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.

There’s been a lot of buzz about the world’s wealthiest man pledging to start a third party, so I addressed that dubious proposition at New York:

The feud between Donald Trump and his onetime deep pocket and henchman Elon Musk keeps bubbling up in unpredictable ways. But one fracture point that is potentially bigger than an exchange of insults and conspiracy theories is the Tech Bro’s musings about creating a third national political party. Not because there’s any real popular demand for another party but because Musk’s wealth could give even the dumbest idea wings.

This angle is interesting in part because Trump has himself flirted with third-party talk when it suited his purposes. But you wouldn’t know that from his categorical put-down of Musk’s fantasies over the weekend at Truth Social:

“I am saddened to watch Elon Musk go completely ‘off the rails,’ essentially becoming a TRAIN WRECK over the past five weeks. He even wants to start a Third Political Party, despite the fact that they have never succeeded in the United States – The System seems not designed for them. The one thing Third Parties are good for is the creation of Complete and Total DISRUPTION & CHAOS, and we have enough of that with the Radical Left Democrats, who have lost their confidence and their minds! Republicans, on the other hand, are a smooth running “machine,” that just passed the biggest Bill of its kind in the History of our Country.”

He went on to brag some more about his megabill and to spitball about why Musk might have opposed it, without mentioning Musk’s own argument that it is a debt and deficit nightmare.

The third-party threat was clearly weighing on the 47th president’s mind this weekend. When asked about it by a reporter earlier on Sunday, Trump said, “’I think it’s ridiculous to start a third party,” later noting, “He can have fun with it, but I think it’s ridiculous.”

Musk has fleshed out his fantasy a bit after getting the inevitable endorsement of his efforts from his personal echo chamber on X:

“One way to execute on this would be to laser-focus on just 2 or 3 Senate seats and 8 to 10 House districts.

“Given the razor-thin legislative margins, that would be enough to serve as the deciding vote on contentious laws, ensuring that they serve the true will of the people.”

The idea, then, isn’t to launch a new party through some big, splashy presidential campaign that will capture what Musk has called the “80 percent in the middle” of voters alienated by the Democratic-Republican “uniparty.” That, as it happens, was the vision of the last real third-party builder, Ross Perot, who never made much of an effort to create an alternative ballot line at the state level. Perot failed in no small part because winning or even threatening to win elections in a first-past-the-post system requires the sort of regional voting base he never enjoyed. The more limited strategy Musk seems to be talking about doesn’t require displacing a national party but instead simply exploiting the close competitive balance of the existing two major parties and seizing the margin of control in Congress for leverage purposes. It’s a down-ballot version of what southern segregationists tried to do with regional tickets in the 1948 and 1968 presidential elections: prevent either major-party candidate from gaining a majority in the Electoral College and then shake the parties down for policy concessions. They didn’t fail by much.

So what would Musk’s new party, which he has dubbed the “America Party,” make its be-all-and-end-all demand? Best we can tell, he wants massive reductions in the size and cost of the federal government, along with the attendant public debt. That’s not only a slender reed for a disruptive third party but it’s at least rhetorically identified with the GOP despite that party’s own spotty fiscal record. From a practical point of view, why would some aspiring deficit hawk in any given state or congressional district want to take a flier on a candidacy under the America Party banner when they could just as easily run as a Rand Paul–Thomas Massie fiscal hard-liner in a Republican primary? The only answer I can think of is that it may be a way to gain access to Musk’s money. And it’s unclear at this point how much of his fortune Musk is willing to devote to this effort.

As Nate Silver points out, if Musk could lavishly finance a new party with a broader agenda than bringing back DOGE — say, developing a national AI strategy that could prevent rather than accelerate demolition of the workforce — it might gain some purchase, particularly with young voters who dislike both major parties. But it would require the sort of patience and political sophistication Musk has not in any way displayed up to this point in his career.

More likely, Musk is just the latest in a long list of political amateurs who look at unhappiness with the two-party system and make two major mistakes: (1) they don’t grasp that most self-identified independents are what Silver calls IINOs, independents in name only, who routinely vote for the same major party even when given alternatives; and (2) they assume all these people share the same grievances with the current party system.

