In normal times, it would be far too early to be writing this article with the intent of it being anything other than a useless clicky read that ultimately doesn’t give you much substance past “in 2005, no one knew who Barack Obama was and 2028 is still far away,” but we don’t live in normal times.
These are the extraordinary times you read about in history books. If you were wondering what you would do in past extraordinary times in history, it is what you are doing right now. We don’t have time to wait for leaders to emerge, we need as many as we can get as soon as we can get them. Add in the fact that the Democratic Party has never been less respected or less well-liked than they are right now, and “who the fuck is in charge here” is perhaps the most salient question in non-Trump politics today.
It seems as if the language that Democrats are learning from the 2024 election is expressed in podcast form, and a litany of politicians have clearly studied Trump’s meteoric rise through a deadly combination of bought and earned media. The podcast bro outline of the 2028 Democratic primary field is beginning to take shape as Axios reports that “Democrats are already jockeying for the 2028 nomination.” As an admitted person who likes gambling but also thinks it is destroying America, I feel uniquely positioned to set the odds for the 2028 primary field as of right now. Longtime readers of mine know that uh, my electoral predictions do not always work out, so I must stress that this is just a current assessment of the 2028 Democratic primary landscape that very much has already begun.
Get the fuck out of here man. Gavin Newsom had the easiest lane in the world and he blew it. He could play the “I was basically president for the West Coast in 2020” card and ride his impossibly slick image and governorship of the globe’s fifth largest economy to being 2028’s Very Serious Candidate. In the alternate reality where Newsom wasn’t the kind of person to marry a Fox News personality, he’s currently reheating his 2020 trade negotiations with China and demonstrating that he can and has done the job under extraordinary circumstances before. Trump nuking the global economy with the largest trade war in modern history is rightfully portrayed as the budding greatest own-goal in man’s history, but we should not lose sight of Newsom’s immense bag-fumbling here. Instead of taking the track already laid out for him, Newsom decided the reason that 19 million 2020 Biden voters didn’t vote in 2024 was because the Democrats weren’t doing the dril racism dial tweet enough. He has launched what can only be described as a podcast focused on the far-right, positioning himself as the guy Willing to Ask the Tough Questions despite saying things like “I agree with you” when talking to Charlie Kirk and Steve Bannon. His popularity fell 26 percent after his first episode and only 13 percent say it improved their image of him while the rest of polling respondents said it did not change their image of him at all.
When Gavin Newsom looks in the mirror, he sees Andy Beshear. The Kentucky governor so far has been a hopeful bulwark of Democratic defiance in the face of Republican authoritarianism. He vetoed the Kentucky GOP’s sweeping attack on transgender people, joined the multistate lawsuit against the Trump administration’s assault on federal funding, and has generally conducted himself like someone who is concerned about where we are going and understands he has some level of power to fight it. Beshear has taken the opposite track of Newsom, standing up for liberal values and deciding that agreeing with Republicans is not what Democrats should be all about. Contrasting him to Newsom is a really good lesson in how coastal liberalism entirely makes up a “bipartisan” reality they think the Kentucky governor’s voters want. Beshear also launched his own podcast, but there are no Charlie Kirks or Steve Bannons to be seen so far. Beshear pledges that the “ground rules are set: be real, be curious, and above all—be human.”
It’s a governor-heavy field, which is a good thing because governor is a real job with real responsibilities and congressperson is mostly a fake job where you’re a glorified poster who primarily begs for money all day. National politics needs more people who have actually had some level of real day-to-day responsibility in their life in the last 40 years. Moore is firmly in the wide field of top contenders, as the Maryland governor’s ability to communicate is better than most Democrats’. His message still remains to be seen in his nascent rise in the party, but to make a sports analogy, Moore is like a top baseball prospect who has shown he can hit big league pitching. Now he has to prove he can do it every day through the grind.
Current 2028 odds: Similar to John Edwards in 2004 who looked poised to be the Democrats’ Next Big Thing (fingers crossed there’s no uncomfortable lawsuits in Moore’s closet).
Stephen A. Smith
Don’t laugh. Seriously. Don’t. We laughed at Trump in 2015 and look where that got us. ESPN’s new $20 million man has long had an interest in politics, admitting to having traditional Republican leanings like hating taxes. Smith recently wrote “Time to stop messing around. Life is great. Especially at ESPN/Disney. Hate the thought of being a politician. But sick of this mess. So I’m officially leaving all doors open.”
