That will be a serious slog over the next three-plus years, with the Democratic brand in poor shape.  A CNN poll released on March 16 found the Democratic Party’s favorability rating stood at just 29% — a record low in CNN’s polling dating back to 1992 and a drop of 20 points since January 2021. Meanwhile, the Republican Party’s rating stands at 36%.

The decline comes as Democrats’ ideological wings fight over the best tactics to counter Trump, which, combined with raw political ambition, makes the emerging Democratic 2028 field a wide-open electoral canvass.

Republicans, too, will choose a new nominee in 2028. The putative GOP field will get a good look-over shortly.

For now, here are some of the notable would-be Democratic candidates eyeing 2028 bids. With the usual caveat that lots can change in politics and the list could, and almost certainly will, shift dramatically the deeper Trump’s second administration goes. The field is highly fluid, and a dozen or more White House aspirants could still join the presidential primary fight, while those mentioned prominently for some time might demur and stay out.

Gov. Andy Beshear (D-KY)

A scion of Kentucky Democratic royalty — whatever that’s worth in a deep red state — Beshear, 47, is building up a national political identity as a can-do problem-solver with an upper-South drawl.

The son of former Gov. Steve Beshear won the Kentucky governorship in 2019 and, in his first term, kept a low profile nationally. Andy Beshear’s only national media appearances usually came in response to pleas for federal aid after tornadoes, floods, and other natural disasters hit Kentucky.

Beshear, after winning reelection in 2023, has assumed a broader national profile. He was a prominent surrogate for 2024 Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris. The then-vice president’s loss has propelled Beshear to at least a mid-level position in 2028 chatter.

Beshear’s positions on issues are standard Democratic, but as governor in strongly Republican Kentucky, he was careful at home to mostly keep mum because GOP supermajorities in the state legislature could override his vetoes almost any time. But he’s now openly critical of Trump administration efforts to slash federal government agencies and programs.

Former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg

The one-time South Bend, Indiana, mayor and 2020 presidential candidate announced on March 13 that he would not run for an open Senate seat in his adopted state of Michigan. Buttigieg’s demurral from the Senate race opens the door to a 2028 bid for the Democratic presidential nod. Buttigieg, if his party’s 2028 standard-bearer, would be the nation’s first gay major-party presidential nominee.

Buttigieg, a member of former President Joe Biden’s Cabinet from 2017-21, in a Substack post explaining his choice not to launch a Senate bid, made clear he’s already working on what amounts to a possible presidential campaign theme. Buttigieg, pointing to his record as transportation secretary, said he lived “within short driving distance of several transportation construction projects that count among the tens of thousands now being built with funds from the infrastructure package that I spent most of the last few years working on.”

Buttigieg, 43, largely acquitted himself well in his 2020 Democratic presidential nomination bid. Whether the multilingual, piano-playing Harvard alumnus and Rhodes Scholar’s sort of technocratic expertise is what Democrats want in 2028 is an open question. Many left-wing activists are pushing for a more performative brand of politics to blunt Trump and his MAGA supporters.

However, Buttigieg is showing signs of a willingness to throw expletive-laced political heat. Buttigieg, when asked on March 24 about U.S. officials sharing war plans with a journalist in a group chat, “From an operational security perspective, this is the highest level of f***-up imaginable. These people cannot keep America safe.”

Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ)

Booker, 55, was a force in national politics even before winning an October 2013 special election to the Senate. For seven years before that, he attracted bountiful media coverage as mayor of Newark, leading New Jersey’s largest municipality in urban challenges such as rising crime and drug sales.

Booker ran for president in the 2020 presidential cycle, but he quickly flamed out, quitting in early 2020, even before early voting primaries and caucuses. He failed to gain traction despite hopeful, forward-looking messages about, in his view, the positive role the government can play in people’s lives.

It’s unclear whether a 2028 presidential bid would play out differently. Of course, politics is unpredictable, and his message could, in theory, have more resonance with Democratic primary voters this time around.

Former North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper

To the degree there are presidential campaign “lanes” anymore, Cooper would seem to cover similar ground as Beshear in Kentucky — that is a sober, Southern centrist profile whose public policy positions largely fall in line with mainstream, relatively centrist Democrats.

Cooper, 67, first has to decide whether to pursue a 2026 challenge against Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC), a possible clash-of-the-titans matchup in North Carolina politics. Cooper, like other prospective 2028 presidential candidates, couldn’t plausibly win a new statewide office and then turn around to launch a national campaign.

Cooper isn’t in a hurry to decide on his political future. The longtime state attorney general-turned-governor began an eight-week fellowship at Harvard University’s public health school in late March.

Former US Ambassador to Japan Rahm Emanuel

When obituaries are written decades from now for the vigorous Emanuel, any one of his previous jobs could be in an opening sentence. He was a top adviser to former President Bill Clinton for six years, then a House member from Illinois, rising to join the Democratic leadership. Emanuel then was former President Barack Obama’s first chief of staff, followed by eight years as mayor of Chicago. He was most recently the U.S. ambassador to Japan, with lucrative stints in between as a private equity deal broker.