The only demonstrated template for third parties in the U.S. is to address an entirely unmet demand. When Republicans broke through in the late 1850s, they were exploiting a situation in which one major party (the Whigs) had already died and the other could not stake out a national position on slavery. At this point, Musk isn’t offering anything voters can’t find in the right wing of the Republican Party or, barring that, in the Libertarian Party. So Trump is correct to argue that his frenemy has “gone off the rails.”

After months of watching and writing about Trump’s huge budget reconciliation bill, I wrote my final assessment today…but then saw a poll that made me rethink the whole thing, and wrote that up at New York:

When top House Democrat Hakeem Jeffries chose to exploit a loophole in the House rules, which allows party leaders to talk as long as they want, to discuss at record length the baleful effects of Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill, it initially looked like a bit of a publicity stunt, albeit it a good one. It delayed for hours a very big moment of Republican self-congratulation over the final passage of this enormous package of legislation. It probably screwed up a lot of congressional flight arrangements to get members home for Independence Day. And it likely put a few kinks into plans for Trump’s own festive July 4 signing ceremony, wherein the president will surely praise himself, thank his vassals, and tell more than a few fibs about what his grim masterpiece will do.

But beyond all that, it’s becoming clear that Democrats need to do a much better job articulating their take on this bill and its profoundly reactionary effects on the social safety net. To those of us whose job it is to listen to arguments over 940-page bills as they chug through Congress for months, it may seem like congressional Democrats have been grinding away at the message that Republicans are cutting Medicaid to give a tax cut to billionaires. Some of them held up signs about Medicaid cuts when Trump delivered his belligerent address to a joint session of Congress four months ago. Yet a startling new poll shows the extent to which that messaging — and for that matter, Republican messages hailing the megabill as a people-pleasing growth engine for the U.S. economy that doesn’t touch Medicaid benefits at all — isn’t really breaking through, as Sam Stein reported:

Meanwhile, the kind of people Democrats need to reach but often don’t aren’t hearing much at all:

“73% of 2024 Trump supporters who didn’t vote in 2020 and 56% of Biden-to-Trump flippers have heard nothing about the bill. These shares are 20 points higher than their Harris supporting counterparts — indicating the urgent opportunity if Democrats break out of our own media silos.”

Part of the problem, to be sure, is that Trump’s megabill is incredibly broad and complicated, and the budget reconciliation process by which it was developed, debated, and enacted is insanely complex and obscure. It’s all about as remote from the civics-book understanding of how laws are made as you can get, and it has been understandably difficult for Democrats to describe it compellingly in a sound bite, a protest sign, a TV ad, or indeed, in Jeffries’s eight-hour speech. It was designed that way, and that’s why half the public isn’t absorbing anything about it, and a lot of others are simply processing it via big, vague party-driven narratives.

The bottom line is that the struggle to define this consequential legislation has just begun. For Democrats, finding ways to convey the horror the megabill inspires in those who have studied it closely, and the concrete damage it will do to actual people, must continue right up until the midterm elections. Yes, Trump and his allies will do many other things that might galvanize voters, from his reckless foreign policies to his cruel mass-deportation initiative to the lawless conduct he exemplifies and encourages among his appointees. But nothing is likely to match the megabill in magnitude or in the malignancy of its authors. If voters march to the polls in 2026 or 2028 with no better than a rough idea of what it means, America will get more of the same.

After writing my umpteenth explainer of this or that legislative, executive or judicial-branch development of 2025, it hit me there was an obvious pattern that I discussed at New York:

Systemic chaos and confusion have been the reigning leifmotif of the second Trump presidency. If your grasp of the way government is supposed to work is based on Schoolhouse Rock or social studies lessons on “how a bill becomes law,” the last five months or so must have been baffling to you. It’s not an accident, either: Donald Trump’s ways of doing business make the normal business practices of the public sector all but impossible.

