The Democratic field for the nomination in 2028 is hampered by so many of them having demographic characteristics that would distract the American electorate.
Commentators say that the Democratic Party has to get its act together so as to oppose J. D. Vance or Marco Rubio in 2029. That presumes that the Democrats had been wrong in 2024 on policy. They had not sufficiently shown that they were addressing the economic conditions in the country. But in fact the economy under Biden was doing very well. Inflation had dropped even though there was no de-inflation that would reduce prices to pre-Covid levels. Moreover, the polls were misleading. They claimed that people voted for Trump because of the economy when I suspect that was an excuse for the real reason, which was that people didn’t want to admit they voted forTrump because he came across as a tough guy or a strong man, people cynical rather than idealistic about their views of government. As in most cases, personality rather than principle decides who people vote for, at least since the working class voted Democratic because of the discipline of unionism and that since 1980 voters go for charm. So let's think of the potential candidates for a Democratic nominee in 2028 on the basis of their personal attributes, including the demographic attributes to which they are associated.ls before going for the brass ring, and so is likely to run for President in 2028.
The Democratic Party would seem to have a strong bench, filled with capable, articulate and pleasant people. The trouble, however, is that most of them are tainted by attributes that would make the campaign about the issue of the attribute rather than the policies of the party or the backlash against Trump. Pete Buttigig is the most obvious example. He has had an unusual career. He was the Mayor of South Bend Indiana, a rather small city but nowhere to go in Indiana politics and so ran for President and showed himself articulate and appealing enough so that he became Secretary of Transportation, which is a non-controversial position, but he parlayed it into prominence by being very knowledgeable about the details and being present at some transportation disasters and mixing it up to his advantage in appearances at Fox News. He is glib in the way a McKinsey whiz kid can be: fast and maybe not too sloppy. He is a worthy candidate for a technocrat. His problem, obviously, is that he is openly gay and has adopted twins and leads a respectable life but some right wing people find his sex orientation as making them uncomfortable and a Presidential campaign with him as the nominee might turn into a debate about the legitimacy of homosexuality: whether it were only a tolerated deviant minority or to being given the garland as the symbolic as well as actual leader of the nation. I would vote for him but he is still young and could wait a while but he has decided not to run in Michigan as senator or governor and get some elective credentials.
There are a number of talented women politicians with considerable experience who could be nominated. They include Amy Klobechar, the Minnesota Senator who has excellent Liberal credentials as an aide to Fritz Mondale and is therefore part of the Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party political tradition and has handled herself responsibly as a candidate for President, leaving the race after Biden’s victory in the South Carolina primary in 2024 so as to unify her party. That was the statesmanlike thing to do whereas the Republican potential nominees in 2016 did not unify around a single alternative candidate so as to block Donald Trump, hoping that each one of them would collect the Trump supporters when Trump’s obviously flawed candidacy was finally un,masked. DShame on them, as history will remember. Other women include Gretchen Whitmier, the governor of Michigan, and my new pin-up girl, Elissa Slotkin the newly elected Senator from Michigan who was a Defense Department Assistant Secretary before being seconded to the CIA to do what she would not disclose to me should I ask her. She is a centrist Democrat, also quite knowledgeable and poised, who still has a generation or more before becoming too old to ruin, that now a criterion that I think should be put in the Constitution. There are age limits even for Cardinals to vote in Papal conclaves.
But here’s the rub. These women are all, duh, women, and the American people seem unwilling to elect a woman as President. I can’t prove it will also be true next time out, but it is a reasonable supposition given recent history. The last two times a woman was nominated, Trump defeated them, but Trump lost to Biden, a man. Not conclusive, given a sample of three, but we have to make conclusions on who to choose as a nominee on available information. Moreover, polls showed that low information Black men said they were reluctant to vote for a woman, and that might just be the outspoken visible part of the iceberg.Should we risk it? Wait until Slotkin has more seasoning.
But that provides the second rub. Slotkin is Jewish and a lot of the Democratic possible nominations are also Jewish. There is Josh Shapiro, the Governor of Pennsylvania, who wears his Jewishness on his sleeve, or J. B. Pritzger, the Governor of Illinois, a hotel magnate who dispenses a lot of charity but would have to lose fifty pounds. Also, Senator Adam Schiff from California and Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland, already tainted by tussling too much with constitutional issues with the Trump crowd and therefore not likely to win over Republican “moderates” because they think being objective means being evenhanded in the war between Trump and Constitutionalists.
Jews can be cabinet officials and serve as spouses of top officials. Nobody minded that Kitty Dekakis was Jewish or that Kamala’s husband was Jewish, but McCain chose Palin over his soul buddy Joe Lieberman for reasons never disclosed. And the Arab American vote in Michigan cost the state in 2024 because of the Hamas-Israel War, which seems ever to be a bigger and bigger issue in the future. The Israelis are part of the Left’s bad guys. Distrust of Jews is probably stronger than was the case when Lieberman was active and even before when Kissinger was Secretary of State. Don’t turn the 22028 campaign into a referendum on Israel. Too much of a wild card when the Democrats have more central issues, like tariffs and civil liberties and the gutting of federal services and entitlements.
