Democrats Consider Tearing Up the Playbook

Officials are eyeing everything from new health disclosures for candidates to revamping the primary calendar.

Then-President Joe Biden with then-Secretary of Health and Human Services Xavier Becerra during an event in the Roosevelt Room of the White House on July 8, 2022. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)

The Biden Blast Radius

Former Vice President Kamala Harris hasn’t even announced whether she will run for governor of California, but already the contours of the race are taking shape around her—and they’re being defined by her old boss.

In a statement last night, Antonio Villaraigosa, the former Los Angeles mayor who is running to succeed Gov. Gavin Newsom in 2026, called on Harris and former Secretary of Health and Human Services Xavier Becerra (who has actually announced a bid) to “apologize to the American people” and answer questions about the “cover up” involving Joe Biden’s health and physical capacity for office.

“Voters deserve to know the truth, what did Kamala Harris and Xavier Becerra know, when did they know it, and most importantly, why didn’t either of them speak out?” Villaraigosa said in a statement.

Villaraigosa’s remarks aren’t just about Biden—who, it’s sometimes hard to remember, led the Democratic party this time last year. They’re also about the future. Revelations about the ex-president’s declining health and the lengths to which his close aides went to keep it private are set to spark massive debates in how Democrats conduct their elections, from the demands placed on the candidates, to the media strategies they pursue, to the scheduling of the presidential primary contests themselves.

Every presidential cycle loss prompts a party to rethink and restructure how it operates. But Democratic strategists say the 2024 defeat and Biden’s handling of his re-election bid created a massive trust issue that the party will have to address. Some compared it to the role that the Iraq war authorization vote played in shaping the 2008 primary—reconfiguring the issues of that race and tanking the candidacies of those who supported the invasion.

One Democratic strategist who worked on a 2008 primary campaign said, “Obama was fortunate because he wasn’t in D.C. so it allowed him to have natural distance. He could say ‘I’m an outsider’ without saying ‘I’m an outsider.’” In other words, since he wasn’t in Congress in 2002, he didn’t have to vote on the Iraq resolution.

In the modern version of that, candidates further removed from the Biden White House will have more credibility and trust among those in the 2028 electorate who feel burned by party leadership.

Democratic strategists who spoke with The Bulwark said there already seems to be an understanding that whoever runs for the party’s nomination in 2028 will have no choice but to unveil copious amounts of health information, providing the public with a far more detailed report than has been the recent norm. The conventional wisdom is that no one over the age of 70 will even bother running.

Major Democratic voices are calling for even more radical transparency from presidential hopefuls. Some are all but blackballing potential candidates already.