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It’s too early to start really handicapping the 2028 presidential race, but some would-be candidates are already making serious moves.
I talk periodically to CNN’s Edward-Isaac Dovere about how the race is changing among Democrats and what to expect. Our latest chat, transcribed and edited for style and flow, is below.
What’s changed? Kamala Harris
WOLF: We last spoke at the end of last year. What’s changed?
DOVERE: The thing that maybe has changed the atmosphere of preliminary thinking the most is that Kamala Harris has made a couple of comments that suggest that she is more serious about running again than most people thought she would be.
If she runs, she would be a factor in the race. I don’t think she would run away with the nomination. But for anybody who is thinking about running, it’s a different kind of race if Harris is in it versus if she’s not, for a couple of reasons.
Obviously she was the nominee and is the former vice president, so inevitably the race would orient around her in a way that it did in the 2024 Republican primaries around Donald Trump and in the 2020 Democratic primaries around Joe Biden.
It doesn’t always work out. In 2008 the Democratic race oriented around Hillary Clinton early on, and obviously she wasn’t nominated. But it would be a different dynamic from a race that was more completely up for grabs.
Part of why it would orient around her she would be able to draw on strong support from Black voters, especially millennial through boomer Black women. Those are pretty reliable and engaged voters in Democratic primaries. Now we don’t know if she’s going to run, and it’s all speculation at this point.
Could she actually overcome a devastating loss?
WOLF: But she lost in ‘24. Do smart people in the Democratic Party think there is a compelling argument that she could excite people and get them out and overcome the bad taste in Democrats’ mouth from losing to Trump — which they said would be apocalyptic?
DOVERE: She would have to make that argument. And so far, she has not quite made the argument. One of the things she said all the time on the trail in 2024 was, “We’re not going back.” And that may be to her detriment this time around if she gets serious about running. She would have to make a forward-minded, proactive argument. She’s spent about six, seven months now on the extended version of her book tour and meeting with a lot of people, talking with a lot of people — we’re not sure what that will result in from her.
Who is winning the book primary?
WOLF: A couple of potential candidates have books out. It’s almost a prerequisite to run. Who’s winning the book election?
DOVERE: (California Gov.) Gavin Newsom sold a lot of books, but what we also found out from some New York Times reporting is that many of those books were bought by Gavin Newsom’s political entities and were then given out to supporters who were donors.
Kamala Harris also sold a lot of books, although I don’t think we have the exact numbers. They weren’t bought by a PAC for her, but a lot of them were tied to sales of tickets to the book tour events. Those have been the really strong ones.
Josh Shapiro’s book (governor of Pennsylvania) got a little bit of coverage when it came out, but didn’t sell in a massive way. Cory Booker’s book landed right as the Iran war started, which was unfortunate timing for him and for his book tour plans.
There is a Chris Murphy (senator from Connecticut) book coming soon. Tim Walz (governor of Minnesota) has announced a book, though I don’t think Walz is likely to run for president.
Where is Gavin Newsom?
WOLF: Newsom seemed ubiquitous for a while, finding ways into the news and trolling Trump. Has he lost steam? Are people tired of him? Where is he?
DOVERE: Newsom has not had a big showdown moment with Trump for a couple months, which is probably what you’re picking up on. That does not mean necessarily that he has lost steam. To the extent that any poll taken two years before the primaries matters at all, his name recognition is consistently shown to be high. A lot of people who are thinking about the race, even if they won’t admit it out loud, will say that he’s the front-runner. I don’t know what being the front-runner means at this point.
Could the messy race to succeed Newsom as governor be a problem?
WOLF: The race to replace Newsom as California governor is objectively a mess, at the moment, for Democrats. Will that hurt him?
DOVERE: Newsom’s people believe that they are in fine shape as long as a Democrat makes it into the top two on June 2, in which case they believe that a very Democratic-leaning state will rally behind whoever that candidate is, even though so far, Californians and Newsom himself, as I’ve reported, have felt a little blasé about their choices.
If two Republicans advance, and therefore a Republican would be the next governor of California — which could happen, given that where Steve Hilton and Chad Bianco are showing up in the polls — that would likely be a problem for Newsom in a lot of ways, both in the appearance of it, and in the investigations that could get launched into him after the fact.
Newsom and his folks certainly see that as a potential problem, and what they have told me is that he’s reluctant to intervene in the race unless he really sees that it is likely headed to what’s been called a Democratic lockout for the top two positions, and he believes that he could substantially change that.
What’s the next tier of candidates?
WOLF: If Harris is the former nominee and Newsom is the person that a lot of people view as the front-runner, what’s the next tier?
DOVERE: I don’t think that it is helpful to think in terms of tiers. It’s just very, very early. But there are a couple people who’ve been trying to keep themselves busy in different ways:
Pete Buttigieg has been keeping around, doing a bunch of town halls in places that are clearly about keeping Democratic energy up and also keeping himself in the conversation. He’s had a couple high-profile interview moments that have gotten him popular on Twitter, as he can often tend to be among Democrats.
I was in Chicago about a month ago for the US Senate primary in Illinois, which had become a sort of proxy test for (Illinois Gov.) JB Pritzker and what his spending would look like, and whether his operation was strong. Things certainly went his way.
We’ll see over the course of the year what the tiers actually start to look like, but they’re different. People are doing things in different ways. Shapiro has continued to keep a relatively low profile as he focuses on the reelection run that he’s got and getting a bunch of, he hopes, Democrats elected to Congress.