Congress has done remarkably little this year other than slowly and erratically tinker on the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill. When reconciliation bills were conceived of in the early ‘70s, they were meant to provide some budgetary discipline to Congress. Over time they have become the principle way for majority parties with governing trifectas to enact massive collections of legislation without fear of a Senate filibuster. Reconciliation bills, put simply, are a way to take power from the minority party. They are tailor-made for a president with authoritarian tendencies and largely undivided party support to ram through a vast agenda. And so, unsurprisingly, the 2025 reconciliation bill is bigger and badder than any of its predecessors. During his first term in 2017, Congress packaged Trump’s agenda into two reconciliation bills. This time he insisted on doing everything at once, creating a truly monstrous megabill.

Budget reconciliation bills have their own incredibly obscure and complex set of rules and procedures that confound everyone but a small tribe of budget wonks. There are multiple layers to the development of a megabill, from a budget resolution that sets targets, to “reconciliation instructions” that tell House and Senate committees what to produce in the way of revenues and spending, to all-night Senate “vote-a-ramas” where the minority party gets to offer dozens of symbolic amendments designed to make the majority look bad. Once the assembled bill reaches the Senate, that chamber’s nonpartisan parliamentarian rules on which provisions fail to meet the criteria for inclusion in such bills. Then the majority party will try to put Humpty Dumpty back together by tweaking the offending provisions, or altering other items to make the overall arithmetic work. All this is happening very quickly, and largely behind the scenes. And then the House has to accept changes made by the Senate or the whole wild process more or less starts over.

Figuring out where things stand at any given moment with a reconciliation bill is all but impossible, so people rely on big partisan narratives. To Republicans, Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill is a carefully wrought device to extend and create tax cuts for people who deserve them; to boost national defense and border security spending; to reverse the “open borders” policies of the Biden administration; and to reduce government “waste, fraud and abuse.” To Democrats it’s an abominable reverse-Robin Hood measure to give tax cuts to the wealthy at the expense of vulnerable poor and middle-class Americans, whose Medicaid, Obamacare, and SNAP benefits will be slashed. Each party accuses the other of fiscal profligacy. Sometimes Republicans jockeying for leverage in their own caucuses temporarily agree with Democrats and yell and posture, but it’s understood that in the end they will toe the party line. No one will read the final bills that Trump will likely push through the House and Senate. So how can citizens comprehend the consequences until the dust clears and the new laws are fully implemented? They really can’t; it’s all based on partisanship, trust, selective information, and gut instincts. Civics in action it isn’t. And it’s all being done this way because Trump has insisted on making the Big Beautiful Bill a testament to his own power and historical significance.

The chaos in the judicial branch is arguably even worse. Since the Trump administration is determined to expand presidential powers to the breaking point, it is inviting and sometimes initiating litigation in the federal courts on a vast array of issues. In general challenges to Trump’s policies have succeeded more often than not in the lower courts. But many issues will only be resolved when they reach a deeply divided U.S. Supreme Court. Indeed, on the final day of that Court’s current term, the conservative majority restricted the ability of lower-court judges to put a hold on the administration’s many power grabs through nationwide injunctions. So more than ever, all roads lead to incredibly high-stakes decisions by the Supreme Court, three of whose members owe their life-time appointments to Trump.

That same Supreme Court, moreover, is increasingly prone to issuing temporary orders with no explanation. This often helps the administration work its will, but leaves a lot of questions unresolved, as the Brennan Center recently explained:

“Today, the justices grant relief in contentious shadow docket cases twice as often as they did just a few years ago. The surge in issuing this relief has coincided with Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett joining the Court.”

It’s hard to avoid the suspicion that Supreme Court conservatives are trying to hide their tracks on controversial cases. Just this week the Court permitted the administration to resume deporting immigrants to random and often dangerous countries other than their own without a hearing — and the decision was made with no oral arguments and no majority opinion. Who knows what it means in the long run? Those without a law school education and a huge amount of time on their hands will be lost trying to follow it all.

On top of everything else, the Trump 2.0 executive branch has engaged in an incredible amount of secrecy and procedural chaos, all of it making it hard to know what will happen to the federal government and millions of federal employees. Elon Musk’s DOGE initiative may be winding down a bit with its chief’s recent departure from the administration. But the damage it wreaked throughout the public sector via arbitrary mass firings, lockdowns of agencies and programs, refusals to pay invoices, and sheer terror tactics by embedded teams of totally inexperienced data geeks, will live on for years. And anyone relying on, much less working on, federal programs and benefits will be seeing shadow ninjas jumping out of the walls to blow it all up for a long time.

