After another week of Trump power grabs and authoritarian conduct, it occurred to me that the atmosphere is going to be very different if Democrats reclaim the White House in 2028, and wrote about that at New York:

As you may recall from the distant days of 2020, the all but announced theme of the Joe Biden presidency at its start was a return to normalcy after the chaos and extremism of Donald Trump’s first term, which was punctuated by the attempted insurrection of January 6. While the new Democratic administration and its congressional allies proceeded to put a lot of ambitious plans into place, there was definitely an atmosphere of restoration, of a status quo ante being brought back.

That will not be the case if Democrats regain the White House in 2028.

Trump 2.0 has broken something fundamental in the two-party system, not just because of the policy extremism or the president’s overtly vicious and vindictive personality. Republicans have taken a very narrow election victory and, instead of trying to build an enduring majority coalition, have launched a winner-takes-everything regime that resembles in spirit the Sack of Rome rather than any sort of continuity in government. To an ever-increasing extent, there’s no “normalcy” that can be restored and no appetite for it among Democrats even if it were practicable. We see this change in attitude not just in the repeated pugilistic rhetoric of Democratic elected officials and party activists but in a very self-conscious thirst for destructive retaliation.

In the most recent example, the Democrats have spent years championing redistricting reform as a way to mitigate the arms race between partisan gerrymanders; all that has flown right out the window in the wake of Trump’s Texas power grab, a mandated mid-decade redistricting without a shred of justification other than being a way to rig next year’s midterms. Democrats are instantly plotting retaliation in California and other states they control, even as they imagine the horrors of a continued GOP Congress beyond 2026 despite the unpopularity of Trump’s agenda.

The disappearance of the status quo ante, never to return again, is most evident in a federal government being rapidly and radically reshaped by a combination of Republican executive and legislative coups. As Pete Buttigieg has rightly pointed out, the agencies being abolished, emptied, and turned upside down aren’t going to just spring back to life in a change of administration. And more fundamentally, the civil-service system Team Trump is so aggressively wrecking can’t be built back overnight either, as Protect Democracy recently explained in the wake of the president’s executive order creating a new category of political appointees:

“Schedule G lays bare what we’ve long known: the Trump administration’s strategy is not just to fire civil servants; it’s to fire them and then fill their roles with loyalists. The White House is now working on the other side of this Fire and Fill equation: preparing to fill roles long held by career civil servants with loyalists.

“As Schedule G’s potential to expand hiring shows, the administration’s gutting of the workforce is not about “right-sizing” the federal bureaucracy — it’s about reshaping the civil service into a tool for unchecked control and removing safeguards that protect the public from the politicization of day-to-day government services.”

A future Democratic administration will have to do something with this planned influx of partisan warriors rationalized by the “deep state” conspiracy theory that treats all existing federal employees as radical leftists. And there may need to be a particularly fraught reckoning with the vast new immigration police state Trump and Stephen Miller are frantically putting together. In seeking to reverse such initiatives, moreover, the odds are very high that the next Democratic presidency will avail itself of the new executive powers Trump-friendly federal courts have authorized. Why exercise restraint, particularly knowing another MAGA administration could be right around the bend?

That leads to the final and, in some respects, most important reason Democrats can’t just hope for a return to normalcy: Even if they eschew payback and seek to rebuild a political system open to bipartisanship and evidence-based policymaking, who will be their partners across the aisle? In 2021, it was possible to hope the pre-Trump Republican Party might reemerge — conservative, to be sure, but not full of venomous conviction that Democrats are traitors who are consciously trying to destroy the country, defy the Almighty, and change human nature itself. That GOP committed suicide when it devoted itself to Trump’s vengeful comeback and began to zestfully share the MAGA movement’s cruelty and authoritarian excesses.

Are we then entering a period when America must choose between two parties equally determined to seek total victory for their point of view, perhaps lurching from one to the other metronomically as lofty-minded pundits wonder why we can’t all just get along? That’s possible. But by the time Trump leaves office for the last time in January 2029, the destruction of the political system that existed when he came down that escalator in 2015 could well be complete and all nostalgia over it forgotten. Add in the anger Democrats almost universally feel over the endless trampling of norms by people whose role models are Orbán, Bolsonaro, and Putin, and you can appreciate that sooner or later payback is on the way.

