The losers and lunatics battling it out to lead the Democrats

In today’s Democratic Party, nothing succeeds like failure. According to a recent poll tracker, the preferred candidates to contest the 2028 presidential election are a host of proven losers. Kamala Harris is the No1 choice, followed by Pete Buttigieg, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Cory Booker and, of course, the slickest of all the failures, California governor Gavin Newsom.

Far less popular, it seems, are candidates who might appeal beyond the party faithful. Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro, who has cross-party support in his state, registered less than a quarter of the support banked by Harris among Democrats nationally. Other Democrats with a greater potential for success include Kentucky governor Andrew Beshear and Maryland’s Wes Moore, yet both of them failed to even break into the poll.

For most Democrats, as Ruy Teixeira notes, ‘the progressive moment’ has not ended, despite all evidence to the contrary. This has been made clear by their reluctance to denounce the recent riots in Los Angeles. A recent poll found that Ocasio-Cortez – who simultaneously downplayed the riots and blamed them on Donald Trump – is most likely to be considered the ‘face’ of the Democratic Party, followed by Bernie Sanders and foul-mouthed Texas congresswoman Jasmine Crockett. This sounds like a potential dream team… for the Republicans.

Democrats pose as upholding ‘fundamental values’, as Newsom puts it. Essentially, this means forsaking public safety and defending criminals and violent protesters. Harris has even insisted, contrary to all evidence, that those LA protests were ‘overwhelmingly peaceful’. Even though most who participated only exercised their rights, the demonstrations provided cover for the keffiyeh-wearing, Mexican-flag-waving mob. In the bizarro world of the current Democratic Party, the police (in 2020) and the National Guard (in 2025) are responsible for the unrest, rather than the politically driven militants.

So far, the only internal pushback from this fraught stance comes from senator John Fetterman and some newly elected Democratic mayors, like San Francisco’s Daniel Lurie. Unlike most Democrats, this small group is aware of the primacy of law enforcement as a pillar of democratic order, and they know that to be seen to be embracing violence, particularly from people in the US illegally, is electorally disastrous outside the deep-blue lunatic zones. Yet if current trends are anything to go by, their relative sanity will condemn them to an unsuccessful career in the Democratic Party.

The reigning queen of upwards failure is Kamala Harris. The former vice-president and 2024 presidential candidate is so inept that she lost to an unpopular Trump, despite her campaign vastly out-spending his and enjoying a compliant media. Unsurprisingly, California seems ready to anoint her as the next governor, despite her repeated inability to win in competitive elections.

The one thing that can be said about Ocasio-Cortez is that she hasn’t lost an election yet. Like Harris, she also benefits from massively favourable coverage from mostly progressive millennial-dominated media. The fact that her NYC district suffers from high crime while she has been an advocate of defunding the police – a strategy now widely discredited and considered a boon to the criminal class – might bother her constituents, but not, apparently, her.

But is she successful? Her much-hyped Green New Deal was never taken up, which may prove a blessing in disguise. Once AOC’s positions on Net Zero, Israel and raising taxes become more widely known, it’s unlikely there will be a groundswell of support for her beyond the left. She is also fortunate not to have a record in government to defend – which, if her allied candidates are anything to go by, would be abysmal.

No one epitomises the Democrats’ governance failures more than Gavin Newsom. Having helped turn the wonderful city of San Francisco into a hellhole populated by homeless criminals and lunatics over his seven-year tenure as mayor, he then turned his attention to the entire state. The slick Californian governor has saddled the state with very high levels of indebtedness, a grossly distorted housing market and ever-rising levels of outward migration. Crime, drug use and homelessness have all sky-rocketed under Newsom.

If the Democratic elite can screw up America’s most favoured state, imagine the wonders it can do for the rest of the country. California is both home to the highest number of billionaires and has the highest poverty rate. Nearly one in five Californians – many working – lives in poverty. Even California’s all-too-patient voters, according to a recent poll, want Newsom to focus more on the state’s myriad crises, and less on preening on the national stage.

Until recently, Newsom had been trying to reposition himself towards the centre on issues like homelessness and energy. He even suggested curbing free medical care for undocumented migrants. But since the LA riots, he has once again presented himself as the leader of the anti-Trump ‘Resistance’. Blaming Trump for everything, from mass lawlessness to budget deficits in his own state, may appeal to Democratic advocates and their media claque, but this represents a dereliction of Newsom’s duties. Remarkably, according to oddsmakers, Newsom’s handling of the riots – that is, his non-handling of them – has actually increased his chances of gaining the Democratic nomination in 2028.

Persistent failure doesn’t seem to be hurting the chances of former transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg, either. He polled second in that recent survey. His record in office was abysmal, spending billions to achieve little. Despite allocating $7.5 billion for electric-vehicle charging points, the Biden administration constructed just eight in two years – some 499,992 chargers short of the target.

In office, Buttigieg oversaw numerous disasters, like the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore harbour, a failed $42 billion broadband debacle and the deterioration of the air-traffic control system. Under him, the roads continued to decay while train projects, notably the California high-speed rail line, suffered embarrassing cost overruns. Should he run, the first question any decent reporter will ask is why, as a cabinet member, he said nothing about Joe Biden’s obvious frailty.

It doesn’t get much better from there. Cory Booker once appeared as a pragmatic and promising figure after he was elected in 2006 as mayor of perennially distressed Newark in New Jersey. Yet after a promising start, Newark did not turn around and it remains distressed today. A third of the city’s population lives below the federal poverty line, the unemployment rate is nearly double the national average and the murder rate remains as high as when Booker took office.

Once he was elected to the senate in 2014, Booker left Newark and embarked on his transition into a Resistance fighter. Infamously, he gave the longest speech in the senate’s history, babbling on for an amazing 25 hours about Trump’s policies. Yet it’s hard to see how someone who has so clearly embraced anti-Trump hysteria – and has done so with such theatricality – will appeal to centrist and independent voters.

Another potential candidate being widely discussed is Illinois governor JB Pritzker, who makes Gavin Newsom look like a governing genius. Unlike Newsom, who has to pass the silver cup to his well-heeled donors, billionaire Pritzker can draw on inherited financial resources.

Pritzker proudly calls Illinois America’s ‘most progressive state’. It would be more accurate to call it America’s worst governed. Moody’s gives Illinois the worst credit rating of any state. As he has continued to expand government and raise taxes, Pritzker has presided over an exodus both of elite companies – Tyson Foods, Caterpillar, Boeing and investment firms Citadel and Guggenheim Partners – and residents in general. The Illinois Policy Institute’s text Lincoln Poll found 51 per cent of the voters surveyed would leave the state if they could, with most citing high taxes as the reason.

The Democrats need to find some success stories, and show they can govern, not just lash out at Trump. Yet the importance of good governance seems foreign to most national Democrats. The blue states are failing economically, overrun with crime and driving people away. Until they show some sign of competence, Democrats have limited prospects of beating Trump, JD Vance or whichever MAGA figurehead challenges them for the White House.

Joel Kotkin is a spiked columnist, a presidential fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University in Orange, California, and a senior research fellow at the University of Texas’ Civitas Institute.