Jonathan Bernstein: “Of course normal people want nothing to do with the 2028 election, and won’t until a long time from now. Even most primary voters, who are already a fairly small subset of the electorate as a whole, are unlikely to really engage until the weeks just before their state votes in winter or spring of the election year.”
“But the even smaller group of party actors — the politicians, campaign and governing professionals, formal party officials and staff, volunteers and donors, and party-aligned interest groups and the partisan media who together are the party network?They’re already thinking about it. Not only do many of them care very much who wins the nomination, but they also take part in the even more important re-definition of the party that it goes through when it makes nominations. That includes potential changes in policy positions and priorities; it also includes questions about other ways that various party groups will be represented, and how central they all are to the party as a whole.”
“I do urge people to focus on those questions more than on which candidate winds up as the nominee. But I also know that people naturally do care about the nominee. And for a while now the biggest questions will be about Vice President Kamala Harris. Will she run? If so, how strong a nomination candidate will she be?”
