2028 will be here before you know it, and the Democrats’ options are looking pretty terrible. But all they need is a semi-normal person who understands the real problems facing the country. It might be time to consider an unorthodox option.
One piece of good news is that the right-wing agenda is hugely unpopular. Donald Trump has squandered his 2024 victory. His approval rating keeps dropping. Trump keeps saying and doing things that voters hate, and then having to back off. For instance, he dismissed the affordability crisis as a hoax, then, realizing this sounded bad, went back to saying he wanted to bring prices down. He promised brutal immigration enforcement, but people don’t like seeing their neighbors roughed up and taken away by masked thugs, or even killed, so now he’s distancing himself from Border Patrol commander-at-large Greg Bovino. He promised to run Venezuela and threatened to conquer Greenland, but there’s no popular support for either action, so the Trump administration backpedaled.
The Trump presidency is destined to remain unpopular, for a quite obvious reason: Trump is a bullshitter. He doesn’t have an actual strategy for making energy costs or groceries more affordable. So voters who thought he would make their lives better were always going to end up disappointed. And when reality ends up conflicting with Trump’s fantasy, Trump has one go-to response, which is to simply lie: to say that in fact, prices are down, the immigration enforcement operations are targeting dangerous criminals, etc. People can see what’s in their own bank accounts, and they can see the raids in the streets, so this strategy cannot work long-term. If everyone can see with their own eyes that Trump is lying (rather than having to trust media fact-checkers), how can his bluster possibly be successful? This creates an opportunity for the opposition.
But the bad news is, the fact that the right-wing agenda is unpopular does not mean the right will be ousted from power. It depends what the alternative is. And with the 2028 presidential election edging closer and closer, it’s clear that the Democratic Party doesn’t have any candidates who are obviously well-positioned to take on whoever Trump’s successor may be. (Assuming that Trump does not in fact go through with his threat of running for a third term, an idea he enjoys flirting with even though it’s unconstitutional).
I’ve long recommended Bernie Sanders as the perfect antidote to Donald Trump. He is capable of speaking to people who feel aggrieved and hopeless, and giving them a better, more authentic populism. But Sanders is 84, and he’s not going to run again. Zohran Mamdani, the mayor of New York City, also did an excellent job speaking to disaffected voters, using an affordability message to win the support of those who may be Trump supporters or otherwise apolitical. But Mamdani is barred under our (incredibly unfair) constitutional rule that prohibits naturalized citizens from becoming president. There’s Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, of course. She might prevail in a matchup against the hectoring, charisma-free JD Vance. But I remain to be convinced that AOC has the ability to speak persuasively to voters who are not left-leaning millennials, and besides we need her to run for Chuck Schumer’s Senate seat. I was once pretty excited about labor leaders Sean O’Brien (Teamsters) and Shawn Fain (United Auto Workers), but O’Brien cozied up to Trump and Fain became mired in an ugly scandal over his mismanagement of the union. (I still think we need more labor leaders to enter politics, though!)
About the present crop of centrist Democrats, the less said the better. Gavin Newsom is like an AI photo generated from the prompt “a generic sleazy politician.” His fellow Californian, Congressman Ro Khanna, recently told Current Affairs that Newsom “doesn’t want to offend the donor class,” which means he won’t support even a tiny tax on billionaires to fund public services. I positively dread seeing Newsom and his parade of memes, Pete Buttigieg giving high-minded lectures on Dignity, or god forbid, Kamala Harris returning for another national humiliation. I’ve said good things about JB Pritzker in the past, and he has a decent record as Illinois’ governor, but he doesn’t have much national recognition, and we ideally don’t want a billionaire plutocrat to campaign hypocritically against inequality and plutocracy.
There is of course Josh Shapiro, the governor of Pennsylvania, who looks to be gearing up for a run. But not only is Shapiro going to be dogged by the infamous Ellen Greenberg case—as attorney general, he claimed that a woman who had been stabbed 20 times had committed suicide, a judgment he continues to defend—but his record on one of the most important moral issues of our time, the Israel-Palestine conflict, is horrendous. When Ben and Jerry’s stopped selling ice cream in Israel’s illegal settlements, Shapiro vowed to apply an anti-BDS (Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions) law against them. “BDS is rooted in antisemitism,” he said. Shapiro described the Palestine Writes literary festival as “hateful” and smeared peaceful student protesters as disorderly and endangering public safety. This is important first and foremost because it is morally abhorrent to whitewash a genocide and trying to stop those protesting. But also, we now know that part of why Kamala Harris lost in 2024 was that she refused to do anything to distance herself from Joe Biden’s heinous support of Israel’s war crimes. Even though the Uncommitted movement warned her that it was electorally unwise not to break from the administration, Harris refused to so much as meet with the families of Gazans. Democratic public opinion on Israel has tanked since the country’s destruction of Gaza, rightly so, and Democrats who insist on defending Israel now are going to demoralize the progressive voters who the party needs if they hope to oust the right.
