The 2028 Race Has Begun. Here’s Who’s Winning.

The Trump Organization may sell Trump 2028 hats, but even President Donald Trump bowed to the Constitution and acknowledged earlier this month that he would not be the next Republican presidential nominee: “It’s not going to be me.”

It’s clear to everyone that the jockeying for presidential primary position in the post-Trump era — in both major parties — has already begun. Ambitious contenders are seizing on book deals, magazine profiles, podcast appearances, policy pronouncements and more than a few low-key beefs to find the spotlight and try to elbow into what will be a crowded race.

So which potential 2028ers jockeyed the best in 2025?

In the spirit of this year’s “FIFA Peace Prize — Football Unites the World” award delivered to Trump, POLITICO Magazine is ready to bestow trophies on some of the likeliest presidential contenders. Here are the Democrats and Republicans eyeing the White House who spent the past year maneuvering — some better than others.

Let the ceremony commence!

The Democrats

Attack Dog Medal of Honor

California Gov. Gavin Newsom

In 2025, sometimes Gavin Newsom made Democrats mad. Sometimes Gavin Newsom made Democrats exhilarated. But more than any other potential Democratic presidential candidate, Gavin Newsom made Democrats think about Gavin Newsom.

He made them mad when he invited the late conservative activist Charlie Kirk on his podcast and said “I completely agree with you” on barring transgender women from competing in women’s sports. Ditto for when Newsom was asked in April about the erroneous deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia in flagrant violation of a court order; he downplayed it as “the distraction of the day” and suggested Democrats should resist talking about immigration because it’s an “80-20 issue” for Republicans.

But many Democrats thrilled to his adoption of a bombastic social media strategy that walked a fine line between parodying and emulating Trump. And he delighted partisans by jumping into the redistricting war Trump started, successfully convincing California voters to pass a ballot initiative suspending the state’s independent redistricting commission and redrawing district lines to favor Democratic candidates.

The net result of all of Newsom’s frenetic activity is that, despite being based 3,000 miles away from Washington, Newsom has unofficially achieved the status of the party’s chief attack dog — and arguable 2028 Democratic frontrunner.

The proof is in the polls, in which Newsom is the only potential Democratic nominee who has shown clear momentum. During the first five months of the year, Newsom was mired in single digits. Since then, he’s consistently earned double-digit support and has led polls sampled by Yahoo/YouGov, Emerson College and AtlasIntel.

Intra-Party Instigator of the Year

Former Vice President Kamala Harris

Kamala Harris had a busy year, writing and promoting her 2024 campaign memoir 107 Days, which quickly became a New York Times best-seller and sold more than 600,000 copies. Her book tour was a success too; as the New York Times observed, “Only two politicians in America have pulled off nationwide tours this year and packed so many venues” — Sen. Bernie Sanders and Harris.

Yet the former vice president saw her potential 2028 standing ebb. In the first eight 2028 primary polls sampled this year, Harris led in six, averaging 27 percent share of support. In the last eight, she led in three and averaged 21 percent support.

Why the slippage? Likely because Harris spent most of the year looking backward, performing an autopsy on her 2024 presidential campaign and picking some intra-party fights in the process.

Harris never distanced herself from President Joe Biden during the campaign, but did air some tensions between them in her book, and wrote “at 81, Joe got tired.” Critics wondered why she hadn’t acknowledged reality before.

She also rage-baited Josh Shapiro, writing that the Pennsylvania governor “mused that he would want to be in the room for every decision” during her running mate vetting process. That prompted Shapiro to accuse Harris, in an interview with The Atlantic, of “blatant lies” to “sell books and cover her ass.” And she rankled former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg by saying she passed over him for veep because she thought pairing a Black woman with a gay man was “too big of a risk,” adding that Buttigieg “knew that — to our mutual sadness.” After publication, Buttigieg told POLITICO he was “surprised” to read that and retorted, “The way that you earn trust with voters is based mostly on what they think you’re going to do for their lives, not on categories.”