Post-Musk, Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought has emerged as the real quarterback of executive branch aggressive chaos. The steely Christian nationalist and Project 2025 co-creator wants to shrink the federal government radically. He’s renowned for pursing all sorts of obscure power-grabbing measures that only a handful of people fully understand, including spending rescissions (cancellation of previously appropriated funds, which must be approved by Congress), spending deferrals (delays in releasing previously appropriated funds, which can be overriden by Congress), “pocket rescissions” (deferrals issued just before the end of the fiscal year so that Congress won’t have time to override them), and impoundments (blatant refusals to spend appropriated dollars). It’s all in play.

Top it all off with a powerful president who is famously erratic, and it’s hard to see the road ahead, or even the road underneath one’s feet right now. To understand any given issue you need to know where it stands in the latest version of the budget bill; whether it’s subject to federal court litigation; what the executive branch is doing to undermine the prerogatives of Congress and the courts; and what priorities Trump may choose at any given moment. It’s a lot, every minute of every day, and the relentless chaos fostered by the 47th president continues to defy every single precedent.

As an inveterate defender of the value of public opinion research, I sprang into action at New York when critics mocked pollsters for getting the NYC Democratic mayoral primary wrong:

One of the reasons Zohran Mamdani’s smashing victory yesterday created such a sensation is that public polls (overall) did a poor job of predicting the size and shape of both his and Andrew Cuomo’s coalitions in the Democratic mayoral primary. An average of these polls prepared by Race to the WH showed Cuomo with 36.4 percent of first-choice ballots and Mamdani with 28.6 percent. While nearly all of these polls showed Cuomo being pushed into a ranked-choice battle with Mamdani, and a few (notably the final survey from Emerson College) showed the democratic socialist prevailing in the final calculation, only one public survey, from Public Policy Polling, predicted a first-choice Mamdani plurality. No one provided evidence of a Mamdani plurality so large that his nomination was certain without waiting for the final ranked-choice numbers.

The polling miss will be a source of great joy among those who think polling plays too great a role in contemporary politics — or that would like to get rid of polling altogether. The idea that we should rely on hunches, spin, prejudice, and tiny-sample reporting to get a handle on public opinion rather than trying to measure it objectively strikes me as, to use a technical term, willfully stupid. But partly to rebut polling nihilists, and to promote a better understanding of what polls can and cannot be expected to do, it’s worth a look at why they were wrong in New York. Here, a few reasons:

Polls are snapshots of fast-moving races

This explanation may seem too obvious to require explanation, but highly dynamic multicandidate contests often take shape late in a cycle, when ads and get-out-the-vote efforts have reached their maximum impact in both persuading and mobilizing voters. Polls often can’t capture such trends, which is why we often mystify them with terms like momentum. Only a few pollsters (e.g., Marist, Data for Progress, and Emerson) did multiple surveys, making apples-to-apples comparisons possible. There was clearly a Mamdani trend underway, but its size and durability was hard to nail down.

Primary polling is always shaky

It’s a truism in the political-analysis biz that polling for general elections is typically more accurate than polling for party primaries. The reasons are simple enough: Much of the electoral behavior we see each November is entirely predictable thanks to partisan patterns that recur time and time again and change slowly, if at all. Candidate choice in primaries is far less mechanical and thus is more fluid and harder to capture. So fairly sizable polling errors in primaries are actually normal, not a sign that they are for some reason becoming useless or misleading. You should just add a few grains of salt to any primary poll.

Turnout in a race like New York’s is extremely hard to predict

All polls are based on models that make certain assumptions about the shape of the electorate, which in turn depends on turnout patterns. There’s nothing much more difficult to predict than who will show up for a municipal primary in late June of a non-presidential, non-midterm election year. For all the local and national hype, heavy campaign spending, and genuine excitement associated with the New York mayoral primary, turnout was only about 30 percent. The value of precedents was limited; for one thing, the advent of early-voting opportunities (a relative novelty in New York, where there was no early voting prior to 2019) has added a new variable to turnout and likely helped boost the participation of the younger voters who backed Mamdani so decisively. More fortuitously, the extremely high temperatures that afflicted the city on Tuesday likely depressed turnout among the older voters central to Cuomo’s prospects for victory.

