And there they go. The “they” here would be the “mainstream” (aka liberal) media. And where they have already started heading is into the jungle of the 2028 presidential election. Before all the midterm election results were in, they fired the starter's pistol on the next cycle. Idle speculation has begun.
Here’s but a sampling of the headlines out there with the 2026 elections barely history by mere days:
Who Will Run for President in 2028? Rumored Democratic and Republican Candidates
Who Might Run for President in 2028?
Who could replace Trump in 2028? Poll reveals presidential favorites
The point is clear. For the media the politics game never stops. Most particularly when it involves presidential politics.
In the now very long ago, Pulitzer Prize-winning author and political reporter Theodore H. White penned what turned out to be America’s first real look at the mechanics -- the media especially -- of a presidential election. White’s book was The Making of the President 1960. And in its day it was a blockbuster bestseller, enough for White to write sequels in 1964, 1968, and 1972.
What stands out today, a full 66 years later, is White’s realization of the role the media of the day played in that election. Arguably it was the first presidential election of its time to fully involve the day-by-day, almost hourly, participation of the press and 20th century style technology. They traveled everywhere with both Democrat nominee Senator John F. Kennedy and the GOP’s Vice President Richard Nixon.
Today no one blinks at the constant, daily and almost hourly media coverage of major presidential candidates. (Not to mention the seemingly minute-by-minute coverage of an incumbent President!) In today’s world of the Internet, computers, cell phones, television and radio no one blinks.
In 1960 this future was only beginning to dawn. JFK brought glamour to the race -- or his adoring press manufactured it. Theodore White, taken with what he was observing first hand of the day’s media, wrote this of the media coverage of Nixon, who suffered by the comparison:
One noticed, for example, the harshness of the television eye and the electronic cruelty of the camera to his countenance. Sitting one evening in the press ranks a few feet from the candidate in Union Square in San Francisco as he spoke, I noticed that one of the local correspondents had brought a portable television set with him, so that one could observe him at once in person and on the screen. The man on the stand before me in person was a handsome young American-only recently out of the hospital, he was attractively slim, as lithe as Kennedy, a fine and healthy American, almost an athlete. His face as he spoke to this friendly audience was a smiling one-and Nixon has a broad, almost sunny smile when he is with friends.
His is a broad open face and the deep eye wells, the heavy brows cast shadow on the face and it glowered on the screen darkly; when he became rhetorically indignant, the television screen showed ferocity; when he turned, his apparently thick brush of hair showed in a glimmering balding widow’s peak; when he smiled and his fine white teeth showed, it was the smile made meaningless by the grin of all the commercial announcers who appear with similar white teeth showing.
All of which is to say, White had Nixon under the microscope of the early mass media of the day. Long before reporters - not to mention the audience! - had cell phones to record (or research!) anything or anyone they chose, whether literally in front of them or somewhere else around the literal globe.
It is with all of this now ongoing that today’s media is setting up its coverage of the 2028 campaign. From the candidates actual and potential to this or that issue (in the famous words of Clinton acolyte James Carville “It’s the economy, stupid!”) the hard political fact of the day is that the 2028 presidential campaign has now begun. The calendar may well say that we have almost two years before voters crowd into November voting booths or mark absentee ballots, but the 2028 campaign is now on. The midterm results have made the Republican race more uncertain, with Trump's waning appeal casting a shadow on the vice president.
A new President of the United States is already out there somewhere on the presidential campaign trail. Who is that? What party is he (or she?) from? But as Americans start thinking of turkey size and Christmas trees, rest assured of one thing: The opening bell of 2028 has rung. And the media already turned the spotlights on.
