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The first scandal of the 2028 presidential campaign arrived in the form of an October surprise — just three Octobers earlier than usual. Here’s what happened: Sometime last year (his office won’t say precisely when) in a Las Vegas casino (his office won’t say exactly which one), Illinois governor and billionaire heir to the Hyatt hotel fortune J. B. Pritzker spent the night playing cards. He had asked his staff if gambling on his vacation might be a bad look for a sitting governor. His concerns were allayed. Who would know let alone care? Then the governor went on a blackjack heater and won $1.4 million.
The windfall, reported in Pritzker’s financial-disclosure filings, raised a lot of questions. Does Pritzker have a gambling problem? How would his hobby affect his position on the growing scourge of legalized betting? And could his winnings — a drop in the bucket for him — foster the perception that he’s an out-of-touch fat cat? “Governor,” a journalist called out during a press conference in Chicago in October, “are you concerned that AOC or another potential rival in a presidential primary could use the capital gains, the gambling winnings, against you for fodder in a campaign?”
“No,” he said. “I think people know when I got elected, and have known for some time, that I’ve been very fortunate in my life.” For good measure, he added, “Right now, I’m focused on running for reelection as governor. That’s the only thing I’m focused on politically.”
Are we getting a little ahead of ourselves here? Yes, we are 36 months away from an election that no one has technically entered, but it’s nevertheless starting to take shape. Demoralized, wildly unpopular, and with no clear party leader, Democrats are desperate to get things going. And it looks to be a wide-open contest. “I think there will be 20 to 25 candidates running, and I think 19 to 24 of them will be men,” one top Democratic strategist told me. “It’s going to be totally nauseating to see all of these people fall over themselves to have their own podcasts.” Jesse Lehrich, a former Hillary Clinton campaign staffer, has been following the podcast primary, listening to an estimated 50 hours of audio per week (at 2.5x speed) for the “Big, Beautiful 2028 Tracker” in his newsletter, Nobody’s Listening. “The shadow primary began pretty much by Inauguration Day,” he told me.
Democrats with a national profile — and some without one — have already begun reaching out to potential staffers. “I got a call from Wes Moore’s team asking if I’d be interested in working on his 2026 reelection campaign with a ‘wink, wink’ about possibly staying on beyond in case there’s a more competitive race in the future,” one Democratic operative told me. Moore, the Maryland governor, has said he has no intention of running, but like a bunch of other ambitious Democrats, he has a habit of popping up in important primary states such as South Carolina. Arizona senator Ruben Gallego, the pugnacious former Marine with working-class bona fides, went to the Iowa State Fair in August to partake in the time-honored traditions of manning the grill at the pork-producers tent and parrying countless questions about his presidential aspirations. “The times I’ve been very successful have been when I moved faster than everybody else,” he said a few weeks later in New Hampshire, the former longtime home to the first Democratic presidential primary.
No one seems to be moving quicker than Ro Khanna, the lefty representative from California who has spent so much time in New Hampshire over the past few years that he’s jokingly referred to as the state’s “fifth delegate” to the U.S. Congress. “I get texts from him,” one Granite State Democrat told me, “and I barely know him.” In fact, being barely known is probably the thing Khanna is best known for. “As expected, Ro Khanna is annoyed I put Chris Van Hollen on my list of ‘intriguing’ 2028 candidates and not him,” a pollster texted me, referring to the Maryland senator who has been outspoken in his criticisms of Israel’s war in Gaza. When reached for comment, Khanna said his text to the pollster was meant to be “lighthearted.” He added, “The grass roots is sick of the consultant class leaking private conversations for their own notoriety and trying to anoint candidates.” Khanna has already started approaching possible hires for a would-be campaign team. “We should have a strong progressive candidate in 2028 in the field, and, sure, there are conversations about that that I’ve been part of,” Khanna told me.
Democratic fundraising has been moribund ahead of the 2026 midterm elections, but there’s a belief that donors are more than ready to start giving for 2028. “Everyone wants to get this started because they are scared shitless about what’s going on in the country right now and they want a hero,” said Rufus Gifford, who recently served as the finance chair for the Kamala Harris–Tim Walz campaign.
