2028 Democratic Presidential Power Rankings: The Ballad of Jasmine Chokeitt

The state of the battle between the liberal heart and the liberal mind, in 2026 and onward.

(Credit for the voiceover for this article goes to the great Samuel Lipson)

Less than a month from now, the first post-2024 national election cycle will officially begin. Across the state of Texas, both Democratic and Republican voters will head to the polls to decide their statewide nominees in what stands to be an astronomically important election: the 2026 Texas Senate race. For the Lone Star State’s long-beleaguered liberals, the stakes are extraordinarily high. Thanks to yet another rough Senate map and Donald Trump’s historic collapse in support among Latino voters, the result this November in Texas is very likely to be what determines which party wins the Senate this year. After decades of low-energy primaries and celebrity politics, Texas Democrats now need to make an exceptionally important choice, one not too dissimilar in its stakes from a presidential primary.

Longtime readers of this series will know that I have spent the past number of months looking at this primary—unique among all other major 2026 battlegrounds with its lack of establishment involvement—as a cipher for the overall mood of the party. Online debates were one thing and early 2028 polling was another, but this race appeared to offer something far realer: an actual, no-bullshit look into how real post-2024 Democratic voters approached highly important races when provided with a wide variety of different tendencies to choose from. And while left-of-center discourse remained stuck on 2016-era progressive-vs.-centrist ideological debates, I saw something different brewing in Texas—something thoroughly unrepresented at any level of the liberal political elite.

This was the rise of Dallas’s Jasmine Crockett: second-term House backbencher, pro-establishment liberal, and one of the defining social media phenoms of Trump 2.0. Despite her having spent almost no time in D.C. and providing absolutely nothing of interest to the informal gatekeepers of liberal hype, she shot up like a rocket over the course of 2025 by means of viral clips and aggressively anti-Republican rhetoric. When she officially entered the primary in December, the party’s Senate nominee from the year prior dropped out on the same day. Nonpartisan polling already had her with an outright majority of the vote against her sole remaining opponent, all before she had raised a single dollar, given a single speech or aired a single ad.

The race seemed as if it was over before it had even begun, and the message it sent appeared to be clear. After having followed the establishment’s lead in the fight against Trump for a full decade, liberals were going rogue, but not necessarily going left. Instead they appeared to be primarily—almost nihilistically—attracted to those who expressed their anger in the loudest tenor the most number of times. That was what Crockett had on offer, and it appeared to be easily wiping the floor with all of the other post-Biden liberal philosophies on offer, whether they be Colin Allred’s D.C.-directed centrism or James Talarico’s Bernie-lite Instagram politics.

It was only when she actually entered the race that things started to go wrong. With only a few weeks left to go before the actual primary, practically none of Crockett’s strength as a representative of the Democratic Party has transferred into strength as an actual candidate. Her fundraising has been shockingly bad, her public appearances have been decidedly low key, and her campaign has completely failed at the principal task of any frontrunner: setting the tone and deciding the question of the race. Somehow, someway, her position has gotten outright worse the more that Texas Democrats have seen of her.

It all warrants a healthy pre-primary update—one that stands to be quite a bit more positive than the one from two months ago. Where the story back in November was the rise of a nihilistic liberal anti-politics, the story since then is how that brand of politics has met its limits. While the ultimate outcome of the Texas Senate primary may not be known for weeks or even months, Democratic voters are slowly starting to show that they may be more sophisticated than they’ve been given credit for. Just through the fact that Crockett has been given a race alone, we have some well-received proof that the booming industry of liberal AI YouTube videos may not have completely captured the Democratic electorate.

At least, not yet.

(Dis)honorable Mentions

Before we begin, let’s start with a few names—or, in this case, one name—that have either received substantial recent coverage or were ranked in previous lists but didn’t make the top ten this time.

• Former Secretary Pete Buttigieg: Let’s start with a bit of a curveball. For the past year, I’ve had the center-left’s state-hopping boy wonder perpetually on the verge of elimination. From those spring days in 2025 when he was the first candidate to seriously challenge Kamala Harris for first place to his recent prolonged slide back into the middle of the pack, I’ve remained similarly unimpressed by him. You might have expected his booting from the top 10 to come eventually, but you likely wouldn’t have expected it to happen in the way it is now: in an article about how liberals might be thinking about politics more deeply than it seemed recently. Shouldn’t such a shift be expected to benefit Buttigieg if absolutely nobody else? He’s always positioned himself as the thinking person’s candidate: a supposedly smart, thoughtful, and wonkish leader whose alleged intelligence is said to make up for his lack of experience or flair. It’s not even remotely difficult to connect him to Talarico; they’re both Lis Smith candidates, after all. Shouldn’t he have an obvious case as one of the best-suited politicians to bring the Texan’s brand of youthful social media politics to the national level?

  
  It’s an understandable take in the abstract, but it breaks down the more one thinks about it. While it’s easy to draw a direct line between Buttigieg and the likes of Talarico, Jon Ossoff, and the other white millennial men that are such hot political commodities these days, there are deep, fundamental differences between the former mayor of South Bend and his ostensible political relatives that will keep him from replicating their appeal. At his core, Buttigieg is a product of the political delusions of Trump 1.0, when the one-term man in the White House was seen by liberals—especially older liberals—as an illegitimate fluke whose victory held little to no long-term implications. Buttigieg appealed to this cohort as an energetic, unconventionally qualified technocrat who could move the country forward while still representing a form of politics they recognized and were comfortable with.

  
  This was a very limited base that, very notably, has almost zero overlap with the kind of coalition that Talarico is putting together now. The first survey conducted after Crockett entered the race had Talarico with the strongest support among young, white, and Latino voters—i.e., almost the same exact coalition that Bernie Sanders and Zohran Mamdani put together in their primary runs. Among the voters who were the most likely to support Buttigieg in 2020—old people, essentially—Crockett was the one who dominated. If true, the net effect of this is to put Buttigieg and his brand of politics in a political no-man’s-land, both demonstrably bad at appealing to the Bernie/Zohran coalition that stands as the last bulwark against Crockettism but also poorly suited to appeal to the once-tranquil senior citizens that have now fallen victim to the political equivalent of AI psychosis. Perhaps he could go forward with another rebrand that puts him and his politics in line with Talaricoism, but it would be late, all too obvious, and face an immense amount of competition from newer and more interesting politicians trying to fill the same lane. As things stand, and for as impossible as it seemed during the Biden years, he may have very well run too early.

The Top 10

#10: Sen. Chris Van Hollen (New)