Which 2028 Democrats have the best electoral track record?

Hint: Not Gavin Newsom.

Ruben Gallego won Arizona in 2024 while Kamala Harris lost by more than five points. Mario Tama/Getty Images.

Before a short-ish newsletter today, a quick announcement. I’ll have another live show with my former FiveThirtyEight colleagues Galen Druke and Clare Malone at Comedy Cellar at 6 p.m. on Wed, March 4. You can buy tickets here. Last time, we conducted a Democratic 2028 candidate draft — so this time, we’ll tackle the Republicans. Plus, cover whatever crazy stories are circulating in the news. Honestly, the past few shows have been some of my favorite nights of the year, and the audience always seems to have fun. Come join us!

---

The New York Times interviewed me today about my vantage point at this early stage of the 2028 nomination race. Some of it is stuff you’ve probably heard before if you’re a Silver Bulletin regular, like how I think Gavin Newsom is the closest thing to a frontrunner.

However, this is not an endorsement of Newsom. We don’t make endorsements, and in fact, my prediction of what Democrats will do isn’t that correlated with what I think they should do if they want to maximize their chances of reclaiming the White House.

Don’t get me wrong, I think any basically reasonable Democrat could win, as I discussed in the Times story:

First, incumbents have been in a very bad way in the United States and around the world for several cycles now. It might almost be an advantage to be the party out of power.

And second, I expect Republicans to have a lot of trouble agreeing on a candidate who is not Donald Trump. They’ve done quite badly in the Trump era in nonpresidential elections.

Still, based on his electoral track record, I also don’t think Newsom would be a particularly good nominee as compared to someone like Ruben Gallego, Raphael Warnock, Andy Beshear, Gretchen Whitmer, or Josh Shapiro — and honestly, a lot of others, too. In this post, I just want to provide some data to back up that assertion.

Newsom, like Harris, consistently underperforms other Democrats

Isn’t Gavin Newsom a winner? He certainly looks like one — and I’ll grant that his decision to put a partisan redistricting initiative on the ballot last year was a big success. Polls tend to show that Democratic voters see Newsom as “electable”. Indeed, Newsom has never lost an election, having advanced up the Golden State ladder from the San Francisco Board of Supervisors to Governor of California.

But you know who else had never lost an election prior to 2024? Kamala Harris.

Yep, that’s right. Granted, Harris probably would have lost most if not all of the Democratic primaries and caucuses she entered had she remained on the ballot in her 2020 nomination campaign. But technically speaking, it’s true: Harris twice won elections for San Francisco District Attorney, twice for Attorney General, once for U.S. Senate, and once for vice president — until she lost every swing state to Trump.

Of course, it’s not hard to win as a Democrat in California. And if you’d looked at Harris’s margins relative to other Democrats, you’d have had good reason for skepticism. In 2010, for instance, she very nearly lost the AG race in California, prevailing by just 0.8 points. There were seven other partisan statewide races on the ballot that year¹, and Democrats won them by margins ranging from 10 points (U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer was reelected by that margin) to 20.3 (State Treasurer Bill Lockyer). Newsom also did better than Harris, for that matter, winning his race for Lieutenant Governor by 11.2 points — although that was less than Jerry Brown’s reelection margin (12.9 points) for the top job.

We can also compare Newsom and Harris against the margins achieved by Democratic presidential candidates in California. For instance, Newsom’s five margins in statewide races are: +11.2 points (2010), +14.4 (2014, his re-election as lieutenant governor), +23.9 (his first run as governor in 2018), +23.8 (the 2021 recall election) and +18.4 (in his last race in 2022). However, in the five presidential elections from 2008 through 2024, Democrats won California by an average of 25.3 points, better than any of Newsom’s finishes.

Newsom hasn’t been at any risk of losing in California, but he’s consistently been underperforming the presidential benchmark.²

Introducing SB Scores

Let’s try to systemize this. Clare, Galen and I selected 18 Democrats in our Democratic primary “draft” last month. One of them was the comedian Jon Stewart, who has never run for office. But for the other 17, we can compare their electoral track records against Democratic presidential candidates in their states or districts.

