Analysis: Republicans are (quietly) making 2028 moves

CNN

2 days ago

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It seems too early, but it's not. Just as Democrats are plotting how to win the next presidential election, Republican candidates are too.
But while Democrats will try to outdo themselves in their opposition to President Donald Trump, Republicans will have to navigate a party that Trump has rebuilt around his own political instincts.
I talked to CNN's Eric Bradner about which Republicans are likely to run for president in 2028 and how they will balance making their own name with paying homage to their current leader, who likes to joke about not leaving office no matter what the Constitution says.
Our conversation, conducted by phone and edited for length, is below.
WOLF: Will Trump try to run for a third term despite what's in the Constitution? Because it's something that he's teased, right?
BRADNER: There is no constitutional path for him to seek a third term. But that doesn't mean ambitious Republicans who want to be a successor can flout Trump. They can't be seen as at odds with him. They're trying to stand out in their own ways, but they can't be seen as going against Trump and suggesting that he is ineligible for a third term, even though the Constitution makes that crystal clear to be problematic.
WOLF: He likes to joke about running, but has also said he will not run. So let's assume, for the moment, that he doesn't try to do something that would violate the Constitution. How do potential Republican candidates plot a campaign for voters while still staying in his good graces?
BRADNER: You have to do it carefully. Part of it is, while Trump is still so popular with the Republican base, demonstrating that you are supportive of his agenda. That can look different depending on whether you are the vice president, in the Senate, in a governor's office.
So far, we're seeing ambitious Republicans traveling to some of the early voting primary states and using their speeches to highlight their support for Trump's agenda and looking for ways to cast themselves as the successor to that agenda.
It's made much more difficult by the fact that Vice President JD Vance is obviously positioned as Trump's understudy. But they're looking for ways to show that they are, at least in some ways, ideologically aligned with Trump and are taking substantive actions to support his agenda, while sort of pitching some of their own accomplishments and their own differences in terms of approach. But it's clear that most Republicans that are already hitting the 2028 travel circuit are looking for ways to align themselves.
WOLF: The Democrats are trying to change the early primary map and de-emphasize Iowa and maybe even New Hampshire. Is the Republican calendar going to be what it has been in recent decades where we go: Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, Nevada. Or is that going to change?
BRADNER: It won't be official for a while, but Republicans appear to be on track to keep the same calendar. I talked to Jeff Kaufmann, the longtime Iowa Republican Party chairman, recently, and he said he had already made his case to the White House to keep Iowa's caucuses first, and said they were very receptive. Republicans didn't have the kind of disaster that Democrats had in Iowa in 2020 and have shown no real inclination to shake up their primary…
WOLF: But Republicans did have a disaster in 2012 — just ask Rick Santorum.
BRADNER: They did. But 2012 at this point will have been 16 years ago, and they have passed on opportunities to change the calendar since then, and there doesn't seem to be any momentum to do so now.
WOLF: Who are the Republicans who are flirting with a campaign at the moment and are actively in those states?
BRADNER: Even within the last couple of months, we've seen a number of Republicans visiting the early states. Look at Iowa alone. This month, Glenn Youngkin, the Virginia governor, visited Iowa to headline the state Republican Party's annual Clinton dinner.
Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders was there for an event hosted by The Family Leader, a conservative Christian group led by Bob Vander Plaats, a well-known activist there. Recently, Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul was in Iowa, where he got a little bit of a chilly reception at times because he was making the case for changes to Trump's 'One Big Beautiful Bill.' And Florida Sen. Rick Scott was there also touting his support for further reductions in spending that the bill included.
He also got a bit of a frosty reception from some of the attendees at the fundraiser that I talked to afterward who really wanted to hear more support for Trump's agenda from him and less about their defenses.
WOLF: The most obvious heir to Trump would be Vance. What is the thinking among Republicans? Do they believe the nomination is his to lose, or will he really have to work for it?
BRADNER: He clearly starts in the pole position. But I was a little surprised during a recent visit to Iowa how frequently the name of Secretary of State Marco Rubio came up, often in the same breath as JD Vance. Both of them, despite their own very public criticism of Trump in the past, now seem to be viewed as team players; as closely aligned with Trump and with his current administration, obviously, as leading members of it.
There's interest in Rubio in part because he has run for president before, unlike Vance. A lot of people in the early voting states remember Rubio visiting them in 2016, when he finished third in Iowa in what were pretty competitive caucuses. So a lot of these early-state Republican voters have met Rubio before. They've already formed opinions of him.
They like Vance, but they don't know him yet. They haven't had a chance to go through the usual process with him. He obviously starts with an advantage as Trump's legacy, but based on the conversations I've had, it doesn't appear to be a lock. I think a lot of Republican voters are going to want to at least meet and hear from a broader range of candidates.
WOLF: That 2016 Iowa race you mentioned, Rubio came in third. Trump came in second. The winner was Sen. Ted Cruz. Is he going to run again? And would he do better this time?
BRADNER: He certainly has never stopped acting like someone who wants to be president, right? He has obviously remained in the public eye and has been supportive of Trump, including in that contentious interview with Tucker Carlson, for which Cruz faced a bit of online backlash.
He's built a fundraising network. He is someone who has clearly already been a runner-up in that 2016 primary, and probably would enter 2028 with vast name recognition. So he has a number of potential things going for him if he, if he does want to run.
WOLF: The party has changed around Trump, who doesn't really have a political ideology so much as political instincts. Now Republican candidates will have to adjust to Trump's populism. Will a person like Sen. Josh Hawley, who sounds very populist, do better than a more traditional Republican like, say, Youngkin?
BRADNER: It certainly seems like that lane could be open, although I would say as of right now, Vance probably starts in the pole position there. He has populist instincts that he displayed for quite some time before he became Trump's vice president. You're right about Trump having political instincts that these potential candidates are going to have to react to and adjust to on the fly.
