The Barely Invisible Mess

Think the 2028 Presidential Election hasn’t already started? Well, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is talking about freezing her eggs and was immediately asked about 2028. Less than three months before the midterms, we’re already in that silly season.

Politics.1com refreshed its 2028 Presidential candidate tracker recently, and the Democratic side of the ledger is already a mess of ambition. Nineteen names made the flagship list. Four more show up on Wikipedia’s parallel tracker of Democrats who have personally, publicly said the quiet part out loud about running. Fold the two together, strip out the overlap, and you get twenty-three candidates. That’s before you even get near Politics1’s “Other Democrats” tab, a graveyard of one-man Facebook campaigns we are mercifully leaving alone today.

Twenty-three is a number that demands the pWAR treatment, and I’ve built out a Primary Edition of the framework to handle it. The core formula doesn’t change. EV still measures overperformance against a baseline rather than raw vote share, FE_mod is still additive rather than a multiplier, DA_bonus still requires you to have actually survived a hostile environment before you get credit for it. What changes is the yardstick: EV here is a proxy for general election viability against generic Republican opposition, and DA_bonus rewards statewide wins in territory that isn’t rigged in your favor. Everyone below is measured on the same scale, and I’m not softening anybody’s number because they have a book tour or a cable hit scheduled.

The field sorts itself almost immediately into three groups, and the split is not subtle.