Democrats need a bold 2028 ticket: Ro Khanna and AOC should run

Fifteen years ago, during President Barack Obama’s first term, we co-founded RootsAction as an online progressive group challenging not only Republicans but also the corporatism and militarism of the Democratic Party. RootsAction supported Bernie Sanders for president in 2016 and 2020. Two years before the 2024 election disaster that returned Donald Trump to the White House, the organization launched the “Don’t Run Joe” campaign, with the warning that the renomination of President Joe Biden by Democrats “would be a tragic mistake.”

Despite polls showing as early as 2022 that strong majorities of Democrats wanted a nominee other than Biden in 2024, the “Don’t Run Joe” message went unheeded — until Biden’s debate debacle in June 2024. By then, it was too late for the open primary process needed to produce a ticket that could inspire activists and defeat the fascistic faux-populism of Trump.

Like the 2024 victory of the twice-impeached, repeatedly indicted Trump, his 2016 win was avoidable. One lesson we’ve learned over the last 16 years since the 2010 midterms is that it’s a big mistake for activists to sit back and expect the Democratic Party establishment to serve up candidates who can mobilize voters and win elections. That establishment failed us in winnable presidential elections in 2000, 2004, 2016 and 2024. Tad Devine, who served as a top strategist for mainstream Democrats for decades before joining Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential bid, knows the mechanisms inside and out. The dollar-dominated process of primary campaigns, he writes in his book “How the Democrats Screwed Bernie,” is often rigged against outsider “candidates who connect with voters, who understand voter anxieties” — and these genuinely populist candidates “are more likely to succeed in general elections than those who rely primarily on insider muscle.”

RootsAction recently teamed up with Progressive Democrats of America to announce that we will jointly launch, just after the November midterm elections, a campaign urging California Rep. Ro Khanna and New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to run for the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination. “The voices of Khanna and/or AOC are needed in the presidential campaign to ensure that voters hear serious solutions,” the campaign’s petition says. “Without a progressive populist advocate atop the ticket, the Democratic response would be woefully underwhelming — enabling right-wing demagoguery to push voter unrest in dangerous and divisive directions.” 

The petition statement adds that the presence of Khanna and/or AOC in the presidential race “is crucial to foster debate on healthcare, jobs, AI, militarism and the U.S. relationship with Israel, along with many other issues important to a wide range of voters.”

Khanna — whose name recognition has grown recently because of his legislative battles to release the Epstein files and to end the Iran War, and his detention in the occupied West Bank by Israeli settlers — represents our country’s wealthiest district and much of Silicon Valley. Still, he wants to increase taxes on the rich. He calls himself “a progressive capitalist.”

Want more sharp takes on politics? Sign up for our free newsletter, Standing Room Only, written by Amanda Marcotte, now also a weekly show on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.

Ocasio-Cortez entered the House with great fanfare after a surprise 2018 Democratic primary victory over one of the party’s top leaders on Capitol Hill — Joe Crowley, who is now a corporate lobbyist — representing a working-class, Latino-majority district in New York City. Since then she has led the effort to bring the jobs-creating Green New Deal proposal to Congress, and she is helping lead the charge against the construction of artificial intelligence data centers. She identifies as “a democratic socialist.” 

While there is a difference in how these two politicians label themselves, most voters will be much more interested in whether each will address the needs of the working class and fight the greed of the billionaires. Both are direct political descendants of Sanders. AOC was active in his 2016 campaign, which inspired her to run for Congress, and she regularly joined him last year at “Fighting Oligarchy” rallies. Khanna was a surrogate and national co-chair in Sanders’ 2020 presidential campaign.

RootsAction’s coalition partner in this initiative, Progressive Democrats of America, has a history of major success in candidate recruitment. In late 2013, PDA launched the “Run, Bernie, Run” movement, which drafted Sanders to seek the Democratic nomination in 2016 — a campaign that elevated the national conversation and helped spark today’s progressive upsurge.

The RunRoRunAOC.org petition argues that either Khanna or Ocasio-Cortez — or both of them — need to enter the presidential race. If both were to declare their candidacies, the organizations behind this recruitment initiative are not worried that the two will somehow “split the progressive vote.” As shown by the historic wave of insurgent victories in this year’s Democratic primaries, the party’s electoral base is largely and increasingly progressive. It’s not a small sliver of voters. And a progressive bloc of delegates at the party’s national convention in August 2028 would be all to the good, pushing for popular policies such as taxing the rich, resisting Big Tech’s AI data centers, abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), green jobs initiatives, enhanced Medicare for All, cutting the military budget and stopping the weapons flow to Israel.

During last year’s New York City mayoral campaign — which, thankfully, employed ranked-choice voting — two progressive candidates actually ran as a duo in the Democratic primary: Zohran Mamdani and Brad Lander. Mamdani became mayor thanks significantly to Lander, and now Lander is heading to Congress thanks in part to Mamdani’s endorsement and support. In other races, progressives have run in tandem in crowded fields, maintaining a non-aggression strategy while bolstering each other’s positions.

Democrats should also remember that in the early months of the 2019-2020 Democratic presidential primary, before a fraught personal split between Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Sanders, the presence of the two previously friendly candidates raising similar issues of inequality and corporate greed had actually moved the whole Democratic debate in a notably more progressive direction. Khanna and Ocasio-Cortez could wield similar influence in 2028.

The ground for progressive candidates is ripe. Despite millions of dollars flooding into the campaign coffers of corporatist Democratic candidates from special interests representing AI, crypto and Israel, and despite assists to those candidates from corporate media, this year’s Democratic primaries produced an unprecedented wave of victories by underfunded progressive candidates, including Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic nominee for Senate in Michigan. These insurgent successes have occurred at local and statewide levels.

After the November midterms, it will be time for progressives to focus on the national level.

Leaving the 2028 presidential nominating process to the money-drenched party elites — with their record of electoral defeats, governance failures and betrayals — would be a recipe for disaster. Ro Khanna and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez could make all the difference.