Midterm results could shape 2028 presidential dialogue

Democratic upsets in this year's midterms, which stretched from the suburbs of Atlanta to rural Kansas, could reshape the electoral map that governs presidential politics — and, with it, the calculus for each party in the fight for the nation’s top office in 2028. Democrats were already cautioning against overconfidence, discussing how to translate their midterm success into more lasting power and to draw back Tuesday's voters in 2028. For Republicans, the defeat set off something close to an existential crisis, with would-be contenders for the party's presidential nomination openly debating what had gone wrong and how the party should regroup after voters rebuked President Trump's agenda.

And members of both parties were taking stock of the deep reach Democrats demonstrated Tuesday, with Senate, House and state legislative seats flipped in red strongholds that have not been up for grabs in a presidential race in years. The midterm results have “enlarged the competitive map” for 2028, said Alex Keyssar, a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School, who has written books about voting rights and the electoral college. States such as Texas and Georgia may no longer be considered long-safe GOP territory, he said, leaving Republicans with fewer states they can count on and more ground they will have to spend money to defend.

"The number of states that the Republicans can feel secure that they have has diminished," he said. "And the flip side of that is that there are more states that the Democrats can compete in. And that's a shift.”

Presidential hopefuls typically begin putting together exploratory committees soon after the midterms, announce their candidacies after the new year and begin fundraising by midyear. Potential candidates began putting down markers swiftly this week. On Thursday, allies of Rep.

Ro Khanna (D-Fremont) launched a fundraising committee for his potential candidacy. Gov. Gavin Newsom, who is considering a run, commuted the death sentences of all California's death row prisoners.

Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker this week released a road map with recommendations for the new Congress. And party leaders in Washington were nodding to 2028 as they outlined broad plans for their House and Senate majorities.

“As we look to 2028 and beyond, we need to start identifying now, in 2027, to solidify our position in the states we won and build our party infrastructure in those areas," Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer told an audience Wednesday at the think tank Center for American Progress, "and continue to expand the map into new states.” Meanwhile, Republican leaders moved swiftly to assert authority within their party with analyses and prescriptions after Tuesday's battering. Vice President JD Vance, long seen as a potential Trump heir, on Wednesday rushed to blame the sweeping losses on the president's war in Iran.

Sen. Ted Cruz, whose state of Texas saw a historic blue wave, faulted his party for ignoring the economic pain many voters face. And Gov.

Ron DeSantis of Florida, one of the few states where Republicans held the line, called the midterms an "extinction level event for Republicans" that will last beyond 2028. "Once you have the [midterm] election results, that's when like the real literal politicking begins, and you have to move quick," said Matt Gorman, a Republican strategist who worked for the National Republican Congressional Committee and the presidential campaigns of Jeb Bush and Mitt Romney. For the GOP, Tuesday's results will mean spending more money in places such as Texas that the party has traditionally counted on to get their candidates to 270 electoral votes, Keyssar said.

“When the map shifts, the strategies have to shift, and that includes the allocation of money,” he said. For Democrats, the midterms demonstrated that the party should be "investing heavily in the coastal South," said Keneshia Grant, a Howard University political scientist. The party needs to "recognize the moment and meet it," she said, pointing to the unexpectedly close Senate races in Florida and Mississippi.

"If you're the Democratic Party at the national level, you now have to ask yourself different questions about the calculus," Grant said. It is generally difficult to predict the next presidential election outcome based on the results of the preceding midterms, said Justin Grimmer, a political scientist at Stanford University. “Right now there's this incentive or dream of Democrats to think, like, ‘Well, what if this were 2028?

Then it's a landslide.’ And then Republicans are fearful that if this map were to carry forward, that they would get ransacked in ‘28,” Grimmer said. But “it’s hard to know what the major issues are gonna be in 2028, who the candidates are, and what sort of world we’ll be in.”

President Trump has so far declined to endorse a successor, saying it is "too early" to make the call, though he has praised both Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio. "We'll see what happens," Trump said Wednesday. "You can have maybe a lot of people running, maybe nobody is going to run.

I don't know who is going to run." Trump cast doubt on whether Vance would eventually run. But Vance appeared to be signaling 2028 aspiration with a post that pinned the GOP defeats on the Iran conflict launched by Trump this year.

The scale of the midterm losses may be the most useful thing for Republicans moving toward 2028, Gorman argued. “The silver lining is that there’s no silver lining,” Gorman said. That’s because there is nothing to cling to.

“It’s a bottoming-out,” he said, which frees the party to begin “rebuilding conversations.” The larger danger for whoever leads the party next is assuming that Trump’s voters come with the nomination, he argued, saying the 2028 nominee will have to create their own voter coalition. The same applies to Democrats, Gorman said, pointing to Latino voters who swung toward Trump in 2024 and back toward Democrats this year.

Such groups of swing voters, said California Republican consultant Mike Madrid, care about economic and quality-of-life-issues, not culture-war and partisan issues. Madrid said that if he were advising a 2028 presidential contender, he would tell them, “Quit talking about these differences, or at least set these differences in the construct of a class-based, top down model — not a right left model.” With Democrats set for a wide-open presidential primary with a large array of candidates, the sweeping success on Tuesday of the party's populist platform could influence how 2028 contenders run their campaigns.

Democratic leaders in Congress have said they intend to make affordability a centerpiece of their legislative agenda as soon as they take control of both chambers next year. But any measure will still need Trump's signature, setting up an early test of whether Democrats can hand voters tangible results before 2028 — or end up with a stack of vetoes to campaign on instead. "We have won immense amounts of political power, and now it's the most important time in which to deliver," Rep.

Maxwell Frost (D-Fla.) told reporters Wednesday, "so we can keep that political power." Now that voters expect Democrats to clean up the nation's problems in the next session, the party has to ensure that is "backed up by real results" — something anyone who is preparing a 2028 run will need to have in mind, strategist Rob Flaherty said at the Center for American Progress event Thursday.

"That is a huge thing that whoever we nominate has to be thinking about: quick delivery, quick change that people can substantively feel in their lives," Flaherty said. Sen. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.)

, who has not ruled out a presidential run, told reporters Thursday that some states may now be more "swing-ish" and that the Democrats will need to "take in" and analyze Tuesday's data. But, he said, voters' top issues will remain the same. "The candidates ...

that can answer those things authentically and well for the voter," he said, are "going to be the more successful" ones.