HERE'S WHY I'M A 2028 ELECTION DOOMER

If we have free elections in November, I expect Democrats to do well. I think they'll retake the House fairly easily and might retake the Senate.

But I'm pessimistic about 2028. President Trump and his party might or might not succeed in rigging the 2028 election, but even if that contest is fair, I question whether Democrats (and the independents whose votes they'll need to win) will be able to unite around a candidate.

It's possible that the party's 2028 nominee will be a progressive -- maybe Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Under those circumstances, I expect plutocrats who sometimes fund Democrats -- Bill Ackman, Mike Bloomberg -- to spend millions trying to elect the Republican candidate (almost certainly J.D. Vance, who has a massive lead in early polling, with Marco Rubio as his running mate). I also think America won't elect a woman, especially a young, slight woman. Many normies appear to believe that the president needs to be physically intimidating. (How can she stand up to China?)

But it's more likely that someone a bit more mainstream will be the nominee. Gavin Newsom seems to be making his presence felt more than any other contender -- and that's leading to a lefty backlash:

Progressive Twitch streamer Hasan Piker ... said he would be unlikely to back Newsom in a hypothetical matchup against Vice President JD Vance in the 2028 race during an interview on the I’ve Had It podcast with Jennifer Welch....

“At that point it doesn’t even matter,” he said. “My policy on this is the same as my refusal to endorse Kamala Harris. The reason why I did not endorse Kamala Harris is she did things that were not only unproductive but also unconscionable. I still stand on that. I still talk about it all the time because people constantly bring it up.”

That makes sense to quite a few online influencers.

On this subject, I'm with Will Stancil, who responds to another influencer here:

The reason people are concerned about lefties saying “I won’t vote for a moderate Dem” isn’t because they want Newsom. It’s because lefties keep not voting for moderate Dems! I think all the scolding about it being years til the primary would hit a little harder if WE DIDN’T JUST GO THROUGH THIS

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— Will Stancil (@whstancil.bsky.social) February 16, 2026 at 1:24 AM

I don't intend to vote for Newsom in the primaries. I understand why people don't like his stance on trans rights and other issues. I'm appalled that he cozies up to the likes of Steve Bannon, Ben Shapiro, and Charlie Kirk.

But he's not a fascist. J.D. Vance is a fascist. Marco Rubio, as he just made clear in his "Vance Lite" speech to the Munich Security Conference, is a fascist. (Today Rubio traveled to Hungary to meet with Viktor Orban and told him, "Your success is our success.") All the other candidates who show up in the first tier in 2028 polling for the Republicans -- Donald Trump Jr. (who won't run), Ron DeSantis, Robert Kennedy Jr., Tucker Carlson -- are authoritarians. They are candidates who will make common cause with Vladimir Putin, Peter Thiel, Curtis Yarvin, and the Heritage Foundation. It will not be possible to nudge them to the left if elected, any more than it's possible to nudge Trump to the left. They don't like democracy. They don't believe in compromise or power-sharing with their political opponents.

And on the issue that Newsom critics always raise first: Yes, I could imagine Newsom signing legislation that banned trans youth from competing in school sports nationwide, just as Bill Clinton signed the Defense of Marriage Act. But Gavin Newsom won't support a complete ban on transitioning. I think a Republican 48th president might do that. I think we could live to see the criminalization of trans people under continued Republican rule. We won't see that even with a bad Democratic president.

And on every other issue, Vance or another Republican president woiuld be immeasurably worse than any Democrat. What's maddening to me is that the Republicans in my lifetime who were elected president when the left abandoned the Democratic Party are some of the worst and cruelest presidents of all time: Richard Nixon in 1968, George W. Bush in 2000, Donald Trump in 2016 and 2024.

That list makes me despair, because the left used to reject Democrats only when they'd been in power for a couple of terms. Nixon and Dubya were elected after eight years of Democratic rule. So was Trump in 2016.

But our national memory of Trump's awfulness faded after a mere four years in 2024. And now we have progressives who want to argue that there isn't a dime's worth of difference between Democrats and Republicans while a Republican is subjecting us to the worst and most authoritarian presidency of all time. It's not even amnesia anymore.

I get it. Fighting the powerful is hard. The left scores very few victories against right-wing extremism or the plutocracy. So, perhaps on an unconscious level, leftists think: We can't hurt the right-wing power structure, but we can beat a Democrat. That's an attainable goal. That's a power progressives actually have: the power to hurt the Democratic Party. So they wield it in order to feel they can make something happen.

I know a lot of you don't think Vance can win the general election, or even win the nomination. On the latter, here's my reply:

You all keep telling me that Vance is too boring to win the 2028 nomination, but I'm going to keep telling you that the GOP base can see what a hate-filled asshole he is every day. The base *loves* that. He's not leading in the primary polls just because of name recognition.

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— Steve M. (@stevemnomoremister.bsky.social) January 8, 2026 at 2:15 PM

And in the general, I'm sticking with what I said earlier this month:

... mainstream outlets may very well portray J.D. Vance ... as a thoughtful, soft-spoken Republican who wants to move the GOP away from its worst instincts....

We'll get insipid, soft-focus profiles of Vance, and he'll be portrayed as a turn of the page after Trump -- more so than loudmouths like Gavin Newsom and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, or whoever emerges as the Democratic nominee.

And I know that the online left is a small sliver of the overall electorate -- but I also know that swing states are often won by small margins.

Do we need better Democrats? Sure. Should we reject the Democrats if they let us down in many ways? Not when the alternative is a 48th president who's the U.S. equivalent of Orban or Farage. And that really will be our choice.