I was watching bits of Senator Jon Ossoff’s debate with Republican Mike Collins the other night, which featured Ossoff saying things like this:

The debate had a lot of Democrats buzzing: Ossoff is a young, charismatic white guy from a swing state, and therefore already on the short list of 2028 presidential nominees. This is the sort of performance that gets the chattering class excited. 

The debate even excited some on the left, despite Ossoff’s reputation as a pretty milquetoast centrist – he has a mixed record on immigration enforcement and Israel, among other things, and just last year was touting his reputation as the Senate’s most bipartisan member. 

This got me thinking a bit about what we’re actually looking for in a presidential candidate in 2028. Arguably the most rhetorically exciting candidates – the ones standing up to Republicans loudly and clearly – are some of the most substantively uninspiring. Gavin Newsom has spent the last couple of years openly confronting Trump, but he also spent the aftermath of the 2024 election hobnobbing with Charlie Kirk and opposing trans rights, and has recently focused on kowtowing to billionaires.

But Newsom, despite being fairly awful across several major issues, has an obvious appeal for many Democratic voters. He seems to understand the scope and scale of the political moment, at least more than some of his peers. He spearheaded the California redistricting effort and signed legislation to unmask ICE agents. He challenged the deployment of the National Guard in Los Angeles. There is, for lack of a better term, some fight in him. Ossoff’s record isn’t so robust, but his rhetoric evinces an understanding that the modern GOP is an out and out white supremacist organization. That’s the sort of thing that should be a baseline position in 2028.

In other words, Newsom and Ossoff seem to have a decent recognition of this political moment. And that’s important, because there’s reason to believe that moment recognition will be just as important as policy come 2029. Trump has, almost exclusively through executive orders, restructured much of the federal government and reoriented how it engages with both Americans and the rest of the world. I’m concerned that the next Democratic president will attempt to undo the damage with his own set of executive orders and call it a day. That won’t be nearly enough. We’ll need someone who understands the stakes. 

As such, I’m proposing a simple scientific framework for evaluating candidates: the politics/moment recognition axis, which measures the quality of a candidate’s politics against their recognition of our current moment. A visual portrayal is below:

As you can see, Gavin Newsom and Jon Ossoff occupy the lower right portion of the graph: weak on politics, but medium to high on moment recognition. For comparison I have also charted Joe Biden, who is slightly better politically but has historically low moment recognition. I’ve also charted John Fetterman.