Two of the most popular political figures in America right now are a democratic socialist from the Bronx and a gay man from Indiana.
Last week, the University of New Hampshire’s Granite State Poll — a long-running survey widely used as an early bellwether
in one of the nation’s first primary states — found them statistically deadlocked among prospective 2028 Democratic primary voters: Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York leads the field at 22 percent, with former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg just one point behind.
It’s not just a New Hampshire thing. A national poll released by Emerson College last Thursday found Buttigieg leading the Democratic field outright at 19 percent, with Ocasio-Cortez tied for third at 13. In May, a national AtlasIntel poll had Ocasio-Cortez leading the field nationally, with Buttigieg in second.
Yet, with the midterms just four months away, and presidential primaries two years out, conversations about their electability have already begun.
The question, as always, is whether the country is ready for the likes of Ocasio-Cortez, a Puerto Rican bartender-turned-congresswoman and self-described democratic socialist; or Buttigieg, an openly gay father of two who already swung and missed during his run six years ago.
But if decades of polling, voting, and peer-reviewed research are to be believed, voters themselves are rarely the problem.
Phantom Electorate
The most influential voter in American presidential politics has never cast a ballot, been polled or focus-grouped. Yet, every election year, they materialize as a figment of the country’s collective political imagination; a vast, faceless electorate spread across its endless counties and exurbs. These hypothetical voters are, by all accounts, a remarkably consistent bunch — unmoved by data, indifferent to the current political moment, unswayed by decades of change. They are the last Americans for whom the optics of the Oval Office must match the portraits in the hallway.
This question of electability on identity grounds — whether a candidate is straight, white, or male enough to earn the country’s votes — is far from new. It is a shadow of doubt that has trailed so-called “unconventional” candidates for decades, invoked almost exclusively in the third person. “I would vote for him or her in a heartbeat,” the thinking goes, “but voters would never.”
By the time Barack Obama ran for president in 2008, for example, more than nine in 10 Americans told the General Social Survey they would vote for a Black presidential candidate nominated by their party — up from 70 percent when the question was asked three decades prior. Yet, days after Obama won the Iowa caucuses, veteran Democratic fundraiser Robert Farmer, national treasurer of four Democratic presidential campaigns, published an op-edin The Washington Post. He withdrew his support for Obama on the grounds that the first-term Illinois senator “would be the object of an unbelievably negative advertising campaign.” Clinton, who had “already been vetted beyond imagination,” was more electable, Farmer said.
The same rhetoric is alive and well today — dressed in the language of pragmatism, but functioning as something closer to preemptive surrender — as donors, operatives, and party insiders narrow the field on voters’ behalf, based on who they believe those voters will accept.
But with the midterms approaching, and the 2028 presidential field already taking shape, voters are about to be told, again, who they are and are not ready for. The stakes of this particular bias have rarely been higher.
‘It’s Not Me, It’s You’
To better understand this phenomenon, consider the example of a political candidate you may never have heard of.
In 2018, Regina Bateson — a Stanford-educated political scientist and former U.S. diplomat — entered the Democratic primary for California’s 4th Congressional District, a red-leaning stretch of the Sierra Nevada foothills that had been held by Republican men for decades.
She expected the usual obstacles: an incumbent-friendly district, a thin donor network, a party infrastructure slow to commit. What she found instead became the subject of a striking 2020 peer-reviewed study, in which Bateson herself describes a pattern of voters discriminating against a candidate “out of concern that others will object to the candidate’s identity.”
Again and again, in living rooms and community halls across rural stretches of Northern California, Bateson heard some version of the same thing. The voters liked her. What they couldn’t vouch for was each other. She ultimately ended her race in third, and went away wondering if what she had experienced on the campaign trail was an anomaly or a systemic pattern.
Bateson’s study, conducted through MIT’s Political Experiments Research Lab (PERL), drew on three separate experiments involving nearly 6,000 Americans. The sample was designed to match census demographics, and weighted for political knowledge and engagement. Her findings showed “the majority of subjects overestimate others’ levels of sexism and racism,” and that “concern about others’ biases could be causing individuals to doubt the electability of diverse candidates.”
A Black female candidate with identical qualifications to a white male, for example, was rated 20 percent less electable. And among her study’s most politically engaged and informed subjects — those most likely to be donors, activists, and party insiders — the gap widened. Among subjects most likely to shape a primary — politically attentive, plugged-in party people —the bias widened, tracking less with their own prejudice than with how biased they assumed everyone else was.