Harris even threw shade at the entire party’s record of delivering for voters at a December speech before the Democratic National Committee, declaring “both parties have failed to hold the public’s trust.”

Whether a former vice president can, in the eyes of voters, sufficiently separate herself from the Washington establishment, remains to be seen. But by spending so much energy on the past, she wasn’t putting in as much time taking on Trump or offering an alternative vision for the future.

There’s a reason why Newsom gained ground and Harris lost ground this year; he seized the mantle of chief attack dog and she didn’t.

Running in Place Award

Former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg

Pete Buttigieg maintained a campaign-lite schedule in 2025, participating in an Iowa town hall and making appearances on right-leaning podcasts — burnishing a reputation as a smooth debater able to connect with red-state voters. (In case anyone missed the point of such appearances, Buttigieg wrote a Substack post titled, “Why I Sat Down for a Two-Hour Podcast That Recently Hosted Trump.”)

After ending his four-year stint as Transportation secretary, he and his family left Washington for Michigan, where he passed on running for open seats for governor or senator, a sign he’s interested in a bigger prize like the presidency. He also grew a salt-and-pepper beard, which could help the soon-to-be 44-year-old shake the perception that he’s too young to be Commander-in-Chief.

What he didn’t do in 2025 is anything to address his biggest political weakness: scant support among Black and Latino voters.

In an August poll from Emerson College gauging Democratic support for 2028 possibilities, Buttigeig earned a promising second place with 16 percent. Yet the number of African American respondents who said they support Buttigieg was zero. Not that the percentage of support for Buttigieg among Black people rounded down to zero. Literally zero African Americans contacted by Emerson said they supported Buttigieg. And the number of Hispanic respondents was only slightly better: one. Every Democratic presidential nominee since Michael Dukakis in 1988 has needed Black support, particularly Southern Black support, to secure a sufficient number of delegates.

Furthermore, Buttigieg’s support was heavily consolidated among the college-educated, with little support from voters with only high school diplomas or vocational degrees. He remains a quintessential “wine track” candidate, and such candidates have often struggled to win the Democratic nomination. Buttigieg ends another year as a contender but without a clear path to forging a diverse base of support.

Excellence in Socialism and Bridge-Building Prize

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the democratic socialist insurgent who had once been known for encouraging primary challenges to Democratic House incumbents, continued her intra-party fence-mending operation in 2025. Last year, she began paying dues to her party’s House campaign arm for the first time. She also gave a full-throated endorsement to Kamala Harris at the Democratic National Convention when others in democratic socialist circles were withholding support to protest the Biden administration’s military support for Israel’s war with Hamas.

This year she helped raise money for the Democratic nominee for the governor of Virginia, Abigail Spangberger, a moderate who has disparaged the “socialist” label that Ocasio-Cortez still dons with pride.

She also solidified her position as the unofficial heir to the democratic socialist movement built up by Bernie Sanders’ two presidential campaigns by joining the 84-year-old Vermont independent for 11 stops on his Fighting Oligarchy tour, which took her to the early primary state of Nevada and the swing state of Arizona.

In another nod to the left, Ocasio-Cortez also didn’t suppress her frustration in November when a faction of Senate Democrats broke ranks to end the government shutdown without a deal to renew expiring Affordable Care Act subsidies.

With Sanders unlikely to run for president a third time, and with the socialist left’s new favorite — New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani — ineligible to run for president (he was born in Uganda), Ocasio-Cortez would likely have the democratic socialist lane all to herself if she chose to run for president.

She may decide not to. Perhaps she sees running against the aging, battle-scarred Chuck Schumer in 2028 as the safer bet or that staying in the House is the safest choice of all. And the question remains whether the socialist lane has grown big enough to win a Democratic presidential primary, let alone the presidency. But Ocasio-Cortez ends 2025 well positioned to finance and staff a presidential campaign, which is more than what most potential candidates can usually say this early in the process.

