red state by winning reelection to a second term. Beshear doesn’t have coattails either — he has only governed alongside veto-proof Republican legislative supermajorities — but that obstacle only lowers the bar for judging his accomplishments.

Democrats, for instance, credit him for having the guts to veto anti-abortion and anti-transgender health care bills. While he wasn’t able to strike bipartisan deals to expand Medicaid and cover dental, vision and hearing, he moved money around to expand coverage by executive action. Cannily, Beshear boasted about those successes to the Democratic donor class, via a New York Times op-ed published one week after Harris’ defeat. Perhaps to avoid being seen as immodest, Beshear didn’t even mention the Morning Consult poll from July which ranked him the most popular Democratic governor in the country and the second-most popular overall.

Brian Kemp

GUBERNATORIAL WINNER, REPUBLICAN

One indisputable gubernatorial loser of 2024 is Ron DeSantis. The combative Florida Republican was crowned “DeFuture” by the Rupert Murdoch-owned New York Post after his landslide reelection in 2022. But his strategy to sell himself as a more competent version of Trump found no traction among Republican primary voters devoted to the original. Worse, Trump humiliated DeSantis at every turn, creating a new narrative of him as a socially awkward, disloyal opportunist, and inflicting major damage to any hope for “DeFuture.” DeSantis can’t even fully take credit for the strong Republican 2024 performance in Florida, since a certain Mar-a-Lago resident is even more associated with the Sunshine State than he.

Virginia’s Glenn Youngkin didn’t belly flop as hard as DeSantis, having avoided a cringe-tastic presidential bid sought by some GOP donors. But he didn’t exactly endear himself to TrumpWorld by playing coy about running over the course of 2023, then refusing to endorse Trump until after the Virginia primary was held in March 2024.

In Youngkin’s favor, the sunny, fleece-wearing conservative has managed to maintain a healthy job approval rating in center-left Virginia, clocking in at 57 percent in a September Washington Post poll. But his coattails remain short. He tried to help Trump flip the state, joining Trump in Salem just before the election and earning a compliment from the candidate: “You have a very sane, very solid governor.” Yet Virginia stayed blue. Trump’s margin of defeat was better than in 2020 but slightly worse than 2016. And Republicans failed to flip any U.S. House seats, coming up short in two swing districts. The term-limited governor now has to decide whether to risk his political capital on a 2026 Senate campaign, which no Virginia Republican has won since 2002, or hope that a Republican outside of Trump’s inner circle has a shot at 2028.

Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, on the other hand, already has TrumpWorld bona fides after serving as White House press secretary for two years. At a Trump rally during this year’s campaign, she leveled a harsh attack on Harris: “My kids keep me humble. Unfortunately, Kamala Harris doesn’t have anything keeping her humble.” The claim ignored that Harris is a stepmother, and insinuated that a woman who isn’t a mother can’t be fulfilled or grounded or worthy of public office. But Trump was likely appreciative of how far Sanders was willing to go to rhetorically kneecap his opponent.

Sanders is not making the jump back to the Trump administration. But she doesn’t need such validation — having already served Trump once and retaining her own seat of power in Little Rock where she can implement a conservative agenda with little interference from Democrats. In a scenario where the Trump White House becomes another den of vipers, snake-biting all involved, residing far from the Beltway might be an advantage in 2028.

But Georgia’s Brian Kemp might be best positioned to exploit such a scenario. Unique among the shrinking community of independent-minded Republicans, Kemp has withstood Trump’s vehement wrath — for refusing to echo Trump’s baseless claims since 2020 about a rigged election in Georgia — without a hint of erosion of support at home.

Kemp won reelection in 2022 by a comfortable margin without Trump’s help. In 2024, it was Trump who needed the help. And after a pointed back-and-forth on Twitter and some shuttle diplomacy led by Sen. Lindsey Graham, Kemp gave a public endorsement to Trump in late August and Trump accepted without mention of his past tantrums. They campaigned together in October, and Kemp’s political action committee helped with turning out the vote and eking out a two-point win in the state.

