Moral Clarity And The 2028 Presidential Primary

All else equal, we should assume that ambitious Democrats would rather rise to the presidency in a fairer system, one that isn’t rigged by Republicans to make Democratic Party governing impossible.

But what these Democrats feel in their hearts and what they campaign on in pursuit of the nomination and presidency won’t necessarily be the same thing. Will these Democrats campaign on reform and accountability? Or will they bend to various pressures to play down these elemental issues in favor traditional policy?

It’s a timely question. Moral clarity has fallen out of vogue in U.S. politics. Republican politics is now driven by vice signaling; and Democrats are trying to reduce their own politics to message discipline around the cost of living. Surfing public opinion, steering around contentious issues, have become signs of savvy; standing on principle has become a mark of naiveté.

Under these circumstances, earnest, pro-democracy candidates will have to endure condescension, mockery, and second-guessing from the chattering class. If they can’t endure it, they will either conform, or lose. And that is how the essential work of tyrant-proofing the country falls by the wayside once again.

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The good news is, things seem to be swinging back toward virtue, at least within the liberal grassroots. If typical Democratic primary voters in 2020 were driven by political caution—principally concerned with nominating whoever seemed best equipped to beat Donald Trump—primary voters in 2026 seem much more exacting. They want new leaders, ideally younger, who have been on the right side of the biggest moral issues of our time.

They seem to be saying that the 2020 consensus, reinforced by major party actors, was a mistake, if not an outright con job. Today, they want nominees who’ve demonstrated vision, rather than restraint. Who can win arguments against Republicans, rather than against other Democrats over hazy questions of electability. Leadership endorsements are actively harmful to Democratic candidates. A fighting spirit is the best predictor of success.

Things were like this in recent memory. Democratic Party voters nominated the “safe” candidate in 2004. John Kerry lost narrowly in an admittedly difficult year for Democrats. But his defeat still stung. Democrats concluded it was a mistake to nominate someone who’d waffled on the Iraq war, rather than someone who’d opposed it on principle.

And so, in 2008, they rejected the establishment favorite, in favor of Barack Obama, a black freshman senator with the middle name Hussein, largely on the basis of a simple heuristic. Yes, he was charismatic. And, yes, he served as a useful foil to George W. Bush in several ways: cerebral, where Bush was impulsive; empirical, where Bush was postmodern; articulate where Bush was gaffe-prone; and on and on. But more importantly, as an Illinois state senator, he’d staked out an early position against the war in Iraq. He got the big question right, when both Bush and Hillary Clinton and John McCain had gotten it wrong.

It worked out well for him.

And so, whenever I’ve been asked to game out the 2028 primary, I’ve looked to who in the party has done best job seeing around corners.

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The Iraq war made identifying Obama’s strengths as a potential candidate relatively easy.

He was right about the central moral question of his time, and every other question paled in comparison. On his way to becoming Obama’s top political adviser, David Axelrod famously wrote a memo to then Senator Obama emphasizing the importance of hitting the sweet spot: Having tired of Bush, voters would gravitate toward his antithesis, and that would be a huge boon to candidates who were right about Iraq in the first instance.