Analysis: Democrats are making 2028 moves. Here's what to know
They're visiting early primary states, workshopping material and formulating plans. This week, it's Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear in South Carolina. Last week, it was California Gov. Gavin Newsom.
CNN's Edward-Isaac Dovere is closely watching all of it. We talked in DC about the list of potential candidates, their strengths and weaknesses, and what are the signs they're actually serious about stepping in the ring.
The conversation, edited for length, is below.
WOLF: The next general election isn't until 2028. Why are we paying attention to this right now?
DOVERE: First of all, because some people want us to be paying attention. Gavin Newsom didn't go to South Carolina just as any state to go to. He picked a state — a presidential primary state — so that we talk about it, as others have done.
JB Pritzker was in New Hampshire at the end of April; Pete Buttigieg went to Iowa, even though it's not quite a presidential state anymore.
This is an ongoing process of the candidates trying to get people to pay attention and to workshop some of their material.
But you also see among a lot of Democrats a deep desire to get past the Donald Trump era, even though the Trump era is still very new. One of the things even that Newsom was saying in South Carolina was, 'We can put an end to this in 18 months.' He's talking about the midterms, but it's that thought that Democrats don't need to just wallow in the horror and misery that they've been in since Election Day of 2024.
WOLF: Biden forced a lot of changes in the primary process for Democrats, including Iowa not really being an early state for them anymore. What's the early map going to look like?
DOVERE: Biden did push through some changes, especially making South Carolina first. But some of the other changes, particularly moving Iowa off of the early-state calendar, were very much supported by a lot of other people in the Democratic National Coalition. We'll see what the calendar ends up looking like. The chances that Iowa gets back to a primary position seem very low. That said, the chances that New Hampshire gets back to the first-in-the-nation spot that actually is required by New Hampshire state law seem much higher.
We won't know the full answer on the calendar until at least sometime in 2026, and there is a lot of wrangling and back-and-forth among the states and among the DNC members. What is definitely true, though, is that no matter what arrangement will come, it seems that New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada will remain early. Where exactly they are is a little bit unclear.
WOLF: Why could he win and why would he have trouble?
DOVERE: Newsom had a real breakout moment over the response to what was going on in Los Angeles a couple weeks ago, and that very quickly identified him in people's minds as the face of the actual resistance to what Trump was doing, rather than just talking about it. He is a very skilled retail campaigner and speaker.
But there are obstacles he'll have to overcome — people who think that he's maybe too California. He was the mayor of San Francisco, too liberal in some people's minds. Too slick. Just having a California air to him — all that stuff is what he needs to overcome.
Other than Kamala Harris, there's never been a Democratic nominee from the West Coast.
WOLF: OK, Kamala Harris. Could she do it again in a crowded primary?
DOVERE: She's obviously thinking about running for governor of California, and I've done reporting that says that she's leaning in that direction. What is also clear is that she and her closest advisers realize that it's one or the other — you can't run for governor and then turn around and run for president right away.
WOLF: Unless your name is Richard Nixon.
DOVERE: Well, he ran for governor in 1962, lost, and then didn't end up running for president again until 1968. Her goal, if she runs, would be to win and not repeat the Nixon thing.
WOLF: Moving east, in the middle of the country, there's JB Pritzker and Rahm Emanuel in Illinois; there's new Michigan resident Pete Buttigieg and Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.
Let's start with Buttigieg, someone who actually won an early contest in 2020.
DOVERE: The Bernie Sanders folks would still protest this, but Buttigieg did win the Iowa caucuses, and he came in a healthy second in the New Hampshire primary.
He has spent the first six months of Trump's second presidency doing a lot of podcasts and outreach to what would be classified these days as the 'manosphere,' or the Republican-leaning or low-propensity voters.
He regularly is embraced by Democrats for the way that he's able to break down Democratic arguments and break apart Republican arguments.
That said, his jobs leading up to now have been to be the mayor of a pretty small city — South Bend, Indiana. And then he was transportation secretary. But part of his theory from when he was running in 2019, and he and I talked about it then, was that we are living in an age of Donald Trump's politics, where it's more about what you're able to do and how you're able to communicate what you're doing than about exactly what job you've had in government. Maybe that's an opening for him. I think that most people assume that he would be a reasonably strong contender, at least if he runs.
WOLF: Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer is an obvious choice, but she's said she's not running.
DOVERE: A lot of people say they won't run for president until they do. Barack Obama insisted he wasn't running.
Whitmer has a lot of strength in Michigan, obviously a key state for Democrats. She's won two tough races there by, in the end, pretty comfortable margins.
She is quite popular in Michigan, as far as one can be in these polarized times. And she has, in these first six months of Trump, taken a different route than a lot of other Democrats. She's tried to find ways to work with Trump, and she feels like that is a good way of being the governor and also delivering for swing areas of the state.
Of course, that has frustrated a lot of Democrats who feel like she's been used by Trump and turned into a prop by him, whether it was at the Oval Office when they had that meeting a couple months ago, or when he then flew to Michigan to announce this new shipbuilding investment and had her come to the podium. She would say she did get the investment, and it makes a big difference for Michigan shipbuilding.
WOLF: Let's go across the lake to Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, the only billionaire on the list, yes. Would the democratic socialist wing of the Democratic Party go for a billionaire?
DOVERE: I sat in New Hampshire at the end of April when Pritzker was there to speak to the big Democratic dinner there, and I asked him that exact question. When there was such a push among a lot of Democrats against the wealthy and oligarchs and all that, how would they vote for a billionaire? He said to me, it's about values, and he feels like he's been pushing the values. He's not apologetic about his family wealth. In fact, he says that he has used it toward helping other Democrats win, and through his personal political donations and a PAC he has put quite a few dollars into everything from state parties to specific campaigns to ballot initiative efforts.
