Alex Soros has a long — long — list of Democrats he’d like to see run for office in 2028.
“Josh Shapiro is great. AOC is great. You know, Raphael Warnock is great. You know, Gretchen Whitmer is great. I mean, I like Tim Walz. Chris Murphy. Brian Schatz. Like, these guys are great,” he told New York Magazine in a sweeping new profile.
As the son of the liberal billionaire (and rightwing boogeyman) George Soros, Alex’s view on who’s best positioned to lead the fractured party going forward is no small thing. According to New York, the elder Soros spent $100 million on Democrats in 2024 and hundreds of millions more on causes they care about—money that Alex had no small part in directing as chair of his father’s $20 billion philanthropy, Open Society Foundations, and president of his super-PAC.
What is clear from Alex’s conversations with New York is that he has little time for the post-election day finger-pointing about Democrats moving too far left. “First of all, it’s not smart after an election to go after your base,” he said. “Second of all, you know, the quick takes, the hot takes—let’s see which age well.”
Alex argued that his own party was too quick to circle the wagons around forcing former President Joe Biden to bow out of the race after his disastrous debate performance. “The fact of the matter is that if Donald Trump had gone on that debate stage and, you know, shit his pants and had a heart attack, Republicans would still be there saying, ‘Yeah, he’s our guy,’” he said. “That meltdown that we had publicly is a discipline problem.”
If anything, he said, it was staking out progressive issues like police reform in the wake of George Floyd’s murder that helped clinch the 2020 race for Democrats. “The George Floyd protests may have been the reason that Joe Biden won the 2020 election,” he said. “It galvanized people to vote; it’s maybe why we won Georgia.”
But Alex didn’t just reserve his fire for naysayers in his own party. He also took aim at MAGA world, recalling how Elon Musk used to like his tweets and once suggested they meet up, before blowing him off. “We both used to believe in civil liberties; now, he’s against them. He used to be a believer in climate change; now, he’s against it,” Alex said.
He also called out vice president JD Vance for cozying up to the leader of Germany’s anti-immigrant party Alternative für Deutschland (Afd) on a visit to Munich, where he snubbed Chancellor Olaf Scholz. “In my view, Vance is anti-American,” he said. “He’s against America. You know, at least the America that defeated Hitler, the America that desegregated.”
The story is laden with other juicy palace intrigue about how 39-year-old Alex wound up taking the reins of Open Society, rather than his older brother Jonathan Soros. One former Foundation official compared him to Succession’s Roman Roy: “Smart but fucking impossible and not particularly interested in the details.”
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The post Alex Soros Has Thoughts on Dems’ 2028 Prospects, Elon Musk, and “Anti-American” JD Vance appeared first on Vanity Fair.