“As polarization makes partisans increasingly desperate to win general elections, donors, party activists, and voters may gravitate toward white, male primary candidates who seem like a safe bet, rather than taking a risk on a woman or a person of color,” Bateson wrote. “That’s strategic discrimination in action.”
Her findings did not stand alone. Two years later, researchers at Stanford University arrived at the same conclusion from a different angle. Across six experiments involving nearly 8,000 more Americans, their study found unambiguously that voters who personally preferred a woman candidate would nonetheless shift their support to a man if they felt she was unlikely to win.
“People base their sense of what is possible on what they have seen happen in the past,” the Stanford researchers wrote. “Often this makes a lot of sense, but it can also be an overly conservative force, slowing social changes that most people would like.”
The argument has powerful allies not limited to the donor class.
In her campaign memoir 107 Days, Kamala Harris revealed that Pete Buttigieg had been her first choice for running mate, writing that he “would have been an ideal partner — if I were a straight white man.”
Harris’s reasoning echoes the double bind Quinnipiac captured in voters years earlier. A Quinnipiac University poll from 2019 found that 70 percent of voters — 85 percent of Democrats and nearly half of Republicans — were willing to vote for a gay president. But more than half of those same voters believed the country itself was not ready.
In her first television interview after the book’s release, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow — who is gay — pressed her directly. “To be a Black woman running for president of the United States, and as a vice presidential running mate, a gay man — with the stakes being so high, it made me very sad,” Harris told her. “But I also realized it would be a real risk.”
After Harris lost in 2024, former First Lady Michelle Obama, one of the most credible messengers in American public life, sat before a crowd of women at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and gave the electability argument its most prominent public airing in years. “You all are lying,” she told them. “You’re not ready for a woman. You are not.”
Is the Country Ready?
For all the rhetoric surrounding the country’s willingness — or unwillingness — to elect a woman as commander in chief, it has come within a rounding error of doing so twice, in two of the most turbulent political environments in modern American history.
In 2016, Hillary Clinton outpaced Donald Trump by nearly three million votes — 65.8 million to his 63 million; a margin of 2.1 percent. She lost the Electoral College on 78,000 votes across three counties in Wisconsin, a margin so thin that a shift of roughly one percent in a single mid-sized city would have changed the outcome. Clinton wasn’t shot down by the voters. She was undone by a structural feature of the American system that sorts votes rather than counts them, a system that has now twice in 20 years elevated the popular vote loser to the presidency.
Eight years later, Kamala Harris — stepping into a race handed to her 107 days before Election Day, the shortest major-party presidential campaign in modern history — lost the popular vote by less than one and a half points. She fell short by fewer than 230,000 votes out of 155 million, and still finished with the third-most votes of any presidential candidate in American history.
In both cases, Donald Trump declared historic victory. Having lost the popular vote to Clinton in 2016, he called it a “massive landslide.” And in 2024, having beaten Harris by a razor-thin margin — the narrowest for a winning candidate since Nixon, in fact — he told supporters it was “the most epic political victory our country has ever seen.”
What those margins actually show tends to get lost in the aftermath. The votes, in the end, do not describe a country that has made up its mind against women, but one that is more ready than it has ever been to elevate them to the highest office in the land.
Enter Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
In a poll last December, the 36-year-old congresswoman from New York’s 14th District, was statistically tied with JD Vance in a hypothetical 2028 matchup — 51 to 49, within the margin of error. The internals were the most crucial: she carried Black voters by nearly 60 points, Hispanic voters by 28, and women by 12. Among voters aged 18 to 29, she led by 16 points. Harris won the same demographic by just four points. Eight percent of people who voted for Trump in 2024 said they would pick her over Vance. Her favorability has more than tripled among conservatives in her home state since 2019, climbing from six percent to 21 percent in a recent Siena College poll.
When asked by a reporter outside the Capitol whether she thought she could beat Vance, Ocasio-Cortez laughed. “Listen, these polls, like three years out, they are what they are. But let the record show: I would stomp him. I would stomp him.”
The polling, of course, is just one data point in a constellation.
When she beat 10-term incumbent Joe Crowley in 2018 — one of the most stunning upsets in congressional history — the political class quickly returned to the question it always asks: Yes, but can she win a general election? Just weeks prior, Ocasio-Cortez began a viral campaign video with the words: “Women like me aren’t supposed to run for office.”