Now, Emanuel is eyeing a 2028 presidential run. Since returning from Tokyo just before Trump took office, Emanuel, 65, has been rebuilding his public profile. He’s a Washington Post columnist and CNN contributor.

Emanuel would bring to the 2028 field a keen understanding of how to win votes beyond the fervent Democratic left-wing base. That’s what he did leading the House Democrats’ campaign arm in 2006, when the party won a majority in the chamber for the first time in 12 years. A key part of that strategy was recruiting centrist, even conservative-leaning Democratic candidates in districts where social justice warriors wouldn’t play well.

Emanuel says Democrats need to go centrist if they have any hope of winning national elections again.

“The public has seen us as more focused around a set of cultural interests and issues — climate, ‘woke,’ DEI, abortion — than the American people,” Emanuel recently told Axios. “All those I care about. But they consumed both our intellectual and thematic energy. The American people said, ‘You care more about that than everything else.’”

Sen. Ruben Gallego (D-AZ)

Gallego just arrived in the Senate after winning a bruising 2024 open-seat race. He’s showing serious political chops that were clear during his 10-year House career, now on a larger political stage.

Gallego, 45, joined Congress a decade ago as a vocal progressive with an impressive background. He’s a first-generation American who went to Harvard, with Marine Corps service in Iraq.

During Trump’s first term, Gallego often offered scorching condemnation of his actions and administration priorities. As one of 100 senators, though, Gallego is taking a more nuanced approach. In January, he threw his support behind the Laken Riley Act. That lent crucial legislative momentum to the GOP-authored immigration bill that would force the incarceration of many undocumented immigrants accused of crimes.

Gallego argues Democrats need to improve their understanding of what motivates Latino voters in his state, and more broadly across the country, on border security and immigration issues. At a time when Democrats, at least those who want to win again, are doing some major soul-searching on what went wrong in 2024, Gallego argues his approach could help them find their way out of the political wilderness.

Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA)

Khanna has long been one of the more enigmatic members of Congress. He represents California’s 17th Congressional District in the northwestern San Jose area, which includes a slice of Silicon Valley and where several top tech companies are based. The district’s median income is $147,671, second out of 435 that make up the House, per the Census Bureau. Yet Khanna, a graduate of the University of Chicago and Yale Law School and a wealthy tech industry veteran himself, is a dyed-in-the-wool progressive who backed the 2020 Democratic presidential primary bid of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT).

Khanna is reaching out to Democratic factions across the relative political spectrum. He’s a vocal critic of Trump but not his voters. Khanna, of late, is trying to show how, in his view, the Trump administration’s federal budget cuts would hurt working people.

Khanna, 48, recently held town halls in the California districts of three House Republican colleagues. The son of Indian immigration painted a grim portrait of a Department of Government Efficiency wrecking ball through the federal government. Khanna further warned against the Trump administration’s efforts to cut Medicaid and Social Security.

The rhetoric could foment a popular backlash that gives Democrats some political momentum heading into the 2026 midterm elections and then the 2028 presidential election. Still, Khanna faces daunting odds in a national campaign because leaping from the House directly to the presidency hasn’t happened since the 1880 election.

Former Vice President Kamala Harris

Democrats generally aren’t very kind to their former, losing presidential nominees. Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis, 1980s-era landslide losers, could barely show their faces at Democratic National Conventions for years.

Harris, 60, may fall into a different category. Due to her truncated 100-day campaign after then-President Joe Biden dropped out, Harris can deflect at least some of the blame for losing all seven swing states, arguing she inherited Biden’s creaky campaign apparatus.

That’s the most charitable view of Harris’s losing bid against Trump. Many others contend she just wasn’t a very good candidate.

Critics largely point to her hypercaution in public appearances. While Harris famously didn’t appear on Joe Rogan’s huge-audience podcast, as Trump did, she also skipped many other, more conventional media interview invitations. Harris seemed so concerned about making unforced errors in journalist interactions that many voters simply didn’t know what she stood for.

Harris has one political decision looming: whether to run for the California governorship. She would likely win. The field now is dominated by her fellow Democrats, mostly in statewide and legislative offices. Still, victory is no sure thing. And anyway, Harris would have to decide if she could stomach being one of 50 governors, albeit in the nation’s most populous state, after previously spending four years a heartbeat away from the presidency.

Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT)

With Democrats split about picking their battles against the second Trump administration or waging all-out political warfare, Murphy falls squarely in the latter campaign. Within weeks of Trump’s inauguration, Murphy described the return president’s tenure so far as a “red alert” for democracy and a “constitutional crisis.”

Murphy, 51, a former state legislator and six-year House member before winning his Senate seat in 2012, rose to national prominence as a gun safety advocate after the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown, Connecticut.

Many Democrats are looking for the kind of aggressive approach Murphy has to offer. But he could also upset a portion of the Democratic base with his long-running criticism of Israel. While the progressive Left has made the Jewish state and the Middle East’s only democracy an international bogeyman, more centrist Democrats are still big supporters.

