Something that’s been bothering me throughout 2025 has been the tendency of rank-and-file Democrats to believe the party’s problem is insufficient combativeness. That may be true in some cases, but we need to grasp how our political system makes fighting successfully in the circumstances Democrats face very difficult, as I explained at New York:

Ask just about any Democrat what’s wrong with the party and odds are good you’ll hear their politicians are unwilling to “fight Trump.” This typically isn’t an accusation of personal cowardice but rather an assertion that Democrats have too little discipline and too many inconvenient principles, which make them easy prey for Trump and other Republicans with no scruples at all.

The latest bout of Democratic self-flagellation over this alleged lack of combativeness has erupted in response to Trump’s successful effort to push an unnecessary mid-decade redistricting of U.S. House seats in Texas in order to improve the GOP’s bad odds of maintaining control of the House in 2026. California governor Gavin Newsom has suggested a countermove in his own state that might neutralize the Texas gambit. But that’s complicated because California, unlike Texas, has a constitutionally imposed nonpartisan citizens’ commission system for redistricting that would have to be contemptuously pushed aside to give that power back to Democratic politicians. Is that a good idea politically? Maybe, maybe not, but it’s legitimately debatable since (a) it may fail in the courts or at the ballot box and (b) it just plain looks bad to the millions of Californians who, rightly or wrongly, love nonpartisan setups.

To hear many Democrats nationally, though, any reluctance to do exactly what Republicans are doing is weak and stupid. Here’s three-time electoral loser from Texas Beto O’Rourke at an event in Washington:

“’Not only do I think he [Newsom] should do this, I don’t think he should wait for Texas,’ said O’Rourke, who is considering running for a Texas Senate seat in 2026. ‘Why the fuck are we responding and reacting to the other side instead of taking offense on these things?’

“’Democrats care more about being right than being in power,’ he added. “We have to change that. We have to be ruthlessly focused on winning power.'”

Similarly, in an interview with The Bulwark’s Tim Miller, Connecticut Democratic senator Chris Murphy fretted that “the regime operates outside the box and the opposition stays inside the box … Democracies die when the opposition doesn’t realize the rules have changed.” So: fight, fight, fight!

The problem with all this pugilism is that it’s entirely possible in America to fight like hell and lose. We have a winner-takes-all system that gives total executive-branch power to whoever wins even the closest of presidential elections. If that president’s party also controls both congressional chambers, it has legislative instruments (including reconciliation and rescissions) that completely shut the minority party out of power. And if the majority party is as power hungry and norms defying as Trump’s, then the only real obstacle to a potential slide toward authoritarianism is the creaky apparatus of the federal courts, now led by a U.S. Supreme Court that Trump largely shaped and has been extremely accommodating to his wishes.

Given these circumstances, Democrats have done about all the “fighting” they can. Democratic lawyers, advocacy groups, and state attorneys general have relentlessly attacked Trump’s power grabs wherever a venue is available. Not a single Democrat in either the House or Senate voted for a single step toward passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the budget megabill that contains most of Trump’s legislative agenda for 2025. Contrast that with the 12 Senate Democrats and 28 House Democrats who voted for George W. Bush’s equivalent of the OBBB, his 2001 tax cuts. Or, going back further, an incredible 63 House Democrats and 37 Senate Democrats (including Joe Biden!) who voted for Ronald Reagan’s first budget-cut package, which was actually more controversial than the OBBB in its day. Have Democrats accepted their defeats by Trump quietly? Tell that to Cory Booker and Hakeem Jeffries, who each gave record-length speeches exposing the bill’s cruelties and its reverse–Robin Hood economics.

The one actual cave by Democrats so far this year was the decision of nine Senate Democrats (led by Chuck Schumer) against forcing a government shutdown in March when a stopgap spending bill they might have filibustered reached the do-or-die stage. It was a tough call given the executive powers available to the rapacious administration during a government shutdown, with the main strategic error probably being Schumer’s big talk before reversing himself and backing down. It’s true you should never toss your knife away after brandishing it. Democrats will likely face the same excruciating dilemma when the stopgap spending bill expires at the end of September.

