By rights, former Vice President Kamala Harris should be the presumptive Democratic Party presidential nominee in 2028. After all, she picked up the reins when Joe Biden fell off his political horse in the summer of 2024, beat her Republican opponent handily in their one debate while keeping him below 50% of the popular vote. More than 75 million Americans cast votes for her.
However, she also faltered badly where it mattered. Pollsters sussed out seven swing states that could go either for Harris or for former President Donald Trump. All seven of those states swung for Trump. This made for a lopsided victory in the only body that matters when picking a new US president. Trump ran up a total of 312 votes to her 226 in the electoral college.
She is not a shoo-in for her party’s nomination even in her own state of California, whose voters twice elected her as state attorney general and sent her to the Senate. A March UC Berkeley-Politico poll of Golden State voters revealed that the state’s term-limited Governor Gavin Newsom would trounce her if the primary were held tomorrow.
Newsom garnered the support of 28% of California respondents to Harris’s 14%, and other possible challengers were nipping at her heels. New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a progressive standard bearer known by her initials AOC, was at 12%. Former Biden administration Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg was at 11%. All other likely candidates were in single digits.
These early results will create a fundraising problem as Harris sizes up her odds. Any American can donate to a presidential campaign, but a lot of the initial funding comes from a candidate’s home base of support. Both Newsom and Harris came up through San Francisco machine politics. Thus, both would be drawing on the same limited pool of funding to get things up and running.
Overwhelmingly Democratic California
Nationally, Harris does better, but polling regularly shows Newsom is probably the candidate to beat. He looks and acts like a winner, with some height, good looks and a shock of gray but robust hair. The party has prospered under him in California where it has seen setbacks in many other states.
Democrats hold all of the statewide elected offices in Newsom’s state, 60 out of 80 seats in the state Assembly and 30 out of 40 seats in the state Senate. That both senators California sends to the US Congress will be Democrats is a foregone conclusion. That most of the state’s representatives in the US House will be Democrats is also baked into the apple pie of American democracy at this point.
Thanks in part to Newsom’s leadership, California is almost certainly going to send more Democrats into Congress next year. His party did not manage this trick by suddenly fielding superior candidates. Rather, they won the right to redraw the maps of congressional districts. This creates a few overwhelmingly Republican districts but otherwise spreads out and dilutes the Republican vote wherever that is geographically possible.
The state GOP has little hope of being competitive with the new district maps. California currently sends eight Republicans to the US House, out of a total House delegation of 52 when all vacancies are filled. Current estimates have Democrats picking off anywhere between three and five of those seats in the November midterms.
Newsom pulled off this trick where others have faltered. He convinced the state’s overwhelmingly Democratic voters in a low turnout election to pass Proposition 50, with the ostensible justification of punching back against Republican redistricting efforts in Texas. Its passage temporarily redraws California’s districts until after the 2030 census. That is when the state is expected to lose at least four seats due to declining population.
Democrats in Virginia, led by new Governor Abigail Spanberger, tried to do roughly the same thing. They were shut down by Virginia’s supreme court.
Democratic Enthusiasm for Newsom
Newsom, 58 to Harris’s 61, has seen an unbroken string of victories in California politics. In his rise from the San Francisco board of supervisors to mayor to lieutenant governor to two-term governor, he has never lost so much as a primary.
A few of his elections have been blowouts. Newsom was reelected mayor of San Francisco in 2007 with 73% of votes cast. His reelection bid for governor in 2022 was not quite so lopsided, but neither was it particularly close. He beat his Republican opponent, state Senator Brian Dahle, 59.2% to 40.8%, with a spread of more than two million votes.
Newsom was not on the ballot in 2025, but he scored a huge victory with Prop 50. The fact that he successfully championed the initiative to redistrict most of the state’s few remaining elected Republicans out of Congress won raves from many Democrats.
Progressive pundit Juan Williams gave Newsom his annual Politician of the Year award for the governor’s spirited opposition to all things Trump. Williams pointed out that, as San Francisco mayor, Newsom “championed same-sex marriage legalization”, which he called “courageous and ahead of its time during the George W. Bush era”.
Williams also pointed out that the California governor “backs access to abortion, gun control and a higher minimum wage”. And after the redistricting victory, Williams predicted, “Newsom has a deep bench of like-minded Democrats who might consider being his partner on a 2028 ticket”.
Newsom was auditioning for that leading role in his 4 November speech celebrating the Prop 50 win. “What a night for the Democratic Party: a party that is in its ascendency: a party that’s on its toes, no longer on its heels. From coast to coast, sea to shining sea”, he said.
What Are Democrats Thinking?
The California governor is up now in some polls. At press time, bettors on PolyMarket gave him a 24% chance of capturing his party's nomination, against a 10% chance for AOC and a 7% chance for Harris.
A lot can happen between now and the presidential primaries to change voters’ minds, which makes candidate preferences in positional polling fleeting. More relevant is how Democrats are sizing up where their party is at, where the country is and how those two ought to intertwine.
One recent poll of attitudes found that America’s Democrats and Democrat-leaning independent voters are broadly in agreement that things are headed in the wrong direction and want to do something about it. Yet the New York Times/Siena poll of more than 1,500 voters also found significant disagreement over what direction the country should take to course-correct.
Many Democrats want the party’s candidates to moderate their stances. Asked if Democrats should move to the center or move to the left, 47% preferred a centrist zig against 28% who wanted a leftist zag. What that would mean in practice is not entirely clear, and there are certain pointed exceptions to the desire for moderation.
Ryan James Girdusky, host of the podcast It’s a Numbers Game, does a great deal of work with polling. “Democrats seem torn between the ideas that they need to fight Trump at all costs and younger Democrats who believe the party [and] the country need to turn to socialism”, he told Statement, commenting on the Times/Siena poll results.
Girdusky said that Newsom’s party at the national level suffers from “PTSD over two losses to Trump” and fumes over “barely any progress at building a large national coalition since Obama won in 2008”. Current party rallying cries are Medicare for all, hatred of AI and a desire to see the US “split from our longstanding alliance with Israel”, he said.
As with every midterm election, all US House seats and one-third of US Senate seats are up for grabs in November. Republicans hold both houses of Congress narrowly and hope to maintain that grasp. Democrats want to pry their hands free of power and set the stage to take back the White House in the 2028 election.
The pairing of a general Democratic loathing of Trump with a thin policy agenda has made for some seemingly schizophrenic Democratic primary results leading up to the midterms. Self-styled “moderates,” Girdusky pointed out, “have won a lot of races under the premise that we need to start winning again, but progressives are claiming scalps and a big part of it is over Israel”.
That is the mental field of play among the supporters Newsom must work with as he seeks to put together a winning coalition that can capture Congress and the Oval Office.