By Tim Reid and Jason Lange
WASHINGTON, Nov 12 (Reuters) – Four potential contenders in the 2028 race for the White House have caught American voters’ attention with their early jockeying: Republicans JD Vance and Marco Rubio and Democrats Jon Ossoff and Pete Buttigieg, according to the latest Reuters/Ipsos poll.
None of the four has yet formally launched a campaign and the parties’ 2028 nominating contests are more than a year away, leaving plenty of time for new contenders to emerge and for voters’ views to change.
Some 45% of Republican voters polled said they believed Secretary of State Rubio would be an “excellent” presidential candidate, with 43% saying the same of Vice President Vance. Former Transportation Secretary Buttigieg and US Senator Ossoff, of Georgia, each got that rating from 29% of Democratic voters.
The poll, which surveyed 1,705 US adults nationwide including roughly 500 registered voters from each party and was completed on Monday, had a margin of error of 5 percentage points for Republican and Democratic voters.
President Donald Trump, struggling with an approval rating 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 flying high after routing Republicans in the November 3 congressional elections, are divided on how aggressively to go after the president, such as through impeachment.
Trump 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.
‘MANAGED TO DO HIS JOB’
Barbara Rezner, an attorney in Florida who voted for Trump in the last three presidential elections, said she prefers Rubio over Vance, whom she considers too far to the right and too close to the president.
“Rubio has managed to do his job. He’s stayed off most people’s radar because he hasn’t done anything too far left, too far right, too crazy,” Rezner said.
The modest but growing dissatisfaction with Trump among Republicans is centered on the president’s 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. 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.
A dozen-odd other Republicans are also in the national conversation over 2028 contenders, with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis among the best regarded, with 32% of Republicans rating him as an excellent option. Others – like Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr., and Texas US Senator Ted Cruz – have their fans, but also many detractors.
OSSOFF AND BUTTIGIEG
Among Democrats, Ossoff is at the top of many voters’ lists, with 29% of the party’s registered voters rating him as excellent. 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 2 points in 2024.
Buttigieg also gets the excellent 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 to 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. For candidates in either party, starting the election cycle with more name recognition can save money that would be spent getting the candidate’s name out, but examples abound of little-known candidates catching fire during the campaign, as happened with former President Bill Clinton.
Buttigieg and Ossoff are considered moderates among Democrats, and that appeals to Democratic voters like Ed Blair, a retired pig farmer in southern Illinois, who gives Buttigieg a better rating in part because Ossoff is less familiar.
“I do favor the more moderate candidates over the more progressive ones,” said Blair, who is wary of proposed major shifts like expanding federal Medicare health insurance coverage from all seniors to everyone in the country. Blair would prefer gradual shifts, such as expanding Medicare to cover all children. “In going towards some of the progressive policies, small steps need to be taken rather than large ones to give people time to adapt.”
The Reuters/Ipsos poll shows other well-known moderates – like 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%, higher than the 15% of Democrats who view progressive stalwart Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a US representative for 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 is “not very interested” in impeachment.
Elaine Kamarck, a Democratic strategist, 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.”
(Reporting by Tim Reid and Jason Lange; Editing by Scott Malone and Alistair Bell)
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