Does the Democratic rank and file understand how little power the party’s members of Congress hold and how impossible it is for them to “stop Trump” or beat him given the system we have and the total grip the president has over the GOP? That’s unclear. What is clear: Democrats will finally have a chance to break Trump’s control of Washington in the 2026 midterms by flipping the House, destroying the GOP trifecta, and making another OBBB impossible. So maybe there is a good argument for tossing all principles and caution to the wind in the re-redistricting battle. If Republicans maintain their grip on the U.S. House next year, Democrats could go into a power outage of truly historic proportions.

 

With proto-candidates already appearing in potential 2028 primary states, I went ahead and wrote for New York an initial overview of the Democratic contest for 2028. It’s really long, so here is Part I, which is about the overall dynamics. Part II, with candidate profiles, will come soon:

Democrats  are understandably traumatized from the results of the 2024 presidential election — as well as the ongoing consequences of Donald Trump’s return to power. But like it or not, time marches on and we’re already at the point where a wide array of would-be Democratic candidates are imagining themselves winning back the White House, and some are already making moves toward that end. So we might as well bite the bullet and look ahead at how the 2028 Democratic primary may play out. But before we talk about who might run and who might win, it’s important to establish some context for what is going to feel like a very different Democratic primary than the ones in 2020 or 2016.

There may not be a clear front-runner.

For the first time since 2008, there won’t be an early heavy favorite in 2028, barring a major change in circumstances. For one thing, unless Kamala Harris makes a third bid for the White House, there will be no presidents, vice-presidents, former vice-presidents, or former First Ladies in the field. That hasn’t happened since 2004, and before that, you have to go back to 1992 to find anything like the wide-open landscape of 2028. Even if Harris runs, there are good reasons (to be discussed below) to believe she may not be all that formidable. So all sorts of ambitious people could be tempted to jump into the race.

The road to the nomination is not mapped out.

From 1972 through 2020, the Democratic calendar for state presidential-nomination contests kicked off with Iowa caucuses and a New Hampshire primary. Would-be presidents knew to make themselves known and (mostly through directed campaign contributions) useful in those two states years before actually launching their presidential candidacies, and even campaign staffers leaped at opportunities to gain experience and contacts in those two golden states. Constant complaints about the nontypical geographical and demographic characteristics of the “duopoly” led to the inclusion of Nevada and South Carolina in the charmed circle of protected “early states” leading into 2008. And generally speaking, the pressure to “front-load” primaries to ensure their relevance created multistate clusters of primaries soon after the early states voted, most notably Super Tuesday, a collection of contests that eventually reached an incredible 24 states in 2008.

All that history more or less went down the tubes in 2020 after the Iowa results were massively delayed by a caucus reporting meltdown and when the eventual front-runner, Joe Biden, finished fourth in Iowa and fifth in New Hampshire. Biden punished the duopoly and rewarded South Carolina (his first and crucial 2020 win) by upsetting the ancient order and placing the state first in 2024. Who will go first in 2028? Nobody knows. As primary-calendar guru Josh Putnam points out, there are two states with early dates now fixed in law: Nevada and Michigan. Setting the rest of the calendar will be a complex dance involving the DNC, the state parties, and the state legislatures, including some controlled by Republicans. The closer we get to the actual contest, candidates will have their own calendar preferences, and that could affect decisions as well. But it’s going to be three-dimensional chess to figure it all out.

Polls this far out are garbage. Ignore them.

