2028 Dems: Don’t label me
In the days since Democrats’ sweeping midterm victories, several likely White House aspirants have argued that their party’s factional feuding needs to take a backseat heading into 2028.
Key points
- Interviews and conversations with more than a dozen potential Democratic presidential candidates, advisers and operatives reveal that rhetorical shift is as much a rejection of the ideological litmus tests that dominated the 2020 primary as it is a calibration toward the dynamics that will drive the 2028 contest.
- Or, as one adviser to a potential candidate said: Voters “do not live in the binaries that a lot of political operatives do.” While last Tuesday’s wave swept Democrats of all stripes into office, it also created openings for each wing of the party to argue that its vision is the way forward.
- “It’s about people who are wanting to work together as a team on issues like the American dream in the middle class.”Many of the party’s rising stars embraced an ethos like Shapiro’s “get stuff done” and, like Slotkin, called to reject progressive-versus-moderate politics in favor of combative candidates.
Candidates won tough races by positioning themselves not as progressives or moderates but as anti-Washington populists and pragmatists — some of them even scoring dual endorsements from both the moderate Blue Dog Democrats and progressive Sen.
Additional details
- That all but guarantees more proxy battles to come as the party moves from running a raft of candidates across diverse districts to selecting just one to try and win the White House.
- “If you see … an elected leader spending valuable time duking it out on whose team won, moderate or progressive, they are missing the actual message of this election,” Michigan Sen.
- “We all lived through the purity tests,” said Adrienne Elrod, a Democratic strategist who advised Joe Biden in 2020, Kamala Harris in 2024 and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 run.
- Democrats’ midterms sweep didn’t solve their ideological civil war — but a number of the party’s potential presidential contenders hope it lets them call a truce.
- The left has seized on strong performances by unabashedly progressive candidates to push Khanna and Ocasio-Cortez to run for president and Sen.
How this summary was made: extractive summary — built from the sources' own reporting. It is drawn only from the reporting of the sources listed below — read the originals for full detail. How we summarize →
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