Voting has started in the 2026 midterms — in Texas, ahead of a big primary on March 3. But this year isn’t about only the midterms: Looming in the background is 2028, and the presidential “invisible primary,” when potential contenders stump for fellow partisans, form campaign teams, hop around early voting states like New Hampshire and release memoirs.
Who’s in the mix for Democrats? Nate Silver, the author of the newsletter Silver Bulletin, recently participated in a fantasy-style draft of potential 2028 Democratic contenders (with two of his former colleagues at FiveThirtyEight, Galen Druke and Clare Malone).
In a written conversation with John Guida, an editor in Times Opinion, he assessed the front-runners, the politicians and non-politicians — and what surprised him about the picks.
John Guida: You’re a big sports fan, so you know the great drama and symbolic importance of the first overall pick in a draft. Drum roll, please: The first pick was …
Nate Silver: The first pick, made by Galen Druke, was Gov. Gavin Newsom of California. But I would have taken Newsom, too. Either he or Kamala Harris is ahead in basically every poll. And he’s moved well ahead in prediction markets, which, whatever their strengths and weaknesses, are a convenient enough summary of the conventional wisdom.
But it’s important to articulate a distinction here: These are our picks based on who we think is most likely to be chosen by Democratic voters and delegates, not whom we would necessarily pick. Personally, I think Newsom is cut from the same cloth as some past losing Democratic nominees like Harris. That said, I don’t think you can sort Democrats into clean buckets of winners and losers. The 2024 election was close-ish, and I’m not sure anyone should fear the likes of JD Vance or whomever else the Republicans might nominate.
Guida: Understood. We will get to whom you would pick soon. In the meantime, how much does it matter that Newsom has drawn scathingly critical attention — and not necessarily from G.O.P. partisans. For example: “Newsom’s record as governor of California is a Republican strategist’s perfect foil” — that’s from Bret Stephens, Times columnist. At The Atlantic, Jonathan Chait and Marc Novicoff wrote that during Newsom’s tenure, the state has been “a laboratory for some of the Democratic Party’s most politically fraught policies and instincts, which has left it less affordable and more culturally radical than it used to be.”
Even if you don’t trust the polls, you can look at how people are moving with their feet. California is projected to lose four electoral votes after the next census, which will be a setback for Democrats beginning in 2032. The state’s population has flatlined, even though people are flocking to warm-weather states pretty much everywhere else. My dad grew up in Los Angeles, my grandparents moved across the country from Connecticut to live there — California once symbolized the American dream. Now it comes attached to a lot of political baggage.
Guida: The second pick also comes from a blue coastal state, New York: Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. She was followed by Pete Buttigieg, the former Biden transportation secretary. Maybe we can bring in some broader context here in terms of how you size up the Democratic Party at the moment. You laid out a taxonomy of three factions within the party: Why those three, and how do you see them shaping the invisible primary, if indeed you do?
Silver: Some of this comes from something I was having trouble making sense of at first. If you look at, for instance, The Times’s interview with the podcast host Jennifer Welch, she’s absolutely furious at the Democratic “establishment.” Her show is called “I’ve Had It.” And yet she seems to be a big fan of Newsom, and of Kamala Harris, which is about as establishment as it gets. So I don’t think it’s as simple as there being just a left-versus-right or establishment-versus-outsider axis. You need to work along a few dimensions here.
The one thing pretty much all Democrats agree upon after 2024 is that the party needs to change course. And there are three different solutions to that. The left-populists think, well, the party needs to be more populist, especially on economic issues and “affordability,” inspired by Ocasio-Cortez and Mayor Zohran Mamdani of New York. Then there’s what I call the “abundance libs.” The name is slightly fraught because it comes from the book written by Ezra Klein of The Times and Derek Thompson, and I think the label has come to be used in ways they wouldn’t necessarily endorse. But it’s become the brand associated with people who think the party ought to move to the center, with “smart” economic policies and perhaps following public opinion more on culture war issues.
