Nate Silver Reveals His Pick for Most Likely 2028 Democratic Presidential Nominee

Stephen Lam/San Francisco Chronicle via AP

Statistician and FiveThirtyEight founder Nate Silver is predicting that Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) would become the presidential nominee for the Democratic Party in 2028.

In a video published to his Silver Bulletin newsletter on Wednesday, Silver and former FiveThirtyEight podcast host Galen Druke both chose Ocasio-Cortez as their No. 1 pick for likely 2028 Democratic presidential nominee.

“I think there’s a lot of points in her favor at this very moment,” said Druke. “In a Yale poll just out this week, AOC has the highest net favorability rating of any of the Democrats that they asked about.”

He argued:

So that means that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has broad appeal across the Democratic Party and there’s a lot of people who could potentially get on board with her. But I think equally important is the fact that she has very fervent support. I think a lot of people are gonna run in 2028 and it’s going to be a contest for attention and getting those sort of people who might be in your boat to turn out and stay with you through thick and thin, and I think that’s Ocasio-Cortez. Like, the media is kind of obsessed with her, and they’re going to follow her every move, which means she will be able to keep the attention on her throughout the primary process.

Silver replied, “I agree with everything. She was going to be my first pick, and I can’t conceal that now, right? Because of some of the polling; because she has this kind of progressive lane, probably not to herself; because she is younger and media savvy. I mean, look, in polls, if she were to try to primary Chuck Schumer, she is now ahead in those polls and New York Democrats are actually a pretty moderate bloc.”

After Silver added, however, that he was not yet sure whether Ocasio-Cortez would even run, Druke said, “I think she’s gonna run. If you’ve been following her moves in terms of her ‘Fight Oligarchy’ tour, in terms of the kind of content she’s putting out on social media.”

He continued:

Also, she has learned a lot as a politician since those early days of opposing Amazon, and especially those early days of the “Abolish IC” stuff that was very unpopular ultimately. You listen to her message today, it’s all about the economy, and she’s really hitting Trump on I think his most obvious weakness most quickly, which is the number of billionaires in his cabinet, he seems to be serving– like playing to the tech elite, and serving people who are ultimately not the median voter in America. And I think one advantage which she has in a Democratic primary is that, as a woman of color, she’s not forced to talk about identity all the time because she’s sort of self-evidently different from any of the like white guys running, and she doesn’t have to prove her bonafides there. At the same time, I think progressives have learned like stick to the economic message because what you have to say about those social and cultural state of affairs in America broadly isn’t popular, and I think she knows that.

For their second most-likely Democratic presidential nominee, both Silver and Druke chose Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro. Druke’s pick for the third most-likely nominee was former Vice president Kamala Harris, while Silver chose Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ).