AOC 能否赢得民主党总统提名？

The “drafts” we’ve periodically conducted for the 2028 Democratic and Republican nominations are popular features with Silver Bulletin readers. No apologies for that.

I’m not going to tell you that 2028 is the most important election of all time, because people say that about every election. But having a truly open nomination in both parties is relatively rare, and they’ll each have the chance — really the obligation — to redefine themselves in the first presidential election since 2012 that doesn’t include Donald Trump. Beyond that, it feels like the country is on the brink of profound political change, whether driven by technological shifts or generational turnover as various Boomer political dynasties burn themselves out.

Early prognostication about the primaries is a great way to get yourself in trouble — I’ve very much made that mistake. But we think these drafts are still a good way to organize your thought process. And polls and other early indicators are more informative than you might assume.

Despite that, I’ll admit I had an ambivalent reaction when, in our weekly planning meeting, Galen proposed a 2028 Democratic primary draft as the main segment of this week’s Still Counting. The midterm election is now less than a month away — indeed, it’s already happening with early voting underway in several states — and the polls are still on the move. Plus, whatever happens on Nov. 3 will profoundly shape perceptions of what it takes to win in 2028. We almost certainly will do another draft soon after the midterms. But there shouldn’t be much harm in also doing one now — if nothing else, it should make for a cleaner before-and-after comparison.

Anyway, the video version of this week’s Still Counting is below:

Or if you prefer the audio, it’s here:

Listener feedback is extremely helpful to “young” podcasts like Still Counting, and we appreciate reviews, comments, likes and subscribes wherever you’re encountering the show.

Galen and I ran our first 2028 Democratic primary draft in April 2025. We both wanted to take AOC #1 but Galen got the first pick and so had the right to select her. For some reason, this made national news.

We certainly don’t get everything right around these parts. We’re hoping to bat 60/40 or something on our predictions. But I think we were pretty smart about anticipating the rise in influence for the left. That was before Zohran Mamdani’s win in New York, or Abdul El-Sayed’s in Michigan. Our thinking was mostly just that Democrats had emerged from 2024 in a bad place, that the party’s voters were ready to “throw the bums out”, and that the left perhaps presented a clearer alternative than the center. Plus, AOC is a talented politician.

I drew the #3 pick in our Still Counting draft yesterday, a choice I was dreading because I thought there was a fairly clear top two: Jon Ossoff and AOC.1 Prediction markets are more equivocal, seeing essentially a three-way tie between Ossoff, Ocasio-Cortez and Gavin Newsom. I wrote this summer about why I think things are trending poorly for Newsom, and he’s declined in the polls, although I certainly wouldn’t count him out. I had him at #3 on my board, but I was happy that Clare took him #1.

AOC has a couple of big barriers to receiving the nomination. One is that it’s not clear that she’ll run for it. She’s only 36, and would probably be a heavy favorite if she runs in 2028 for Chuck Schumer’s Senate seat in New York. At the risk of making a bad prediction, I wonder if Schumer, now age 75 and unpopular even among Democrats, would simply stand down if faced with a challenge from AOC.

Ocasio-Cortez would also have to overcome fear among the party’s primary electorate that a woman can’t win the presidency. This is a touchy subject, and something that deserves its own newsletter. But a lot of Democrats have a reflexive reaction: Barack Obama (M) won twice, Hillary Clinton (W) lost, Joe Biden (M) won, Kamala Harris (W) lost.

If you ask me, this is overly crude pattern-matching, and is sometimes employed as an excuse to wave away poor decisions made by Clinton and Harris that had little to do with their gender. Biden — never exactly an electoral overperformer himself — faced more favorable circumstances in 2020 than Clinton or Harris, running against a president who had fumbled a global pandemic, and would probably have lost in 2024 by a wider margin than Harris did if he’d remained on the ballot. This quick-reflex reaction also ignores that the Democratic nominees in 2000 and 2004 were men, and both Al Gore and John Kerry lost. Overall, there isn’t much evidence that female candidates face an electoral penalty, although that deserves a deeper analysis.

But perception often becomes reality in the primaries. Women in the 2020 Democratic primary, especially Harris and Elizabeth Warren, broadly underperformed expectations in a way that was perhaps not entirely coincidental and may have reflected voter concerns about their “electability”. And that was before Harris lost the general election in 2024.

There’s also a more subtle concern for AOC. The Democratic delegate allocation system is extremely proportionate; there’s a 15 percent threshold for receiving delegates, but not winner-take-all bonuses, like Republicans have in some states. This strongly encourages compromise and blunts the effects of early momentum. Democratic Party nominees have a strong historical tendency to be triangulating choices between the party’s progressive and moderate wings. In 2020, Bernie Sanders sort of won Iowa, then did officially win New Hampshire, then won Nevada bigly. But then Biden got an endorsement from Jim Clyburn, won South Carolina overwhelmingly, and swept most of the important Super Tuesday contests as the pandemic hit American shores and there was a “flight to safety” among Democrats.

But the thing in 2020 was that the alternative to Biden might have been a contested convention. The first few states on the 2020 calendar happened to be good for Bernie in various ways. Biden was probably always going to win South Carolina and many of the more conservative southern states on Super Tuesday. Our nomination-race model that year accounted for this and never got out over its skis for Sanders.