You may be tempted to sort out the 2028 Democratic field by consulting the polls that are already out assessing the candidates. Don’t. At this early point in the process, polls are almost entirely a measurement of name ID, not actual popularity, much less suitability to become the Democratic presidential nominee. For example: In July 2002, an ABC–Washington Post survey of potential 2004 Democratic candidates showed 2000 nominees Al Gore and Joe Lieberman handily leading the field. Gore, of course, didn’t run, and Lieberman ran but went nowhere fast. Even more strikingly, Chris Christie led most candidate polls in 2013 for the Republican contest of 2016. Donald Trump didn’t even register in the polls until he came down the famous escalator in June 2015, then almost immediately dominated both the polls and then the primaries. Nobody had that on their bingo card much earlier. Don’t even bother with bingo cards this far out.

The Democratic factions aren’t going anywhere.

While Democrats are arguably more ideologically uniform than they used to be, they are far from being the rigid cult the GOP has become in the Trump era, and “progressive” and “centrist” factions have again become very visible in the wake of the 2024 defeat. Now more than ever, many progressives believe it should be their turn to guide the party, now that the presidencies of Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Biden are in the rearview mirror. And now more than ever, many centrists believe that perceptions of the party as “too far left” must immediately be addressed. Back in March, my fellow columnist Ross Barkan hailed the likelihood that 2028 would provide the kind of open factional battle that past Democratic kingmakers have suppressed. If centrists-versus-progressives warfare does break out, we could see an early search for a “unity candidate.”

The outcome of the midterms will shape the race.

Before the 2028 campaign goes totally live, of course, the 2026 midterm elections will take place with Democrats focused on, at the very least, wrecking the GOP trifecta in Washington by flipping the House. A sizable Democratic wave like the one that flipped 41 House seats in 2018 would greatly improve party morale. On the other hand, an underwhelming Democratic trend — or, worse yet, the failure to bust up the trifecta — could induce more panic within the party than we’ve seen in many years. That would make almost anything possible for 2028. Most likely, it would place a premium on electability arguments for this or that candidate and give a big boost to anyone who could claim to be an “outsider,” particularly with respect to Washington, D.C.

 

Any Democrats who are chortling and popping popcorn at the intra-MAGA blowup over the ghost of Jeffrey Epstein should be aware that what MAGA really wants is a witch-hunt against Democrats that Trump may well give them, as I explained at New York:

Observers seeking to understand the intense furor that has swept the right in the wake of Donald Trump’s efforts to dismiss the “Epstein files” are now wondering if millions of people really do believe Epstein was at the center of a global cabal of pedophile elitists and that the “files” the federal government collected about him were a sort of Rosetta Stone for understanding a host of political and cultural evils.

But in MAGA-world, you don’t have to be a full-on rabbit-hole dweller who buys into the more cosmic interpretations of Epstein’s significance to be bitterly disappointed by Trump’s “nothing to see here” dismissal of a long-awaited moment when the veil hiding the many crimes of the opposition would begin to lift. Perhaps for many, the files were just an appetizer for the revelations that would bring the heavy hand of justice down on the many devils of the MAGA imagination.

The underlying reality is that for all of Trump’s audacious actions since taking office, he has failed, so far, to fully undertake the campaign of retribution he promised his supporters again and again and again on the campaign trail. The Bidens are at liberty. So are the Obamas and the Clintons. So are the members of the January 6 committee. So are the prosecutors in New York and Washington and Atlanta that persecuted Trump personally. Not a single “enemy of the people” journalist has been jailed (though some have been silenced by their employers or intimidated by Trump and his lawyers).

Now, perhaps those who go too far in taking Trump “seriously but not literally” figured all these threats were just political theater. But his most avid supporters heard them many times, as Politico’s Ankush Khardori observed at the height of the 2024 campaign:

“In the most volatile presidential campaign of the last 50 years, one thing has remained remarkably constant: Donald Trump’s stated intention to prosecute a wide swath of his opponents if he wins the White House.

