Democrats start angling for 2028 and experimenting with new approaches to voters

Democrats are already lining up for the 2028 presidential race but don’t yet know which way to run.

President Trump’s resounding comeback victory left the Democratic Party in tatters and set the table for an intraparty battle royale over who is best equipped to lift the party out of the ashes.

“The Democrats have a significant challenge right now in finding out what the party stands for,” said Stephen Farnsworth, a political science professor at the University of Mary Washington. “That may be a debate that continues into the 2028 Democratic nomination contests.”

That early jockeying is already underway. Some potential contenders are striking a more conciliatory tone with the Trump White House, while others are deriding the Trump administration as an incompetent and cruel authoritarian regime that is running roughshod over the Constitution and steering the nation into an economic recession.

Former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, a grizzled political veteran who cut his teeth under Presidents Clinton and Obama, is testing whether his old-school take-no-prisoners political approach will resonate with Democrats looking to get back into the win column.

Former Secretary of State Pete Buttigieg is also considering taking a second crack at becoming the party’s standard-bearer after outperforming expectations four years ago and recently passing on bids for the U.S. Senate and governor in his adopted home state of Michigan.

Then there is 2024 Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris, who must first decide whether she will instead run for governor in California, and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, who has said he is open to running under the right circumstances.

Plus, a who’s who of Democratic governors — Andy Beshear of Kentucky, J.D. Pritzker of Illinois, Wes Moore of Maryland, Gavin Newsom of California, Jared Polis of Colorado, Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, and Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan — are all considered potential contenders.

Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut has assumed a more significant presence on the national stage. Meanwhile, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez could be next in line to take the mantle of Sen. Bernard Sanders, the 83-year-old democratic socialist from Vermont who surprised the naysayers of his 2016 and 2020 presidential bids.

Looking ahead to 2028 offers a reprieve for Democrats as they struggle to pick up the pieces from the November election, unite around a popular message and mount a more formidable resistance to the Trump-led Republican Party.

“The chattering class, the parlor, is in full tilt right now,” said Chris Walton, former chairman of the Milwaukee County Democrats. “We’d rather be trying to figure out what ’28 looks like instead of trying to survive until ’28.”

At the moment, whoever emerges from the crowd will most likely be squaring off against Vice President J.D. Vance. It also appears the Democratic Party has a lot of room for improvement as it looks to distance itself from President Biden’s four years in office.

A CNN poll released over the weekend showed the party’s favorability rating had hit a new low, with 29% of Americans giving it a thumbs up. The survey also found that Democrats want party leaders to do more to thwart Mr. Trump.

The recent battle over the Republican-driven spending plan and growing concerns over the quest by Mr. Trump and Elon Musk to downsize the government has exposed deep fissures in the Democratic Party. Those divides have seemingly grown wider every day since party leaders forced Mr. Biden out of the 2024 race and coronated Ms. Harris as the presidential nominee.

Mr. Farnsworth said Mr. Biden’s failed attempt to lead the Democratic ticket created a bottleneck of would-be contenders eager to put their stamp on the national party.

“The truth is a lot of people want to be president, and they start as soon as the votes are counted from the last presidential election,” he said. “You wait at your peril in presidential politics.”

For his part, Mr. Emanuel, who was most recently US Ambassador to Japan but is better known for his stints as mayor of Chicago, a member of the U.S. House, and chief of staff to President Obama, has crashed back onto the scene with a blunt assessment of the national political conversation.

“We just had the worst reading scores in 30 years, worse math scores in 30 years and we are talking about bathrooms, locker rooms,” Mr. Emanuel said at The Economic Club of Chicago. “We have failed the American people, and they are pissed off, and guess what? They earned the right to be pissed off at all of us.”

Mr. Newsom, the epitome of a California liberal, unexpectedly jogged to the right by hosting MAGA royalty — Charle Kirk and Steven Bannon — on his new podcast. He also broke with Democratic Party dogma on his podcast by saying transgender athletes competing in female sports is “deeply unfair.”

Ms. Whitmer has sought to find common ground with Mr. Trump and recently met with him at the White House to discuss the economy and tariffs.

Mr. Pritzer, a billionaire, is set to travel to the first-in-the-nation primary state of New Hampshire next month to headline the Democratic Party’s annual fundraiser. On Tuesday, he derided the Trump administration during an appearance at the Center for American Progress in Washington.

“If we want to regain the trust of the voters that we stand for, Democrats have to deliver,” Mr. Pritzer said. “For sure, we have to call out the BS that Republicans have been selling, but meanwhile, Democrats have to make people’s lives better.”