Spoiler alert: No one has the slightest idea who the Democratic candidate for president will be in 2028. Including me.

But that doesn’t mean it’s not a subject being discussed every single day in the nation’s capital and elsewhere among what might be described as political circles. So I thought I would give you a brief summary of some of the buzz, leavened (I hope) by some of what I am actually seeing in the real world.

We still have to make it through all of 2026 to even get to the midterms, and the presidential election is two long years after that. This leads to one of the key points to be made while ‘Beastcapping’ this next election: We have little idea what the central issues or the political theme of the race will be. Yes, clean up on aisle Trump and anger over the past four years will be part of it. Yes, so too will be the fact that American democracy and our economy are both broken, rigged, serving the very rich and leaving the rest of the country to struggle.

But many questions with the capacity to make or break a candidate’s chances remain unresolved—and as events unfold, the dynamics of the election will be altered: Will Trump make a more concerted push toward authoritarianism? Will the “Epstein files” produce new revelations? Will Americans be angered by the corruption and thuggishness of the current government, or will they become numbed to it? Will the 2026 midterms have been fair? Will Democratic majorities in Congress—assuming the election was fair, mind you—see hearings that elevate members to star status? Will national events do the same for some governor or mayor?

And as you know, politics in America is now a form of reality TV: personality-driven, shallow, gossipy, veering from hypercringe to bowel-wrenchingly terrifying. In short, it is mesmerizingly weird as f--k. Like watching a puppy race across a sixteen-lane highway, we can’t turn away. So keep a loose grip on the bandwagon onto which you want to hop—and there’s a lot of bandwagons out there to choose from:

For the purposes of this article, I will stick with the Democrats. We will delve into what’s going on among Republicans in the near future.

The Man Who Will Not Be King

One of those mentioned most frequently as a leading contender has been Gavin Newsom, the outgoing (in every sense of the word) governor of California.

One recent story asserted that former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi plans to devote her efforts to promoting Newsom’s candidacy. And you can understand Pelosi’s impulse. Newsom is what the old guard imagines the new guard to be. To them, he looks young and energetic—and by comparison, he is. They are drawn to his good hair, sparkling smile, quotability and name recognition. They see his ability to blend sharp shots at Trump with defenses of billionaires and his hobnobbing with the denizens of MAGA-world as assets. That seems like “centrism” to them; to paraphrase a quote from the recently departed Robert Duvall in Apocalypse Now, they love the smell of centrism in the morning. It smells of victory.

It also ignores the reality that, by 2028, the majority of American voters will have been born after 1990. Millennials and Gen Z will play a big role at the polls, and when I speak to them, the critique of Newsom is clear. They see his podcasting with Steve Bannon and Joe Rogan as opportunistic pandering and his cozying up to the ultrarich as a sign that he is just another pol. While they like some of his social media jabs at Trump, they can’t help but remember that this is a guy who was once married to Kimberly Guilfoyle.

Worse for Newsom is that he is the front-runner in much early betting… which is the absolute kiss of death. Of the last four winning Democrats—Carter, Clinton, Obama and Biden—three were not even being discussed seriously three years........

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