Ranked-choice voting complicates everything

This was only the second mayoral primary conducted under the controversial ranked-choice voting system, which allows voters to express second-through-fifth-place candidate preferences, with a postelection calculation eliminating lower preferences until someone wins a majority. While there has been a lot of talk about how RCV might affect who won or lost, it’s equally important to comprehend that the system has a complex and hard-to-measure impact on campaign strategies (especially the cross endorsements that Mamdani used effectively) and how voters process their own decisions, particularly when everyone is still a novice at utilizing RCV. A lot of late-deciding voters were just figuring out how RCV worked, which very likely affected how they responded to polls.

Maybe 2025 is a bad year for pollsters

It’s almost always a bad idea to generalize from any one contest, or any one election cycle, that “the polls” (another generalization) are good or bad. For one thing, they are always useful in providing analytical data, even if they’re “wrong” about predicting winners or winning margins. Some data is better than no data at all. Beyond that core dogma, which cannot be repeated too often, the reality is that polls are more accurate in some election years than others and vary by the type of race involved. Most famously, the 2016 presidential-general-election polls were pretty accurate at the national level but erred decisively in the battleground states that unexpectedly vaulted Donald Trump to the White House. Similarly, 2024 general-election polls were reasonably accurate, but a slight underestimation of Trump’s vote in the battleground states, which tilted all of them into his column, made them seem off. 2020, by contrast, was a “bad” presidential election for polls, in part because the pandemic introduced a lot of uncertainty into turnout patterns and candidate preference alike.

Polling in non-presidential election years is harder to assess because they are less frequent and consistent, and the only “national” numbers predict the overall House popular vote, which is not that tightly related to the number of seats won or lost. But 2022, to cite the most recent example, was a “good” midterm election for polls. There’s no telling what the scattered election landscape of 2025 will ultimately show (there’s no public polling at all in many off-year races), and pollsters are constantly refining their methodologies as well. So the smart thing to do is to wait a beat, or two, or three before making any sweeping judgments about what the New York City results mean for the relevance of polls.

At New York, I wrote a post about Andrew Cuomo and the sort of faux-centrism I believe he represents–the week before the former governor went down to a shocking defeat in the New York Democratic mayoral primary. Maybe I was on to something….

There’s something very familiar to me in the air right now as some Democrats unhappy with the alleged leftist direction of their party aggressively brand themselves as “centrist.” I spent quite a few years, you see, associated directly or indirectly with 20th and early 21st-century Democratic centrism, eventually serving as policy director for the famous Clinton-adjacent Democratic Leadership Council. That organization finally closed its doors in 2011, mostly because its principal goal of making it possible for a Democrat to be elected president had been redundantly accomplished.

The DLC and the politicians associated with it regularly oscillated between two distinct impulses: (1) advancing a positive policy agenda rather than simply defending past progressive accomplishments, and (2) disassociating the Democratic Party from some of the more toxic policy and political habits of the left. Bill Clinton embodied both impulses in his 1992 campaign and subsequent presidency: promoting polices from national service to reinventing government to welfare reform that also helped position him as a “different kind of Democrat,” or as we liked to say, a “New Democrat.”

All along there were people in and around the DLC who weren’t all that interested in policy ideas, but were really into “pushing off the left” as some of us called it, or “hippie-punching” as some critics described it. Some of the hippie-punchers unsurprisingly wound up becoming Republicans or Republican-enabling deal-cutters, including longtime DLC chairman and 2000 Democratic vice-presidential nominee Joe Lieberman. In any event, the extremism of the 21st-century Republican Party, intensified by the ascendancy of Donald Trump, convinced my kind of DLC Democrats to declare an intraparty truce and work with progressives against the common foe.