That leaves the third faction, the “Resistance libs,” which might actually be the majority faction. They usually attribute Democrats’ problems in 2024 to poor messaging or the failure to take on Donald Trump aggressively enough. They want a fighter. And Newsom plays expertly into that. They actually think the party’s platform is totally fine, though — it’s hard to identify any real differences between Newsom and Harris. Or maybe they think the same message would win if it were articulated by a white man rather than a Black woman; there’s some of that subtext here, too.
Guida: How would you apply that taxonomy to Ocasio-Cortez and Buttigieg?
Silver: Oh, Ocasio-Cortez is definitely a populist. And she might have that lane to herself. There are two other highly successful politicians from this group, but they’re Mamdani, who was born in Uganda and not eligible to run for president, and Bernie Sanders, who at 84 is even older than Joe Biden. Ocasio-Cortez’s recent international trip suggests that she wants to broaden her profile, but as inequality worsens, especially at the very top of the scale, as affordability remains a perpetual concern, this is arguably a more valuable message than it has been in a long time.
I also wonder, by the way, how A.I. plays into all of this if the timelines are even half as fast as Silicon Valley expects. I’ve argued, as has The Times’s Ross Douthat, that concerns about mass job loss at the same time tech valuations are increasing exponentially could be a very good issue for the left, even if they’ve been unduly dismissive of A.I. up to this point.
Meanwhile, Buttigieg is iconically in the abundance libs faction. He presents himself as a smart technocrat with a little bit of a crossover biography (gay, but married, from Indiana, former naval officer, etc.). However, he also borrows a little bit from the Newsom playbook in being quick on his feet and willing to punch back, albeit in more highbrow ways than with the occasional ALL-CAPS POSTS.
Guida: Here are the full results of the draft, and then we can continue in categories:
(1) Newsom; (2) Ocasio-Cortez; (3) Buttigieg; (4) Gretchen Whitmer; (5) Ruben Gallego; (6) Josh Shapiro; (7) Wes Moore; (8) Harris; (9) Cory Booker; (10) Raphael Warnock; (11) Jon Ossoff; (12) Mark Kelly; (13) Jon Stewart; (14) J.B. Pritzker; (15) Andy Beshear; (16) Ro Khanna; (17) Amy Klobuchar; (18) Chris Murphy.
There were six Democratic governors selected. Two of them — Whitmer of Michigan and Shapiro of Pennsylvania — represent swing states. Only one (Beshear of Kentucky) leads a red state. Did anything surprise you about this group — perhaps that Whitmer was the second one taken, since it is not so clear that she is interested in running?
Silver: There’s been a huge debate in the party about whether moderation or progressivism is the way to electoral success. I’m on the side that says the evidence pretty clearly lines up with moderation — other things being equal, which often they aren’t. But what really ought to be the best demonstration of electability is, well, actually having won elections — ideally by comfortable margins in purple states that will be key in the Electoral College, or even red states, as in the case of Beshear. Whitmer and Shapiro have that. Some of the senators, like Gallego, have it too.
But for whatever reason, I don’t think this definition of electability is selling to the electorate. It’s really been a long time since Democrats nominated someone who was a clear electoral overperformer. You’d have to go back to Bill Clinton, although Barack Obama won by a very large margin in his only Senate race in Illinois.
Guida: What stood out for you among the members of Congress?
Silver: I should also have mentioned Warnock and Ossoff, Georgia’s two senators, above. In 2024, Georgia moved even closer to what we call the electoral tipping point — the state most likely to be decisive in the Electoral College. Ossoff has generated significant buzz since we did the draft a few weeks ago and would probably rank even higher now. He’s the rare case of someone who might be acceptable to all three factions, combative but with some electability credentials, progressive but not “too” progressive.
I’m not sure what to make of the comparative lack of Latino candidates, or for that matter, Asian American candidates. But these are groups that were generally moving away from the Democrats from 2016 to 2024. It’s been in Georgia, where Democrats have relied on a coalition of Black voters and suburban whites, where their numbers have held up among the best.
