The 2028 Democratic Presidential Contenders, Ranked by Nate Silver

By Nate Silver and John Guida

Mr. Silver is the author of “On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything.” Mr. Guida is an editor in Times Opinion.

Voting has started in the 2026 midterms — in Texas, ahead of a big primary on March 3. But this year isn’t about only the midterms: Looming in the background is 2028, and the presidential “invisible primary,” when potential contenders stump for fellow partisans, form campaign teams, hop around early voting states like New Hampshire and release memoirs.

Who’s in the mix for Democrats? Nate Silver, the author of the newsletter Silver Bulletin, recently participated in a fantasy-style draft of potential 2028 Democratic contenders (with two of his former colleagues at FiveThirtyEight, Galen Druke and Clare Malone).

In a written conversation with John Guida, an editor in Times Opinion, he assessed the front-runners, the politicians and non-politicians — and what surprised him about the picks.

John Guida: You’re a big sports fan, so you know the great drama and symbolic importance of the first overall pick in a draft. Drum roll, please: The first pick was …

Nate Silver: The first pick, made by Galen Druke, was Gov. Gavin Newsom of California. But I would have taken Newsom, too. Either he or Kamala Harris is ahead in basically every poll. And he’s moved well ahead in prediction markets, which, whatever their strengths and weaknesses, are a convenient enough summary of the conventional wisdom.

But it’s important to articulate a distinction here: These are our picks based on who we think is most likely to be chosen by Democratic voters and delegates, not whom we would necessarily pick. Personally, I think Newsom is cut from the same cloth as some past losing Democratic nominees like Harris. That said, I don’t think you can sort Democrats into clean buckets of winners and losers. The 2024 election was close-ish, and I’m not sure anyone should fear the likes of JD Vance or whomever else the Republicans might nominate.

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