It’s a longstanding truism of modern American politics: The next presidential race begins as soon as midterm elections end. That nonstop politicking has been an annoyance for many voters but also for political reporters like myself. Like, give us a break, literally.
Not this time.
In the wake of the 2026 midterm elections that scrambled the national political map and its hoary red- and blue-state boundaries, Americans of all persuasions should be excited by the potential of the 2028 presidential election — and not just for its promise of ushering out Donald Trump.
The 2028 contest stands to be one of the most wide-open, eventful, wholly unpredictable and historic races in memory. By wide open, I mean featuring both an expanded number of states and more and more diverse candidates. Generational change is all but certain, retiring the octogenarians, fellow boomers and too-familiar names like Clinton, Biden, Bush … and Trump.
Ironically, even as Trump and his team boasts of their corrosive anti-DEI purges in civilian and military posts, and cocoon themselves with fellow white men, the voters elected women and people of color as senators and governors in red, blue and purple states, suggesting their openness to merit over identity. And Democratic operatives are no longer suggesting, as they have since Kamala Harris’ and Hillary Clinton’s defeats to Trump, that their party must get behind a(nother) white man.
What’s underway in both parties is nothing less than a bid to redefine themselves for disillusioned voters while defining a future for the nation that rebuilds from the ruins of the self-branded builder in the horribly scarred White House. Among Democrats, centrists and democratic socialists will face off. Among Republicans, wannabe Trump heirs will contend against those who seek distance from Trump if not a break, testing Trump’s still-firm hold on the party’s MAGA base.
As for Trump, despite all of his teasing and merch-selling suggesting that he’d try to run again, the Constitution’s term limits be damned, he won’t. Yet neither will the narcissist cede the stage. If he can’t be king, he’ll at least insist on being kingmaker and take Shakespearean delight in making life miserable for Republican princelings by his infamous caprice.
Neither Republicans nor Democrats have an heir apparent for their presidential nomination. Before this month’s elections, the smart money was on Vice President JD Vance to be the Republican nominee — assuming he kept the Don’s favor, of course. But without even being on a ballot, Vance emerged as one of biggest losers, if not the biggest, of 2026.
Never a good choice for vice president, Vance helped cost Republicans the governorship and a U.S. Senate seat in his home state of Ohio. Quite a feat in a red state, or formerly red state; a presidential nominee that can’t carry his own state is, well, so Al Gore.
Vance, the nasty, politically hapless man who in 2024 whined about “childless cat ladies” among the voters and lied that his legal Haitian constituents in Ohio (he was still senator then) were eating their neighbors’ pets, this season heartily defended Republican gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy and his vile TV ad revictimizing Democratic rival Amy Acton years after her childhood sexual abuse by her stepfather. Acton won, of course.
Immediately after the election, the chameleon-like Vance blamed the war and resulting high energy prices for Republicans’ record-setting losses, even as he suggested that Trump agrees, which the president does not. Vance also is a friend and financial beneficiary of the nation’s tech lords, the now and future villains for many voters.
On Tuesday, former House speaker and MAGA hanger-on Newt Gingrich wrote that, prior to the midterm elections, “I was routinely telling people that Vice President J.D. Vance was the most likely GOP nominee for 2028.” No more: The Republicans’ “disastrous results … opened the gates to a lot more potential GOP candidates — and a much more open race than I would have thought.”
For what it’s worth from Gingrich, a man who (like Trump since) led the Republican Party to the political heights in the mid-1990s only to nearly wreck it, he named as newly enticing Republican candidates Texas’ Sen. Ted Cruz, retiring Govs. Ron DeSantis of Florida and Brian Kemp of Georgia, Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, former Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin and Sens. John Kennedy of Louisiana, Rick Scott of Florida and Ron Johnson of Wisconsin.
Yet the blood in the water that hungry Republican politicos sense around Vance likewise extends to others who’ve chosen to swim in Trump’s swamp. Looking especially at you, Secretary of State and National Security Advisor Marco Rubio, but to some others on Gingrich’s early list as well. Trump stink might be perfume to many 2028 Republican voters, but as the 2026 results showed, it’s repellent to the general electorate.
The long list of potential Democratic candidates — too numerous to name here — attests to the party’s deep bench, players sidelined too long as Joe Biden and other old guard Democrats held on. It’s the intraparty contest we should have gotten in 2024.
And as for the 2028 general election campaign, it will be fought on a field larger than any in my lifetime now that Democrats have shown they can win high office in states they’d all but written off, including Texas, South Carolina, Ohio, Iowa, Kansas and … Mississippi! For decades we campaign reporters got so tired of following presidential candidates to the same few “battleground states,” leaving most states untouched and their concerns little addressed.
And here’s another reason to celebrate: Suddenly, the Supreme Court is at stake too.
Decisions by its oldest and most far-right justices, Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr., not to retire while Republicans still controlled the Senate suggest that Trump may well not get another nominee confirmed. If Democrats keep control of the Senate after 2028, as seems likely, and win the presidency, the prospect of replacing Thomas and Alito means a 6-3 right-wing court potentially could swing to 5-4: five Democratic appointees, four Republican appointees.
A rebalancing all around. That’s what 2028 will be about.
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