There’s been a lot of buzz lately about bad favorability numbers for the Democratic Party, so decided to discuss what it does and doesn’t mean at New York:

There’s nothing Republicans enjoy more than polls illustrating the unpopularity of the Democratic Party. So they had great fun with a new survey from The Wall Street Journal this week showing the party’s “image has eroded to its lowest point in more than three decades … with voters seeing Republicans as better at handling most issues that decide elections.”

“The new survey finds that 63% of voters hold an unfavorable view of the Democratic Party—the highest share in Journal polls dating to 1990 and 30 percentage points higher than the 33% who hold a favorable view.”

For one thing, such findings appear to offset or even obliterate the unpopularity of Donald Trump and his agenda:

“Democrats have been hoping that a voter backlash against the president will be powerful enough to restore their majority in the House in next year’s midterm elections, much as it did during Trump’s first term. But the Journal poll shows that the party hasn’t yet accomplished a needed first step in that plan: persuading voters they can do a better job than Trump’s party.

“On the whole, voters disapprove of the president’s handling of the economy, inflation, tariffs and foreign policy. And yet in each case, the new Journal poll found, voters nonetheless say they trust Republicans rather than Democrats to handle those same issues in Congress.”

More broadly, Republicans hope such numbers show that their party’s return to power in 2024 didn’t just represent an opportunistic moment at the expense of an unpopular Biden-Harris administration, but one of those big realignments offering political dominance for years, maybe even decades.

But it doesn’t take more than a few moments of reflection to understand all this Dead-Donkey Blues is mostly an illusion. Democrats suffer from the hatred of the opposition party and the disappointment of their own troops. That doesn’t mean “voters” as a whole prefer Republicans to Democrats, as G. Elliott Morris explains in more detail:

“The WSJ reports that Democrats are 19 points underwater in party image compared to Republicans. That’s indeed pretty bad. But does it mean, e.g., that voters won’t vote for Democrats in next year’s elections? In fact, no! The very same Wall Street Journal poll that got branded as the party having its “worst ever” image also shows the Democrats up three in the generic congressional ballot. That’s a six-point swing from their last poll in 2024 and would be large enough for the Democrats to win somewhere around 230-235 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives…..

“How can the Democrats have such a poor rating while winning the House popular vote? What’s going on here is that a lot of Democratic voters don’t like the party brand, but still think of themselves as Democratic voters, and will vote for the party above alternatives.”

Indeed, Morris has a more precise idea of where the self-loathing among Democrats is located:

“In our Strength In Numbers/Verasight polling, there is a large mass of left-leaning Democrats who are bringing down the party’s favorability rating. In our data, about 20% of the Democrats who call themselves ‘very liberal’ have an unfavorable view of the party. That compares to just 8% of “very conservative” Republicans who view the GOP negatively.”

It’s not too hard to figure out that left-leaning Democrats are most likely to believe that their elected representatives aren’t “fighting hard enough” against Trump and also may feel little solidarity with their party’s largely centrist leadership. But they aren’t going to vote Republican in the foreseeable future. Yes, there is always some risk that a discouraged ideological party base will not turn out at the polls as it should, but polls that measure enthusiasm for the midterms are showing a Democratic advantage, the Independent noted recently:

“Just six months after Republicans took control of the White House and Congress, 72 percent of Democrats and Democratic-aligned voters say they are ‘extremely motivated’ to vote in the next election, a CNN poll conducted by SSRS this month found. By contrast, only 50 percent of Republicans say the same.”

You don’t get extra votes for loving your party and its candidates or fewer for preferring them with reservations. Right now Democrats are strongly favored to win most of the competitive off-year races in 2025, including the New Jersey and Virginia governorships, and nothing quite ameliorates a sense of defeatism like winning a few elections. The advent of competitive gerrymandering that Trump has triggered with his redistricting power grab in Texas may also help stimulate positive vibes among Democrats who can cheer retaliation in California or other states instead of simply mourning the inability of congressional Democrats to do much of anything.

Democrats don’t need to be a wildly popular party. They just need to win, and that will take care of most of their morale problems.

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.