Rahm Emanuel (former White House chief of staff and Chicago mayor), much like Buttigieg, does not have any actual role in government or politics these days, but Emanuel is putting out idea after idea to try to both shape the conversation and get people talking about him. For now, he continues to be written off by a lot of the political people as interesting but not going to actually happen.
We are living in a world where the president of the United States, for only the second time in history, is serving a nonconsecutive term. He was a reality TV star who had been impeached twice and convicted of crimes and then got himself reelected to the presidency. So who counts as a serious or credible candidate, I think, is a different conversation going into 2028.
Both as a reporter and as a citizen trying to absorb this, I’m trying not to say, “This person is in better shape than that person.” To steal a line that is often circulated on Twitter, around this time for the 2004 presidential race, Joe Lieberman was leading all the polls.
(Note: The polling was actually more complicated than that, but Lieberman was performing well. It’s also true that at this point in the 2016 presidential election cycle, polling generally didn’t even include Trump.)
‘Left’ and ‘right’ are getting scrambled
WOLF: What seemed to make Lieberman viable early in the primary was that he had been Al Gore’s running mate in 2000. He also, ultimately, effectively left the Democratic Party after the fact. He was a centrist. Is there anybody moving to the middle of the party, or is everybody moving to the left?
DOVERE: Another thing that we are seeing in the larger political conversation is that terms like “the left” or “the right” or “progressive” are getting scrambled. What defines a progressive is somewhat in the eye of the beholder these days.
In the 2020 Democratic primary race, basically it was, if you support Medicare for All, you’re a progressive, and if you don’t, you’re a moderate. It’s not clear if there will be one overriding issue in a 2028 Democratic primary race.
One thing that we are seeing already is that support for Israel is being turned into a progressive/moderate issue, which is a major change in American politics, and is a major change in Democratic Party politics. It has never before been the arbiter of what is progressive versus what is moderate.
When will the presidential race really start to happen?
WOLF: How far are we from people actually announcing campaigns?
DOVERE: Elizabeth Warren announced her campaign on December 31, 2018; Joe Biden didn’t announce until April of 2019. So we have some time. But it’s less about what day you announce than what you’re doing — especially if we end up with a dozen, even up to two dozen candidates.
The money aspect of campaigning could change in the attention economy
WOLF: How the money flows and where it is going is changing. How is that going to affect Democrats? Will the real spending be outside the traditional campaign structure?
DOVERE: A number of operatives and potential candidates have talked to me explicitly about this from things like what happened with Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral campaign in New York. Take away whatever you think about his politics or the specifics of the race. He did not spend a lot of money on his campaign. He did it through breakthrough social media videos and other things he was doing — events, scavenger hunts, those sorts of things — that galvanized attention and created a level of press that made it so that he could run things on the cheap.
There’s a very prominent Republican in New York City who, the night before the mayoral election in November, called me up and said, “We’re going to have to find out where all the money is that’s propping up this campaign.” And I said to him, “No, there’s not secret money. It’s just through the social media stuff.”
So it’s going to be a combination of how much they raise; all this outside money that’s going to flow from all sorts of places, including AI companies and other groups that are spending a lot; and then what they can do to maximize their place in the attention economy.
The generational change is here
WOLF: It could be the first election without a boomer or a pre-boomer like Trump or Biden.
DOVERE: No one being talked about as running is over 70, which does take away most of the boomers. So yes, there will be some level of generational change, at least in party leadership. And some of these people could be much younger, right? Buttigieg, 44, is the youngest of the people being talked about in any kind of serious way.
Except for (New York US Rep.) Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who would just be past the 35-year-old eligibility point. She obviously embodies a lot of excitement. And her politics, people agree with it — but she also has a clear youthfulness that is a contrast with people who have been leading the party in the last bunch of years.
AOC has serious name recognition
WOLF: She’s maybe the most divisive of the Democrats. Republicans have been demonizing her for years.
DOVERE: But also extremely popular for a lot of people among the Democratic Party base. She is someone who you could put on the list with Kamala Harris and Gavin Newsom. Any Democrat who was thinking about running for president would be desperate to have the kind of support numbers that she has in the polls. But she is also somewhat locked in with people and their impressions of her, whether they like her or they don’t. But if we’re in a field where, by the time we get to the primaries, there are five or six serious candidates, as there were in 2020, and she’s pulling 30-ish plus percent of the vote, that’s going to put her in a strong position.
But Ocasio-Cortez could be running for one of three offices — either reelection to the House, or to the Senate seat that’s currently held by Chuck Schumer in New York, or for president.
Is there a surprise out there?
WOLF: Is there anybody that’s done anything to surprise you recently?
DOVERE: I was in New Orleans for a (Democratic National Committee) event, and (former Mayor) Mitch Landrieu got up and gave a speech that I watched, and then made some other speeches that other people saw that were all of a sudden clear to people that he was starting to think seriously about running for president. I think we are in this quiet moment, for the most part, of people starting to get serious about their own internal deliberations. Without revealing private conversations too much, several of the prospective candidates have started to ask me, like, if you really think this person’s running and that person — they’re thinking about it. They’re trying to game their spots out of this, and we’ll see what that leads to.
One other thing — (Maryland Gov.) Wes Moore spoke to me about a couple months ago about how much he was going to put into trying to get the redistricting bill through the Maryland legislature. The session ended in Maryland and the bill never got picked up, and he kind of let it fade away. That was seen by a lot of people as one of many tests that Moore would have in front of him. The other thing that’s sort of blocking out the political sun for a bunch of people is the war. Next time we have this conversation, I think we’re gonna see some clearer signs for people about where they’re starting to lay down markers.
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