Election Polls: Vance, Rubio Lead 2028 White House Race
The election polls for 2028 are already taking shape, and the first serious reading of the field points to four names. A new Reuters/Ipsos poll finds that Republicans JD Vance and Marco Rubio, and Democrats Jon Ossoff and Pete Buttigieg, have caught the attention of American voters with their early jockeying for the White House. None of the four has formally launched a campaign, and the parties’ nominating contests are more than a year away, but the poll offers the clearest picture yet of who is leading in the polls right now, and of the forces that will shape the race to succeed President Donald Trump.
The numbers are striking for how evenly they split. Among Republican voters, 45 percent said Secretary of State Marco Rubio would be an excellent presidential candidate, and 43 percent said the same of Vice President JD Vance. Among Democratic voters, Senator Jon Ossoff of Georgia and former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg each drew the excellent rating from 29 percent. The poll surveyed 1,705 adults across the country, including roughly 500 registered voters from each party, and was completed on Monday. Its margin of error was five percentage points for Republican and Democratic voters, which means the gaps at the top of each field are narrow and could easily shift.
The poll arrives at a moment of unusual turbulence in American politics. Democrats are flying high after routing Republicans in the November 3 congressional elections, winning control of both the House and the Senate. Trump, meanwhile, is struggling with an approval rating near the lowest of his career. The two facts hang over the 2028 race in opposite ways: for Republicans, the question is whether the next candidate should break with Trump or follow in his footsteps; for Democrats, the question is how aggressively to go after a president their voters have just repudiated.
The Republican field: Rubio and Vance
The Republican contest, as the poll measures it, is a two-man race with a twist. Rubio edges Vance, 45 percent to 43 percent, on the question of who would make an excellent candidate, but the two men could hardly be more different in how they got there. Rubio is the nation’s top diplomat, a secretary of state who has spent the year travelling the world and, by most accounts, keeping a low profile at home. Vance is the vice president, the most visible figure in the administration after Trump himself, and the heir apparent in the eyes of many in the party.
The difference shows up in how voters talk about them. Barbara Rezner, an attorney in Florida who voted for Trump in the last three presidential elections, told Reuters she prefers Rubio over Vance, whom she considers too far to the right and too close to the president. Her reasoning was practical: Rubio, in her view, has managed to do his job without drawing attention to himself, staying clear of the extremes on either side.
But Vance has his own advantages, and the poll suggests they are considerable. Very few Republicans say they are unfamiliar with the vice president, while about one in six say they do not know who Rubio is. In a primary, that kind of recognition is worth a great deal: a candidate who is already known does not have to spend money and time introducing himself to voters.
Vance has shown signs of wanting to distance himself from the administration’s most unpopular decision, the war on Iran, saying publicly that the Republican drubbing in the midterm elections owed to the war. That is a careful piece of positioning. It allows him to present himself as the candidate who learned the lesson of the midterms, while remaining loyal to the president who chose him as his running mate.
A dozen more Republicans in the conversation
Beyond the top two, the poll found a dozen or so other Republicans in the national conversation over 2028 contenders, and the numbers suggest the field is far from settled. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is among the best regarded, with 32 percent of Republicans rating him as an excellent option, a strong showing for a candidate who lost the 2024 primary to Trump. Others, like the president’s son, Donald Trump Jr., and Texas Senator Ted Cruz, have their fans, the poll found, but also many detractors, which is the profile of candidates who can excite a faction without winning a majority.
The depth of the field matters because of the margin of error. With a five-point margin for each party’s voters, the gap between Rubio and Vance is well within the range of statistical noise, and DeSantis is not far behind. The poll is a snapshot of name recognition and first impressions, not a prediction. A candidate who is little known today can catch fire during a campaign, as former President Bill Clinton did when he went from an obscure Arkansas governor to the Democratic nominee.
The Democratic field: Ossoff and Buttigieg
Among Democrats, the poll puts Ossoff at the top of many voters’ lists, with 29 percent of the party’s registered voters rating him as an excellent candidate. Ossoff has grabbed headlines in recent months by calling Trump corrupt and unfit for office in unusually direct language, and last week he won his re-election race by 18 percentage points in Georgia, a state Trump carried by two points in 2024. That combination, a sharp critic of the president who has just proved he can win in a state Trump won, is a powerful one in a party that has spent the last two years arguing about how to fight back.