Since Trump’s successful comeback in 2024, however, there’s a new era of Democratic intraparty tension clearly underway. And while efforts to bring back some sort of DLC-style institutional presence haven’t born fruit so far, we are definitely seeing the second coming of a breed of centrist Democratic politician who is as interested in “pushing off the left,” almost to the exclusion of any other purpose, as anyone in Clinton’s orbit. Indeed, two of today’s prime examples, Andrew Cuomo and Rahm Emanuel, made their bones as Clinton administration figures (the former as HUD secretary and the latter as a key White House staffer). As Ben Mathis-Lilley argues compellingly at Slate, both men embody what he calls centrist “identity politics,” based on positioning and intraparty conflict more than anything positive or tangible:

“[T]here is the tendency of well-to-do Democrats who work in law, finance, management, and the media to become captivated by a certain kind of pugnacious, business-friendly centrist—examples include Michael Bloomberg, Howard Schultz, and Rahm Emanuel. The Bloombergs and Emanuels win this audience—which includes numerous high-level donors and pundits—by taking shots at the left and extolling their own contrasting commitment to pragmatism and realism. Crucially, their hold on their elite base persists even if, in practice, they turn out to be inept candidates or incompetent managers with few practicable ideas. …

“And no one coasts on reputation for pugnacious realism, in U.S. politics, like Mario Cuomo’s son. Yes, he was forced into resigning in 2021 because a large number of women (including several who worked for him) said he had harassed or groped them; one of those gross interactions even happened on camera. … But let’s not forget that at that time, he was also being exposed for having lied repeatedly about COVID deaths in New York nursing homes and other aspects of his pandemic response. … Extensive reporting by New York magazine’s Rebecca Traister depicted a Cuomo administration that had almost no interest at all in what the actual consequences of its own policies would be, operating entirely as a vehicle for Cuomo’s spotlight craving and feuds with other political figures.”

Cuomo’s “not a lefty” political identity has reached its apotheosis in his current campaign for mayor of New York, in which he has managed to get himself into a virtual two-way race against a young Muslim democratic socialist who has been outspokenly hostile toward Israel’s war in Gaza. “I’m not Zohran Mamdani” appears to be Cuomo’s main message, aside from the personal “toughness” that is supposed to make him an effective battler against the Trump administration.

This last characteristic of latter-day belligerent centrists is key. There are certainly plenty of Democratic politicians who are decidedly not “of the left” — say, Pete Buttigieg, Josh Shapiro, Gretchen Whitmer, or for that matter, Joe Biden. But all of these centrist Democrats have more than a passing interest in policies as opposed to positioning, and also are committed to intraparty civility.

Cuomo and Emanuel, on the other hand, enjoy long-standing reputations for being — to use a technical term — assholes. Cuomo in particular has inspired loathing among a wide swath of associates and observers, regardless of party or ideology. In a Democratic Party longing desperately for someone to fight back against the terrifying second Trump administration, mere pugnacity can be advertised as a real asset.

Unfortunately, in the long run, brains matter as much as spine in politics. To effectively challenge the Trump administration, centrist Democrats need a fresh policy agenda and a reputation of competence, not just a willingness to fight. And within the Democratic Party, new ideas and a sense of camaraderie will do more for centrists than calling progressives names. Perhaps the most encouraging sign on the center-left is the emergence of the so-called “abundance agenda,” which combines some specific policy goals for Democrats with an acute but not unsympathetic analysis of how the left has managed to frustrate the ability of government to get things done. It’s interesting that one of the authors who has helped stimulate this debate, Marc Dunkelman (author of Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress — and How to Bring It Back), was once communications director for the DLC.

In the ongoing emergency of the Trump era, there’s nothing wrong with a robust intra–Democratic Party debate, even if that means an occasional sharp elbow. But those promoting a sort of centrist identity politics of conflict without substance would be well-advised to work harder to identify with the common values and goals that unite Democrats across the spectrum, and to make successful governance rather than ideological positioning the gold standard.

Sometimes you have to look a little deeper than the headlines to understand polls, and I did so at New York this week:

A new Reuters-Ipsos poll provides the unsurprising news that rank-and-file Democrats are displeased with their party’s leadership. The numbers are pretty stark:

“Some 62% of self-identified Democrats in the poll agreed with a statement that ‘the leadership of the Democratic Party should be replaced with new people.’ Only 24% disagreed and the rest said they weren’t sure or didn’t answer.”