The ‘Got a Bill Signed Into Law’ Blue Ribbon

Rep. Ro Khanna

One thing Ocasio-Cortez still does not have on her resume is a signature legislative achievement, which another progressive House Democrat reportedly eyeing the presidency notched this year.

Teaming up with a small band of renegade Republicans, Rep. Ro Khanna helped round up a majority of House members to sign a discharge petition and force a vote — against Speaker Mike Johnson’s wishes — on legislation mandating the Justice Department release documents related to the Jeffrey Epstein case. The bill then sailed through the House and Senate, cornering Trump and compelling his signature. Khanna now has a bipartisan success story to tout on the presidential campaign trail as evidence he can take on Trump and win.

That’s not only more than Ocasio-Cortez can say, but also more than what any Senate Democrat can say they did in 2025.

A-For-Effort Certificates

Senate Category:

Cory Booker, Mark Kelly, Elissa Slotkin, Ruben Gallego and Chris Murphy

Potential presidential candidates from the Senate Democratic Caucus, lacking obvious legislative options to distinguish themselves, tended to embrace symbolic acts of defiance. Some had better success than others.

Back in March, Cory Booker of New Jersey delivered the longest floor speech in Senate history, holding court for over 25 hours and calling attention to the harsh impacts of Trump’s policies on everyday Americans. In the moment, he received accolades from progressives hungering for some signs of fight, but nine months later, good luck finding someone who remembers anything Booker said.

Last month, Arizona’s Mark Kelly and Michigan’s Elissa Slotkin — two senators with national security backgrounds who represent battleground states — joined four House Democrats to deliver a video message urging members of the military to refuse to follow illegal orders. Trump accused them of treason and suggested they should be executed, giving the Democrats a year-end publicity bump as they refused to back down in multiple interviews. But that media attention is also beginning to fade.

More substantively, Sen. Ruben Gallego, who also represents Arizona, made a small splash in May when he unveiled a comprehensive immigration reform plan. His more provocative move came this month when Gallego sought to outflank Trump on his populist right with a letter passive-agressively scolding the Trump administration for approving 30,000 H-1B visas for tech companies seeking high-skilled foreign workers while those same companies laid off hundreds of thousands of American workers.

But the biggest risk Gallego took was back in January, when he voted for the Laken Riley bill, sought by Trump to require mandatory detention without bail of undocumented immigrants who were charged — but not necessarily convicted — of low-level crimes like shoplifting. Gallego was not the sole Democrat to cross party lines, or even the sole potential presidential aspirant. So did Kelly and Slotkin as well as Pennsylvania’s John Fetterman. But Gallego stood out as he played up his vote as the product of “the perspective of working class Latinos from Arizona.”

At the beginning of the year, most Democrats were still shell-shocked by Trump’s election victory and were not inclined to harangue Gallego and others for trying to tack toward the political center. But Trump’s record on immigrant detentions and deportations has since shocked the conscience of many Democrats, and public opinion of Trump’s handling of immigration has gone underwater. The Laken Riley vote taken in January 2025 may end up being a vulnerability once primary voters go to the polls in 2028.

Another 2025 Senate floor vote that could lead to future political repercussions was on the GENIUS Act. The legislation passed with bipartisan support and ostensibly was a bid to regulate a type of cryptocurrency called stablecoins, but it was criticized by progressive financial reform advocates as full of holes. In The Atlantic, anti-Trump conservative David Frum argued that the new law could cause a chain of events leading to “shocks that reverberate through the global financial system.” Yet several potential Democratic 2028ers have their fingerprints on it, with Booker, Fetterman, Gallego, Slotkin and Khanna voting for the final measure. If stablecoins destabilize the economy by 2028, this 2025 vote could loom large.

One Democratic senator interested in 2028 who steered clear of these two controversial bills: Connecticut’s Chris Murphy. He also started a political action committee to help increase voter registration ahead of the 2026 midterms. In a November speech to Democrats in the traditionally early primary state of New Hampshire, he took some swipes at the Democratic Party establishment for poor messaging, and also complained the party has “become kind of addicted to litmus tests, and that made us a pretty ideologically pure party, but it made us a losing party.” Yet he hasn’t been able to dramatically demonstrate how he would message differently and navigate the party’s myriad interest groups.

