In today’s Democratic Party, nothing succeeds like failure. According to a recent poll tracker, the preferred candidates to contest the 2028 presidential election are a host of proven losers. Kamala Harris is the No.1 choice, followed by Pete Buttigieg, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Cory Booker and, of course, the slickest of all the failures, California governor Gavin Newsom.
Far less popular, it seems, are candidates who might appeal beyond the party faithful. Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro, who has cross-party support in his state, registered less than a quarter of the support banked by Harris among Democrats nationally. Other Democrats with a greater potential for success include Kentucky governor Andrew Beshear and Maryland’s Wes Moore, yet both of them failed to even break into the poll.
For most Democrats, as Ruy Teixeira notes, ‘the progressive moment’ has not ended, despite all evidence to the contrary. This has been made clear by their reluctance to denounce the recent riots in Los Angeles. A recent poll found that Ocasio-Cortez – who simultaneously downplayed the riots and blamed them on Donald Trump – is most likely to be considered the ‘face’ of the Democratic Party, followed by Bernie Sanders and foul-mouthed Texas congresswoman Jasmine Crockett. This sounds like a potential dream team… for the Republicans.
Democrats pose as upholding ‘fundamental values’, as Newsom puts it. Essentially, this means forsaking public safety and defending criminals and violent protesters. Harris has even insisted, contrary to all evidence, that those LA protests were ‘overwhelmingly peaceful’. Even though most who participated only exercised their rights, the demonstrations provided cover for the keffiyeh-wearing, Mexican-flag-waving mob. In the bizarro world of the current Democratic Party, the police (in 2020) and the National Guard (in 2025) are responsible for the unrest, rather than the politically driven militants.
So far, the only internal pushback from this fraught stance comes from senator John Fetterman and some newly elected Democratic mayors, like San Francisco’s Daniel Lurie. Unlike most Democrats, this small group is aware of the primacy of law enforcement as a pillar of democratic order, and they know that to be seen to be embracing violence, particularly from people in the US illegally, is electorally disastrous outside the deep-blue lunatic zones. Yet if current trends are anything to go by, their relative sanity will condemn them to an unsuccessful career in the Democratic Party.
The reigning queen of upwards failure is Kamala Harris. The former vice-president and 2024 presidential candidate is so inept that she lost to an unpopular Trump, despite her campaign vastly out-spending his and enjoying a compliant media. Unsurprisingly, California seems ready to anoint her as the next governor, despite her repeated inability to win in competitive elections.
Read the rest of this piece at Spiked.
Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and and directs the Center for Demographics and Policy there. He is Senior Research Fellow at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas in Austin. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.
Photo: via Gavin Newsom on X.
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