From Bernie Sanders to Theo Von: These Democratic Kingmakers Will Anoint the Next Obama

In some particularly tortured living rooms across America, people are playing a parlor game called Who Is the Next Democratic Leader? Its central premise is that someone will save Democrats specifically and democracy more generally. Maybe that’s true, maybe another Obama will spring from the head of Zeus fully formed and serving in the Senate, or maybe it will be a big messy primary à la 2016 or 2020.

But before asking who the next leader of the party is or will be, it helps to ask who are today’s Democratic kingmakers who can anoint an upstart with legitimacy, who can help shepherd a chaotic Democratic Party apparatus behind a rising star. Some of the faces are familiar, some are newcomers wielding tremendous power.

When I asked Dan Pfeiffer, my favorite of the Pod Save America guys, he essentially rejected the premise of my question. “Given how most Democrats feel about the party these days, endorsements from establishment leaders are likely to be net negatives, and people will be clamoring for the support of party outsiders.”

I heard something similar from Bradley Tusk, a venture capitalist who previously served as a deputy governor of Illinois and as a campaign manager for Mike Bloomberg’s 2009 mayoral campaign. “I feel like that world doesn’t exist anymore. Party machines are mainly dead,” Tusk wrote to me. “Endorsements typically don’t matter much because people have so little faith in institutions. The candidate with the most money doesn’t necessarily win so having rich donors isn’t enough. I think now it’s a cult of personality rather than being blessed by a kingmaker.”

These responses capture the wider frustration with the Democratic Party, but I don’t necessarily agree that this sentiment negates the influence that powerful figures could potentially wield.

I got much more fulsome responses when I granted sources anonymity. “I think Nancy Pelosi still plays a big role,” one young congressional staffer told me. “Mike Bloomberg and Bill and Melinda Gates. Donors: George Soros, Laurene Powell Jobs, and Future Forward PAC. Rachel Maddow.” She added that Obama is still very much a kingmaker in the party, and that his endorsement was helpful to Kamala Harris’s campaign. Similarly, a famous writer told me that “despite being old and tired, you gotta say that [Chuck] Schumer and [Hakeem] Jeffries are still kingmakers—helps to have their support.”

It also seems inevitable that the next Obama will almost certainly need the support of a broad podcast coalition. In the 2024 election, Kamala Harris’s campaign didn’t end up doing Joe Rogan’s show. “There was a backlash with some of our progressive staff that didn’t want her to be on it, and how there would be a backlash,” campaign adviser Jennifer Palmieri said, according to the reporting by the Financial Times. But next time, the young congressional staffer told me, things will be different. “In an upcoming election, a Joe Rogan endorsement could mean almost as much as an Obama endorsement.”

The next generation of kingmakers is likely to be motley and diffuse. One rising star in the Democratic party described this diaspora of influence as “a great big blob,” adding that “even in very narrow elections their combined might is trumped by the voters themselves, whoever they are.” A very smart Democratic congressional staffer sent me this list: Theo Von; Adam Friedland, a podcaster with a growing audience; and Faiz Shakir, an adviser to Bernie Sanders.

A media personality told me that he thought one of the big Democratic kingmakers was a guy called Donald Borenstein—who I hadn’t heard of because I’m clearly very old and because everything is so siloed—one of Zohran Mamdani’s video guys.

The same famous writer who mentioned Jeffries and Schumer told me that one figure to watch is Rebecca Katz, the political consultant who worked with John Fetterman and Ruben Gallego, and is helping with the campaigns of Graham Platner, the oyster farmer hoping to unseat Susan Collins in Maine, and Abdul El-Sayed, who is running for a Senate seat in Michigan.

Whether this next generation of potential kingmakers will ultimately move the needle in upcoming elections remains to be seen. Lis Smith, a Democratic political consultant, was among the many folks I talked to who told me that the old party paradigm hasn’t been relevant for a long time. “The honest answer here is that Obama made Obama— not a kingmaker, and that general model of politics is very much on the decline,” she wrote to me in a text message. (Which may not be entirely true: In 2008, two economists estimated that Oprah’s endorsement helped Obama earn a million votes in the primaries and caucuses; in 2024, however, her support apparently wasn’t as decisive for Harris.) But wither the kingmakers? Seems like a much more boring parlor game to play.