Josh Shapiro is already receiving calls from Democratic Party leaders in Pennsylvania urging him to run for president. Gavin Newsom held a call Friday with about 50,000 people in his network of small donors and called a special legislative session to sway California against Trump. And Pete Buttigieg will tout his Cabinet achievements at a series of events as he wraps up his official role.
Democrats are just days into the accusations about why they blew the presidential race. But conversations and moves by ambitious Democrats aimed at 2028 have already begun.
Of course, Kamala Harris could still run for office and focused as leader of the movement against Trumpism in her concession at Howard University. But potential rivals are already interested in the pleas of their supporters to take steps, test their fundraising activities and position themselves as leaders of the resistance against Donald Trump in the United States.
For the Democrats’ rising stars, there was a silver lining in the blow dealt to them by Trump’s victory. Before Harris’s defeat, it appeared that a generation of Democratic talent would be sidelined for a decade or more. Now they have a new lease on a political future at a time when the party is looking for a way back from the wilderness.
“The 2028 public campaign begins on Trump’s first day in office, when he signs his first executive order,” said Dan Sena, a consultant who led the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. “But the work behind the scenes starts today, the moving and maneuvering is now in full swing.”
The primary field, as it was in 2020, could be huge, including any number of governors, legislators and Cabinet secretaries. In addition to Harris, Harris’ running mate, 60-year-old Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, is drawing attention in the Harris-Walz orbit.
“When Democrats started talking about 2028 six months ago, Walz’s name wouldn’t have been on the list, now it might be at the top,” a former Harris aide, granted anonymity to review the field, told me. to POLITICO.
Newsom is at the top of the pack of hopefuls and could be one of the biggest beneficiaries of Harris’ loss, given the vast amount of overlap between their California-based networks. With his final term two years away, he has long been considered a future presidential candidate and his team has built up to the point where no sitting president stands in his path. Few Democrats are so willing to launch a national campaign.
Newsom, a rising leader of the anti-Trump resistance, runs a full-time political operation involving Harris’ leading 2024 pollster and several of her current and former advisers; has raised $151 million for itself and others since 2020; has a combined small donor list that includes nearly 30 million emails and phone numbers and is close to some of the country’s largest donors.
With his party suddenly sidelined, he has stepped in to fill the void by calling his Democratic-dominated Legislature back to Sacramento for a special session to help protect the state from Trump on climate issues. immigration and reproductive rights – everything from abortion bans and electric vehicle cuts to deportation raids and the withholding of federal disaster aid.
But Newsom and his team are reluctant to appear too hungry, believing Democrats are tired of 24/7 campaigning. Instead, he seeks to emphasize the policy implications of Trump’s return to office, with the understanding that liberal California — more than any other state — is destined to be in the crosshairs of the newly elected president.
On the political side, Newsom is reactivating his volunteer army that has sent a total of 33 million text messages and logged 85,000 calls since June urging Democrats to vote in the presidential race. Newsom held a Zoom call for his network late Friday in which he vowed to defend the state against Trump but not fight him just for the sake of partisan battles.
“I respect this country, I respect the presidency, and I want our president to succeed and our job – my job – is not to wake up every day and take a crowbar and slam it into the spokes of the send from the Trump administration,” Newsom said. “In the spirit of an open hand and not a closed fist, that is how we want to move forward. That said… I am not naive either, we are pragmatic and we will remain steadfast.”
And then there are Harris’s discarded veep shortlisters, including Shapiro and Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, and others who found their way into the conversation, like Buttigieg and Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker.
In the wake of Harris’s loss, some Democratic officials and operatives have looked to Shapiro as a kind of potential savior, asking whether he could have helped take Pennsylvania if Harris had chosen him as her running mate. As Shapiro’s national star has risen this year, he has raised $9 million for his gubernatorial campaign, which is up for re-election in 2026. On the other hand, if the election was a test of his influence in Pennsylvania, it wasn’t enough to keep Harris from losing the state.
Buttigieg has not declined or declined a 2028 bid, nor has he rejected a possible run for governor of Michigan in 2026 after moving to the state and registering to vote there. But the soon-to-depart transportation secretary, working in his personal capacity, dusted off his fundraising drive for the top of the ticket and showed he still had juice, raising $16 million for Harris and President Joe Biden — a few hundred thousand dollars more than Newsom has raised for the team. In the final days of the campaign, he crossed the Blue Wall states for the campaign. And on the eve of Election Day, he called Democrats up and down the ballot to inquire about their races.
At 42, Buttigieg could also skip the race and still compete in the future. But his ability to communicate on Fox News and other hostile media environments could give him new momentum in a country that has been moving in the right direction. Even as he campaigned for Michigan’s primary candidates the day before the election, he heard pleas to look for higher office himself. At a party headquarters, he stopped by to greet volunteers, and a woman told him, “We want to see you as president in our lives.” He smiled.
Buttigieg is expected to wrap up his Cabinet role by highlighting his and the Biden administration’s achievements in a series of events — including returning to his alma mater for the fireside chat at the Harvard University Institute of Politics in over the next few days, where he will also speak “about the challenges facing the next administration.”
And nearly all of the Democratic Party’s top candidates paraded through New Hampshire this year on campaign swings for Biden and then Harris, which continued long after it was clear the former swing state would remain blue.
The selection was part of the 2020 renewal – Buttigieg, Sens. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) and Cory Boeker (DN.J.), and even Senator Michael Bennet (D-Colo.) – and some newcomers. Newsom and Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer visited this summer, the former in an effort to shore up Biden’s faltering campaign, the latter to promote Harris’ nascent candidacy. Pritzker arrived over Labor Day weekend, followed by Beshear in October. Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) also visited in October. Then, six days before the election that would hinge on his critical swing state, it was Shapiro’s turn.
Many of the same names — plus others like Maryland Governor Wes Moore — also made sure the state was included in their blitzes of key states’ breakfasts at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. California Rep. Ro Khanna, a frequent flyer to New Hampshire, even sponsored the state breakfast for a week.
The attention the party bench has focused on New Hampshire is both a blatant admission of future ambitions — “You all know how to elect a president,” Shapiro said at his breakfast stump — and a clear message that Biden’s attempt to win the state of his stripping power Its position at the top of the 2024 primary lineup has not diminished its power in the future presidential process.
“My view is that we have an incredible group of talented people on the Democratic bench,” Khanna told reporters in August after speaking to the DNC delegation in New Hampshire. “And hopefully we get our moment of leadership.”
Some have downplayed their ambitions more than others during their visits to the state. Whitmer, who was asked by POLITICO during her July campaign campaign whether she would return to New Hampshire later, said she had “no intention of doing so in a political capacity” but would “like to come back and explore the state . ”
But Beshear used his headlining spot at a New Hampshire Democrats dinner to promote both himself and Harris.
“If I may just introduce myself,” the governor said, “I am the man who defeated Mitch McConnell’s hand-picked nominee last November. And I’m the guy who hand-picked Donald Trump’s nominee last November. To cheers, he then touted his bona fides as a “proud” pro-union, pro-choice and pro-public education Democrat in a deeply red state.
And the activists who came to the restaurants, backyards and banquet halls of New Hampshire to hear their party’s rising stars tout the top of this year’s ticket were already sizing up the next game.
Watching Shapiro happily in a Concord bookstore one morning in late October after running for Democratic gubernatorial candidate Joyce Craig, local Democratic activist Maura Willing marveled at the party’s deep bench.
Shapiro is “fantastic,” Willing said when asked if she would ever like to see him run for president. “We have so many great people. But if he was on the candidate list, yes, absolutely… I would support him.”