Buttigieg also gets the excellent rating from 29 percent of Democrats. He ran for president in 2020 and is better known nationally than Ossoff, which gives him a head start in a race where name recognition is, as the poll shows, a real asset. About one in five Democrats say they have never heard of Buttigieg, compared with roughly one in three who say the same about Ossoff. For candidates in either party, starting the cycle with more name recognition can save money that would otherwise be spent getting the candidate’s name out, and Buttigieg has been building that recognition since his first presidential run.
Both men are considered moderates among Democrats, and that appeals to voters like Ed Blair, a retired pig farmer in southern Illinois, who gives Buttigieg a better rating in part because Ossoff is less familiar to him. Blair told Reuters he favours the more moderate candidates over the more progressive ones, and that he is wary of major shifts like expanding federal Medicare coverage from all seniors to everyone in the country. He would prefer gradual change, such as expanding Medicare to cover all children, believing small steps are better than large ones when it comes to giving people time to adapt.
The poll also measured the party’s better-known figures, and the results suggest the field is genuinely open. Former Vice President Kamala Harris, who lost to Trump in the 2024 presidential election, and California Governor Gavin Newsom each get excellent candidate ratings of 23 percent, higher than the 15 percent of Democrats who view progressive stalwart Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez that way. The numbers suggest that, for now at least, the party’s voters are leaning towards the centre rather than the left, and towards candidates who have held high office rather than those who have built their profiles in opposition.
Impeachment and the party’s divide
The sharpest division among Democrats, the poll suggests, is over how aggressively to go after the president. Democrats are divided on the question, the poll found, including whether to pursue impeachment, and the two leading candidates have already taken different positions. Ocasio-Cortez told CNN after the midterms that impeaching Trump should be an option on the table. Buttigieg, by contrast, told the New Yorker magazine that he is not very interested in impeachment.
That difference is not a small one. It goes to the heart of what the Democratic Party is for in the next two years, and it is the question that the party’s voters, fresh from a midterm victory built on anger at the president, will have to answer. The candidates who lead the early polls are, for the moment, the ones who are most cautious on the question.
Elaine Kamarck, a Democratic strategist, cautioned against reading too deeply into the public’s current views this far out from the 2028 election. She described the current picture as a world away from the one that will exist when voting begins, noting that there are lots of people in both parties who are still deciding whether to run. In her view, it may be possible to predict who will run, but it is certainly not possible to know who will be ahead.
What happens next
The first thing to watch is whether any of the four formally launches a campaign, and when. None has done so yet, and the parties’ nominating contests are more than a year away, which leaves plenty of time for new contenders to emerge and for voters’ views to change. The early numbers reward the candidates who are already known, but the history of the last few cycles suggests that the candidate who leads the first polls is rarely the one who wins the nomination.
The second thing to watch is Trump. The president has said he will not necessarily endorse in the Republican primary, but his preferences are well known to his allies, and his quizzing of them about Vance and Rubio suggests he is thinking hard about the succession. If he does endorse, the endorsement will reshape the field overnight. If he does not, the primary will be fought on the question he has left open: whether the party’s future lies with the candidate who follows in his footsteps, or the one who breaks with him.
The third thing to watch is the midterms’ aftermath. The election results that handed Democrats control of Congress have changed the political landscape, and the next two years will be shaped by the investigations, the legislation and the confrontations that follow. The candidates who can navigate that landscape will have an advantage. The swing states that decide control of Congress will also decide the presidential race, and voter turnout in those states will be the prize.
For now, the poll gives the 2028 race a shape: two Republicans at the top of their field, two Democrats at the top of theirs, and a long road ahead. The names may change, and the numbers certainly will. But the questions the poll raises, about Trump, about the war, about the pace of change and about the direction of each party, are the questions that will define the campaign. The race has begun, even if no one has formally entered it.
Source: Reuters