As for Fetterman, we cannot offer him an A-for-Effort certificate this year. He has been defiant, but mainly toward fellow Democrats and the institution of the United States Senate itself. Early in the year he was dinged for high rates of absenteeism, though he has missed fewer votes since April. A searing profile in New York magazine citing former staff members raised questions about his mental fitness. Recent polling of Pennsylvania voters shows Fetterman deeply underwater with Democrats and newly popular among Republicans. He gave cryptic answers to NOTUS when asked about a presidential bid, including, “Accept the mystery. 2028 is gonna be crazy.” But there is no mystery. Any hope he could win a Democratic presidential nomination is gone. Getting through a Senate primary may be hard enough.

A-For-Effort Certificates

Governor category:

JB Pritzker, Josh Shapiro, Tim Walz, Andy Beshear, Wes Moore, Gretchen Whitmer, and Josh Green

While Ocasio-Cortez likely would not have to worry about competing against a fellow democratic socialist, she may have to worry about getting crowded out of the progressive populist lane, and by a billionaire no less: Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker.

Unlike Newsom and some other Democrats, Pritzker hasn’t tried to recalibrate at all on immigration or trangender issues. During Trump’s first week back in office, Pritzker promised his state would “stand in the way of an unconstitutional order” related to immigration, and later waged legal battles to thwart Trump’s Chicago deployment of the National Guard. He’s ending the year by signing a bill that expands the state’s sanctuary laws.

In a fiery speech to members of the New Hampshire Democratic Party in April, Pritzker charged “do-nothing Democrats” with “want[ing] to blame our losses on our defense of Black people, of trans kids, of immigrants — instead of their own lack of guts and gumption.”

Still, Pritzker is only registering middling single-digit numbers in 2028 primary polls. That makes him little different from every other White House-curious Democratic governor not named Gavin, including Pennsylvania’s Josh Shapiro, Minnesota’s Tim Walz, Kentucky’s Andy Beshear, Maryland’s Wes Moore, Michigan’s Gretchen Whitmer and Hawaii’s Josh Green.

Each had their moment in the spotlight, for better or worse, over the course of 2025. Green, a medical doctor, called for the resignation of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. because of his “anti-vaccine ideology.” Whitmer suffered an awkward moment, covering her face with a folder during an unscheduled Oval Office photo-op with Trump. Beshear was named the chair of the Democratic Governors Association and used his new perch to pen a Washington Post op-ed offering advice on how Democrats can woo rural voters. Moore, the only African American currently serving as governor, vetoed a bill to study reparations for slavery. Walz is dealing with the fallout of a scandal in which fraudulent entities billed the state government for social services that weren’t delivered, prompting Trump to scapegoat — and Walz to defend — Minnesota’s Somali American community. Shapiro, in April, was the target of an arsonist who blamed the Jewish governor for the deaths of Palestinians in the Israel-Hamas war, and he ended the year with a major profile treatment in The Atlantic.

Two incoming governors could also spark fresh presidential buzz. New Jersey’s Mikie Sherill and Virginia’s Abigail Spanberger each have strong national security resumes and each won their 2025 elections with impressive margins. But they won’t be in office long before needing to make a decision about pursuing the presidency.

Several governors convened this month for a DGA conference and talked up the value of having an accomplished, outside-the-Beltway government executive lead the 2028 ticket. But if they want that person to not be Newsom, they’re going to have to find a way to outdo Newsom’s considerable attention-grabbing skills.

THE REPUBLICANS

The Thomas Marshall Prize for Vice Presidential Existence

Vice President JD Vance

This award is in memory of Woodrow Wilson’s vice president, Thomas Marshall, who famously said, “Once there were two brothers. One ran away to sea. The other was elected vice president. And nothing was ever heard of either of them again."

