The 2028 Democratic Primary Is Shaping Up as a Generational Opportunity for the Left

While some may assert that it is too soon to talk about 2028 and the next most important election of our lifetimes, this is where campaign infrastructure is put in place. Where candidates meet with important local players and shake hands and talk shop as they jockey to position themselves going into 2028. The conventional wisdom is that we are far too distant from the primary for anything now to matter, but that is simply not supported by history. In 2018, Joe Biden was polling a little under 30% in the 2020 Democratic primary. By the first debate six months later, he was at a little over 30% support. Once voting began in February 2020, the eventual Democratic nominee was—you guessed it—right around 30% in the polls.

We are in the 2018 of the 2028 cycle, and some candidates are very obviously running for president as we speak, while others are playing it a little closer to the vest. With the caveat that entire lifetimes can unfold between today and less than two years from now when primary voting begins, as the race currently stands, this looks like a gigantic opportunity for the left. 

Nearly every election since 2008 has been a change election in an America that can’t make up its mind, and this is very clearly another change election cycle emerging over the horizon. Candidates with longstanding ties to the Democratic Party are going to be held down by the baggage of America’s most unpopular brand to varying degrees, as demonstrated by Susan Mills running as a garden variety establishment Democrat in the Maine primary for Senator, and not being able to get in the same polling zip code as a guy with a Totenkopf tattoo. This is why the sweatiest 2028 candidate, outgoing California governor and aspiring right-wing podcast bro Gavin Newsom, is hosting Ben Shapiro and other bad faith GOP operatives, because being a mark for GOP propaganda is probably a more popular position to take in America than being a milquetoast mainstream Democrat.

It is going to be very popular for every single candidate to say that the Democrats suck and things need to change, and candidates will have to find a way to cut through the noise. Hell, even Rahm Emmanuel has capitulated on Israel already and has said he wants to end the free ride they have been given by the Pentagon. Endorsing the last generation of Democratic policy is a non-starter in the post-2024 Democratic Party.  

So it helps that the left has been banging the campaign drum for change since the days of Hillary Clinton’s email server being the most important story in politics. Bernie Sanders’ superpower is his ability to stay on message, and deliver the same righteous speech in every corner of America, because it may be the first time someone has heard it or has become open to listening to the reason behind it. This stump speech has done yeoman’s work to prove to the electorate that while us lefties may be a bunch of annoying jerks sometimes, there’s no question what we believe in, which is the only question around most mainstream Democrats. There is a lot you can say about us socialists and our inability to get above an electoral ceiling of about a third of the Democratic Party in a presidential primary, but we have a coherent elevator pitch for our vision of power: Medicare for All and the Green New Deal. Meanwhile, many establishment Democrats have openly joked that the party believes in nothing as it has wandered the post-2024 wasteland. 

The establishment Democrats backed by braindead consultants sullying Harry Reid’s good name are certain to come up with some poll-tested version of what they say they deeply care about, and it’s an open question whether the American public will believe yet another pivot by a group of people whose only consistency is coming up with a new set of values every campaign cycle. Gavin Newsom is an excellent peacock playing a discount Patrick Bateman character for the cameras, but outside of bullying unhoused people, it’s difficult to discern what this man who once married a Fox News anchor truly believes in outside his own ego.

BetOnline currently has Newsom as the heavy betting favorite at +160, which I think is a sucker bet (to be clear: all political bets and especially bets that don’t pay out for multiple years are sucker bets). To my eye that admittedly wrote the worst headline of my entire life about Joe Biden in 2018, Gavin Newsom is the 2020 Kamala Harris of 2028. He’s got a big time professional operation around him generating tons of media attention and he’s trying to carve out a lane between the establishment and the left, but as soon as this begins in earnest, he will peak early and bow out before he ever planned to, because he fucking sucks at this.

Kamala Harris is the establishment candidate who I think has a serious chance, as farcical as it sounds, and anyone betting Newsom at +160 instead of Harris at +1000 doesn’t understand how math or politics works. Primary polling right now is frankly, all over the place and you should not take these numbers as anything more than a very rough reflection of each candidate’s name recognition, but name recognition is by far the most important trump card in American politics. It’s why a lot of past primaries have unfolded similarly to how they look two years out from it. Race to the White House has the current polling average as such:

Kamala Harris: 23.3%

Gavin Newsom: 17.6%

Pete Buttigieg: 11%

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: 8.8%

Josh Shapiro: 5%

Mark Kelly: 4.3%

Cory Booker: 3.2%

J.B. Pritzker 3.1%

Forget the numbers, just look at the names up there. Are there more establishment-style candidates or lefty candidates? The 2028 Democratic primary is shaping up to be a bunch of people who have associated themselves with the Democratic Party, some political unknowns and newcomers, and AOC. If AOC doesn’t want to run for president, that leaves the lefty lane wiiiiiiiiiide open for anyone who wants to take it (keep an eye on J.B. Pritzker, the only acceptable billionaire to much of the left).

Bernie in 2020 hit his head on the one-third ceiling lefties have proven we can win when it actually matters, but AOC is not Bernie. She has made far more inroads with normie Democrats than us Bernie Bros ever did or frankly, could. She is a far more talented communicator than Sanders, and her Instagram livestreams have helped her establish a robust and organic digital presence that no other Democrat enjoys. If I were an establishment flack, I’d be praying to the Third Way gods that she chooses not to run. 