There are better choices than Stephen A., but there are also worse ones in the Democratic Party. Sean Hannity’s bestie has already proven he has more of a spine to stand up for liberal values in the public sphere than Gavin Newsom, and Smith’s media savvy should not be undersold. He has proven that no one understands the modern peacocking environment better than he does, and if Trump can outsmart America’s braindead mainstream media, I shudder to think of the circles that Stephen A. could run around Jake Tapper and company. This could also be a ploy to manipulate the media to serve other ends of his, Trump “ran” for president many times before just as he hawked a new book after all, but Stephen A. has a real lane here if he wants it.
Current 2028 odds: The same odds to win both the 2028 Democratic and Republican primaries that Trump had in January 2016.
J.B. Pritzker
The Illinois governor is my betting favorite among the people who are definitely running in 2028. He’s a billionaire who could match Elon Musk dollar for dollar himself if he really wanted to, and Pritzker has been by far the most aggressive and high-profile governor trying to organize a nationwide opposition to Trump. Pritzker firmly planted himself on the right side of history at the same time that Bernie Sanders was making overtures to Elon Musk, and the shifting war in the Democratic party from ideology to a willingness to buck norms and fight has benefited Pritzker immensely. He has very clearly been taking shots at Gavin Newsom every opportunity he gets, and should they ever meet in a debate a few years from now, I look forward to the rhetorical annihilation that the Illinois governor will unleash on California’s feckless hairpiece.
Current 2028 odds: He gets Newsom’s Biden 2020 favorite positioning. No one (save for two people) is out ahead of the pack, but I suspect that if we get stuck with a stalemate between three warring pluralities like we did last time with Biden, Bernie and neither, that Pritzker would be the likeliest candidate the Chicago-based Obama machine would coalesce around behind the scenes.
Rahm Emmanuel
This would not be an article about the Democrats if we weren’t talking about some stale reheated bullshit that nobody wants now or ever has. The podcast bro revolution has convinced Emmanuel that now is the time for his brand of corrupt braindead centrism. By all available reporting, he’s very serious about running for president. Emmanuel alienates everyone everywhere he goes because by all accounts, he’s just a fucking asshole, and in a normal world, helping to cover up the Chicago police’s murder of Laquan McDonald should have been his last act of public life. But unfortunately, we’re stuck in a world with the traitorous post-LBJ Democratic Party, so Joe Biden, also a man very familiar with attempts to cover up state-sanctioned murder of children, nominated Emmanuel as his ambassador to Japan. We will never rid ourselves of these cretins until we make it clear to this iteration of the Democratic Party that they will be lucky if history remembers them as fondly as it remembers Neville Chamberlain.
Current 2028 odds: This is 2020 Amy Klobuchar territory where a very small cabal of extremely out of touch insiders have convinced themselves that a politician who could never command a majority of support in America is secretly a juggernaut. The difference is that Klobuchar has actual political talent, it’s just more Minnesota-based, while Emmanuel is a walking portrait of the rampant corruption, egotism and idiocy of Beltway Democrats who only get ahead through self-dealing with one another.
Pete Buttigieg
If Gavin Newsom wants to know what it’s actually like to go into the lion’s den to try to talk it off the ledge, he could watch any one of Pete Buttigieg’s incredibly patient Fox News appearances. In 2020, it was frankly absurd to suggest that the mayor of Indiana’s fourth largest city could handle the duties of president, but after serving in a presidential administration (to mixed results, admittedly), Mayor Pete is more than just a Mayor these days. He has proven himself to be one of the most talented communicators in the Democratic Party, and ruling himself out of Michigan’s gubernatorial and Senate elections suggests he does have high hopes for 2028.
Current 2028 odds: He is in the upper crust of the favorites tier, as one recent Economist/YouGov poll puts him second among Democrats behind the person atop every single poll these days.
Kamala Harris
What else did you expect? Did you think we don’t live in hell? Did you think that the problem with the Democratic Party was confined to its array of shitty politicians who don’t believe in anything? Who do you think keeps voting for the same shitty politicians, even in 2020 when they had a thousand other choices? Our only hope to avoid the most annoying Democrats on the internet coalescing around the ghost of 2024 in 2028 is that Kamala Harris gets lured away by the siren songs of the California governor’s seat. This Economist/YouGov poll, like nearly all polls ever, shows that Democrats want to vote for the most “electable” candidate more than one who agrees with their policy positions, and apparently that desire aligns with the candidate who has the (second) biggest name recognition within the Democratic Party. What a coincidence!