We kid. Readers of my past year-end presidential primary scorecards know I’m usually bullish on current and former vice presidents. In the modern primary era, the only veeps who ran and never secured their party’s nomination — Mike Pence and Dan Quayle — were boxed out, respectively, by their former running mate and former running mate’s son. Otherwise, primary voters are highly inclined to treat vice presidents as heirs apparent.

JD Vance ends 2025 having made great progress with forging the traditional bond vice presidents have with primary voters. In every GOP primary poll taken this year Vance is the runaway leader, often clearing or nearing 50 percent support, even when Trump’s eldest son Don Jr. is added to the mix. The tragically widowed Erika Kirk who now runs Turning Point USA gave Vance an early Christmas present by pledging her support for his assumed 2028 campaign.

Vice presidents typically struggle to distinguish themselves while playing second banana to their presidents. And Trump hasn’t exactly helped his underling by occasionally giving him equal billing to Secretary of State Marco Rubio. In October, while talking to reporters on Air Force One, Trump mused aloud about the 2028 primary: “We have JD obviously. The vice president is great. Marco’s great. I’m not sure if anybody would run against those two. I think if they formed a group it would be unstoppable.”

But Vance has learned how to emulate Trump’s all-publicity-is-good-publicity approach to politics with a steady stream of provocative statements — from demeaning Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy as “disrespectful” in the Oval Office in February to publicly urging his Hindu wife to convert to Christianity in November to declaring that under the Trump administration, “you don’t have to apologize for being white anymore” in December.

As with Trump, Vance’s incessantly confrontational posture comes with a downside: weak favorability among the broader electorate. In mid-December, Vance’s favorability in the Real Clear Politics average was a limp 40.6 percent, nearly six points lower than his average unfavorability. Vance will begin any presidential campaign as a polarizing figure, which is hardly fatal in our social media-driven political era, but could make him vulnerable if a 2026 midterm blue wave prompts rank-and-file Republicans to seek out candidates who are not fully in the Trump mold.

The Eager Sidekick Award

Secretary of State Marco Rubio

Almost 10 years ago, Rubio roasted Trump on the campaign trail: “He’s not going to make America great, he’s going to make America orange,” and “You know what they say about men with small hands? You can’t trust them!” Turning serious, Rubio said, “I will never allow the conservative movement to be taken over by a con artist.”

Rubio’s antagonism was fleeting. Once Trump became president, Rubio became a dutiful soldier in the Senate. And though Trump abandoned the hawkish internationalist foreign policy of the conservative movement, Rubio gamely accepted Trump’s second-term offer to lead the State Department and implement his foreign policy.

Rubio’s inclination toward submission is seemingly paying off. He’s become an influential force in the administration and Trump has even suggested Rubio could be the next president, slighting Vance and maybe some of his offspring. Yet true to form, instead of feeding the notion he is interested in jousting with Vance for the 2028 nomination, Rubio has reportedly told confidants that he would support Vance in 2028. That would be a canny move if he wants to become the running mate of the likely nominee, and if he’s willing to wait until 2032 or 2036 to slake his longstanding presidential thirst.

Yet beneath the surface, tensions may exist. During the infamous Vanity Fair photo shoot, Vance jokingly offered the photographer $1,000 if he made Rubio’s picture worse than his.

More substantively, Vance is deeply committed to an “America First” foreign policy that deprioritizes human rights concerns abroad and degrades the NATO alliance (“I just hate bailing Europe out again” Vance privately told top Trump officials in the infamous Signal chats that inadvertently included a journalist).

Amid some appearances that Rubio pulled the U.S. back from a Russia-favored plan to end the war in Ukraine and has helped push a militaristic regime change strategy in Venezuela, suspicions are growing among America First adherents that Rubio hasn’t fully converted.

All this is to say that Rubio’s standing on the right may be shakier than Trump’s 2028 musings otherwise suggest. Nevertheless, being mentioned in Trump’s musings is better than not.

At least, I’m sure Don Jr. feels that way.