Some of the more specific complaints the poll identified are a little strange. “Just 17% of Democrats said allowing transgender people to compete in women and girls’ sports should be a priority, but 28% of Democrats think party leaders see it as such.” This is largely hallucinatory. With the arguable exception of those in Maine, who earlier this year fought with the Trump administration over the power to regulate their own school sports programs, most Democrats in the public eye have given this sub-issue (inflated into gigantic proportions by demagogic ads from the Trump campaign last year) a very wide berth. It’s not a great sign that Democrats are viewing their own party through the malevolent eyes of the opposition.

But beyond that problem, there’s a questionable tendency to assume that changing “the leadership” will address concerns that are really just the product of the party having lost all its power in Washington last November. And to some extent, the alleged “disconnect” between party and leadership is exaggerated by the lurid headlines about the poll. For example, “86% of Democrats said changing the federal tax code so wealthy Americans and large corporations pay more in taxes should be a priority, more than the 72% of those surveyed think party leaders make it a top concern.” That’s not a particularly large gap, and, in fact, there are virtually no Democrats in Congress who are not grinding away like cicadas on the message that Republicans are trying to cut taxes on “wealthy Americans and large corporations.”

The more fundamental question may be this: Who, exactly, are the “Democratic leaders” the rank and file wants to replace? It’s not an easy question to answer. I am reasonably confident that a vanishingly small percentage of Democrats could name the current chairman of the Democratic National Committee, Ken Martin, despite some media stories about turmoil at the DNC since his election.

According to a recent Economist-YouGov survey, 36 percent of self-identified Democrats had no opinion of the “Democratic leader” closest to actual power in Washington, Hakeem Jeffries, who is very likely to become Speaker of the House in 2027. Of those who did have an opinion, 51 percent were favorable toward him and 13 percent were unfavorable, which doesn’t sound much like a mandate for “replacing” him. In the same poll, Jeffries’s Senate counterpart, Chuck Schumer, had a 48 percent favorable and 28 percent unfavorable rating among Democrats, which is surprisingly positive given the massive negative publicity he earned for botching a confrontation with Republicans over a stopgap spending bill in March. Indeed, the favorability ratios for every named Democrat in that poll are a lot better than you’d expect if the rank and file were really in a “throw the bums out” kind of mood: Bernie Sanders is at 82 percent favorable to 8 percent unfavorable; Pete Buttigieg is at 62 percent favorable to 9 percent unfavorable; Elizabeth Warren is at 67 percent favorable to 12 percent unfavorable; Cory Booker is at 56 percent favorable to 11 percent unfavorable; Gavin Newsom is at 56 percent favorable to 17 percent unfavorable; and Gretchen Whitmer is at 49 percent favorable to 11 percent unfavorable.

Democrats obviously don’t have a president to offer unquestioned leadership, but back in the day, losing presidential nominees were often called the “titular leader” of the party until the next nominee was named. Under that definition, the top “Democratic leader” right now is Kamala Harris. Democrats aren’t mad at her, either: Her favorability ratio per Economist-YouGov is a Bernie-esque 84 percent favorable to 10 percent unfavorable. Her 2024 running mate, Tim Walz, comes in at 65 percent favorable and 13 percent unfavorable.

These findings that aren’t consistent with any narrative of a party rank and file in revolt. The source of Democratic unhappiness, it’s reasonably clear, is less about party leaders and more about the party’s dramatic loss of power, even as Donald Trump has asserted the most massive expansion of totally partisan presidential power in U.S. history. No new set of leaders is going to fix that.

Barring a really nasty and divisive nomination contest, the 2028 Democratic presidential nominee will become the unquestioned leader of the party, at least until Election Day. Jeffries, as noted, could enormously raise his profile if Democrats flip the House in 2026, and midterm elections could create new stars. Other Democrats could have big moments like Cory Booker’s after his 26-hour speech deploring Trump’s agenda or Gavin Newsom’s during his toe-to-toe messaging fight with the administration over its assault on his state. But in the end, Democrats on the ground and in the trenches won’t be satisfied until their words can be backed up with real power.