The last time Galen Druke and I ran a “draft” of Democratic presidential candidates was in April 2025, and my headline said it was “way too early.” I don’t really think that’s true anymore! Like it or not, the 2028 presidential nomination race is already underway as Democrats compete for stature and influence in a wide-open, winnable contest with no credible successors left to past Democratic dynasties.1 As in the 2008 cycle, the last time Democrats ran against a term-limited president, you may well see some candidates officially declare this year almost immediately after the midterms.
This time, Galen and I brought along another former FiveThirtyEight colleague, Clare Malone, and we did the draft in front of a live audience at the Comedy Cellar. (Check out Clare’s excellent recent profile of Bari Weiss; she’s also working on a new book about MAHA and RFK Jr. that I’m very excited to read. Galen’s newsletter is here, meanwhile.) There’s also a guest appearance by Eli in a Vanna White-like role.
You can find the video above, and then I’ll have a paragraph of thoughts about each draft pick below. However, the first ~20 minutes or of the show was about recent the killings of two civilians in Minneapolis, which we all had some pointed commentary about.
The scoring system for the draft is similar to last time:
25 points for winning the nomination
5 points for officially running
5 points for surviving until the first officially-sanctioned nominating contest
3 points for winning each nominating contest before Super Tuesday
2 points for winning each nominating contest from Super Tuesday onward
1 bonus point for winning each state with at least 15 electoral votes and/or pivotal swing states in 2024 (CA, TX, FL, NY, PA, IL, OH, GA, NC, MI, AZ, WI, NV)
10 bonus points to Clare for picking third, 5 bonus points to Nate for picking second
Here were our picks; mine are indicated with a gold star (⭐).
Gavin Newsom (Galen). Good pick. He’s ahead, or tied with Kamala Harris, in the polls. He’s by far the top choice in prediction markets. That doesn’t mean I have to like it. But I’m seeking to be predictive here (who I think Democrats will pick), not prescriptive (who I’d pick). One thing that hadn’t been as clear to me in April was the emergence of the “Resistance Libs” as a separate faction from the Left and the more wonkish and center-left Abundance Libs. To simplify, because I’ve written about this stuff a lot, the Abundance Libs generally think Democrats should move to the center, and the Left thinks, of course, they should move to the left. Whereas the Resistance Libs claim there isn’t really any positioning problem at all: Democrats just have a “messaging” problem instead. Candidates like Newsom play right into this, selling the idea that Democrats can fight back against Trump by copycatting his ALL CAPS social media presence — even though they’re from the same faction of the party that brought you Harris. Granted, Newsom was smart on redistricting. And nearly any Democrat would seem to stand a fair chance against JD Vance or another Republican nominee; I expect the GOP to have a difficult time of things, post-Trump.
⭐ Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (Nate). Both Galen and I wanted her at #1 last time around. Nothing has really negatively affected my assessment of AOC since then. I suppose she hasn’t achieved liftoff in the polls — but the election of Zohran Mamdani (in case you’re wondering, not eligible to run because he was born in Uganda) speaks to the appeal of this type of message among Democrats. She’s also just an effective communicator: see, for instance, Bernie and AOC on the shutdown and how much more focused their message was than Chuck Schumer’s. Plus, at a time when Democrats have some compelling arguments to make on the concentration of wealth, the left lane is unusually clear because Bernie is 84 years old.2 That said, Democratic elites panicked when it looked like Sanders would win in 2020 and intervened to help Biden; you can imagine that happening again if AOC won an early primary or two. And I suspect there are some Democratic voters who will be scared to select any women candidates after the Harris and Hillary Clinton losses.
Pete Buttigieg (Clare). Mayor Pete is in an interesting position in that his natural faction is probably the Abundance Libs. But he also has some Resistance Lib appeal by virtue of being an effective and tenacious communicator and a veteran of the Biden administration. He’s also third in the polling average, although his numbers have declined as Newsom’s have risen. (Proof that he’s competing for Resistance votes, I guess.) There’s also the elephant in the room, or actually a pair of them: his persistent lack of support with Black voters, and whether America is ready for a gay president. I had an extended take on that back in September.