The Roscoe Conkling Award for Achievement in Resignation

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene

As fans of Death by Lightning and the James Garfield presidency know, Roscoe Conkling was an imperious Republican senator from New York and defender of the spoils system. When Garfield wouldn’t appoint Conkling allies to key posts, Conkling huffily resigned with the belief he would be swiftly re-appointed by the New York State legislature in a show of his political strength. The plan backfired when the legislature snubbed him and his political career ended.

Now Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene has resigned her seat after locking horns with Trump. Will her counter-intuitive flex fare any better than Conkling’s? There’s reason to think it could.

Greene’s close relationship with Trump imploded as she increasingly criticized Trump and Republican Party leadership for failing to address expiring Affordable Care Act subsidies and resisting release of the Epstein files.

But what seemed to be Trump’s last straw was an interview with NBC News published on Nov. 14 in which Greene lambasted Trump’s focus on global affairs. NBC provocatively headlined the story: “Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene questions if Trump is still the ‘America First’ president.” Hours after the story published, Trump publicly rescinded his endorsement of Greene and branded her a “traitor.” One week later, Greene announced her resignation from the House, effective Jan. 5.

The resignation can easily be viewed as a sign of Trump’s strength and Greene’s weakness, a recognition by Greene that she might not survive a Trump-backed primary challenger for her current House seat. But Greene remained popular in her district, and she may be thinking a few steps ahead.

She has insisted she has no plans to run for president. But post-resignation announcement, she has embarked on quite a media tour for someone with no intention of running for something. And she has flatly said she isn’t running for governor or senator this year. That leaves one other office above her current station.

In resigning, Greene also staked out ideological territory occupied by few others in elective politics: the America First purist unmoored to Trump. She even went so far as to distinguish America First from MAGA during her recent 60 Minutes interview with CBS News’ Lesley Stahl:

STAHL: Are you MAGA?

GREENE: I’m America First.

STAHL: And that’s not the same as MAGA?

GREENE: MAGA is President Trump’s phrase. That’s his, his political policies. I call myself America First.

STAHL: But you’re, you’re not saying you’re MAGA. That’s over.

GREENE: I’m America First. Yep.

The challenge for Greene going forward is convincing more rank-and-file Republicans that Trump, as well as Vance, aren’t America First enough and she is the true keeper-of-the-flame. If Republicans begin to sour on Trump following a rough 2026 midterm election, yet aren’t interested in returning the party to its traditionally conservative roots, Greene will be well positioned to take advantage.

The Profile in Niceness Prize

Utah Gov. Spencer Cox

Granted, it may take a colossal midterm shellacking to convince rank-and-file Republicans to seek out the absolute antithesis of Donald Trump. But in that scenario, Utah Gov. Spencer Cox will be waiting for them with fresh baked cookies and hot chocolate.

I say that because in 2020 Cox gave protesters in front of his house fresh baked cookies and hot chocolate.

Cox has long cultivated a reputation for political civility, which was put to the test in 2025 under horrific circumstances when conservative activist Charlie Kirk was murdered in his state.

While Trump was trying to exploit the assassination to broadly tar the “radical left,” Cox used the unwelcome spotlight to reject such divisive tactics: “At some point we have to find an off-ramp, or else it’s going to get much worse.” He saved his blame for social media and urged people to “log off, turn off, touch grass, hug a family member, go out and do good in your community.”

In November, Cox announced a deal to publish a book on reducing political polarization. And he ended the year by joining Shapiro for a bipartisan forum on “Finding Common Ground” that was televised on NBC, where he continued to pile on social media companies for monetizing division: “These are the wealthiest and most powerful companies in the history of the world, and they’re profiting off of destroying our kids and destroying our country, and they know it, and it’s very intentional.”

Upon announcing the book deal and in his NBC appearance, Cox insisted he isn’t running for president. And maybe he means it. Regardless, intentionally or not, he is carving out a place in the 2028 primary for a type of Republican not seen leading the party since the last guy not named Trump won the nomination — another nice guy with Utah ties named Mitt Romney.

