First posted on Instagram · @profilopolitics
A new Reuters/Ipsos poll has offered the first serious snapshot of the 2028 race for the White House, with Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Vice President JD Vance leading the early Republican field and Senator Jon Ossoff of Georgia and former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg tied at the top of the Democratic field.
Among Republican voters, 45% said Rubio would be an "excellent" presidential candidate, with 43% saying the same of Vance — a gap well inside the survey's five-point margin of error. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis was the next best regarded among Republicans, with 32% rating him as excellent.
On the Democratic side, Ossoff and Buttigieg each earned an "excellent" rating from 29% of Democratic voters. Former Vice President Kamala Harris and California Governor Gavin Newsom each drew 23%, while Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York was rated excellent by 15% of Democrats.
The poll surveyed 1,705 adults across the United States, including roughly 500 registered voters from each party. It was conducted November 6-9 and completed on Monday, and it carries a margin of error of five percentage points for Republican and Democratic voters.
The measure is not a head-to-head primary ballot. It asks voters to rate each figure individually, so respondents can speak highly of several potential candidates at once — meaning it captures enthusiasm and familiarity rather than a direct forecast of how a primary would unfold.
None of the four leading names has formally launched a campaign, and the parties' nominating contests are more than a year away, leaving plenty of time for new contenders to emerge and for voters' views to change.
Rubio himself has refused to discuss the race. "I literally will not talk about 2028 anymore," he said, according to Reuters.
President Donald Trump looms large over the conversation for both parties. He has quizzed allies on whom they prefer, Vance or Rubio, and in a Sunday interview with CBS's "60 Minutes" said he would "not necessarily" make an endorsement in the Republican primary.
Republicans are divided on whether they want a candidate who breaks with Trump or follows in his footsteps. The modest but growing dissatisfaction with the president among Republicans is centered on his decision to launch a war on Iran that has driven fuel prices higher. Rubio has been notably absent from many of the so-far fruitless peace talks with Iran despite being the nation's top diplomat, while Vance has shown signs of wanting to distance himself as well, saying publicly that the Republican drubbing in the midterm elections owed to the war with Iran.
Democrats, who routed Republicans in the November 3 congressional elections, are divided on how aggressively to go after the president, including through impeachment. 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 is "not very interested" in impeachment.
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. 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 roughly one in three who say the same about Ossoff. Very few Republicans are unfamiliar with Vance, but about one in six said they do not know who Rubio is.
A dozen or so other Republicans are also in the national conversation over 2028 contenders. Trump's son, Donald Trump Jr., and Texas Senator Ted Cruz have their fans, but also many detractors.
Democratic strategist Elaine Kamarck cautioned against reading too deeply into the public's current views this far out from the 2028 election. "It's a world away," Kamarck said. "There are lots of people in both parties who are still deciding if they are going to run. You might be able to predict who will run, but you certainly don't know anything about who is going to be ahead."