Murphy, in November 2024, joined 18 other Senate Democrats in voting to block the further sale of U.S. weapons to Israel, needed to counter Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and other enemies of the country after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks, which claimed about 1,200 Israeli lives. Dozens of Israeli hostages are still being held captive by Hamas terrorists in the Gaza Strip. Yet Murphy instead directed his anger at Israel, citing what he called the mounting number of civilian casualties and questions over the remaining objectives of Israel’s leaders.

Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA)

Ahead of Newsom’s forced departure from his Sacramento perch in January 2027 due to state term limits, he’s setting himself up for a presidential bid in an unusual way.

Newsom launched a podcast in March, and his early guests included a MAGA A-List of sorts. He chatted, mostly amiably, with Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk, one-time Trump adviser and populist-nationalist aviator Steve Bannon, and conservative radio show host Michael Savage. The move would seem a strange way to win over liberal voters needed to capture the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination. But political victory favors the bold, and outreach to Trump voters is a sign the governor knows his party needs to broaden its appeal.

In the Kirk podcast interview, Newsom broke with many in his party on the issue of transgender women in sports. Newsom, 57, also admitted that Democrats had overly focused on how people use pronouns.

This political dexterity is already drawing criticism from would-be 2028 Democratic rivals. Beshear criticized Newsom for platforming Bannon, a 2020 election denier.

“Newsom bringing on different voices is great,” Beshear said on March 13 while visiting a House Democratic planning retreat in northern Virginia. “But Steve Bannon espouses hatred and anger, and even at some points violence, and I don’t think we should give him oxygen on any platform ever, anywhere.”

Gov. JB Pritzker (D-IL)

The billionaire chief executive is setting himself up as a key Trump administration foil. On Jan. 20, only hours after Trump’s inauguration, Pritzker, 60, released a statement sharply criticizing the president’s initial executive orders and predicting the Trump administration would ignore court orders.

Pritzker soon announced a ban on state jobs for Illinois residents who participated in the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection and had been pardoned by Trump. Pritzker also has likened what he calls the Trump administration’s attacks on the rule of law to the Nazis, a notable stance in its own right but particularly because Pritzker is Jewish.

Gov. Josh Shapiro (D-PA)

After a steady rise through state politics, Shapiro was elected governor of Pennsylvania in 2022 in a romping 15-point win over a prominent 2020 election denier. Within two years, Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee-in-waiting, strongly considered Shapiro as her running mate, though the former vice president didn’t choose him as an understudy.

Shapiro had, by that point, built up a national political reputation, with chatter growing about whether he could one day become the first Jewish president. Shapiro, 51, in his early days as governor, issued an executive order opening state government jobs to applicants who lack bachelor’s degrees. To fill the post of secretary of state, an office appointed in Pennsylvania, Shapiro tapped Al Schmidt, a Philadelphia Republican who had been targeted by Trump allies for defending the city’s voting process following the 2020 election.

Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN)

The 2024 Democratic vice presidential nominee is refashioning his national profile as an “I told you so” figure.

Walz, like many Democrats in elective office, says he warned the country about the perils of a second Trump presidency. But Walz is taking it a step further, in a way he’s uniquely positioned to do. Walz says he was muzzled by Harris’s presidential campaign once he joined the Democratic ticket, effectively blunting the unabashed Trump-blasting rhetoric that made him a left-wing favorite to begin with.

“We, as a party, are more cautious” in engaging the media, both mainstream and nontraditional, Walz, a one-time high school football coach, said in a recent interview. And during the 2024 campaign, he said, “In football parlance, we were in a prevent defense to not lose when we never had anything to lose. Because I don’t think we were ever ahead.”

Walz, 60, must first decide whether to seek a third term as Minnesota’s governor. Winning reelection is no sure thing in a relatively closely divided state. He might be better off trying to go national.

Still, the track record in recent decades of losing vice presidential nominees isn’t strong. Former Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina had the best bid, finishing second in the 2008 Democratic Iowa caucuses before a sex scandal soon detonated his political career.

DEMOCRATIC PARTY APPROVAL RATING HITS RECORD LOW: POLL

Cautionary tales include the late Sen. Bob Dole of Kansas, President Gerald Ford’s 1976 running mate. After the Ford-Dole ticket lost that close race, the Kansan sought the 1980 Republican nomination, but he was barely an asterisk in early-voting states against future President Ronald Reagan and soon dropped out. Dole did get a measure of political redemption by winning the 1996 Republican presidential nomination, his third try for the prize, only to lose handily against Clinton in November.

On the Democratic side, the late Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut sought to be his party’s 2004 standard-bearer. Lieberman was the 2000 Democratic vice presidential nominee but couldn’t get off the ground when he ran in his own right, finishing a desultory fifth in the New Hampshire primary. He soon quit the race and, a couple of years later, was out of Democratic politics altogether, winning his final six-year Senate term from Connecticut as an independent over his continued Iraq War support.