Newsom is 100% running for president, and Kamala Harris has all but indicated that she is going to try again. Frankly, I don’t really blame her even though I would never in a million years vote for her in a Democratic primary. She did get the short end of the stick in 2024 and as bad of a campaign as she ran, she still improved upon the existing Democratic pitch of “fuck you I’m owed this” and nearly rescued the car out of the ditch that Biden drove it into. I have immense sympathy for how Harris was betrayed by an egomaniac who strongly intimated that he only planned on being a one-term “bridge” to the future.

But Kamala Harris had every opportunity to run the campaign she wanted to in 2020, and she wound up opposing the Medicare for All bill she co-sponsored, rebuked a policy she wrote she was proud of in her book, and then dropped out before people started voting. I think she, not Newsom, is very clearly the current front-runner, but that says a lot about the current decrepit state of the Democratic Party.

This Data for Progress survey of likely Democratic primary voters from April of last year tells a better story than the cacophony of primary polling does. You can see how there are five candidates with a fervent base of support: Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, Cory Booker (???), Tim Walz, and AOC. Those are the only five Democrats where over a quarter of respondents say they are “one of my top choices in the primary.” You can add Amy Klobuchar and Gretchen Whitmer to the periphery of contenders as those six are the only Democrats with a net +50 or better support. I think this is where Newsom gets exposed, as he looks more like another power-hungry egomaniac in Josh Shapiro than Kamala Harris (save for the “not supportive” quarter of Democrats they both share).

All the names fighting for the lane to AOC’s right are either retreads we have heard over and over again, or relative newcomers who have yet to earn their name recognition powers. There will be a lot of noise and confusion in that lane, while the battle for the left lane currently consists of AOC and, uh…Ro Khanna, who is not in most primary polling and only has 2% odds on Polymarket. At a time where the Democratic Party is openly admitting it does not know what it is or what it believes in, there is a wildly talented lefty candidate who appeals to Democratic voters and has long proven she believes in a robust vision of government. This is the moment lefties have been waiting our entire lives for.

Now I can already hear the doomers groaning and saying that we need to pick the most boring white man imaginable because America will never elect a woman and Trump is proof, even though the last two Democratic presidents before Joe Biden were a Black man and America’s so-called first Black president. To those folks questioning why I am getting in the way of the inevitability of President White Bread and intimating that two non-white women are the Democratic front-runners, I simply want to ask: do you think America is more sexist than Pakistan was in 1988? Because that’s when they elected their first female prime minister, Benazir Bhutto. If you think that, then you have a bleaker and more condescending view of Americans than Stephen Miller does.

The biggest thing that the losing Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris campaigns had in common is not that they were spearheaded by women, but that they were led by a person who stapled themselves to a dramatically unpopular Democratic Party brand. Kamala Harris ran basically the same campaign that a president polling in the 30s was running, and she never separated herself from a platform that was defined by a wildly unpopular old white man. If we had followed this belief that a white guy like Biden is a better candidate than a nonwhite woman like Harris, then it’s very possible that Trump would have won states like New Jersey given that the Pod Save America crew said the Harris campaign saw internal Biden polling giving Trump 400 electoral votes after the infamous CNN debate (Harris only won deep blue New Jersey by 6%). 

This doomer belief that a woman cannot be president of America is one of the dumbest things I have ever heard. We elected the first Black president whose middle name was Hussein just five years after we invaded Iraq and renamed French fries freedom fries. We followed that up by electing a racist game show host who got caught on a hot mic saying he grabs women “by the pussy.” If your takeaway from the 21st century is that America will only elect a very narrow band of candidates for president, I’m sorry to tell you that you flat out don’t understand 21st century politics. It’s quite literally the opposite–anyone from outside the mainstream political spectrum has a serious chance to win. Americans are tired of the two-party duopoly. 

I think if AOC runs, she’s the favorite, and her at +750 is the second-worst pricing in this field after Newsom’s sucker bet. Most other candidates’ odds like Pete Buttigieg are between +1200 and +2500 in the “who the hell knows” range. There are still many twists and turns we cannot see coming, and I believe that the campaign Jon Ossoff is running in Georgia could upend the nature of a race that is currently forming around two immensely powerful California Democrats and a popular democratic socialist from New York. He is one of the younger Democrats yet to really define himself, and it seems as if his incredibly aggressive anti-corruption message in his Senate race this year is a setup for a presidential run in two years. If he wins, he could run a very compelling campaign saying that if this platform that does echo a lot of lefty complaints about capitalism can win in Georgia, it can win anywhere. The fact is that the Democratic Party has become so weak and feckless and beholden to major capital that simply enforcing existing anti-trust laws on the books would make the next Democratic president the most liberal one since the 1960s.

But unless a Democrat wins the race to succeed Georgia Governor Brian Kemp, Ossoff would have to abandon his Senate seat and run for president with the baggage of helping Republicans gain a seat in the Senate. Every challenger to AOC’s lane on the left has significant hurdles to clear that she simply doesn’t. A lot can happen between now and 2028, but one of the likeliest outcomes for the election as I currently see it is the establishment lane being over-crowded and over-saturated, which will result in all those candidates fighting with each other over the same voters, all while AOC cruises in the left-hand lane. It would not shock me at all to see most primaries unfold with AOC getting around 40% of the vote, Newsom and Harris each getting about 20%, and everyone else combining for the remaining 20%. If Ocasio-Cortez can pick off enough mainstream Democratic voters in 2028 while retaining her advantage with the left, she very clearly is the candidate to beat.