Why Policy Will Make a Comeback in 2028

By Philip Klein

Thursday, November 12, 2026

 

With the midterms now behind us, the political world has already shifted to speculation about the next presidential race. While I am not quite ready to make any horse race bets, I will venture to make an even bolder prediction: 2028 will be the election when policy makes a comeback.

 

At risk of being accused of romanticizing the past, I will freely acknowledge that there was never any golden age in which presidential campaigns were focused on sober-minded discussions about the finer points of policy. Go back through the decades, and in every election, you will find complaints about how elections were much more focused on personalities and trivial matters than serious issues.

 

In the 1950s, liberals complained that the Ivy League–educated Adlai Stevenson was soundly beaten by Dwight Eisenhower not based on his substantive ideas for the nation but because of Eisenhower’s wartime persona and the simple “I Like Ike” messaging. Republicans of a certain age would regularly argue that people who listened to the first 1960 presidential debate on the radio thought that Richard Nixon had won, yet John F. Kennedy benefited from the event because he came off better on the relatively new medium of television. Democrats have long lamented the effectiveness of Ronald Reagan’s “There you go again” response to Jimmy Carter’s attack on his past opposition to Medicare, or of George W. Bush’s “fuzzy math” dismissal of Al Gore’s attacks on his tax and economic plans.

 

Having said all that, I’d also note that when I first began covering politics in the early part of this century, campaigns were much more focused on policy proposals by the competing candidates than they have been in recent elections. It was expected that every serious presidential candidate would have policy proposals on all the key issues. Over the course of the primaries and general election, they would release a tax plan, an energy plan, a health-care plan, and so forth. Their announcements were carefully rolled out by the major campaigns, with press releases, briefings with policy advisers, interviews, speeches, and endorsements from outside experts. Sure, their ideas were often light on details, scrutinized by think tankers and policy journalists for not fully adding up, but they would typically trigger a debate among the campaigns on policy matters.

 

When Republicans sought to retake Congress in 1994, they unveiled the “Contract with America”; Haley Barbour, the RNC chairman at the time, later wrote a policy book titled Agenda for America. In a matter of a few years, Paul Ryan went from being a representative known mainly to Washington conservatives to becoming the vice-presidential nominee — largely on the basis of his detailed budget proposals. On the Democratic side, a central part of the protracted race between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama in 2008 revolved around relatively minor differences in their health-care proposals (at the time, Obama was opposed to the individual mandate).

 

Over the past decade, however, policy proposals have largely vanished from presidential campaigns. Two big blows came from President Trump and Senator Elizabeth Warren, in different ways.

 

Since Trump entered politics in 2015, most of our national arguments have focused on whatever Trump was saying or doing at a given time. He calculated, correctly, that most people don’t care about detailed white papers from candidates. He would sometimes outline plans using one-page sheets filled with a few bullet points, but mostly kept repeating a few marquee pledges such as building the wall and having Mexico pay for it or “No tax on tips.”

 

In contrast, Elizabeth Warren ran in 2020 on the slogan, “I have a plan for that.” Her dizzying array of proposals made her the favorite of left-wing journalists even though a closer examination of her plans made it clear that they relied on trickery and ignored constitutional questions. Either way, it turned out that releasing detailed plans on many issues did little to attract voters, while it did leave her open to many attacks. Her campaign began unraveling by the fall of 2019 as she tried to explain how she would pay for her $34 trillion health-care proposal without raising taxes on the middle class.

 

Given this recent history, is there any reason to believe that 2028 candidates will want to start unveiling policy proposals again?

 

Perhaps the biggest reason is that Trump himself will not be on the ballot. No other candidate will have his ability to rile people up to debate, say, whether to take Greenland, whether immigrants are eating people’s pets, whether it should be called “artificial intelligence” or “super intelligence,” or any number of other policy-free controversies he has created.

 

But another key reason is that in both parties, a genuine ideological debate is happening.

 

With the wind at their sails from 2026, a lot of Democrats are going to feel confident enough in their ability to retake the White House, and as a result, many of their primary voters are likely to prioritize ideological alignment over electability, which they will view as all but assured.

 

There is going to be a huge debate over whether Zohran Mamdani–style socialism is where the energy of the party should be or whether the nominee should be progressive in a more incrementalist sort of way. While the issue of Israel will generate a lot of attention, health care will likely be the source of the most ideological differences.

 

The bidding for a 2028 Democratic candidate will start with making permanent the Biden-era expansion of Obamacare subsidies that Republicans allowed to expire. But most major candidates will probably support adding some kind of government-managed plan as an option on the Obamacare exchanges. However, there will no doubt be a contingent reviving the case for a full government takeover, arguing that the gaps in the system that remain under Obamacare require getting private insurers completely out of the health-care business and adopting a single-payer model branded as “Medicare for all.”

 

This broader debate between revolutionary proposals and incrementalism will play out on childcare, housing, education — and every other issue. Activists will demand more specifics, and candidates will be eager to differentiate themselves from the rest of the likely crowded field.

 

On the Republican side, there is likely to be an even more dramatic contrast.

 

JD Vance represents a new form of Republicanism that departs from Ronald Reagan to an extent that Trump himself never did. Vance is a critic of free-market orthodoxy and on a number of issues has advocated government intervention in the economy. “American economic policy on the right is now much more Alexander Hamilton than it is Milton Friedman,” he has said. “I think that’s obviously a good thing.” He was one of the few Republicans who praised the work of Lina Khan, the former Federal Trade Commission chairwoman under Joe Biden who took an expansive view on antitrust enforcement. In 2019, Vance said that his three favorite Democrats in terms of “policy outcomes” were, in order, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Tulsi Gabbard. Ultimately, he is not shy about wanting to aggressively use the government to manipulate the economy, even though he has different social aims.

 

His vision is almost certainly going to be challenged by somebody, Senator Ted Cruz being the most likely. Cruz has already distinguished himself from Vance when it comes to his eagerness to call out the rise of antisemitism on the Tucker Carlson wing of the right, but he has also warned against the rise of “right-wing socialism.” Cruz has said, “There are misguided voices on the right saying we should embrace ‘socialism lite.’ We should not become Democrats with a slightly less generous Santa Claus.”

 

With Vance perceived as more vulnerable than before the midterms, there are likely going to be more entrants into the GOP nomination sweepstakes than previously thought. Given the competing visions for what the future Republican Party will look like in the wake of the Trump era, policy debates are likely to rage among different types of conservatives even if Vance overcomes the postelection questions and reemerges as the prohibitive favorite.

 

Beyond the familiar ideological battles on either side, there are broader factors that will thrust debates upon candidates. The nation’s debt is unsustainable. Social Security’s trust fund is on track to become exhausted in the next presidential term, forcing leaders to confront a crisis that always seemed many years away. Meanwhile, the rapid embrace of AI will lead to significant debates over the proper way to regulate the models and deal with any economic disruption they cause.

 

The lopsided election results have Democrats smelling blood and Republicans grappling with the direction of the post-Trump party. Major policy debates are unavoidable.