Dem
47
GOP
53
Statistician Nate Silver and two of his former colleagues at 538, Galen Druke and Clare Malone, have ranked 18 Democrats in order of the probability of their getting the Democratic presidential nomination in 2028. We present his rankings as evidence that Silver is losing his touch and substituting attention and current popularity for data and insight into the electorate.
Our guess is that Democrats are so desperate to win and defeat Trumpism that the majority of them will put aside ideology and all other factors and pick a candidate they think can beat J.D. Vance, SoS Marco Rubio, Gov. Brian Kemp (R-GA), or whoever the Republicans pick. The Democrat is likely to be a straight, white, centrist, Christian man who has proven his ability to win elections in a swing state or red state. We allow that the right Jewish candidate could make it work, and, as several readers wrote in to point out, that EpsteinYZ might open a lane for a woman candidate. But we think that if you're going to bet, bet on a straight, white, centrist, Christian man.
What is surprising is how few of Silver's candidates pass that test and how low on the list they are. Here is his list and some of our notes about each one. We are starting from the premise that there is still a lot of prejudice in America and that matters. We tell it like it is here, even if it makes some people uncomfortable:
| Rank | Candidate | Notes |
| 1 | Gavin Newsom | Perfect on paper but a political chameleon desperately trying to erase years of being very woke |
| 2 | Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez | Too young, too female, too brown, not enough gravitas, and will probably run for the Senate |
| 3 | Pete Buttigieg | If he were straight, he would be JFK II, but he is married to a man. |
| 4 | Gretchen Whitmer | Might be a good vice president since she is from a key swing state |
| 5 | Ruben Gallego | Finally! A Latino Marine Corps combat veteran from a swing state |
| 6 | Josh Shapiro | Jewish, but would easily win the biggest swing state and probably Wisconsin and Michigan, too |
| 7 | Wes Moore | Black. Not all Black people are Barack Obama, a truly brilliant politician. |
| 8 | Kamala Harris | She already lost once and hasn't gotten more popular since then. |
| 9 | Cory Booker | See Moore. |
| 10 | Raphael Warnock | See Booker. |
| 11 | Jon Ossoff | He's Jewish, but if he wins Georgia in a landslide in November, he's a maybe. |
| 12 | Mark Kelly | Perfect on paper but he might not run because he needs to care for his wife, Gabby Giffords. |
| 13 | Jon Stewart | Has Nate started smoking something and inhaling while at work? |
| 14 | J.B. Pritzker | An old heavyset Jewish strongly pro-Israel billionaire is not what the kids are looking for. |
| 15 | Andy Beshear | Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton were southern governors; Beshear should be in the top three. |
| 16 | Ro Khanna | A very, very progressive brown guy from Silicon Valley will not play in Peoria. |
| 17 | Amy Klobuchar | She tried in 2020 and got nowhere. |
| 18 | Chris Murphy | On paper, good, but he is kind of low-key and probably won't run. |
What surprises us is that six of the candidates are people of color and three are women. Yes, Barack Obama won, but he was a brilliant once-in-a-generation politician. The question Silver, et al., should be asking is: "Can this person win white working-class voters in Pennsylvania and Georgia?" Asking: "Who makes progressive kids swoon?" is probably the wrong question. Only half the people on the list are straight white men and of those, four are Jewish, which could be a problem, depending on what is going on in the Middle East in 2028. However, two of them have something special (Shapiro brings in the biggest swing state and Ossoff brings in the second biggest swing state and a lot of young voters). All in all, we think Silver has been blinded by how much attention some candidates are getting this far out and how fervent their supporters are, not how many of them there are. If being the front runner this far in advance mattered, President Giuliani would have been elected in 2008 in a landslide. (V)