Five Questions Not to Ask About 2026 and 2028
Many of the election related questions we are accustomed to asking are no longer the right ones.
In order to understand, and best respond to, the current political moment, it is essential to accept that the regime change is pretty far along. This is not a case of a president of the other party in the first year of his term crafting policy and appointing people we do not like. Rather, we have a cult-fascist hybrid regime destroying American democracy at an extremely fast pace. If we do not begin to think about this regime and what can be done about it differently, it will consolidate even faster.
One of the areas where this is most relevant is elections. We are so accustomed to the cycles, rhythms and regularity of elections that too many in the media and punditry default to thinking about 2026 and 2028 as if they are ordinary elections in a typical American political context. To help get past this less helpful framework, I have outlined five questions, but there are more, we should not be asking about the next elections. In part two of this series, I will identify five questions we must begin asking as these elections approach.
1) Who will be the Democratic nominee in 2028? Discussing who the opposition party will, or should, nominate for president is always a fun parlor game. We can all imagine our dream ticket and explain, based on nothing but our opinion, why our preferred candidate has the best chance of winning. This is no longer helpful because chatter about 2028 reinforces the false notion that this is just a normal presidency that can be defeated at the ballot box and that we just have to be patient. Therefore, it minimizes the gravity of the situation while offering a comfortable framework for discussing politics.
It doesn’t much matter who the Democrats nominate in 2028 and it is impossible to know who would be the best candidate. More importantly, this chatter takes it as a given that we will have free, fair and democratic elections in 2028 and that is a grave mistake.
2) Who will the Republicans run after Trump in 2028? Anybody still asking this question is dramatically and fatally misreading the political room and the Republican Party. Trump will run in 2028, and nobody in the Republican Party or at the Supreme Court is going to stop him. Trump will run for several reasons. His need to be the center of political power and in the media every minute of every day means Trump cannot turn the party over to anybody else.
Moreover, although it may befuddle some Democrats, Trump is the Republican’s best candidate. Trump has charisma and appeal that none of the next tier of potential GOP leaders have. If Trump does not run, there will be an ugly primary that will inevitably end up with a weaker candidate than even an increasingly old, addled and doddering Donald Trump. Trump probably does not understand that strategically, but he understands it viscerally.
The only thing that would stop Trump from running is if he dies between now and November 2028. We cannot know if that will happen, but if it does, the fight to succeed Trump will be an important, bizarre and frightening spectacle.
3) What are some issues where we can find agreement or compromise as we head into 2028? This would be a good question to ask 20, 30, maybe even 15 years ago, but anybody asking this now is disconnected from reality. Trying to find common ground with a fascist movement is foolish because meeting a fascist movement halfway makes a party, or a leader, half a fascist.
It is also difficult to imagine what a compromise would even look like. Should Democrats support shaking down universties and law firms for half as much money as Trump has, reducing the number of masked ICE thugs by half, allowing Trump and his cronies to grift half as much money? You get the point. Politics in the US is about policy, but undergirding that, it is about regime type. Any opposition to Trump should be firmly on the side of democracy and against fascism. There should be no halfway points there.
4) Will his supporters sour with Trump if the economy takes a downturn? The problem with this question is not only that the answer is obviously no, but that it suggests an understanding of politics that has never been true while it simultaneously understates the threat we face. This crisis is not going to fade away simply because the price of eggs goes up.
This question also seeks to deny the popularity of Trump and his programs, but if we do that, we make it more difficult to combat the MAGA movement. It is true that there are some who voted for Trump in 2024 because of the economy and that if they switch back to a Democrat in 2028, that might make the difference in a close election, but that idea is based upon the view that elections will be free and fair and that we will have something that looks like a functioning democracy by 2028. We should not assume either of those things to be true.
5) How can Democrats govern blue states and cities better and prove themselves to the rest of the voters? This question seems to arise out of the notion that if only cities like Los Angeles, San Francisco or New York were better run, voters in Wisconsin, Georgia and Arizona would have voted differently in 2024. The strangeness of that notion speaks for itself, but there is more to it than that.
Many cities, including New York and San Francisco, are governed much better than Fox News and a surprisingly large contingent on the Ezra Klein-Abundance center would suggest. Many big cities governed by Democrats are much safer with much lower crime rates than many non-urban areas or cities governed by Republicans. Similarly, public transportation and other services are much better in big cities. This question is not so much one of political strategy, but an effort to move the Democratic rightward for ideological reasons.