“The list of targets has been growing for years. It includes an array of Trump’s political and legal antagonists — real or perceived — ranging from President Joe Biden and Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) to Anthony Fauci, the members of the Jan. 6 committee and Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg. Just a few weeks ago, Trump put hundreds — maybe thousands — more of his political opponents in his prosecutorial crosshairs by threatening unnamed Democratic lawyers, political operatives, donors, voters and election officials.

“Trump has talked about his plan for a prosecutorial revenge tour in public speeches, press interviews and a litany of social media posts. It is subtly embedded in the official Republican Party platform, which proposes to ‘hold accountable those who have misused the power of Government to unjustly prosecute their Political Opponents.'”

And it’s not just a matter of Trump holding grudges against those who allegedly “weaponized government” against him. Throughout his political career, but most intensively during his last campaign, Trump has not just promised to “make American great again.” He’s promised to punish those who ruined the country before he came on the scene to redeem it. So naturally, MAGA folk are dissatisfied at his accomplishments so far. Yes, it’s wonderful to see the federal government undertake the mass deportation of immigrants. But in a conspiracy theory fully and formally embraced by Trump, his campaign, and increasingly his party, they were told repeatedly that the people running and supporting the Biden administration had deliberately and with criminal intent “opened the borders” in order to enroll millions of aliens as illegal voters to perpetuate their disastrous regime. Are these traitors to escape any reckoning for their crimes?

This may be the fear underlying the angst over Epstein. Trump had given them every reason to believe the “files” might be a Pandora’s box that could begin the “retribution tour” with a bang. Now the claim they are a nothing-burger must feel to many MAGA activists like conquering the enemy castle only to find that the evil king’s treasure chest is empty.

That’s why the most likely way out of the political trap Trump has laid for himself is to scratch the itch that underlies the Epstein furor. Yes, he needs a distraction to change the subject. But for his base, the best distraction would be some investigations, arrests, perp walks, show trials, and consequences for the terrible villains who wrecked the country for so long. If you’ve ever been on a Trump “enemies list,” it would be a good time to hunker down and lawyer up. Trump needs some heads on pikes, some trophies for his base. And he needs them now.

Democrats desperately want their politicians to fight back against Trump’s outrages, and California Governor Gavin Newsom has a plan for one kind of retaliation. I discuss the pros and cons at New York.

Just as nature abhors a vacuum, a national political opportunity is rarely passed up by California governor Gavin Newsom, a likely 2028 presidential candidate whose heavily Democratic state is both a target for and a major point of resistance against Donald Trump’s regime. So when Texas Republicans bent to Trump’s demand for a mid-decade re-redistricting of the state’s congressional map in order to gin up a few extra U.S. House seats for the GOP prior to the 2026 midterms, Newsom was predictably quick to respond, as Politico reports:Gavin Newsom suddenly can’t stop talking about Texas gerrymandering — and a provocative idea to counter it in California.

“On podcasts and social media, the California governor has threatened that if Texas follows President Donald Trump’s advice and redraws its congressional districts to shore up the GOP’s slender House majority, California should throw out its own maps to boost Democrats, circumventing or overhauling the state’s voter-approved redistricting commission.

“It’s a proposal capturing the imagination of a Democratic Party spoiling for another fight with Republicans and desperate to regain a foothold in Washington. This week, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries privately huddled with members of the California delegation to discuss redistricting at the bloc’s weekly lunch. And in California, text threads are ablaze with discussions of what a redraw would look like, who would benefit, and how it would affect active efforts to recruit candidates and raise money.”

The idea of matching Texas in partisan audacity is catnip to Newsom, who has long engaged in long-distance rhetorical battles with the GOP leaders of the red megastates of Texas and Florida. But there’s a bit of a problem with a tit-for-tat response to the Lone Star State. In Texas, the legislature fully controls redistricting; it can do whatever it wants short of violating the increasingly toothless federal Voting Rights Act or “one person, one vote” considerations. California, by contrast, conducts redistricting via an elaborate citizens-commission process approved by voters in two constitutional-amendment ballot initiatives passed in 2008 and 2010.