His strength would be that he's running for reelection now to a third term. A lot of things that he has done as governor fall into the category of Trump-proofing the state, and some fall into the category of just trying to make the state a center-left laboratory for all sorts of things.
WOLF: There is a former mayor of Chicago who is clearly trying to set up the idea that he would run. Is Rahm Emanuel (a CNN contributor, former White House chief of staff, former ambassador and former congressman) actually serious?
DOVERE: He is talking about running more in terms of the concept of what he would bring to the argument, or to the debate of how Democrats should be moderate and how they should talk about things in a different way than in the normal way of a potential candidate.
WOLF: Moving South, what about a moderate governor from an otherwise-red state?
DOVERE: That's Andy Beshear's argument: that he's won, and won comfortably, among the types of voters that most Democrats have given up even trying to appeal to, and done it in a state — Kentucky — that hasn't had a Democrat other than him and his father competitive statewide for years. He's done it while not shying away from Democratic positions on issues like abortion rights and even trans kids, but as he also spends some time in South Carolina this week, he's unabashedly starting to test how much appetite there is for his lower key — in both positions and personality — approach.
WOLF: Let's go to the mid-Atlantic. Let's talk about Wes Moore (governor of Maryland), and then Josh Shapiro (governor of Pennsylvania).
DOVERE: Wes Moore is clearly a very charismatic, appealing figure who has caught the eye of a lot of the Democratic intelligentsia for having a motivational, optimistic approach to how he speaks. He does not have as much of a legislative record as some of the other governors, which is notable in that Democrats have full control of the legislature in Maryland. So there may be some questions about what he has done and what he has been able to actually make happen when he's up against other governors, although he has also said he's not running for president.
WOLF: Josh Shapiro clearly is somebody that everybody is watching. Will he run?
DOVERE: We don't even have an official announcement that he's running for a second term as governor, although he obviously will. What he has managed to do, from when he was attorney general through when he was running for governor, through three years as governor, is have extremely high popularity ratings in Pennsylvania. That's among Democrats and Republicans, and in a state that has become such a swing state.
For someone who is an unabashed Democrat to have that kind of reception is really a demonstration of the way that he approaches his governing and his outreach to the state.
He has been very low-profile in terms of national politics over the course of these first six months of the Trump term. Most people probably haven't heard from him at all, other than that terrible incident with the arson of the governor's mansion when he was there with his family on the first night of Passover.
That is a deliberate effort for him to stay focused on Pennsylvania. One of the questions over the next year or two, as he runs through reelection, is how much does he start to pop onto the national radar?
WOLF: Usually a list like this is full of senators. Who could be on it?
DOVERE: I would put Cory Booker from New Jersey, Chris Murphy from Connecticut, Mark Kelly from Arizona and Ruben Gallego from Arizona.
WOLF: We've had Bernie Sanders as a very popular alternative in recent elections. He must be too old at this point. Who inherits his mantle?
DOVERE: Who are we to say who is too old? He will turn 87 by Election Day 2028 — that would make him by far the oldest president that we've ever had, even outdoing the Biden and Trump records. Most people do not expect that he will be running for president again.
The question of who inherits his mantle is a big one, and most people would put their money on Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who is going to have some decisions coming up about whether she sets her eyes on running for president or running for Senate.
There's an election in 2028 — that is Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer's seat, whether he decides to run, or she runs against him, or whether she just builds up her power by gaining seniority in the House. She's obviously quite young, and she has done more with her House seat already than almost anybody ever has in that amount of time.
If not her, then I think there is a big open question about who it would be. Rep. Ro Khanna, the congressman from California who was a co-chair of Sanders' campaign in 2020, has been making clear that he is exploring a presidential run and hoping to have some of that support.
If she doesn't run and he doesn't get that kind of support, then I think there would be a question of whether there's someone else that could be the right vessel for that, or whether it would diffuse between multiple candidates.
WOLF: What about a complete outsider? There's a boomlet of interest in the ESPN analyst Stephen A. Smith. Is there room for a wild card?
DOVERE: Trump is the first person in history to be president without having served in a military or government role beforehand. So who knows. There are a lot of people who you could see thinking that they would be that person. There was some reporting four years ago that Bob Iger, the Disney CEO, talked about maybe he should run. Whether it would be businesspeople or celebrities, Trump has made it clear that you could come from outside the political scene and do it. Other people who have thought about it have turned away because they have not wanted to have their lives picked over the way that we do to political candidates. There's even a new movie in which John Cena plays the president of the United States, and the gimmick is that he is an action hero who then just gets elected because of that.
WOLF: Arnold Schwarzenegger, if he'd been born in the US. Or the Rock.
DOVERE: Who was born in the US.
WOLF: What sets off your spidey sense that somebody is getting serious about a run?
DOVERE: The early state visits. If they start talking about national politics a lot more. Shapiro is a good example of somebody who gets talked about a lot but doesn't actually discuss national politics that much. If, all of a sudden, he's talking about Donald Trump a lot more, or what Democrats should stand for, that would be a reason to start thinking about him or whoever else is starting to do it.
Then there are the things that happen behind the scenes — starting to reach out to interested donors or the sort of Democratic elders, brain trust, whatever you want to call it.
As we get closer to 2027, when people will start launching their campaigns, there'll be outreach to staff and things and quiet invitations to reporters to come and meet the candidate.
WOLF: So when you have an interview with one of these guys, we know that they're running.
DOVERE: When I was sitting with Pritzker in New Hampshire, we were talking and at the end of the interview I said so can we just fast-forward through this and to say like you're running for president? He said, no, not yet.
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