The 2026 midterms are dominating the conversation right now, and that makes sense. Speculating about the 2028 presidential election while the midterms haven't even happened feels a little premature. But the 2024 election doesn’t even seem all that long ago, and the 2028 election will be here before you know it.
And the big question from where I sit is whether Democrats have already blown it.
Why is that the key question? Well, recent polling shows former Vice President Kamala Harris is still the frontrunner for the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination. Now, part of that is simple name recognition. This early in the cycle, whoever the public knows best tends to poll highest. I've said for a while that Kamala is riding that wave. But name recognition only gets you so far, and there are plenty of reasons to believe that her potential 2028 campaign could be over before it even starts.
Think about it. Kamala spent over $1 billion in the 2024 general election and lost every swing state to Donald Trump. Every single one. And that wasn't even her first experience crashing and burning. In 2020, she couldn't make it to Iowa. She dropped out before a single vote was cast, never gaining real traction… save for that brief moment after she accused Joe Biden of being racist. I’ve long believed that the donor class won’t be eager to open their wallets for her again.
But, they may have no choice.
ESPN host Stephen A. Smith put it rather bluntly during an appearance on Megyn Kelly's podcast. "I think that she's had her chance — or bites at the apple — not just once but twice," Smith said. "In 2020, she couldn't even make it to Iowa. In this last election, you had 107 days, that's true, but you also had $1.5 billion, you understand, and you were to upgrade from Joe Biden, and you still managed to lose that."
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Despite that, Smith warned that the party will feel enormous pressure to nominate her anyway, for the same reason she got the 2024 nod without a contested primary: optics. In 2024, Democratic leaders essentially had no choice but to hand her the nomination when Biden stepped aside because you can’t sideline “the first minority woman vice president” in favor of a while male… or anyone else for that matter.
That mode of thinking hasn't gone away. "You cannot bypass a black woman, female, like the VP for a Josh Shapiro, white guy," Smith said. He's right, even if Democrats wouldn't nominate a Jewish candidate anyway — the underlying point stands. If Gavin Newsom — wealthy, straight, white, Christian — beats Kamala in a fair primary, the party still faces a brutal internal reckoning. Even if he picks a minority woman as his running mate, the accusations of casting aside a minority woman will follow him straight to the convention.
Democrats built this trap themselves. They spent years making identity politics the centerpiece of their brand, and now they can't escape it. The very framework they constructed to build a coalition is what could force them to run the weakest possible candidate again in 2028.
For Republicans, that's not a problem. That's a gift. If the Democratic Party is too ideologically tangled to nominate their best available candidate — and too afraid of their own base to have an honest conversation about Kamala's repeated failures — then 2028 may already be decided. Democrats' obsession with identity politics could hand Republicans another election on a silver platter.