Plaque for Potentially Delusional Persistence

Sen. Ted Cruz

If Marjorie Taylor Greene is blazing her own path by daring to criticize Trump’s foreign policy, Ted Cruz is trying to do the same by criticizing Tucker Carlson’s foreign policy. It’s not quite as politically daring, though it does represent an attempt to sharply shift the Republican Party’s platform back toward hawkish internationalism. Axios reported that Cruz’s forthright support of Israel and denouncement of Carlson’s platforming of the antisemite Nick Fuentes has impressed some in the GOP donor class.

Cruz took another indirect swipe at Trump by chastising Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr for pressuring ABC to cancel the late-night talk show of Trump critic Jimmy Kimmel, and even threatened to roll back FCC powers.

He has also built up a significant audience who listen to his thrice-a-week podcast Verdict with Ted Cruz. Ben Jacobs noted in POLITICO Magazine last month that the podcast gets up to 2 million monthly downloads, more than three times the size of Newsom’s.

Yet Newsom’s average poll share of the Democratic primary electorate is 10 times the size of Cruz’s on the Republican side. Polls may not be the equivalent of votes, but they are closer to it than downloads. For Cruz to be so far back in the pack, after a past presidential run and more than a decade of chasing headlines, suggests that Republican voters simply may not buy what he’s trying to sell.

The Milk Carton Award for Missing Politicians

Governor Category:

Ron DeSantis, Brian Kemp, Sarah Huckabee Sanders and Glenn Youngkin

While Democrats boast about their deep bench of governors, Republican governors in 2025 largely went missing.

Florida’s once-omnipresent-now-term-limited Ron DeSantis began 2025 pushing the idea his wife Casey could succeed him next year. Then came allegations that the governor illegally funneled $10 million from a Medicaid settlement into a nonprofit organization run by Casey DeSantis before most of it ended up with a political action committee opposing a ballot initiative to legalize cannabis. No one yet has been charged with committing a crime, but an ongoing investigation is not a great backdrop to a gubernatorial campaign (even though Donald Trump might differ), and we haven’t seen Casey DeSantis take steps to launch one.

We used to see a lot more of Georgia’s Brian Kemp when he was facing Trump’s wrath about the 2020 vote count. And Kemp won real notice by winning re-nomination in 2022 despite Trump’s backing of a primary challenger. But since Trump won Georgia in 2024 there’s less for the two to argue over.

Having worked in Trump’s first-term White House before getting elected governor in Arkansas, Sarah Huckabee Sanders was already a national figure. In August, she raised the eyebrows of election watchers when she headlined a Republican event in the early primary state of South Carolina. But the speech lacked any newsworthy content and was quickly forgotten.

Two months prior she did something few Republicans try to do: get an op-ed published in The New York Times. Sanders bragged to the coastal elite readers about being the first governor in the country to enact antitrust law that prevents pharmacy benefit managers — who negotiate drug prices between pharmacies and insurance companies — from owning pharmacies with which they’re supposed to negotiate. It’s a novel policy solution to address rising health care costs. But we have little evidence that’s what Republican voters are looking for.

Finally, Virginia’s Glenn Youngkin sparked presidential buzz four years ago when he upset former Democratic Gov. Terry McAuliffe. But Youngkin’s star faded as he hemmed and hawed about running for president last year and as he failed to turn Virginia’s legislature red. Meanwhile, Trump lost the state last November and his lieutenant governor lost the race to succeed him this November.

Youngkin is now spending his final month in office squabbling with Gov.-elect Abigail Spanberger over the state’s universities. Democrats won court decisions that effectively prevented Youngkin from filling 22 board positions at three higher institutions, including five at the University of Virginia, before Spanberger is sworn in. But at Youngkin’s urging and over Spanberger’s objection, the University of Virginia board is moving to name a new president before those vacancies are filled. One last stick-in-the-eye to Democrats would probably give Youngkin a fresh round of accolades from conservatives, but that’s well short of what he needs to join the top tier of 2028ers.