There’s a sense that what a prospective candidate does now, even at this extremely early and seemingly premature juncture, matters. The prevailing thought among many political operatives is that it may be way too early to win an election but it’s not too early to lose one.
Pritzker’s million-dollar jackpot is undoubtedly being filed away for further use by his opponents, even as the governor has burnished his reputation as an antagonist of Donald Trump by standing up to the president’s attempts to flood Chicago with federal troops. “If you come for my people, you come through me,” Pritzker has said, seemingly a surefire way to get attention and win the affection of Democratic voters.
“Authoritarians will take every moment to lock down their authority and control, and if you do not push back, the noose will get tighter and tighter,” he told me when we spoke in his office 16 floors above downtown Chicago in October. “What I’m doing comes naturally to me. Maybe another way to say it is I can’t help myself.”
Carlos Bernate/Bloomberg (Buttigieg); AP PHOTO ( Jose Juarez/Whitmer); Stefanie Keenan/Getty Images (Newsom); Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images (Murphy); Paul W. Gillespie/The Capital Gazette (Moore)
The 2028 Democratic primary feels up for grabs because of voter disgust with the Establishment. “One thing I’ve seen as I look at focus groups and polling: They are so pissed off about what happened in 2024,” Lis Smith, who helped run Pete Buttigieg’s 2020 campaign, told me. “So pissed off about Joe Biden, pissed off about the gerontocracy. They just want new blood.” It’s a little awkward, then, that one of the technical front-runners, according to polls that don’t really mean anything, is Biden’s vice-president, Kamala Harris.
After Harris was defeated last November, she promised her outgoing staff that she would not go “quietly into the night.” There were basically three options open to her: run for governor of California, run for president again, or leave her career in public service. In the summer, she ruled out a run for governor. Since then, she has published an account of her short presidential run, 107 Days, and toured the country to trash Trump and promote her book, which blames her loss, in part, on shortsighted aides in Bidenworld. As far as Harris’s team is concerned, it’s been a smashing success — adoring crowds at her events, a runaway best seller. “Some people have said I was the most qualified candidate to ever run for president,” she exclaimed when she came through Washington, D.C. “If Kamala decides to run, she will certainly have a lot of Democratic support, and I think she will easily be someone everyone will want to sit down with again in a period that’s not just 107 days,” Robert Wolf, a venture capitalist and Democratic donor, told me.
Other Democratic insiders, however, disagree and are worried Harris is drawing precisely the wrong lesson from the lines she sees snaking around the block. “She’s irrelevant,” said a Democratic consultant who has worked multiple presidential campaigns. “She couldn’t raise money to run for president. She couldn’t put the organization together. It would be a complete and utter disaster.” Her devastating loss to Trump and her inextricable link to the ever-unpopular Biden administration would haunt another campaign. But who can stop her? Recently, she loudly hinted that she might run again, telling the BBC, “I am not done.”
Axios reported that key members of her former campaign team, including top strategist Ace Smith and campaign manager Juan Rodriguez, are now working for California governor Gavin Newsom and are expected to stay on if he runs in 2028. By all accounts, Newsom has all-caps tweeted himself into the early pole position in the primary — imitating Trump’s trollish style of politics while spearheading a campaign to redistrict his state in an effort to both counter the GOP’s extreme gerrymandering and help win back the House. “He’s no Trump,” Steve Bannon told Politico, but “he looks like the only person in the Democratic Party who is organizing a fight that they feel they can win.”
Newsom’s redistricting ballot initiative, Proposition 50, is polling very well. People associated with other potential 2028 candidates can sound envious when they talk about Newsom’s situation. Proposition 50 is both a local issue and a national one, giving Newsom a fight in his own backyard that resonates with the rest of the country. Plus it allows him to have a spring-training-like campaign, to get his reps in ahead of the real thing. One operative compared the campaign to the situation Newsom found himself in in 2021, when California voted to have a recall election. The governor ran a successful campaign that seemed only to make his operation stronger. “There’s the Gavin Newsom machine pre-recall and post-recall,” the operative said. “He was able to build this quite powerful, tremendous list and base of support after the recall because it was the biggest thing going on. They are very clearly running the same play, which I think is very smart.”
