4 potential candidates for the 2028 presidential election stand out in a new poll

WASHINGTON, Nov 12 (Reuters) – Four potential candidates in the race for the White House in 2028 have caught the attention of American voters with their early maneuvers: Republicans JD Vance and Marco Rubio and Democrats Jon Ossoff and Pete Buttigieg, according to the latest Reuters/Ipsos poll.

None of the four have yet officially launched campaigns and the 2028 party nomination elections are more than a year away, leaving plenty of time for new candidates to emerge and voters’ opinions to change.

Some 45 percent of Republican voters surveyed said they thought Secretary of State Rubio would be an “excellent” presidential candidate, and 43 percent said the same of Vice President Vance. Former Transportation Secretary Buttigieg and U.S. Sen. Ossoff of Georgia each received that rating from 29 percent of Democratic voters.

The poll, conducted Monday among 1,705 U.S. adults nationwide, including about 500 registered voters from each party, had a margin of error of 5 percentage points for both Republican and Democratic voters.

President Donald Trump, struggling with approval ratings near the lowest of his career, looms large over the conversation for both parties. Republicans are divided on whether they want a candidate who breaks with Trump or follows in his footsteps, while Democrats, who are riding high after routing Republicans in the Nov. 3 congressional elections, are divided on how aggressively to go after the president, such as through impeachment.

Trump polled allies on whether they preferred Vance or Rubio and, in an interview Sunday with CBS’s “60 Minutes,” said he would “not necessarily” throw his support behind the Republican primary.

“SUCCEEDED IN DOING HIS JOB”

Barbara Rezner, a Florida lawyer who voted for Trump in the last three presidential elections, said she prefers Rubio to Vance, whom she considers too right-wing and too close to the president.

“Rubio was able to do his job. He stayed off most people’s radars because he didn’t do anything too left, too right, too crazy,” Rezner said.

Republicans’ small but growing dissatisfaction with Trump centers on the president’s decision to launch a war against Iran that drove up fuel prices. Rubio has been notably absent from most of the so-far unsuccessful peace talks with Iran, despite being the country’s top diplomat. Vance has also shown signs of willingness to distance himself, publicly saying that the Republican defeat in the midterm elections was due to the war with Iran.

A dozen other Republicans are also participating in national discussions of 2028 candidates, with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis among the most favored, with 32% of Republicans viewing him as a strong option. Others — like Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr., and Texas U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz — have their fans, but also many detractors.

Among Democrats, Ossoff tops many voter lists, with 29 percent of the party’s registered voters rating him excellent. Ossoff has made headlines in recent months by calling Trump corrupt and unfit for office in unusually blunt language, and last week he won re-election by 18 percentage points in Georgia, a state Trump carried by 2 points in 2024.

Buttigieg also gets a high rating from 29% of Democrats. Buttigieg also ran for president in 2020 and is better known nationally than Ossoff.

About one in five Democrats say they have never heard of Buttigieg, compared with about one in three who say the same about Ossoff. Very few Republicans don’t know Vance, but about one in six said they don’t know who Rubio is. For candidates in both parties, starting the election cycle with greater awareness can save money that would be spent on getting the candidate’s name out there, but examples abound of little-known candidates who caught fire during the campaign, as happened with former President Bill Clinton.

Buttigieg and Ossoff are considered moderates among Democrats, which appeals to Democratic voters like Ed Blair, a retired hog farmer from southern Illinois, who gives Buttigieg a higher rating in part because Ossoff is less familiar.

“I favor the more moderate candidates over the more progressive ones,” said Blair, who is wary of proposed major changes, such as extending federal Medicare health insurance coverage to all seniors to everyone in the country. Blair would prefer incremental changes, such as expanding Medicare to cover all children. “In moving toward certain progressive policies, small steps should be taken rather than large steps to give people time to adapt. »

The Reuters/Ipsos poll shows that other well-known moderates – such as former Vice President Kamala Harris, who lost to Trump in the 2024 presidential election, and California Governor Gavin Newsom – each have an “excellent candidate” rating of 23%, more than the 15% of Democrats who consider progressive stalwart Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the US representative in New York, that way.

Ocasio-Cortez told CNN after the midterms that impeaching Trump should be an option on the table, while Buttigieg told the New Yorker magazine he was “not very interested” in impeachment.

Elaine Kamarck, a Democratic strategist, cautioned against reading too much into the public’s current views so far away from the 2028 election. “It’s a world of its own,” Kamarck said. “A lot of people in both parties are still deciding whether they’re going to run. You might be able to predict who’s going to run, but you certainly don’t know who’s going to be in the lead.”