In fairness to Harris, she never got a fair shake in 2024. Biden lost her the campaign much more than she did, and as much as her advisors were on an “it’s everyone’s fault but mine” press tour after the campaign, they had a point about how staggeringly deep a hole they started in. In also fairness to Harris in a way she wouldn’t appreciate, she had the opportunity to run the campaign she wanted to in 2020, and it was so successful that she shut it down before anyone could cast a vote. She has yet to prove she is a national candidate, and yet, many Democratic voters seem to currently assume the opposite.
Current 2028 odds: I would like to think that Democrats have learned by now that anyone hand-picked by the party is by definition, a horrific choice antithetical to all logic about modern American politics, but this poll is not assuaging those fears. I currently give Kamala Harris similar odds to Hillary Clinton in January 2008.
Tim Walz
The best part of the Democrats’ 2024 campaign is returning to your TVs from his DNC-imposed exile to prove why everyone was so excited about him in the first place. So far Walz’s campaign seems to be confined to the articulate, thoughtful and passionate cable news hits that endeared him to a bunch of Democrats, but he’s so good at rallies that you can see the bigger opportunity ahead of him if he can exploit it. He polls similarly to Pete Buttigieg, and while that should logically put him in the upper crust of contenders, this is my political sportsbook, and my gut tells me that Walz has a vice-presidential ceiling.
Current 2028 odds: The same odds that Joe Biden had in 2004.
Mark Kelly
The Senator from Arizona saw his star rise last year when he received serious consideration for the VP nomination. Political consultant Andy Barr told Axios that “if Mark Kelly wants to run for president in the future he’s immediately in the small circle of people who have a shot,” and that “the power players in D.C.” see his potential. While the former Navy Captain and astronaut has an all-American story, he is firmly on the far right of the Democratic Party. A big hurdle he had to clear last year was standing opposed to the PRO Act, the signature piece of union legislation advanced in the last four years. Despite reversing his longtime position as being labor’s biggest enemy in the Democratic Party, it was not enough to stop the Walzmentum. Kelly feels like a relic from a different era, where he would have been a powerhouse in 2004, but he has staked out such conservative positions in the Democratic Senate and he is not exactly overflowing with charisma that it’s difficult to see how he gets widespread support in a party whose rank and file are largely opposed to Kelly’s conservative ideology.
Current 2028 odds: The same odds as Bill Richardson in 2008 when tons of people in power thought this relative unknown from America’s southwest was about to take the field by storm (spoiler: that didn’t happen).
Josh Shapiro
The man who could have set off another civil war within the Democratic Party had he been chosen as Harris’ running mate clearly has a future as a contender in the party. Shapiro is one of countless Democratic politicians who seemingly adopted the cadence and tenor of Barack Obama after 2016 (Pete Buttigieg’s attempt at this in 2020 was hilarious), and Shapiro is by far the most successful at it. He has serious political talent and the support of powerful establishment figures in the party, but his past writings and his recent positions have firmly positioned himself on the minority side of the flashpoint in the Democratic Party around the Biden-backed genocide in Gaza. As it stands, no other candidate in the field would evoke lefty ire like Shapiro, but with his political talents and chameleon-like ability to move in and out of the various circumstances he finds himself in, I wouldn’t rule out the governor of Pennsylvania finding some way to thread the needle to at least take some heat off him and let the machine behind him do the work.
Current 2028 odds: Shapiro also has 2004 John Edwards-style odds, but with a far higher likelihood than Wes Moore that there is an uncomfortable lawsuit in his closet, like potentially the one he presided over as Pennsylvania Attorney General where he agreed that a woman stabbed 20 times, including in the back of her head, committed suicide.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
I hesitated to even put her on this list because reports are that she’s more interested in staying in Congress, even though she’s the favorite in my book if she wants it. By all accounts, she actually likes the job. A revelation of Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is that due to her independent fundraising prowess, she can spend most of her time being a Congressperson and not calling rich people and begging them for bribes campaign contributions. One of the many images that sticks in my head from the Trump era is seeing her practically alone time and time again in a big room listening to tedious testimony from experts and doing the grunt work of a legislator with few others around her. In her seeming ideal world, she would be the Democratic leader in Congress working hand in hand with a president aligned with her policy agenda.
Current 2028 odds: If you include the uncertainty her decision brings, probably about the same as Beshear or a little worse. If she’s definitely running, I give her Barack Obama in February 2008 odds. AOC’s name recognition is a superpower that would really help her on a national stage, but if she wants Chuck Schumer’s job in the Senate, the recent head-to-head polling suggests that she’s a heavier favorite against him than Barack Obama was in the 2012 Democratic primary. Now that she’s had her best fundraising quarter ever, the world is her oyster.