Still, Newsom has plenty of personal baggage, including being previously married to Donald Trump Jr.’s ex-girlfriend Kimberly Guilfoyle and having had an affair with his then–campaign manager’s wife. And with his slicked-back hair and expensive dining habits, he can give off the impression that he’s the person in the nascent primary who comes from generational wealth. “If you put Newsom and Pritzker together on a stage,” said Andrew Mamo, a veteran of the Buttigieg presidential campaign, “which one would most people assume is the billionaire?”
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has kept mum about whether she might run for president or the Senate, but she has been making appearances across the country with both the hot new politician of the moment, Zohran Mamdani, and the last Democratic presidential candidate people still seem to like, Bernie Sanders, on his “Fighting Oligarchy” tour. Insiders told me Ocasio-Cortez is pretty much the one person in Democratic politics who can afford to enter the race as late as she wants. “If she decides to do it, she will have no problem raising money or hiring staff,” one person close to her told me. Also, unlike the 2020 cycle, in which most candidates raced to the left, Ocasio-Cortez is the dominant figure in that lane this time around, potentially leaving a bunch of white moderate-coded men to battle among themselves.
In that group is former Transportation secretary Buttigieg, who has plenty of time during his moment of fun-employment to stump for fellow Democrats and appear on television constantly. The downside to having free time is that Buttigieg may be the highest-rated presidential prospect without a vehicle for his political project. And yet, more than most potential candidates, he does have the bones of a seasoned presidential-campaign team-in-waiting, including Lis Smith, Mamo, and former Biden spokesman Chris Meagher. Buttigieg is one of the best communicators and fundraisers in the party: During the first half of the year, his leadership PAC raked in $1.6 million, putting him in the upper echelon of possible 2028 contenders. However, like Harris, he risks being dragged down by his ties to the Biden administration and is perhaps seen as too close to an Obama style of politics that is being contested in the furor of this anti-Establishment moment. He also seems to have almost no support from Black voters.
Pritzker is in the white-guy lane as well. Speculation about his ambitions has been fueled not only by his battle with Trump and his likely immense war chest but by his noticeably shrinking waistline. “I’ve probably lost, I don’t know, a thousand pounds in my life and gained it all back,” Pritzker told me. “And nobody asked me before if I was running for president, but people claim now, somehow, that’s why I’m losing the weight.” Former Jeb Bush aide Tim Miller has gone so far as to caution Pritzker about letting his suits get too baggy, an issue that plagued Miller’s former boss on the campaign trail. Pritzker has also been popping up in politically important states other than his own: as a top donor to the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, a keynote speaker at a recent dinner in Georgia, and a fiery speaker at a fundraiser in New Hampshire, where he raged against “simpering timidity” from members of his party. “It’s time to fight everywhere and all at once,” he said.
Yet too much attention too early can backfire. “I find Newsom’s and Pritzker’s daily antics obscene. I think they’ve become SNL skits,” said a top party consultant. “The way to run for president is to get shit done in their day job, and they’ve abdicated that.”
The former Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel — last seen defending his decision to delay the release of footage that captured police brutality — has made it no secret that he’s testing the waters. He has been spotted in Silicon Valley meeting with possible donors, setting himself up as an anti-woke crusader who can speak the tech bro’s language and take on the progressive wing of his party. (“He’s a bit behind the others,” said one Democratic operative. “Because he doesn’t have long relationships out there.”) Meanwhile, Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut has grown a beard, tacked left, and spent a lot of time talking about ways to bring lonely and disenfranchised men back into the fold. “I think he’s having a midlife crisis,” one Democratic strategist said.
