Democrats who are seen as contenders for the 2028 presidential nomination have been at the front of their party’s shutdown messaging battle.
Gov. Gavin Newsom of California has posted relentlessly on social media to frame the shutdown as a failure by President Donald Trump and Republicans. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez appeared in a video with Sen. Bernie Sanders to call out Republicans over health care. Sen. Cory Booker says he plans to hold events with constituents.
“I’m going to try to continue to elevate our message,” Booker, who earlier this year performed a Senate speech of over 25 hours in protest of Trump’s policies, told NOTUS.
“I literally have heard from people in New Jersey from all over the political spectrum who are like. ‘We are facing existential challenges,’” Booker said. “There’s this feeling in our state, and you can see through the polling numbers that even among Republicans, they see a lot of crisis here and they want somebody to stand up and fight.”
Booker, like others potential 2028 hopefuls, has not said whether he will run for president.
But he and other potential candidates are speaking out as part of a push by Democrats to make clear to their discontented base that they’re willing to fight Trump. And while these Democrats could eventually face off in future primaries, their shutdown message is remarkably similar: This is Republicans’ fault.
Newsom has attempted to match Trump’s style of mocking his opponents by depicting the president as a Marie Antoinette type who is building a ballroom while his constituents might be subject to a rise in health care costs.
On his X account, Newsom depicted Vice President JD Vance and other Republican leaders as minions, lying about the shutdown.
In her video with Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez called Republicans’ government funding bill “one of the dirtiest tricks that is being pulled on the American people right now.”
Sanders, who ran for president in 2020 and has been appearing with Ocasio-Cortez in Republican districts on their “Fighting Oligarchy” tour, told NOTUS that the shutdown is not “a question of standing up to Trump” but a matter of “showing the country that we cannot allow 15 million people to be thrown off their health care.”
Neither Newsom or Ocasio-Cortez immediately responded to requests for comment.
As far as running in 2028, Sanders’ office directed NOTUS to an August interview with CNN where the Vermont Senator said, “Lets not worry about that. I am going to be 84 years of age next month, as a matter of fact. So I think that speaks for itself.”
In a video posted after government funding ran out, Sen. Adam Schiff, who the White House has targeted for his role in congressional investigations into Trump, had a similar tone.
“People will be getting notices that their health insurance costs are going up by hundreds and hundreds of dollars every month,” Schiff, whose office did not immediately respond for comment, said. “This is what Democrats have been fighting to prevent in these budget negotiations.”
“This is Donald Trump using a shutdown of his own creation to try and cause more harm, more cruelty to the American people,” he added.
And national Democrats are trying to make sure that voters outside the Washington media market know about what they’re doing on Capitol Hill.
“This is the right thing to do to make clear that we’re not going to be bullied by Republicans again,” Sen. Chris Murphy, one of the most prominent Democrats opposing Trump, told NOTUS.
“People are on our side. They do not want premiums to go up, they don’t want Donald Trump to run a censorship state. They want to know that someone is fighting for them, and this is a moment when our cause is righteous,” he added.