The Democrats’ 2028 Plan Is to Run It Back With the Same Losing Team

By Tammy-Jo Pritchett · August 11, 2026

Opinion

So I’m sitting in the carpool line, scrolling through my phone, and I see this new poll about the 2028 Democratic primary. And ladies, I just have to laugh, because the party that told us for four years that everything was fine, the economy was great, the border was secure, and we were all imagining things is now telling us their best idea for 2028 is… Kamala Harris. Again.

Rasmussen Reports surveyed likely voters and found Harris sitting at 37 percent. Her closest competitor is Gavin Newsom, the man who turned California into a place people are fleeing like it’s on fire, at 14 percent. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is at 9 percent. Pete Buttigieg, who spent his tenure as Transportation Secretary making sure our airports ran like a DMV, is at 10. Nine and ten. Those are the visionaries.

Here’s what really got me, though. Harris was at 34 percent in May. She went UP. She lost a presidential election in 2024 and her numbers got better. In what universe does that happen? I’ll tell you which one. The one where the same consultants and the same donors and the same media voices who swore up and down she was about to win are still running the show. They think if they just keep telling us she’s the frontrunner, we’ll forget what we saw with our own eyes on election night.

Kamala Harris, former Vice President, is a candidate for the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination.

Now, there’s another poll, this one from Lake Research Partners, that tells a completely different story. They did a ranked choice voting simulation with 800 likely Democratic primary voters, and Harris and Newsom are neck and neck, 52 to 48. In that same poll, when you look at first-choice preferences, Harris is at 5.1 percent. Five point one. AOC is actually ahead of her at 10.7 percent. So which is it? Is she the unstoppable frontrunner or is she barely registering? Two polls, two completely different realities, and nobody in the press seems to think that’s worth explaining to us.

I’ll tell you what I think. I think these polls are being used to manufacture a narrative. The Rasmussen number gets the headline. The Lake Research number gets buried in paragraph nine. And the message is clear: sit down, shut up, Kamala’s the nominee, and don’t you dare ask questions.

Harris told Al Sharpton earlier this year she’s “thinking about it.” Thinking about it. Like it’s some kind of favor to the country. Like we should be grateful she’s even considering gracing us with another campaign. I watched that 2024 campaign. I watched the word salads. I watched the interviews where she said nothing for ten minutes straight. And now she’s “thinking about” doing it again, and 37 percent of likely voters in one poll are apparently thinking, “Yes, please, more of that.”

Gavin Newsom, Governor of California, is a candidate for the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination.

And Newsom? The man presides over a state where stores lock up toothpaste behind plexiglass and he thinks he should be president. AOC couldn’t even explain how she’d pay for the Green New Deal when she first rolled it out and she’s supposed to run the country. These are the options. This is the bench.

Sixty-three percent of Democratic primary voters want ranked choice voting in 2028, by the way. Seventeen percent oppose it. You know what that tells me? Even their own voters know this field is a mess and they’re trying to rig up a system where they can cobble together a winner from the scraps. That’s not confidence. That’s panic.

The Republican party has its problems too, don’t get me wrong. But at least our problems involve too many fighters, not too few. The Democrats are staring at a field where their frontrunner already lost once, her closest challenger runs a state people are escaping in U-Hauls, and the rest of the bench is a transportation secretary who couldn’t keep the trains running and a bartender-turned-congresswoman who thinks economics is a feeling.

Lake Research Partners conducted a ranked choice voting simulation with 800 likely Democratic primary voters.

So yes, I have questions. I have a lot of questions. But the biggest one is this: if this is the best they’ve got, why are they already polling it? What are they so afraid of?

Answer: us. They’re afraid of us. And they should be.

Sources