Efforts to emulate the Great Texas Power Grab in California will require some risky legal and political work-arounds that will offend not just the opposition party but some actual voters. Newsom has obviously thought about that but seems willing to take the plunge via one of two strategies, as Punchbowl News reports:

“Newsom can call a special session. The legislature would put a proposition on the ballot that would “pause” the commission or rescind its redistricting power. California voters would have to approve this in a special election. They might not …

“[A second] path is less likely because it is more complicated and legally murky. The California legislature would embark on redrawing districts under the theory that it is permitted because the state’s constitution is silent on mid-decade redistricting. And if the California constitution doesn’t address that scenario, then Democrats could do the mid-decade redraw without the commission.

“This strategy would depend on surviving a legal challenge. Newsom called it ‘a novel legal question.’ It’s a risky tactic, but could be done more expediently than a ballot initiative.”

It appears that California’s Democratic U.S. House members are onboard with the scheme, at least publicly, even though it might make some of their own districts marginally more competitive. It’s unclear, even if everything works out, that California could completely offset the Texas action: Punchbowl News estimates that a two-to-four-seat Democratic gain is possible in a legislative redistricting that ignores all the competition-enhancing principles of the current system; Trump has asked Texas Republicans for five more seats. And while there’s some talk of Texas backing down in the face of California’s threat, I wouldn’t count on that at all — this is Donald Trump demanding an egregious gerrymander, and it’s always possible the California gambit could backfire in the courts or at the ballot box.

California is significantly more Democratic in its voting preferences than it was when the citizens commission was adopted in order to take partisan politics out of the redistricting process. And without any question, highly partisan Democrats in and beyond California will love the idea of competing with the very worst Republican practices in imposing one-party rule in Washington and in the states. But some progressives and probably many independents will still be offended, and a few are making their voices heard already, Politico notes:

“‘Trying to save democracy by destroying democracy is dangerous and foolish,’ said Assemblymember Alex Lee, the head of the state Legislature’s Progressive Caucus. ‘By legitimizing the race to the bottom of gerrymandering, Democrats will ultimately lose.’

“Or as one Democratic political consultant granted anonymity to speak freely put it, ‘The idea of taking away the power from the citizens and giving it back to the politicians — the optics of that is horrendous and indefensible.’

“The consultant said, ‘That’s insane. That’s a crazy hill to die on.'”

There’s also some grumbling that this is a self-serving Newsom gambit, but asking California Democrats to subordinate their good-government instincts to the mission to match Republican partisanship will be a tempting proposition for most.

Hard as it can be to define the best strategies for one’s party, it’s also imporant–and fun–to mock the other party’s strategic thinking. I had a chance to do that this week at New York:

Hanging over all the audacious steps taken so far this year by Donald Trump and his Republican Party has been the fact that voters will get a chance to respond in 2026. The midterm elections could deny the GOP its governing trifecta and thus many of its tools for imposing Trump’s will on the country. Indeed, one reason congressional Republicans ultimately united around Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill was the sense that they needed to get all the policy victories they could in one fell swoop before the tough uphill slog to a likely midterm defeat began. No one had to be reminded that midterm House losses by the president’s party are a rule with rare exceptions. With Republicans holding a bare two-seat majority (temporarily three due to vacancies created by deaths), the gavel of Speaker Mike Johnson must feel mighty slippery in his hands.

But if only to keep their own spirits high, and to encourage fundraising, Republican voices have been talking about how they might pull off a midterm miracle and hang on to the trifecta. A particularly high-profile example is from former RNC political director Curt Anderson, writing at the Washington Post. Anderson notes the unhappy precedents and professes to have a new idea in order to “defy history.” First, however, he builds a big straw man:

“[I]t’s always the same story. And the same conventional campaign wisdom prevails: Every candidate in the president’s party is encouraged by Washington pundits and campaign consultants to run away from the national narrative. They are urged to follow instead House Speaker Thomas P. ‘Tip’ O’Neill Jr.’s famous axiom that ‘all politics is local’ and to think small and focus on homegrown issues.”