Guida: Only one nonpolitician was in the mix: Jon Stewart. Did that surprise you, given the success of Donald Trump in the G.O.P.? Other non-politician names have been mentioned elsewhere: Stephen A. Smith, Mark Cuban, Stephen Colbert?
Silver: If we were doing this a year ago, I’d have been more bullish on the non-politicians. But I think we’ve found that Democrats like Newsom, Ossoff and Ocasio-Cortez are pretty good at grabbing attention on their own, in ways that play more organically into political news cycles. And so there isn’t necessarily that much demand for celebrity-type outsiders among the primary electorate.
There’s also the fact that the president to be elected with basically the least government experience in American history is Donald Trump, and I’m not sure how eager Democrats should or will be to emulate that. Plus, some of these guys may be a little out of their depth when it comes to the substance. Stewart recently drew a lot of criticism for his lack of understanding of Economics 101 concepts in his interview with the Nobel Prize-winning economist Richard Thaler.
Guida: So you think Democrats will be picking from a pool of largely conventional political candidates — and yet the party itself is strikingly unpopular. Do you see that as a problem, or do you think adjustments around some cultural issues and the strong counterreaction to a Trumpist G.O.P. will drive the Democratic primary?
Silver: I do want to be clear that, even if I think someone like Newsom is a suboptimal choice, I’d probably give him a 50-50 chance of winning in 2028. Two big things are behind that.
First, incumbents have been in a very bad way in the United States and around the world for several cycles now. It might almost be an advantage to be the party out of power.
And second, I expect Republicans to have a lot of trouble agreeing on a candidate who is not Donald Trump. They’ve done quite badly in the Trump era in nonpresidential elections, from the 2018 midterms (and probably this year’s, too) to off-cycle and special elections. I don’t expect “marginal” voters (people who don’t always vote) to walk over glass for, say, JD Vance, the way they did for Trump. And yet Vance has some of Trump’s liabilities and maybe not as much of his political talent.
Guida: Let’s get to how you, personally, see it. If you were picking for yourself, who would be in your top five?
Silver: I don’t want to be too prescriptive here. But I’d say, from the list of 18 candidates we drafted, here are the ones who have a track record of electoral overperformance: Whitmer, Gallego, Shapiro, Warnock, Ossoff, Kelly, Beshear, Klobuchar. If you want to limit it to five, I’d just take the first five. Kelly has less charisma than the others (subjective, I know), Beshear will probably read as too much of an outright Joe Manchin-y centrist, and Klobuchar seems unlikely to run in 2028 as she’d be just two years into her first gubernatorial term (should she win this November).
Guida: David Axelrod has a theory about how voters choose a president. As he put it, “Open-seat presidential elections are shaped by perceptions of the style and personality of the outgoing incumbent. Voters rarely seek the replica of what they have. They almost always seek the remedy, the candidate who has the personal qualities the public finds lacking in the departing executive.”
We have one recent model where Trump was the sitting president, which is Joe Biden: a return to normalcy, etc. Do you see anyone in this pool of potential candidates who could be the remedy in 2028?
Silver: I basically agree with that, but I think candidates tend more to follow zigzag patterns. They’re sort of moving at perpendicular, 90-degree angles, not doing a full 180. On the one hand, they want to turn away from the failures of the previous incumbent president. On the other hand, they want to present something new and different and to also escape from the ghosts (or at least the failed nominees) of their own party’s past. Biden was maybe an unusual case in being so “retro,” and also drawing on some nostalgia for Obama. And he wrapped up the nomination very quickly after struggling in the first few states, just as Covid exploded in the United States and Democrats were in a risk-averse mood (and party leaders like James Clyburn weighed in heavily on his behalf).
But I wouldn’t say Biden had a particularly successful presidency. Which means the “return to normal” messaging would be a harder sell this time.
Nate Silver, the founder and former editor of FiveThirtyEight and the author of “On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything,” writes the newsletter Silver Bulletin. He is a part-time adviser for Polymarket. John Guida is a Times Opinion editor.
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