Being nimble in interviews and messaging is always important, but it's going to be especially important in a landscape where Trump is the dominant figure in the party. While he won't be on the ballot, he is very likely to have interest in steering things.
WOLF: How do you group the potential field? There are senators, there are governors, there are people in the administration.
BRADNER: I think that's the right starting point. People in the administration, which you can kind of divide into two groups, right? Vance and Rubio are by far the best known and are the ones that I have heard from Republican voters about the most clearly.
There are some other folks, like Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and potentially others who are former governors, are Trump allies and have their own ambitions, but don't carry the sorts of advantages that Vance and Rubio have.
Then there's a group of governors, and to me, this is potentially the most interesting group, because they have their own agendas outside of Washington and are less tied to whatever's going on in the White House or on Capitol Hill on any given day.
Youngkin, the Virginia governor, ran an impressive campaign in 2021, and because Virginia does not allow governors to run for second terms, he is just a few months away from leaving office, which means he will be a popular Republican elected in a Democratic-leaning state who now is out of a job and has all day to campaign.
A couple other Republican governors who are in that basket would include Sanders, who obviously is forever aligned with Trump due to her time as his White House press secretary, and Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, who is chairman of the Republican Governors Association, which gets him a way to build connections with donors all over the country.
Kemp is among the Republicans who have had the biggest differences with Trump on the list of prospective 2028 candidates because he didn't support Trump's claims that Georgia was stolen from him in 2020. But the two of them seem to have played nice in more recent years and Kemp is conservative. He does have his own record in Georgia that he can talk about.
Then finally there are the senators. Tim Scott is one who ran for president in 2024 and did appear to end that race with a closer relationship with Trump than when he started it, which was a really tricky thing to (do).
The problem Scott faces is one that Trump laid out in 2024, which is that he's a better salesman for Trump and his agenda than he is for himself. There are other senators, Rand Paul (Kentucky), Rick Scott (Florida), Josh Hawley (Missouri), Tom Cotton (Arkansas), who I think everyone will be keeping an eye on. But it's going to take some lucky breaks for them to make a ton of headway in a potentially crowded field, especially when they'll be having to spend so much of their time participating in and reacting to what's happening in Washington. They don't have the kind of freedom that governors have at this stage.
WOLF: There are also two governors that are closely aligned with Trump's policies in Texas and Florida, which are the two biggest red states in terms of electoral votes. What about Ron DeSantis (Florida) and Greg Abbott (Texas)?
BRADNER: Both are clearly aligning themselves with Trump's most popular policies, which is strict immigration enforcement, border security and ramping up deportations. For DeSantis, building 'Alligator Alcatraz' was a clear example of political maneuvering to be seen publicly as having Trump's back. Both of them are absolutely on the 2028 landscape, and DeSantis, in particular, appears to have smoothed over the tensions that remain from his 2024 run. DeSantis is one to watch because he has already built a fundraising network. He has already traveled the early states and made those inroads, so launching a presidential campaign, perhaps earlier and perhaps without some of the mistakes that hampered his 2024 effort, would certainly be possible.
WOLF: What about someone from Trump's new coalition? Robert F. Kennedy ran as a Democrat and an Independent in 2024; why not a Republican in 2028?
BRADNER: If Kennedy runs in 2028, it'll be a fascinating test of how durable parts of Trump's winning 2024 coalition are once Trump is off the ballot.
How big is the so-called MAHA movement that was merged into Trump's MAGA movement? Does party loyalty still matter at all in Republican primaries and caucuses? Or are figures who weren't even Republicans — like Kennedy and potentially former Hawaii Democratic Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, Trump's director of national intelligence, who grabbed headlines recently with wild accusations that former President Barack Obama committed treason — received with open arms? Have cultural issues like abortion, where they've long staked out positions at odds with the GOP base, lost some sway?
WOLF: Vance would run from within the administration. Rubio would have to leave the administration. Extricating yourself from Trump's orbit without drawing his ire would be kind of an incredible feat. What would be the timeline to do something like that? When should we start to expect to see would-be presidential candidates leave the Trump administration?
BRADNER: The traditional answer would be shortly after the midterms, but it also depends on, obviously, the point you raised about Trump and a third term, and whether that sort of freezes the start of the 2028 primary and stops candidates from campaigning openly. It depends on what Vance does. I think people who are in the administration will have to react to the speed at which the field appears to be developing. I can tell you that in the early states, party leaders, activists, donors, party faithful are already eager to hear from these 2028 prospects and I doubt there will be much room to wait long past the midterms.
So potentially late 2026, early 2027 is when anybody in the administration that wants to run for president would probably need to be in motion.
WOLF: A lot of what happens will depend on how popular Trump remains with Republicans and how successful his second term is. Is there a lane for a Nikki Haley or somebody who has been critical of Trump, or should we assume that everybody who tries to run will just be swearing fealty to him?
BRADNER: Only time will tell. Right now, none of these major Republican figures are publicly distancing themselves from Trump, but if Republicans are shellacked in the midterms, if they lose the House or — much, much longer shot — if they lose the Senate, that could change the landscape significantly.
Primary voters want to win, and they're loyal to Trump, but if his popularity nosedives; if the party performs poorly in the midterms; if his tariffs wind up damaging the economy; if the roiling controversy over his administration's handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files continues — all these sorts of things could wind up becoming political time bombs that could change the landscape and lead Republicans, even if they aren't publicly criticizing Trump, to do more to show their differences and to pitch themselves as their own person.