The 2028 Democratic Presidential Tier List: Zohran's America Edition

A very new look at the best and worst prospective Democratic candidates for 2028.

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

No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any Person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States.

— Article II, Section 1, Clause 5 of the Constitution of the United States

Words cannot describe my hatred of this sentence.

When Donald Trump was inaugurated for his second term as president at the start of this year, my biggest fears for the long-term future of American politics centered around one thing: the sorry state that the electoral left had found itself in by the end of the Biden years. Just years after it shocked the world with its most competitive presidential campaign in generations, the movement was on the rocks: marginalized, co-opted, and shrinking. It had a popular national figurehead in Bernie Sanders, but he was also 83 years old. Past him, the biggest names in elected office were so uninspiring that it seemed as if the only path forward was ripping up the playbook entirely. Even the most radical shots in the dark seemed safer than the status quo.

Then, everything changed. With his shocking upset victory in New York City, Zohran Kwame Mamdani accomplished everything the rest of the left had failed at and more. He ran the kind of campaign we hadn’t seen since Bernie 2016 and saw success far surpassing Sanders himself. He completely remade the electorate through a youth vote surge for the first time in living memory. He won working-class minorities in a way no other member of his faction ever had before. He even decisively won over the mainstream liberals who had previously formed the core of the Clinton and Biden coalitions. Despite facing opposition in the general election from two members of his own party, he’s already outrunning national Democrats among young men, their latest priority demographic.

He also cannot legally run for president. Ever.

It’s a massive, massive shame—one that prevents us from bringing the only politician demonstrably capable of doing crucial things other left-wing candidates have not to the national stage. But even if he won’t be on this list himself, Zohran Mamdani’s presence will be felt in every evaluation we make below. Left-wing politicians who once looked electorally risky will come across an entirely different light. Centrist politicians who once looked enticing because of their strong electoral records will now have to contend with the possibility of an entirely new playbook existing. Other hopefuls who I didn’t consider before will be added for the first time, while others who haven’t shown much movement will be removed, at least for now.

In short: there’s going to be a lot of changes, far more than I expected to occur over just six months. As always, each candidate will be judged along a simple axis: a combination of their electoral strength and the strength of their policies. Without further ado, here’s the final word on which prospective candidates are good, which are bad, and who has the best chance of replicating what Zohran has accomplished.

Z Tier

Former White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel

When I published my first post-election iteration of this list back in February, I introduced an entirely new ranking: the Z Tier. Added on in light of how backloaded these lists often are, its purpose was simple: to separate the merely very bad politicians from the ones who represent something existentially depressing. Back then, only one politician had what it took to distinguish themselves from the rest of the pack of bad-on-policy underperformers. Today, it the category gained a new member, a prospect so unfathomably bad that I seriously considered making a Z- tier just for him.

Meet former Ambassador, Mayor, Chief of Staff, U.S. Representative and Senior Presidential Advisor Rahm Emanuel: man-for-all-seasons of the Democratic establishment and the chief architect of our current political moment. After fumbling a once-in-a-generation Democratic trifecta, running his hometown of Chicago into the ground, and generally failing so much at everything he’s ever done that even Washington Democrats decided to ice him out, Rahm has now decided that he’s the one who has what it takes to save the ailing Democratic Party. Never the one to let his view of the world be influenced by new information, his prescriptions are the exact same ones he’s given since his time in the Clinton administration: that Democrats should run to the right on everything, and that they should do so in the exact manner that political and economic elites want.

Rahm may not be unique among the candidates on this list in either suggesting a strategy of capitulation or in having a weak-to-nonexistent electoral record. What makes him special is that he somehow represents an outright regression from the already failed Biden-Harris theory of politics into something even worse. He rejects the few good things about their approach while embracing all of the bad, all in the service of a theory of politics so clearly contradictory and antiquated that one interviewer all but told him he was insulting her intelligence when he described it to her. If he ever becomes anything more than a punching bag during the debates in 2027, it will be a DEFCON 1 moment for anyone who cares about anything.

Former Vice President Kamala Harris