2028 election

All reasonable people agree that this year’s midterms mark an epochal shift for America. The problem is, “all reasonable people” is a lousy pundit. Sometimes what looks like regime change turns out to be a mere tantrum: Newt Gingrich harnessed Republican indignation against Bill Clinton to win a landslide victory in 1994 – but what the country ultimately got was a merger of its two parties. Sometimes a tantrum has elements of revolution: the Tea Party was presented in the media as an incontinent bunch of racist hicks when it rose up in 2010 against Obamacare and the Republicans who enabled it – but what the country ultimately got was Donald Trump. So another shoe is about to drop. This election could be a nothingburger.

Ron DeSantis is the Republican party’s great “what if…?” If Donald Trump had opted not to run for a third time in 2024, DeSantis might very well have been that year’s Republican nominee.And if this were the second year of president DeSantis’s first term, how would Republicans have fared in this month’s midterm elections?  As it was, Governor DeSantis’s Florida was an almost solitary bright spot in the GOP’s otherwise dismal fortunes this cycle. As DeSantis concluded his final term in the role, Florida achieved what Texas could not: it kept the governorship and a US Senate seat in Republican hands. Imagine if president DeSantis had delivered results like that for Republicans nationwide.

Simon Cameron, the Pennsylvania party boss who served as Abraham Lincoln’s first Secretary of War, has long been credited with the rule that an honest politician is one who, when he is bought, stays bought. His War Department handed out contracts to friends so freely that the House of Representatives censured him for it. By then, Lincoln, fed up, had already named him an emissary to Russia. Cameron was a crook, and his friends at least got their contracts. America’s technology giants have helped pay for Donald Trump’s new White House ballroom and have gotten nothing from it. The Democrats, favored to take the House of Representatives in the midterms, have promised subpoenas.

J.D. Vance is clearly trying to thread a needle as he prepares to run for the Republican presidential nomination next year. On the one hand, the Vice President doesn’t want to appear too eager for the job. He insisted last week he might choose not to run because “we’ve got four little kids” at home. On the other hand, he told 2WAY's Mark Halperin Monday, “I think if I run, the President will endorse me.” But he left himself an out: “Because the President’s endorsement is so dispositive, you could absolutely see a scenario where the President says, ‘You know what? We need to let like this race play out and not preemptively prejudge the results.’” Vance himself has to perform a balancing act.

Once upon a time, the export crop of Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket was whale oil. Nowadays it is money, harpooned by visiting campaigns from deep-pocketed donors at anchor in their summer seaside retreats. In the peak season of July and August, the islands’ social rhythms are dictated by money-harvesting events, wrangled by local hosts jostling for the social éclat that comes from securing a high-profile honoree. By late August this year, the territory had already been worked over by a series of hopeful visitors with hands outstretched, such as the rising Texas Senate hopeful James Talarico, Hakeem Jeffries in eager pursuit of the House Speakership that is almost in his grasp, Maryland Governor Wes Moore and others questing the donor dollar.

“We gotta take care of business this November,” said Vice President J.D. Vance, demurely, at the Republican convention last night, “then we’ll worry about what comes next.” He was referring to the chants of “28! 28!” that emanated from the exuberant MAGA crowd – an appeal for him to be the next Republican presidential nominee. The message of the night was clear, though. Following something of a wobble in the early months of 2026, Vance has re-emerged as the clear favorite to succeed Donald Trump. For now, the MAGA inheritance, and all its problems, seems to be his.  Trump has reportedly stopped doing his private “Marco or J.D.?” polls among house guests, friends and Rupert Murdoch.

Kamala Harris is destined to be the Democratic nominee in 2028 because the American left is now conservative. Democratic politics is now based on two suppositions: The existence of a “silent majority” and the reflexive defense of even the most unlovely institutions.  The conservative left glorifies the intelligence agencies and praises generals as the defenders of the republic, while insisting that most Americans despise MAGA and its revolutionary aims. It’s why Joe Biden’s attorney general described the FBI as “patriotic public servants” and the Democrats ran Abigail Spanberger, a former CIA operative, in Virginia.