How the midterm elections will set Democrats up for 2028 success or failure

It may seem premature to look ahead to the 2028 presidential race before the midterm elections are over, but jockeying for party nominations to the White House will start almost immediately after control of Congress is settled later this year.

In fact, campaign staff hiring and early decision-making for prospective presidential candidates have already started. This is especially true for Democrats, who seem likely to have a big, wide-open field.

Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) wasted no time trying to nudge former Vice President Kamala Harris, the 2024 Democratic nominee, out of the race under the guise of saying he wouldn’t run if she did.

“Of course not. Why would I? I wouldn’t do that to her. I wouldn’t do it to me. Why would I?” Newsom told CNN’s Jake Tapper. “I wouldn’t waste everyone’s time. Who needs that?”

Soon afterward, Axios reported that “a surprisingly large number of former aides, surrogates and donors to Harris” were saying they didn’t think she was going to run. These Democrats pointed to her slow hiring, minimal public posturing, and continued tensions with her party’s big donors after blowing $1 billion on a race in which she lost all seven battleground states and the popular vote to President Donald Trump.

(Illustration by Thomas Fluharty for the Washinfgton Examiner

But as the outlet noted, “some of her former aides concede they could be wrong — or could even be ‘wishcasting’ because they don’t want her to pursue another bid.”

Harris leads in most of the public polls and is the only top-tier contender performing especially well with black voters. Newsom and Harris have both been out on the campaign trail ahead of the midterm elections, boosting Democratic candidates. How the Democrats, and other presidential wannabes such as former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, appear and ultimately do will matter for their 2028 prospects.

Democrats who want to run for president are going to look very closely at the midterm election results. A blue wave would embolden virtually every faction of the party, but would especially make the Left eager to reach for the stars. If Democrats don’t do as well as they expect or the polls currently predict, many primary voters will put a premium on electability.

When the promised red wave failed to materialize in the 2022 midterm elections, it convinced many Democrats it was safest to stick with then-President Joe Biden in the subsequent presidential contest. If congressional Democrats had taken a bigger beating, it’s possible that Biden would have declined to run for reelection, and likely that he would have faced more serious opposition in the primaries if he did seek another term.

From left: Senate candidates Peggy Flanagan of Minnesota and Troy Jackson of Maine have underwhelming leads in what were thought to be safe Democratic races. Democratic presidential possibilities include socialists Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), left, who may strike voters as too old, and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), who at 37 may seem too young. (AP photos)

The Democrats who would be president have different theories for how their party can win the White House again. The midterm election results could help or hurt some of their arguments. Do Democrats tack to the center, move further left, or do something else entirely in 2028?

Most of the socialists who won Democratic primaries this year will win in November because they are running in deep-blue congressional districts. But Democrats have nominated a handful of socialist, or at least Democratic Socialists of America-adjacent, candidates for Senate in battleground states. Some of these states may turn out to be battlegrounds in this year’s election precisely because they have tapped socialist nominees.

Abdul el Sayed of Michigan, Troy Jackson of Maine, and Peggy Flanagan of Minnesota are all running in typically blue states in what should be a Democratic year, although Trump won Michigan and carried Maine’s 2nd Congressional District. Minnesota was the only state to vote against Ronald Reagan in his 49-state landslide reelection in 1984.

Yet all three of these Democrats have underwhelming leads. Jackson and Flanagan are each up by 1.8 points, according to the RealClearPolitics polling averages. El Sayed is ahead by 2.8 points, though the polls there dramatically overestimated his support in the primary earlier this year.

Jackson replaced socialist fellow traveler Graham Platner as the Democratic challenger to Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) after a series of Platner scandals jeopardized Democrats’ chances of flipping the seat. Jackson has considerably less baggage than Platner, but there are still concerns about his campaign. Democrats also consistently led Collins in the polls six years ago, often by a bigger margin than Jackson enjoys now, only to lose to her by nearly 9 points.

El Sayed won a hotly contested primary against Rep. Haley Stevens (D-MI) in which Israel, money in politics, and the direction of the Democratic Party loomed large. He campaigned with the left-wing social media personality Hasan Piker, whose comments about America deserving the 9/11 terrorist attacks have become an albatross for the Michigan Democrat in his general election race against former Republican Rep. Mike Rogers.