Gavin Newsom, too, is exposed here, since he too rejects the consensus of human rights groups that Israel has committed genocide. AOC, though she has been forceful in condemning Israel’s actions, shamefully shielded Harris by falsely claiming that Harris was “working tirelessly for a ceasefire,” and has supported redefining antisemitism to include legitimate criticisms of Israel. If Democrats run a pro-Israel zealot in 2028, the party is going to be riven with internal conflict, just as running Hubert Humphrey at the height of the Vietnam War in 1968 enabled a Nixon victory.
So who are we left with? Well, with few other obvious options, it might be time to think about drafting Jon Stewart. The comic, whose show is still viewed by millions every week, has long been one of the fiercest and most articulate critics of the right. Stewart describes himself as having “socialist or independent” politics, and has no ties to the unpopular, sclerotic Democratic Party establishment. A Stewart candidacy would excite people. He would run rings around humorless, distinctly unlikable characters like Vance and Marco Rubio who lack the special sauce that Trump has. (Trump is fun. No other Republican is fun, with the possible exception of George Santos.)
What the Democrats need if they are to get back into power is candidates who hold sincere progressive convictions but aren’t tarnished by the completely toxic brand of the national party. Sanders was great for that, because he’s officially an independent and so he was free to criticize the record of the Obama administration. Stewart is as independent as they come, and has been absolutely brutal in his criticism of feckless Democratic leaders like Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries. He is well-educated on the issues (he can hold his own on economics in an argument with Larry Summers), supports single-payer healthcare, and has been forthright in criticizing Democrats for their hypocrisy in supporting Israel’s brutalization of Palestine. In a discussion on the Gaza genocide with Peter Beinart, Stewart stressed the need for moral clarity on Israel on something self-evidently horrific and inhumane. Stewart can be brilliant at exposing bullshit, and some of his interrogations of pompous politicians have been devastating. Watching him cross-examine the deputy defense secretary about the Pentagon’s budgeting is deeply satisfying. And he has charisma. Charisma is important in a leader. Put Jon Stewart together with the Mamdani video and social media team and, to my mind, you’ve got an operation that will be hard for any Republican to beat.
I have some problems with Stewart. He has a tendency to swallow vacuous centrist platitudes, and when he has people like Jen Psaki or Ezra Klein on his show, he can be a bit too credulous. Stewart’s skewering of Tucker Carlson on Crossfire is legendary, but looking back it seems like he was upset that Crossfire was too “partisan.” His 2010 “Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear” was an embarrassment, implying that the problem with American politics was hyperpartisanship, when the most important issue (as would soon be seen with the explosion of the Occupy Wall Street movement) was that the American people were being robbed blind by oligarchs. But Stewart has supported Sanders and Mamdani, and he gets that corporate power, not wokeness or Big Government, is the central cause of American ills. I think Stewart’s history of anti-partisanship might help him because he can claim he is not reflexively anti-Republican, and his history of activism has focused on universally-popular issues like helping 9/11 first responders and giving benefits to veterans who were exposed to toxic burn pits. His record here is admirable and uncontroversial, and Stewart is a wholesome guy with an animal sanctuary.
Donald Trump, a reality TV show star, destroyed any conventional notions that Political Experience is necessary to getting elected. You might still claim that it’s necessary to govern well, but I’d trust Stewart in a heartbeat over the much more “experienced” Newsom and Shapiro, just as I trusted the less experienced Mamdani over the more experienced but corrupt and amoral Andrew Cuomo. To beat back the right, it is necessary to go bold, not to run a demoralizing empty suit politician like Buttigieg, Newsom, or Shapiro, all of whom seem like they’ve been gearing up to run for president since second grade. Ideally, we would not be in this situation, and I think that new leaders will soon emerge among young progressives. But at the moment, I do not see a better option than Stewart. He's certainly miles better than most of the contenders being discussed on the Democratic side. And the race will be here sooner than you think. We might need to start pressuring him to run sooner rather than later.
