Four names stand out in the earliest serious look at the race for the White House in 2028. A new Reuters/Ipsos poll puts Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio at the front of the Republican field, with Senator Jon Ossoff of Georgia and former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg leading the Democrats.
None of the four has formally launched a campaign, and the parties’ nominating contests are more than a year away, leaving plenty of room for new contenders to emerge and for voters’ views to change.
Among Republicans, 45% of those polled rated Rubio an “excellent” presidential candidate, with 43% saying the same of Vance. Among Democrats, Ossoff and Buttigieg each earned that rating from 29% of the party’s voters. The poll surveyed 1,705 adults across the United States, including roughly 500 registered voters from each party, and was completed on Monday. Its margin of error was five percentage points for voters of each party.
President Donald Trump looms large over the conversation on both sides. His approval rating sits near the lowest of his career, and Republicans are divided over whether his successor should break with him or follow in his footsteps. Democrats, buoyed by routing Republicans in the congressional elections on 3 November, are divided over how aggressively to pursue the president, including through impeachment.
Trump has asked allies whether they prefer Vance or Rubio, and told CBS’s “60 Minutes” on Sunday that he would “not necessarily” endorse a candidate in the Republican primary.
Growing dissatisfaction with Trump among Republicans is centred on his decision to launch a war on Iran, which has driven fuel prices higher. Vance has publicly blamed the midterm drubbing on the war, while Rubio — despite being the nation’s top diplomat — has been notably absent from many of the so-far fruitless peace talks with Iran.
One Republican voter polled, Barbara Rezner, an attorney in Florida who voted for Trump in the last three presidential elections, said she preferred Rubio over Vance, whom she considered 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,” she said.
Among Democrats, 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, who ran for president in 2020, 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 did not know who Rubio was. Name recognition early in a cycle can save a campaign money, though little-known candidates have caught fire before, as former President Bill Clinton did.
A dozen or so other Republicans are also in the national conversation. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is among the best regarded, with 32% of Republicans rating him an excellent option. Donald Trump Jr. and Texas Senator Ted Cruz have their fans, but also many detractors.
Among Democrats, other well-known moderates — former Vice President Kamala Harris, who lost to Trump in the 2024 election, and California Governor Gavin Newsom — each earned “excellent candidate” ratings of 23%, ahead of the 15% given to progressive stalwart Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a representative for New York.
Ocasio-Cortez told CNN after the midterms that impeaching Trump should be an option on the table, while Buttigieg told the New Yorker he was “not very interested” in impeachment.
Democratic strategist Elaine Kamarck cautioned against reading too much into the public’s current views this far out from the 2028 election. “It’s a world away,” she 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.”
Sources: Reuters — “Vance, Rubio, Ossoff and Buttigieg lead 2028 White House hopefuls, Reuters/Ipsos poll finds” (https://www.reuters.com/world/us/vance-rubio-ossoff-buttigieg-lead-2028-white-house-hopefuls-reutersipsos-poll-2026-11-12/)