For instance, Gallego was elected to the U.S Senate in Arizona by 2.4 points in 2024, while Harris lost to Trump there by 5.5 points. That’s a spread of 7.9 points in favor of Gallego. We’ll call this his Simple Benchmark Score or SB Score.³

If the candidate’s race didn’t happen in a presidential year, there’s a fairly straightforward workaround: we can look at the average of presidential years that immediately preceded and followed it. For instance, Whitmer was reelected by 10.5 points in 2022. By comparison, Joe Biden won Michigan by 2.8 points in 2020, while Harris lost it by 1.4 points in 2024.

Yes, this is conceptually related to the “wins above replacement” type methodologies that some other sites publish. I like some of those methods, like the one at Split Ticket, and don’t like others so much. SB Scores aren’t meant to compete with those; rather, they’re deliberately simple. The goal is just transparency here.⁴

There is one more adjustment that isn’t quite so simple, but I think is worth making. In cases where we have to compare presidential years to non-presidential years to get our SB Score, we’ll account for changes in the background political environment, as measured by the aggregate popular vote for the U.S. House. For instance, 2012 was a pretty good year for Democrats, while 2014 was a rough one. So in benchmarking a Democrat’s performance in 2014 against Obama’s in 2012, we’ll correct for that.⁵

One last ground rule. For these 17 candidates, I’ve listed every federal (U.S. Senate or U.S. House) and statewide race where the general election featured exactly one Democrat and exactly one Republican. In other words, I didn’t look at uncontested races, races where the general election was between two Democrats, races where the Democrat was only facing a Libertarian, races where there were multiple Republicans, and so on. I also didn’t look at things like mayoral races or state legislature.

Ready? Here’s every qualifying race I could find for these candidates, who are sorted in the table by the order in which we drafted them.

A few quick notes on these:

• Beshear and Amy Klobuchar have had probably the most consistently impressive results. True, in Beshear’s case, Southern states can have a soft spot for Democrats in statewide offices that they won’t get replicated for federal offices like Senate or president. But if there’s a Mr. Electability in the 2028 field, it should be him, not Newsom.

• Gallego was beating his presidential baselines in his House races even before he reached the Senate in 2024. His Arizona colleague Mark Kelly also had a notably high SB Score (+10.4) in his 2022 re-election.

• Shapiro got a terrific +18.0 SB Score in 2022, though it came against an awful Republican candidate. But he was also positive in his two wins for Attorney General.

• For Whitmer, the 2022 re-election margin was very impressive; her 2018 result was good too, but came with more of a tailwind at Democrats’ back in an anti-Trump midterm.

• Although I had some praise for Jon Ossoff in the NYT interview, Warnock’s SB Scores are actually slightly better. Ossoff’s aren’t bad, but the 2017 special election in Georgia’s 6th congressional district that put him on the map — even though he lost — doesn’t look so impressive in retrospect given that the district was trending hard blue, and Lucy McBath would win it outright in 2018.

• Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s SB Scores are decent, with two plus years and two minus years. You can make critiques of her electability, and maybe she’s a very Queens-specific type of candidate, but her performances in her district have been fine to good.

• As discussed here, Pete Buttigieg’s mayoral races in South Bend would score reasonably well, but they’re outside of our scope. His one statewide race for Indiana State Treasurer in 2010 does not get a good rating, however. While I’m of the view that more moderate candidates are generally more electable, what you’d really like to see is proof of concept in the form of a signature big win or two. You have that with candidates like Gallego, Whitmer and Shapiro, but not really with Mayor Pete.

1. Not counting an election for a nonpartisan office, Superintendent of Public Education.

2. Harris was, of course, the Democratic presidential nominee in California in 2024, with a margin of “just” 20.1 points, following roughly 30-point Democratic wins in 2016 and 2020. But Newsom’s last re-election in 2022 was actually worse, at +18.4 points.

3. Not coincidentally, SB Score could also be a reference to Silver Bulletin.

4. We eventually will get fancier, of course, but that will take the form of our election model.

5. In 2012, Democrats won the House popular vote by 1 point, while in 2014 they lost it by 5.7 points — in other words, a 6.7-point swing. So, for instance, in applying Obama’s 2012 performance in a state or district as a benchmark for a 2014 candidate, we’d subtract a net of 6.7 points from Obama’s margin in the state or district to account for deterioration in the political climate for Democrats.