David M. Shribman
NATIONAL PERSPECTIVE
In other news …
With great issues of war and peace swirling across the globe, with questions of international law in the air, with the world economy facing fresh challenges, with the plate tectonics of geopolitics in motion, and with the political environment in countries from Hungary to Canada undergoing profound change, the United States is preparing for an election that won’t happen for more than two more years.
Yes, the 2028 presidential campaign is underway.
There hasn’t been a formal start to the electioneering. The midterm congressional elections — they are a tentative Geiger counter that measures the pulse of the nation — still haven’t happened. The locations of the national political conventions haven’t been chosen. The parties haven’t even completed the quadrennial gavotte over whether Iowa and New Hampshire will retain their jealously guarded positions at the front of the parade of caucuses and primaries.
But make no mistake. The presidential campaign is well underway.
It is being conducted in disparate places.
Islamabad, for example, is not customarily regarded as a typical stop on an American presidential campaign, but Pakistan’s Serena Hotel may be as important a landmark on the road to the White House as the Renaissance Des Moines Savery Hotel is in Iowa. It is the site of the Iran war negotiations, where Vice President JD Vance sat down with Iranian delegates.
Nor is Detroit customarily an early stop in a presidential campaign. But that’s where a gaggle of possible presidential candidates preened and pandered earlier this month. Michigan is regarded as a swing state even though the Democrats have taken it in seven out of the last nine elections. Donald Trump won it in his two victorious campaigns (2016, 2024), but the state gave its 15 electoral votes to Joe Biden in 2020.
New Hampshire is always a favorite spot, it being the site of the first primary for more than a century. So no one should be surprised that former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, Govs. Gavin Newsom (California), Andy Beshear (Kentucky), and JB Pritzker (Illinois); and Sens. Cory Booker (New Jersey) and Ruben Gallego (Arizona) already have visited the state.
For the first time since 2016, no incumbent is running for reelection and, as a result, the campaign, like those of 1988 and 2000, will be conducted — forgive an old-fashioned metaphor — in stereo.
That produces unusual interest and an unusual dynamic, as what unfolds in one party’s campaign has a subtle effect on the rival party. In 1988 and 2000, sitting vice presidents (George H.W. Bush and Al Gore) had to defend the administrations of which they were a part while struggling to differentiate themselves from the presidents they served (Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton). They thus became targets of both Republicans and Democrats.
That will be the challenge if Vance seeks to succeed Trump. Many vice presidents have tried moving to the presidency from their position as second-in-command and failed (Kamala Harris was the most recent, but the group also includes such figures as, among others, Richard Nixon, Hubert Humphrey, and Gore). The only ones who succeeded were John Adams (1797), Thomas Jefferson (1801), Martin Van Buren (1837), and the elder Bush (1989).
Vance’s challenge: capturing the movement that Trump created even as he expands his base. The MAGA forces may be big enough to get to the general election, as nomination fights tend to be conducted on the extremes of the parties rather than amid the middle of the spectrum, where the general election ultimately is won or lost. The vice president’s public skepticism of the Iran war may help him in both the nomination phase (a large faction of MAGA shares his view) and in a general election (Democrats surely agree).
The moving part in the GOP is Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who ran a credible campaign in 2016, was critical of Trump throughout that period, and has crafted a role in the second Trump administration that is arguably more substantial than that of Vance, the parley in Islamabad notwithstanding. Rubio has pledged to defer to Vance if the latter wants to run for president, but promises like those are made to be broken, and might be. Then again, the two might (as Reagan did in 1976) make an early agreement and run as a ticket for the nomination.
But the broader question is whether by 2028 the MAGA brand will have become either unsustainable (because of warring factions within it) or stale. The New Deal didn’t get stale for 60 years, but it was far less emotional a creed than MAGA. This is perhaps the most important unknown in American politics now.
In second place is the destiny of the Democrats.
Will the party continue its veer to the left, a kind of analog to the sharp rightward turn of the Republicans, or will it drift to the center in an attempt to corral the independents who hold the balance of power?
Will the purists in the party (another analog to the Republicans) provide a series of progressive litmus tests that make their nominee the darling of the left but anathema to centrist voters? The last time they tried this was in 1972, and that year their nominee, Sen. George McGovern of South Dakota, was a bona fide war hero and a minted Ph.D. (history, Northwestern University). Do they have anyone with that sort of record and gravitas who can do better than losing 49 states?
There are signs that the party is asking those questions in a serious manner.
Several Democrats are publicly floating notions of tax cuts. This is usually a part of the GOP playbook, but it won’t do the Democrats any harm if, as they vow, they aim them at the middle class — which is what Republicans always say they will do but seldom accomplish.
Harris has been suggesting she might want to do what Nixon did, which is to follow a losing general-election presidential campaign with a winning one. As a Californian familiar with the Nixon loss in the state’s 1962 gubernatorial campaign, she shrewdly stood down from the 2026 race for the governor’s chair. But she would have to be reminded that Nixon won in 1968 as the “New Nixon.” So far there are no hints of a New Harris.
But like everything else, there’s plenty of time.
A Swampscott High School Class of 1972 member, David M. Shribman is the Pulitzer Prize-winning former executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
