It’s early days, but if a new poll is any indication, Donald Trump’s legacy will live on long past his term limits.
Granted, the Biden administration isn’t even officially over yet — even if Joe Biden himself has taken the political phrase “wilderness years” a bit too literally and wandered off there a few months early — but we already have polling on what the 2028 race will look like.
Surprise, surprise: Voters of both parties seem to want the closest thing to a rematch that they could get.
According to the Echelon Insights survey, released Monday, Vice President Kamala Harris and vice president-elect and Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance are far-and-away the two top candidates for the 2028 presidential race, if the primaries were held today.
The poll was taken between Nov. 14 and 18 among 1,010 voters in the “likely electorate” for 2028.
The margin of error was plus or minus 3.5 percentage points.
Among Republicans, Trump’s veep pick was easily the runaway favorite, garnering 37 percent of the Republicans polled.
Vivek Ramaswamy, a former Trump primary challenger and co-head of the DOGE commission, was tied for second with 9 percent, along with former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis was at 8 percent, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz was at 5 percent, and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, Trump’s secretary of State nominee, was also at 5 percent. Everyone else came in below the 5 percent barrier, with 18 percent unsure.
Would you vote for J.D. Vance for president?
Yes: 100% (2 Votes)
No: 0% (0 Votes)
Meanwhile, Harris topped the Democrat side with 41 percent. California Gov. Gavin Newsom was second with 8 percent, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro third with 7 percent, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg next with 6 percent, tied with Harris running mate and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz.
Everyone else was also below 5 percent — although it’s worth noting the next runner up was New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez at 4 percent.
Now, again, these numbers are colored by Trump’s recent victory and the fact that Democrats probably want another shot with Harris getting a full race, but there are two lessons here.
First, the ascension of Vance: Originally tagged as “weird” and a drag on the ticket, the Ohio senator was the candidate who saw the biggest bump to his public image during the 2024 cycle; at turns affable, intelligent, devastating and — contra that slur the Democrats tried to make work — decidedly normal.
He became, in short, both the politician you’d most want to have a beer with and the politician who could probably best trace the path of beer from the ancient Sumerians to the disruptions in beer consumption patterns caused by Dylan Mulvaney in 2023.
Most importantly, he became the de facto face of “Trumpism without Trump” that the GOP has been looking for. The running mate spot did a lot for that, but for him to be crushing it by so much over other contenders — Ramaswamy, DeSantis, Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders (2 percent), Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin (1 percent) and others — it says something about how well he nailed the role and Trump nailed the pick.
Also, note the lack of RINOs aside from Haley, who couldn’t even surpass her bête noire Ramaswamy. If that doesn’t say it all about how the party has changed, nothing will.
As for the Democrat side, it’s early days, but this continues to look like Charles Dickens’ “An Election Day Carol” and they keep on getting visited by the Ghost of Don’t You Guys Ever Learn.
First off, we’re apparently continuing the fiction — which first just seemed like a copium overdose on election night — that Harris ran a flawless campaign and it was the voters or Biden’s refusal to exit earlier or Saturn entering the 12th house or whatever that contributed to her loss, not the fact that she’s an empty vessel filled with progressive ideas and a total inability to either effectively advocate for them or hide them behind moderate rhetoric, and that voters don’t like that.
However, you’d think that the Democrats would at least notice that, if they believed Harris has been done dirty, that what they were doing wasn’t working. Nope!
Look at that list: With the exception of Shapiro, who one suspects is only on there because of veep buyer’s remorse, it’s a list of unelectable progressives and/or Biden-Harris apparatchiks. AOC made sixth, for the love of Pete Buttigieg!
You have to get down to 9th place to find a guy who might provide someone who could be dressed up as a “moderate” (Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, 2 percent), and virtually no new faces that didn’t appear in the administration or who weren’t in the Kamala veepstakes.
In other words: The GOP under Trump isn’t just different, it’s more dynamic and more resilient. Democrats, meanwhile, are convinced that getting trounced wasn’t a referendum on their policies or their people, the voters just made a mistake which absolutely won’t happen again. TDS is real, in other words.
Sure, it’s one poll and it’s early days, but it’s yet another sign the Trump shift in American politics is a real one, for both parties.
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