WASHINGTON, DC – 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 November 9, had a margin of error of 5 percentage points for Republican and Democratic voters.
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, Reuters said.
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 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, Reuters noted.
Buttigieg and Ossoff are considered moderates among Democrats.
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.
@India-West