The morning after her victory, then-House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi stepped in to contain the moment. “They made a choice in one district,” she told reporters. “It is not to be viewed as something that stands for everything else.”
Since then, Ocasio-Cortez has been called too radical, too socialist, too far left, too confrontational, too online, too young, too inexperienced, and too dumb — the same “strategic discrimination” Regina Bateson tackled in her post-campaign study. And her base — young, diverse, working-class, and enthusiastic — is, in the coded language of Democratic strategy, the wrong kind of coalition for a general election.
Yet, according to Federal Election Commission filings, Ocasio-Cortez raised more than $23.6 million in 2025 alone, entirely from individual donors. Not a dollar of it has come from corporate PACs, which she has rejected as a matter of official policy since her first campaign. In the first half of 2025, she ranked third on ActBlue, the Democratic Party’s largest fundraising platform, trailing only the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and the Senate campaign arm — outpacing every individual candidate including the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) itself, according to CNN.
But the pundit class remains undeterred in dismissing her chances.
James Carville, the operative who built Bill Clinton’s path to the White House, told Newsmax’s Greta Van Susteren last week that Ocasio-Cortez is “remarkably talented…but she’s not gonna run for president because she’s not gonna have any chance.”
When asked to speculate on a possible 2028 run herself, Ocasio-Cortez — who has built one of the most formidable grassroots political operations in American politics — didn’t take the bait. “They assume that my ambition is a title or a seat,” she told David Axelrod at an event in May. “My ambition is to change this country.”
But Ocasio-Cortez is not the only one the electability argument has circled recently.
While she was on stage with Axelrod at the University of Chicago in May, Pete Buttigieg was nearly a thousand miles away in New Hampshire — his third visit to an early primary state since leaving the Cabinet — doing what candidates who are definitely not running for president sometimes do. Since stepping down as secretary of transportation, Buttigieg has traveled to more than a dozen states, stumping for local candidates in battleground districts, holding town halls in red-state communities, and building the kind of ground-level infrastructure that could support a presidential campaign in a couple years’ time.
This month, he was the keynote speaker at the Liberty and Justice Celebration dinner — the Iowa Democratic Party’s flagship annual fundraiser, where Barack Obama’s 2007 performance is widely credited with turning the tide of the 2008 caucuses in his favor.
The numbers have started to reflect the effort.
When Buttigieg ran for president in 2020, he won the first nominating contest of the Democratic primary and nearly won the second, outlasting Harris, Booker, and a dozen others who had arrived with far more institutional support. For approximately two weeks, he was the frontrunner, but ran out of road, stalling at around 10 percent nationally when he failed to hold younger voters against Sanders, or compete with Biden’s decades of accumulated trust in Black communities. An early Quinnipiac poll had him at less than one percent support among Black Democratic primary voters — a number that captured, in a single data point, how much ground he still had to make up. He dropped out of the race two days before Super Tuesday. Six years later, a 2025 Emerson poll on the 2028 field found him still lagging with Black voters.
But 2026 is not 2020. No single poll currently settles the question of who’s actually leading the Democratic field, but what holds steady across nearly all of them is this: the two candidates most frequently dismissed on identity grounds — Buttigieg and Ocasio-Cortez — are, by current available data, rising together as two of the strongest candidates the Democratic Party has.
The data surrounding them suggests an appeal that transcends the primary electorate either of them would need to win in 2028.
On the Republican side, the 2028 field is taking shape around familiar names, such as Marco Rubio and JD Vance. The same AtlasIntel poll that has Ocasio-Cortez leading the Democratic field also shows Rubio — the most favorable Republican tested — sitting at net negative five points nationally. The electability conversation, notably, is not happening on that side of the aisle.
That election, now less than two and a half years away, will arrive in the wake of a second Trump presidency that has ravaged the economy, started a war with Iran, betrayed the trust of allies, corrupted whole layers of American bureaucracy, and created a foreign policy landscape so thoroughly disrupted that it has forced the Democratic Party to reckon with what it actually believes. These are the hurdles candidates must clear in the path to the presidency. None of them, however, have anything to do with gender or sexual orientation.
Voters, for their part, have a different obstacle ahead of them: what they assume about each other.
Alex Ashley is a journalist and writer based in Los Angeles and Seattle. His reporting has appeared in Rolling Stone, The Atlantic, NPR, and other national outlets.
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