Who Could be the Democratic Trump?

An early look at 2028's potential dark horses.

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

With Kamala Harris’ defeat in the 2024 election to Donald Trump, the Democratic Party is arguably the most leaderless it has been this century. This is a good thing. For as often that stability is spoken of as a virtue in politics, you can tie nearly all of the Democratic Party’s recent failures to the fact that the party hasn’t undergone a real, honest-to-God shakeup since 2008, if not far before even then. This could very well change four years from now. Strong and likely meaningless early polls for Kamala Harris notwithstanding¹, the prospective Democratic field for 2028 is the most wide-open one we have seen in a generation. From battle-tested purple state governors to Red Scare-listening senators to Patrick Bateman impersonators, liberal voters look set to be faced with a true luxury of choice come two years from now, with a real chance of giving themselves their first leader from outside of D.C. in a generation.

But with all of these new names and faces, it can be easy to miss something important: that not many of these contenders are all that ideologically or even personally distinct from one another. Figures like Gretchen Whitmer, Andy Beshear and Gavin Newsom may have very different backgrounds, but they all follow a very similar mainstream liberal creed—one that, regardless of its merits, has been dealt a severe blow in its failure to stop Trump. You don’t have to squint to see the obvious comparison here: the GOP of 2016. The Republican Party that year had also just faced a worldview-shattering loss against a hated nemesis while being stuffed to the gills with talent that, although imposing on paper, proved incapable of articulating a new way forward. It was in this gap that Donald Trump rose to take control of the party, and it is in this similar gap that another outsider could find a lane in the 2028 Democratic race.

Although there are truly countless possible names, here’s an early overview of 2028’s top potential outsider candidates, from the dream scenarios to the ones representing the most literal interpretations of the phrase “Democratic Trump.”

U.A.W. President Shawn Fain