Mamo told me being new is a crucial quality. Candidates who have been around too long may have what he calls “the Cory Booker Problem.” When Booker ran for the Senate in 2013, he was the hottest thing in Democratic politics. But when he ran for president in 2020, the biography of this Rhodes Scholar turned mayor of Newark didn’t hit the same way. “His story wasn’t any less compelling; it was just that it had been told before and everyone had seen that movie,” Mamo said. (N.B.: Booker hard-launched the news of his engagement to his girlfriend on Instagram in September and will be in New Hampshire later this month.)
There are potential top-tier candidates like Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro (who is facing a difficult reelection battle) and Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer (who has to see out her final term) who are reluctant to show signs of higher aspirations at the moment but will likely leap to the peak of the prediction markets soon. Mark Cuban has been publicly and privately telling people that he’s not going to run for president, but he or some other outsider candidate could jump in and shake up the race (although a Washington Post analysis showed that Newsom’s podcast has way more listeners than that of Stephen A. Smith, the perennial option in the nonpolitician category). And the midterms could create stars not yet on anyone’s radar. “We can’t talk about 2028 in a real way until we see what happens in 2026,” said Rebecca Katz, the founding partner of consulting group Fight Agency. “Also, and this is important, we don’t know what the state of the country will be in a year. These are not normal times, and it’s really fucking hard to predict the future.”
On the donor front, it’s easiest for those who have a reason to ask for money right now. Doors open quickly for Shapiro. Same with Moore in Maryland, who has a strong foothold among Wall Street donors from his time running the anti-poverty Robin Hood Foundation. Megadonors like Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings, former Sequoia Capital venture capitalist Michael Moritz, and Cargill heiress Gwendolyn Sontheim have given to Newsom’s congressional-redistricting effort in California. “It’s notable, though, who has not donated,” one Democratic operative with ties to the fundraising world told me. “The list of California donors who didn’t give is a lot longer than the list of who did.” (The holdouts include LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, Emerson Collective founder Laurene Powell Jobs, and producer Jeffrey Katzenberg.) They think it’s a sign that Newsom hasn’t come close to locking up the donor world even in his own state. “In my mind, people are kind of going too hard, too fast, too early; people’s attention spans are a split second to begin with,” said Gifford, Harris’s former finance chair. “The last thing you want to do is peak in 2025.”
Still, Gifford told me he wants to help candidates raise money and build networks to get their messages out. In early October, he organized a group of potential donors to meet with Kentucky governor Andy Beshear in the Amalgamated Bank offices in downtown Boston. Beshear was in New England for a swing through — you guessed it — New Hampshire, where I watched him deliver what constituted his version of a stump speech at various house parties hosted by state legislators. Beshear has garnered attention as a possible presidential candidate mostly based on the fact that he has won twice in a state Trump won by 30 points in the last election. He preaches a politics of pragmatism. “We need to spend 80 percent of our time focusing on issues that matter to 100 percent of Americans,” he said at each stop. He can give off a Mister Rogers vibe. “I remain optimistic because being pessimistic never helped me solve a problem,” Beshear told me when I asked if he was worried about the fate of American democracy.
By next year’s midterms, Beshear will be the head of the Democratic Governors Association, a job that has already given him the perfect excuse to start traveling the country and meeting with donors. He has enlisted media-consulting help from a strategist who has worked for Ocasio-Cortez as well as the Biden and Harris campaigns. The son of a governor with a beautiful family, a well-behaved dog, and John Edwards–without–the–whiff–of–sex–scandal looks, Beshear is so good on paper that Vogue has already featured him in a glossy photo spread. “He kind of brings us back to a Bill Clinton type,” said Wolf, the Democratic donor. If after four years of Trump, the country decides it wants to elect his exact opposite, Beshear will have a very good case to make. Or voters might feel he has come off the line at the presidential-bobblehead factory — a trinket from a bygone era.
“Does he have the fire in the belly that’s needed right now?” asked Adam Carlson, a Democratic pollster. “You can’t just brush off the shit that’s going on right now. It might work in a general election, but it won’t work in a primary.”
Gifford, who was impressed with Beshear in Boston, didn’t seem particularly concerned about the governor’s relatively low profile. “I wouldn’t want to be anyone’s default choice yet,” he said. “People may tire of you.”
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