So the Democratic bench is considerably weaker if demographic characteristics that are controversial are eliminated. My son, who is an economic Conservative who wants lower taxes and smaller budgets and wants Nikki Haley as the standard bearer, thinks that the Democrats should nominate Wes Moore, the Governor of Maryland, who acquitted himself by managing through the damage created at the Baltimore bridge and seems centrist on politics, and so no bomb thrower and so comfortable with him being President, which is also my criterion: who would be responsible and capable if given charge, even if not following my policies, as would happen if Nikki Haley were elected President. I could feel easy about the future of the nation while not feeling so if J. D. Vance was elected.
But Moore is African American. That barrier was breached in 2008 by Obama, who I thought would never get elected and I thought, anyway, that Hillary had more experience to sit in the Oval Office. But times may be more retrograde today than they were back then and distrust of African American Progressives, the ones who the hard core Republicans hate. So I again turn to find a white Christian straight man as a Democratic nominee. The obvious choice is Gavin Newsome, the Governor of California, and clearly the patient inheritor of the throne and has faced up well against Trump in managing the recent L. A. demonstrations. But then it would become a referendum on the California lifestyle which scuttled Diane Feinstein as a vice presidential candidate for Walter Mondale because there were too many film clips of her going to fundraisers which included flamboyantly gay supporters. Also, it seems to me that Newsome is a bit hysterical, not sufficiently sober in his assessments. He went on about California wildfires as the result of climate change when there was ample evidence that the proximate causes were arson, fallen power lines and reckless expansion of the population into which the land had not been prepared, such as burying power lines and cleaning brush.
A possible nominee is Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona. He has some flash and credibility because he was an astronaut. I always give credit to ex helicopter combat pilots like Tammy Duckworth or people who were in the CIA. They are clever and decisive. Kelly gains some sympathy because his life includes his wife, Tammy Gifford, having been seriously maimed because of an attack at a shopping mall political event, Kelly is moderate on issues. He does want the border to be secure. Kelly may not be as personally accessible, articulate and a flair for the dramatic as Cory Booker, who made a bit of a splash by filibustering in the Senate, but you can’t have everything. We will see if Kelly makes a splash.
The nomination is very far off. There are the midterms just a year and a quarter away whereby there may be a rejection of Trump and a bit already restoring American order until the Presidential campaign. Other issues can arise that make front and center, let us say, a defeat of Ukraine by the Russians or a nuclear disaster or the invasion from the Martians. Much more likely is a departure from T-Bonds that wrecks the economy even though, as Richard Nixon said, nothing can be done to wreck the American economy. More likely as well is racial and gender disputes getting out of hand and there being rioting in the streets. Remember that Presidents have to deal with whatever problems arise, not just what they propounded white on the stump. That would concentrate the electorate and the nominees on managing the issues at hand, never mind their demographics. Who could be trusted?
Trump has so far been “lucky” in his second term so far in that the crises he has encountered are self inflicted: tariffs and deportation. That means he can reverse course whenever he likes as has been the case with tariffs and perhaps as a result of public unrest, the deportation of law abiding citizens. That is different from his first term where he muffed a true crisis, that of Covid, and said it would all disappear miraculously by Easter Sunday and claimed his job was not to distribute respirators, which it most certainly was. Imagine there was a real crisis right now. Let us think of how well Trump and Pete Hegseth would manage China deciding to invade Taiwan, There is some solace in thinking that the Chinese are professional enough that they will forestall such an invasion until a more competency administration takes power in the United States so that the two sides could manage their conflict.
But there are other possible critical points that need attention or might need attention. The universities are in turmoil not just because of the Israel-Hamas War. They have not satisfactorily resolved the multigenerational transformation from being elite institutions where people went to college to learn things about other than themselves to large numbers of inadequately prepared students many of whom major in advocacy. Some atrocity on that front cou;ld lead to major unrest. Also, Hispanics, a rather pacific minority, might become militanty rather than follow the path Marco Rubio planned for many years ago, which is to become a permanent part of the Republican Party. And what of those T-Bonds might stop being the gold standard for safe investment? What of that fallout? In short, there are social issues which are situations that are recognized as needing to be addressed and there are social problems that remain in a slumber. The status of slaves has been a social issue since the eighteenth century at least but the recognition that homosexuality is a social issue rather than a universal condition of deviance did not emerge until the Fifties. I don’t know that Trump could deal with some social upheaval not of his own making.
In case you think I am being too harsh on the candidates, blaming them for the prejudices against them and thereby reasserting prejudices through a linguistic subtrafuge that says other peoplr but not me are prejudiced. Realize instead that I am being hard on the American electorate, just pointing out their prejudices. Commentators on TV and in the press like to let off the electorate rather easily because cultivating the electorate is their job. In fact, this is still a democracy, which means that we the people, whether wisely or not, ae responsible for who they elect. After all, they voted for Trump twice fully knowing what he was like. He does not hide his selfish feelings and his mean thoughts. So I am skeptical that the electorate in this our time will not give into its prejudices. It isn’t that the electorate is stupid, as some people think. It is that they will choose precisely the candidate they want.