Throughout it all, Kemp’s home state popularity has solidified, uniting conservatives and moderates. In an October poll from Emerson College of the seven battleground states, Kemp’s job approval among Georgians was 53 percent, and his disapproval just 26 percent. His net approve-disapprove margin of 27 points was by far the best among the swing state governors (Shapiro’s was 15 points and Whitmer’s just four). If Republicans are in the mood for a non-Trumpy Republican — not an anti-Trump Republican, to be clear — then they’ll take a close look at Kemp.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

HOUSE WINNER, DEMOCRAT

The House is an even worse launchpad for president than the Senate. Over the last 50 years, Mo Udall, Dick Gephardt, Dennis Kucinich, Eric Swalwell, John Delaney, Tim Ryan, John Anderson, Phil Crane, Jack Kemp, Bob Dornan, John Kasich, Ron Paul, Michele Bachmann, Duncan Hunter and Tom Tancredo all failed to become the first sitting House member since James Garfield to win a major party nomination for the presidency, let alone the presidency itself.

But New York’s Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is not your average backbencher. She has a much larger national profile than most senators and governors, with nearly 13 million followers on X and eight million on Instagram. According to data compiled by OpenSecrets, Ocasio-Cortez was the fourth biggest fundraiser among Democratic House candidates in the 2023-2024 cycle, eclipsed only by Hakeem Jeffries (House Minority Leader), Eugene Vindman (Trump administration whistleblower) and Adam Frisch (Coloradan who nearly knocked off far-right Rep. Lauren Boebert in 2022). Many presidential wannabes wish they had already built that much political infrastructure.

Granted, 2024 was not the best year for “the Squad.” The small, pugnacious band of young-ish, socialistic lawmakers lost two members in Democratic primaries: Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush. After Trump’s attacks on “woke” politics throughout the presidential campaign, some centrist Democrats have argued that their party needs to shed some ideological baggage. Ocasio-Cortez has pushed back on her BlueSky feed: “A lot of folks w/ poor campaign fundamentals are now blaming ‘wokism’ but haven’t held a town hall or knocked a door all cycle.”

While Ocasio-Cortez continues to fight such intraparty battles, in 2024 she took bold steps to bridge those divides. For the first time she gave money from her campaign account to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the official campaign of the House Democrats. Four years ago, her only remarks at the Democratic National Convention were to nominate the runner-up, independent Sen. Bernie Sanders. This year, she kicked off the party’s national convention with an effusive endorsement of the Harris-Walz ticket, in a subtle effort to help quell discontent on the left.

She clearly has some work to do in winning over the party; House Democrats chose the more senior Rep. Gerry Connolly over Ocasio-Cortez to be the top Dem on the Oversight Committee. Yet the 35-year-old social media star competed for the post in a polite, old-school manner, without leaving any Democratic blood on the floor or earning new enemies. “She’s a wonderful talent and the caucus really likes her,” said 85-year-old Rep. Steny Hoyer. “Something will come along because she’s so dynamic and she’s such a great communicator.”

Another ambitious progressive House Democrat also sought to raise his profile after the election, California’s Ro Khanna. Unlike Ocasio-Cortez, however, Khanna has shown interest in trying to work with the incoming Trump administration in hopes of steering it in a more progressive direction. “I’m ready to work with @doge, @elonmusk + @VivekGRamaswamy to slash waste,” Khanna posted on Musk’s social media site X, referring to Trump’s new Department of Government Efficiency (which is actually an ad hoc commission, not a real governmental department).

Khanna wasn’t embracing the whole of the extreme budget-cutting goals for the commission as articulated by Musk and Ramaswamy; he highlighted a need to focus on Pentagon spending. But rank-and-file Democrats who want to see fervent opposition to Trump will likely recoil at seeing a Democrat treat DOGE as an opportunity for bipartisan compromise instead of a dangerous attempt to hollow out the federal government. Perhaps Khanna is cleverly carving a distinctive path for himself, but at first blush, that path looks politically rocky.