The progressive Michigander has also had to make amends with Stevens’s supporters in an attempt to knit the Democratic coalition back together by November. Jewish and black voters have been unenthusiastic, while Rogers has openly courted disaffected Democrats.

One reason many black Democrats are cool to el Sayed is his support for the “uncommitted” movement to withhold delegates from the Biden-Harris ticket in 2024. Harris came to Michigan to support him.

“I know the history … But when we look at the stakes in this moment, we cannot take ourselves out of the game,” the former vice president said. “It’s OK to not be in love with a candidate … because this choice is better than that one.”

Flanagan is Minnesota’s lieutenant governor. In addition to possibly being too left-wing for what Republicans hope will eventually become a swing state, she has been dogged by the same daycare fraud scandal that caused Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN) to forgo a reelection bid just two years after being the Democratic nominee for vice president. Republican former sports broadcaster Michele Tafoya has waged a spirited campaign, tying Flanagan in one poll and trailing by single digits in others. Many voters remain undecided.

A fourth socialist Senate candidate became the surprise Democratic nominee in Florida. The race against Sen. Ashley Moody (R-FL) wasn’t expected to be competitive. Florida has become the reddest big state in the nation under Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL), and Trump has carried it in the last three presidential elections. When Angie Nixon won the primary over Resistance hero Alex Vindman, Democrats initially rejoiced that they wouldn’t end up spending money in the state and diverting resources from other, more winnable elections.

As Democrats gained strength in polls across the country after Labor Day weekend, some have taken a second look at Florida. One poll found the Senate race tied, though most others show Moody with a lead in the high single digits. The RealClearPolitics average has Moody up by 5.5 points.

The Democratic establishment did not want socialist candidates in any of these races, though party leaders were resigned to a state convention picking Jackson after Platner’s decisive primary win. But their electability arguments fell on deaf ears because the establishment lost to Trump in two out of the last three presidential elections and needed perfect conditions to beat him in 2020.

Democratic leaders have come around on these candidates after the primaries, needing them to prevail on Election Day to take control of the Senate. But they could be pyrrhic victories. If the socialist Senate candidates lose, it will revive the electability argument against them in the presidential primaries. But if they ride a blue wave to Washington, the socialists’ momentum will continue to build.

The rest of the Democrats threatening the 53-47 Republican Senate majority are positioning themselves, with varying degrees of plausibility, as centrists. That may not be the best way to describe former Gov. Roy Cooper in North Carolina, former Sen. Sherrod Brown in Ohio, or ex-Rep. Mary Petola in Alaska. But none of them is trying to win in a Trump 2024 state by running on a socialist platform. 

That contrast will be unmistakably clear if the socialists lose. It will get lost in the post-election Democratic euphoria if all or most of them win. “Nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result,” Winston Churchill once wrote. For partisan political operatives, winning an election with a bad candidate comes a close second. 

Much of the Newsom-Harris wrangling is over the donors and supporters they share as Californians. But a nontrivial part of it is also about clearing the lane for non-socialist establishment liberals. Only so many of them can run, and both Newsom and Harris have tried to make peace with the socialist uprising inside their party.

“I believe in universal healthcare, and I believe in Medicare for All; the party does overwhelmingly,” Newsom said when asked about the DSA’s rise. “And so, if it’s about more money in your pocket, lowering costs, getting money out of politics, if it’s about Medicare for All, I think we’re pretty aligned.”

“It’s about recognizing that we’ve got a planet that is getting hotter and drier and that we’ve got to address the issue of climate change, we want energy security, and we want to move off fossil fuels,” Newsom added. “That’s a DSA position, that’s a mainstream position within the Democratic Party.”

Harris has been in talks with the socialists, presumably trying to smooth over left-wing opposition to her and Biden’s record on the war in Gaza following the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks on Israel. Darializa Avila Chevalier, a socialist Democrat running for Congress in New York, had to delete past social media posts saying, “F*** Kamala Harris.”