Someone Else
“No one knew who Obama was in 2005” is both a cop-out and a legitimate angle on trying to come up with an informed opinion on this, because the only certainty in this world is change. No one knew who Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was in 2017 and now every poll has her and Kamala Harris appreciably ahead of the pack (know why this is the case and what they share in common more than anything? Name recognition!). A lot can happen in a few years, and new leaders can emerge. The reporting surrounding AOC’s wish to remain in Congress in a seemingly perfect world stems from her desire to see someone else step up that she can ally with. This exercise in trying to identify a defined unknown is a paradox, but here’s one longshot idea: Rep. Ruwa Romman from Georgia’s 97th district who will turn 35 in June 2028. The first Palestinian and Muslim woman elected to Georgia’s Congress was pushed as a speaker at the DNC to try to demonstrate some unity before she was denied a speaking spot. There is a spark on the left that some are well-positioned to exploit, even more than AOC, and I have zero idea whether Rep. Romman has any aspirations past Georgia’s chamber, but she is just one example of how there are plenty of potential Barack Obamas out there.
Current 2028 odds: A lot better than most Democratic campaign managers would ever want to admit. Somewhere along the lines of Barack Obama in December 2007.
Jared Polis
Heed my words fellow Americans, this is not the Coloradan you want. I have lambasted my home state Senators John Hickenlooper and Michael Bennett time and time again this year for consistently voting for Trump nominees and being a core part of the Trump-allied Democratic Senate caucus, but Polis may be worse. Full disclosure: he did have my sister arrested once, who was the head of Sunrise Movement Colorado at the time, along with 37 others, including high school students as they protested outside the Colorado House chambers. They sang and chanted to disrupt the State of the State he was leading over a bill they opposed that he supported, and my sister and some high schoolers were forced to spend a night in jail at the behest of the governor.
But that also has nothing to do with me telling you this guy sucks by showing you posts that Polis wrote where he was “excited” by Robert Kennedy Jr.’s nomination, whose policies are designed to kill children. Or Polis’ litany of attacks on scientists during the pandemic where he wasn’t afraid to fudge the facts to support his shifting narrative. Polis has always had a very strong libertarian streak, and he is another creature of this greater podcast bro universe as he clearly takes some kind of inspiration from its Silicon Valley-based right wing. Colorado was one of the few states who moved left in the last election, but somehow our three highest profile politicians are all moving right. They’re all bums and we should vote all of them out and replace them with people who have a spine.
Current 2028 odds: The exact same campaign and odds as Andrew Yang in 2020.
Gretchen Whitmer
We’ll bookend this column with another Newsom-style implosion, although the Michigan governor’s is much less terminal. Whitmer looked like one of the party’s rising stars after 2020, and she passed on the veep chase last year in favor of going behind the scenes to run the DNC alongside the Harris campaign. What happened next was uh, not great for her resume, and she was last seen cowering in the corner of the Oval Office after realizing her bipartisan brain had tricked her into being a prop in one of Trump’s authoritarian photo-ops. What separates her from Newsom is how she instantly realized it and clearly felt some level of shame, while whatever the hell the DNC is doing to Newsom’s hair has smoothed out his brain beyond a point of no return. Whitmer’s early 2028 campaign has reportedly taken a real hit in the eyes of Democratic insiders, but being on the border of Trump’s trade war will give her plenty of opportunities for redemption.
Current 2028 odds: Whitmer feels like she has 2020 Bernie-style odds for 2028. She has a differentiator and real power behind her elevating her floor, but some real weaknesses both in her campaign and in how accepting the electorate is of her pitch limiting her ceiling. But in a wildly crowded field, it’s anyone’s ballgame.
Official Splinter Sportsbook Lines You Should Not Bet Because Gambling Is Bad For You
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (+300)
Kamala Harris (+400)
Pete Buttigieg (+500)
J.B. Pritzker (+500)
Wes Moore (+700)
Andy Beshear (+700)
Josh Shapiro (+800)
Tim Walz (+1200)
Someone Else (+1300)
Mark Kelly (+1300)
Gretchen Whitmer (+1300)
Gavin Newsom (+1500)
Stephen A. Smith (+1500)
Jared Polis (+2000)
Rahm Emmanuel (+3000)
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The Truth Hurts
