The 2028 outlook: Democrats are early favorites, but the field is wide open

The midterm elections transformed the political landscape. Beyond Republicans losing control and the Democrats sweeping Congress, the outcomes were historic: 

“The pendulum swing is normal, but the extent of the pendulum swing is very unusual,” according to Christian Grose, a political science professor at the University of Southern California and director of the USC Democracy and Fair Elections Lab. “This is a historic swing to the Democrats, especially in the U.S. House, that I have not seen in my lifetime, in decades,” Grose said to Kalshi News.

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The Democratic wave-turned-tsunami in the midterm elections, which produced those historic firsts, makes the party the favorite to win the 2028 presidency. Kalshi traders now price the party’s chances of victory at 65%.

“The midterm 2026 election shows that if the environment stays like this, probably any kind of Democrat could win,” said Grose. “A progressive could win. A moderate could win. A charismatic fighter could win.”

Jon Ossoff, winner of the Georgia Senate race, has the highest prediction market odds of becoming the 48th president of the United States at 21%, a 12 percentage point increase since Election Day.

John Pitney, a government professor at Claremont McKenna College who worked inside the Republican National Committee in the 1990s, identified Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as “generational talent” in the Democratic Party. Her positions are left of where most voters are, but she is a gifted communicator, per Pitney.

“Republicans have a tendency to underrate her, which I think they do at their peril, so she is definitely somebody to watch if she actually decides to run for president,” Pitney continued. Ocasio-Cortez, a New York representative, has a 10% chance of winning the 2028 presidential election and a 14% chance of winning the Democratic nomination.

Despite their landslide victory in the midterms, the Democrats’ path to the White House is not guaranteed. “It’s a long time between now and then, and so who knows what’s going to happen in the world, or how well or poorly the Democrats are going to manage their big majorities they have, or what’s going to happen in the states,” Walter Mebane, a University of Michigan professor of political science and statistics, told Kalshi News.

Pitney even cautioned Democrats that the outcome of Election Day was more anti-Trump than pro-Democrat. “The risk is that Democrats may over-interpret the victory as an endorsement of everything they want to do, rather than a repudiation of Donald Trump,” Pitney said to Kalshi News.

The new members of Congress face a long to-do list. Democrats have promised to address affordability and the country’s involvement in overseas conflicts, but the electorate may expect results sooner than elected officials can deliver them.

“They [Democrats] have to do something. They’re expected to do something. The phones will be ringing, even though they don’t have offices,” said Bowdoin College government professor Janet Martin. Newly elected members of Congress are sworn in on Jan. 3. “You can hit the ground running to a certain extent, but you have to at least be given the keys to the building, to be given the desks and chairs, staff resources, funds to pay for telephone charges, things of that sort,” Martin told Kalshi News. 

The to-do list also includes holding the Trump administration accountable for its alleged misdeeds, working across the aisle to get the president’s signature on bills, and balancing the diversity of its party on both the local and national level. 

Nithya Raman, endorsed by the Democratic Socialists of America, secured the mayoral seat for Los Angeles, defeating establishment Democrat Karen Bass. Texas, long known for its deep Republican roots, turned blue after Democrats won the Senate and gubernatorial races. The Senate contest in Michigan, won by progressive Abdul El-Sayed, exposed tensions among Democrats over Israel. Elsewhere, New York Times columnist Ezra Klein described the Democratic Party as a “big tent.”

Managing internal disputes between the more progressive wing and the more moderate camp will be an ongoing challenge for Democrats, according to Pitney. “How they manage that will go a long way toward determining how the Democrats do in two years,” Pitney said. 

The biggest factor for the 2028 presidential nominees will be early states, two professors argued. “Candidates will have to get enough to compete in South Carolina and other primary states to survive the first culling of the election,” said University of Michigan’s Mebane. Black voters are a significant part of the Democratic electorate in South Carolina and the electorate overall, so a Democratic presidential candidate is going to need to do well with Black voters in the South, added USC’s Grose.

“Latino voters are also going to be really influential because Nevada and New Mexico have large Latino voter populations and will be early states,” Grose continued. He and the USC Democracy and Fair Elections Lab found Democrats Ossoff and Ocasio-Cortez polling high in their selection of seven congressional districts in California with substantial Latino populations.

Vice President J.D. Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio have a 13% and 12% chance, respectively, to be the 2028 U.S. presidential election winner, placing them in second and third place, ahead of Gavin Newsom and Ocasio-Cortez, who are tied at 10%.

However, the midterm election results likely hurt Vance’s chances with the nomination. The midterm outcomes were a “repudiation of the Trump administration that Vance is going to get tagged with some of that,” Grose said. “Some Republican voters might not view him as electable anymore to a general electorate after the midterms.”

Bowdoin’s Martin said, “At the same time, if he starts breaking away from Trump as vice president, and he gets the wrath of Trump, that also doesn’t look good either.” 

Who becomes the Republican nominee depends on whether the candidate can win over the MAGA base and still appeal to other voters enough to be electable, said Pitney, who was a Republican until election night 2016.

Kalshi markets now predict:

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