“The vice president reached out to have a conversation, and we’ve had a brief conversation,” New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, the socialist kingmaker, said of Harris on a podcast in June. “We’ve been in touch over the last few months, and I really do appreciate her outreach.” 

The socialist lane will need to sort itself out, too. Mamdani was born outside the United States and is therefore constitutionally ineligible to run. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) carried the mantle in both 2016 and 2020, but he is older than both Biden and Trump. He appears to realize that his age would be a major impediment to a third campaign, even if the national environment is more inviting than ever.

“I am 40 years of age now,” Sanders quipped on a podcast with a Politico reporter. “And I think having reached the golden age of 40, it’s hard… I think it’s unlikely that I will become president of the United States.”

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) will soon turn 37. She is much younger than Sanders, but meets the constitutional age and birth requirements. She is the third socialist Democrat who could plausibly run a national campaign. Some think she is too cautious to run for president, given the safer and easier option of mounting a primary challenge against Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), though she seemed to dispel that notion in a recent interview.

“There’s an argument that some make that this is a very unique political window and, oftentimes in politics, you do only get one shot,” Ocasio-Cortez told the New York Times. “Life doesn’t wait for you to be ready for things. Sometimes life just makes things ready for you.” She has already been in Congress nearly twice as long as Barack Obama was when he ran for president, though no one has gone straight from the House to the White House since James Garfield won the 1880 presidential election.

In 2020, Biden won the nomination after the party establishment coalesced behind him to stop Sanders and socialism. Buttigieg, now a much more established national figure, was part of that great consolidation. Whether something like this would happen again in a more socialist-friendly climate is anyone’s guess. If neither Sanders nor Ocasio-Cortez runs, it’s not clear who the socialists’ preferred presidential candidate would be.

There are candidates who hope to chart a different course for both the party and themselves, some of whom may be directly empowered by the midterm elections. Gov. Josh Shapiro (D-PA) is expected to win reelection in a state Trump carried in two of the last three presidential elections in a landslide. Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-GA) insists he has no plans to run for president, but his reelection campaign took Georgia from being one of the GOP’s best Senate pickup opportunities to one of the Democrats’ strongest states.

Rahm Emanuel, the former Chicago mayor, White House chief of staff, congressman, and U.S. ambassador to Japan, has been urging the Democrats to move to the center more vocally than any other potential candidate. This has gotten him a lot of media attention. Will it translate into many votes in a Democratic primary?

If Democrats do well in the midterm elections, it seems likely that the answer will be no. It took three straight presidential election losses in which Republicans carried at least 40 states for Democrats to nominate Bill Clinton. Why would a party coming off its biggest wave since 2006, one that can elect socialist senators in swing states, need to course-correct or moderate? Emanuel’s electability argument, and that of more liberal contenders such as Harris and Newsom, would be in tatters.

Unless, of course, the polls are wrong and Democrats underperform in ways that cannot plausibly be blamed on gerrymandering. That seems like a bit much to hope for, though it is possible Republicans could retain the Senate, and the fight for the House could tighten by November. This could ultimately become a problem for Shapiro or Gov. Andy Beshear (D-KY) as well, though they both have more room to shape-shift to align with the primary electorate.

Beshear says Democrats need a governor to be their presidential nominee, which they haven’t done since Bill Clinton in 1992. Newsom, Shapiro, Gov. JB Pritzker (D-IL), and Gov. Wes Moore (D-MD) are a few others who could check that box.

DO YOU BELIEVE THE POLLS OR DEMOCRATIC INSIDERS ABOUT KAMALA HARRIS 2028?

The midterm elections won’t settle every argument among Democrats. It’s possible the results will further complicate them. Progressives could win, but by a narrower margin than the Democrats running to their right. States the party’s bicoastal elites traditionally write off could become a vital part of Democrats’ Electoral College calculations.

Democrats could also easily overreact to the midterm elections, seeing a mandate in what is merely a rebuke of Trump, high gas prices, and an unpopular war. And Republicans will have debates of their own, especially if voters reject them at the ballot box. But November will affect how Democrats think about 2028, and that’s exactly what they’ll do the second this year’s elections are over.

W. James Antle III (@jimantle) is executive editor of the Washington Examiner magazine.

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