Now the Democratic calendar has been revised in a way that’s friendlier to moderates. AOC isn’t an obviously great fit for the first early-voting state, South Carolina, nor the last one, Virginia. That’s probably a tactical disadvantage.

The four states in the middle offer better opportunities, though. Nevada, for instance, could be a good one for AOC, with a lot of Hispanic voters and unionized workers. But the most interesting state from her standpoint is probably Michigan.

AOC recently said that “If Abdul [El-Sayed] can win in Michigan, anybody can win anywhere.” Whatever the result on Nov. 3, El-Sayed’s performance is almost certain to touch off another round in the “moderation wars” among election nerds and the Democratic commentariat. If, say, AES wins by 2 points in a D +9 environment, that’s probably not the best advertisement for his electability. But any AES victory clear enough to be called on election night2 might be taken as a green flag by the left.

But to play this forward, if in 2028 there’s an extended three-way race between Ocasio-Cortez, a more explicitly moderate/centrist candidate like Josh Shapiro or Andy Beshear, and someone in between like Ossoff, both the nomination rules and the party’s inherent risk-aversion might favor the compromise choice.

Still, left/progressive candidates have obviously made big gains since 2024. Furthermore, AI is almost certain to rise in importance by 2028, and Ocasio-Cortez has a clearer and probably more popular position on AI than almost any other plausible 2028 Democrat.

What’s more, the left lane in the Democratic nomination race is relatively uncrowded due to quirky circumstances. The “Big 3” on the left right now are Sanders, AOC and Mamdani. But Sanders is 85 and presumably won’t run for president again, and Zohran isn’t eligible to do so because he was born in Uganda. After the “Big 3”, the next-most-prominent left/progressive Democrat is probably El-Sayed. In fact, based on the same logic, I took AES with my 4th-round pick in the draft. However, (1) El-Sayed is certainly not guaranteed to win in Michigan and (2) even if he does, it would be unusual for a candidate who was just elected to office, especially one who was electorally vulnerable and who might have lost absent a blue wave, to immediately turn around and run for president.

As I talked about on the pod, my “spidey sense” is that AOC might wait for a future opportunity. That’s not based on any reporting and you shouldn’t weight it heavily. If she doesn’t have presidential ambitions, that’s completely understandable. If she does, waiting might be a mistake. Political tides shift quickly, and will probably cycle even more rapidly if AI disrupts society to even half the extent that Silicon Valley expects it to. But I have no idea what she’s thinking.

Still, I take the increasing influence of the left seriously. I don’t think they’re right about electability, but I think they’ve been winning the argument about it all the same by tagging establishment candidates like Harris as moderates when they aren’t.

You might have heard less about the moderation wars lately. Democrats, in my view, have been surprisingly arrayed since the summer fights over AES and Graham Platner and Francesca Hong. Everybody in the party just really wants to beat Trump. It’s not exactly clear what the left is rooting for on Nov. 3, beyond the fact that it would obviously be bad for the left if AES were to lose or severely underperform, and maybe also to an extent if Troy Jackson or Peggy Flanagan did. But the infighting is almost certain to resume once the dust from the midterm clears.

I’m not sure I’d bet on the left at even odds in the nomination fight. But I’m not sure any individual candidate in the party has more than, say, a 20 or 25 percent chance to win the nomination — lower than that, in fact, if you take prediction markets literally — and the left lane is less crowded. I think AOC has both a high ceiling and a relatively high floor3 … if she runs.

It’s been a comparatively straightforward week. Once again, I’ll remind you that we’re now updating ELWAY and QBERT twice a week instead of once.

I’m not quite sure whether to highlight “coming Silver Bulletin attractions”. The risk there is that until a story is actually written, there’s never a guarantee that it will get published in a timely fashion (or ever). But some topics we’re considering:

• You almost certainly will get a Model Talk within the next couple of days on the Senate races where Democrats are at risk of losing seats. Michigan has received a lot of coverage, but Minnesota — where the polling is actually closer than in Michigan — has flown mostly under the radar, as we talked about at the top of the show.

• I’ve been working on an AI thinkpiece that addresses the question of why the frontier AI labs often seem ambivalent about the technologies that they’re building.

• Speaking of AI, don’t miss Eli’s story on what 2028 Democratic contenders are saying about AI. We’ll have a follow-up post soon to cover the Republicans.

• SBSQ is returning soon.

• And given QBERT’s perpetual love for him, we might need to run a story on 49ers quarterback Brock Purdy.

Thank you for being a Silver Bulletin reader. And we’ll hope you’ll become a subscriber if you aren’t one yet.

1

Yes, in that order, with Ossoff #1.

2

Having covered elections for a long time, I think this is an important threshold for media and narrative perceptions. These can be path-dependent and lock in early. “Democrats sweep everywhere, including in Michigan” as a Wednesday morning headline is much better for El-Sayed than “Democrats do well, but Michigan is too close to call.”

3

Although I’d never take a “floor” as a sure thing. Every primary cycle has one or two candidates — Harris, for instance, in 2020 — who just completely aren’t ready for their moment. There tends to be a lot of hindsight bias in claiming this was obvious all along, but it usually isn’t.