Is There a Left Candidate for President?

The race for 2028 is already starting, and progressives are all asking one question: Who will take up the left’s mantle in the next presidential election? 

An obvious first choice for many self-described leftists, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., has said she is seriously considering a run. Ocasio-Cortez laid the groundwork for a potential presidential bid rooted in economic populism and “fighting oligarchy” while campaigning alongside Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., for midterm candidates around the country this cycle. 

Democratic strategists, however, have pointed out it would be far easier for Ocasio-Cortez to run for Democratic New York Sen. Chuck Schumer’s seat in 2028; and it’s even possible the 75-year-old presumptive majority leader will retire.

There isn’t a clear pick for another Democratic candidate with star power who could mount a truly progressive campaign — presenting the left with the threat of losing the momentum that fueled a democratic socialist wave during the primaries and animated campaigns across the ideological spectrum on Tuesday. 

That, said her former spokesperson Lauren Hitt, is not Ocasio-Cortez’s problem.

“I think the wrong reason to run would be because nobody else is running in the progressive lane,” said Hitt, who now advises progressive and moderate candidates. “She has made a lot of good investments in the midterms and in helping build up the progressive bench, but it was not her job to make sure we had another person to run.”

(Representatives for Ocasio-Cortez did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

So if Ocasio-Cortez doesn’t run from the left, who will?

The Field So Far

Candidates exploring potential presidential bids include a few newer faces alongside a very similar cast of moderates who campaigned for the Democratic nomination in the 2016 and 2020 primaries.

Names like New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker, former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, and even the party’s former nominee Kamala Harris are making the rounds; Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., has also laid the groundwork for a run. The recently reelected Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro has long been viewed as a potential contender, as has Georgia Sen. Jon Ossoff, though he said last month he’s not planning on a run.

None of them are people you would necessarily liken to someone like Ocasio-Cortez or the grandfather of the movement behind her, Sanders himself.

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Rep. Ro Khanna of California is so far the most “progressive” person openly considering a run. Khanna served as national co-chair of Sanders’s 2020 presidential campaign, and he’s long been a voice for an anti-interventionist foreign policy. He drew the ire of tech billionaires for supporting a wealth tax in California. 

Yet there’s a palpable skepticism around Khanna among leftists, even if they can’t quite put their finger on why. Some weren’t impressed when he defended his support for funding Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system after publicizing an arrest in the West Bank earlier this year. (Khanna later came out against funding the Iron Dome). And as a multimillionaire, he’s also drawn criticism from the right and the left for his personal wealth.

Like Ocasio-Cortez, Khanna has said he will back Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., for House Speaker despite pledges from other candidates to withhold their support for either Jeffries or Schumer, both moderates, for leadership positions next session. 

Leveraging Economic Populism

It’s still incredibly early, but there’s one unifying theme emerging from Tuesday’s results for whichever candidate decides to try to court the progressive vote.

“All I know is that the populist lane is wide open for someone to seize it,” said Ravi Mangla, the spokesperson for the Working Families Party. 

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Victories over the past two years, from Zohran Mamdani’s election as mayor of New York City to the clutch of democratic socialists and progressives heading to Congress in January, show that Democrats can marshal discontent with Donald Trump and the far right to elect candidates running on progressive policies.

”Voters were very clear: People are very, very angry,” said Greg Krieg, a progressive Democratic strategist who works with Slingshot Strategies and is the spokesperson for the pro-Palestine super PAC American Priorities. “There is a focus on economic populism that transcends the ideological splits in the party.”

With the rising cost of living, and candidates tapping into that populism, the question for progressives is how to best wield the blue version of economic populism against the right-wing version that powered Trump’s rise. 

“Right-wing populism didn’t really defeat left-wing populism, it just ran against a kind of corporate slop for many years,” Krieg said. 

This era’s new “kitchen table” issues are a constellation of economic woes that voters are increasingly connecting to the forces concentrating wealth and political power in the hands of the few. Democrats should respond to that by fighting, visibly, against the things that take money out of people’s pockets, corruption and price-gouging among them, Krieg said. 

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“I think that the American people, if they are presented a choice of right-wing populism and left-wing populism, will opt for the left-wing populism,” Krieg said. “And I think that’s quadruply true now that we’ve done the right-wing populism experiment and it’s been such a fiasco — so let’s give them that option.” 

The factors influencing how Democrats approach 2028 are taking shape now. They include the debate over who will lead the party in the House and Senate, though any effort to stop Schumer or Jeffries from leading roles would face long odds. And how Democrats fare in the next presidential race will depend in large part on what they do with their control of Congress during the last two years of Trump’s final term in office.

DSA Endorsement?

Then there is the group that helped power the rise of Ocasio-Cortez, Mamdani, the next mayors of Washington and Los Angeles, and the largest incoming bloc of socialist members of Congress in history: the Democratic Socialists of America.

Any candidate that gets buy-in from DSA will have to support policies like Medicare for All, taxing the rich, a Green New Deal, and an embargo on U.S. arms to Israel. DSA, which endorsed both Sanders’s 2016 and 2020 primary bids, is running a presidential exploratory committee that will eventually vote to endorse a candidate after collecting input from its members. 

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DSA passed a resolution to explore a 2028 endorsement at its national convention last year. And there isn’t necessarily a consensus among its members — more than 125,000 people across 130 chapters in 43 states — on whether or not they want to see Ocasio-Cortez run, said Ella Teevan, who chairs the group’s presidential exploratory group and sits on its National Political Committee.

“The Bernie case feels just a little bit different because I think the membership was a little bit more united around Bernie, although by no means unanimously,” Teevan said. “If and when we do consider an AOC endorsement, hers will be a little bit more contentious. But like I said, that’s the beauty of DSA.”

Though Ocasio-Cortez is no shoo-in, DSA members haven’t coalesced around any other candidate — and it’s not clear they will. 

“I know that there are other quote-unquote progressives who might be considering a presidential run in 2028, but I think it’s really clear for us that they need to support DSA’s core demands that most people in the United States support,” Teevan said. 

“If a candidate were to come along who supported those policies, I think a considerable portion of membership would think about whether we should endorse them,” she said. “But yeah, I don’t think that there’s a natural other person with name recognition in the field that, at least, I can think of right now.”

And there may yet be candidates who enter the race who aren’t yet on the radar, said Hitt, Ocasio-Cortez’s former spokesperson: “It’s totally possible there’s a progressive champion who could fill that lane that we aren’t even thinking of yet.”

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