Actually, nobody who was really paying attention has said that since ol’ Tip’s retirement and death. As Morris Fiorina of the Hoover Institution has explained, presidential and congressional electoral trends made a decisive turn toward convergence in 1994, mostly because the ideological sorting out of both parties was beginning to reduce reasons for ticket splitting. And so, returning to a pattern that was also common in the 19th century, 21st-century congressional elections typically follow national trends even in midterms with no presidential candidates offering “coattails.” So in making the following prescription, Anderson is pushing on a wide-open door:

“[T]o maintain or build on its current narrow margin in the House, the Republican Party will have to defy historical gravity.

“The way to do that is not to shun Trump and concentrate on bills passed and pork delivered to the locals, but to think counterintuitively. Republicans should nationalize the midterms and run as if they were a general election in a presidential year. They should run it back, attempting to make 2026 a repeat of 2024, with high turnout.”

Aside from the fact that they have no choice but to do exactly that (until the day he leaves the White House and perhaps beyond, no one and nothing will define the GOP other than Donald Trump), there are some significant obstacles to “rerunning” 2024 in 2026.

There’s a lazy tendency to treat variations in presidential and midterm turnout as attributable to the strength or weakness of presidential candidates. Thus we often hear that a sizable number of MAGA folk “won’t bother” to vote if their hero isn’t on the ballot. Truth is, there is always a falloff in midterm turnout, and it isn’t small. The 2018 midterms (during Trump’s first term) saw the highest turnout percentages (50.1 percent) since 1914. But that was still far below the 60.1 percent of eligible voters who turned out in 2016, much less the 66.4 percent who voted in 2020. Reminding voters of the identity of the president’s name and party ID isn’t necessary and won’t make much difference.

What Anderson seems focused on is the fact that in 2024, for the first time in living memory, it was the Republican ticket that benefited from participation by marginal voters. So it’s understandable he thinks the higher the turnout, the better the odds for the GOP in 2026; that may even be true, though a single election does not constitute a long-term trend, and there’s some evidence Trump is losing support from these same low-propensity voters at a pretty good clip. At any rate, the message Anderson urges on Republicans puts a good spin on a dubious proposition:

“The GOP should define the 2026 campaign as a great national battle between Trump’s bright America First future and its continuing promise of secure borders and prosperity, versus the left-wing radicalism — open borders and cancel culture or pro-Hamas protests and biological men competing in women’s sports — that Democrats still champion. Make it a referendum on the perceived new leaders of the Democratic Party, such as far-left Reps. Jasmine Crockett (Texas) or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (New York).”

Without admitting it, Anderson points to the single biggest problem for Republicans: They don’t have a Democratic incumbent president or a Democratic Congress to run against. Jasmine Crockett is not, in fact, running in Pennsylvania, where she is likely unknown, and even AOC is a distant figure in Arizona. Democrats aren’t going to be running on “open borders and cancel culture or pro-Hamas protests or biological men competing in women’s sports” at all. And Republicans aren’t going to be running on “Trump’s bright America First future” either; they’ll be running on the currently unpopular Trump megabill and on economic and global conditions as they exist in 2026. Democrats could benefit from a final surge of Trump fatigue in the electorate and will almost certainly do well with wrong-track voters (including the notoriously unhappy Gen-Z cohort) who will oppose any incumbent party.

Whatever happens, it won’t be a 2024 rerun, and the best bet is that the precedents will bear out and Republicans will lose the House. A relatively small group of competitive races may hold down Democratic gains a bit, but unless an unlikely massive wave of prosperity breaks out, Hakeem Jeffries is your next Speaker and Republicans can worry about what they’ll do when Trump is gone for good.