Dem
47
GOP
53
Speaking of 2028, there is a new, and pretty wild, poll from Republican house AtlasIntel. It reports that 45.4% of Republican voters have Secretary of State Marco Rubio as their preferred choice to be the Party's 2028 nominee, as compared to just 29.6% for VP J.D. Vance.
The reason that is pretty wild is that, in all the other polling to date, Vance has been the clear frontrunner for the nomination. The aggregator 270toWin says, on average, that Vance is the preferred choice of 39.6% of Republicans, as compared to 14.8% for Rubio. Race to the WH has it at 41.6% and 14%. Real Clear Politics (RCP) says it's 44.8% and 14.4%. In all three cases, Vance's average is 24.8 points (or more) higher than Rubios's. Indeed, RCP doesn't even think Rubio is in second-place. To them, the current silver medalist, the preference of 15.3% of Republicans is... Donald Trump Jr.
Of course, the aggregators are all using a lot of old polls, some of which date back to fall of 2025. So the question is: Could Rubio really have flipped the script so aggressively, in just a few weeks? We'll want to see more polls, of course, but our gut feel is... yeah, maybe. He's clearly Trump's favorite right now, and is drawing the plum assignments, like meeting with the Pope. Despite being Secretary of State at a time when diplomacy with Iran has failed six ways to Sunday, he seems to not be taking much damage. And since Rubio is not actually MAGA, we can imagine normie Republicans flocking to his banner in hopes of getting a candidate that's at least somewhat sane.
We think that Vance, by contrast, is just an awful candidate. Putting aside his views on the issues, he's just... weird. He looks strange, he talks strange, he walks strange. He is also about the phoniest politician we've ever seen (sorry, Lindsey Graham). Yes, many politicians are chameleon-like, but with Vance it's painfully obvious that he is just saying whatever he thinks he needs to say, not what he actually believes. At least Rubio has some bedrock principles, even if some of them (ahem, the government of Cuba is evil) are rather old-fashioned. And on top of all of this, pretty much everyone knows Vance is a tool of his patron Peter Thiel.
We're not clear whether Donald Trump Sr. was, or is, aware of this particular poll. Whatever the case may be, he offered up a "solution" to the problem of "some Republicans like Rubio, others like Vance." That solution, of course, was that they should be running mates in 2028. Trump described this as a Republican "dream team." We suppose that is technically correct, in that a nightmare is a kind of dream.
Trump did not quite say who would be the presidential candidate, and who would be the vice-presidential candidate, though he seemed to vaguely imply that Vance would lead the ticket. There is no way Rubio would go for that, though. Secretary of State to VP is very clearly a demotion. At the same time, there's no way Vance would agree to sign up for another hitch as VP. Sure, John C. Calhoun did it, but that was nearly 200 years ago. And even then, he eventually got sick of it and quit.
There is no question Rubio will run, and with an eye toward the big chair. He pinch-hit for White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, who is on maternity leave, last week and he wowed the crowd (admittedly, "better than Leavitt" is a low bar to clear). He also showed a video, later posted to his eX-Twitter account, that is very clearly a proto-campaign ad in which the Secretary ties himself to both Trump and St. Ronnie of Reagan.
And therein lies the problem. Trump is a wildly unpopular president, and Rubio and Vance are both joined at the hip with him. Kamala Harris struggled to distance herself from the unpopular Joe Biden, and that was with a president who surely understood that sometimes politics trumps friendship. Donald Trump most certainly does NOT understand that, and he is clearly going to muck around in Republican presidential politics until the day that he's pushing up daisies. If the 2028 GOP candidate tries to put some distance between themselves and Trump, then Trump will pounce. Meanwhile, neither Rubio nor Vance has a fraction of Trump's "charisma," so they have little hope of keeping the MAGA base fired up. All of this is also true of the other three candidates who are being polled as possible 2028 nominees, namely Trump Jr., Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) and Vivek Ramaswamy. Nevertheless, there are other possibly 2028 candidates in the wings, including Gov. Brian Kemp (R-GA) and former governors Glenn Youngkin (VA) and Chris Sununu (NH). Don't forget a week is a long time in politics and 2 years is forever.
What it amounts to is that we don't believe Rubio-Vance 2028, or Vance-Rubio 2028, is remotely possible. We doubt that Trump thinks that way, either—he just likes to throw crazy stuff out there and then sit back and watch the reaction. We also don't really believe that either one of them will be the nominee, even with another running mate. And if they are, well, we just don't see how they can win, unless maybe the Democrats nominate a Black socialist trans woman from California. (Z)