Jon McHenry’s comments in The Daily Caller regarding the early Democratic presidential primary field:
Jon McHenry, vice president of North Star Opinion Research and a GOP polling analyst, said there’s one participant in the “invisible primary” that currently stands out to him as most capable of taking down a Republican in a general election.
“I think Josh Shapiro is the Democrat most likely to beat a Republican in 2028,” McHenry told the DCNF. “The way he’s governed in Pennsylvania, which maybe wouldn’t win him a nomination on the Republican side, has still been pretty effective. He just seems like he has an ear for essentially the middle of the state of Pennsylvania, which is also essentially an ear for the middle of the country, in a way that a lot of Democrats don’t seem to have. You know, Tim Walz is the perfect example. He’s from Minnesota, he looks like your football coach, and he’s just as completely out of touch as you can be, whereas Josh Shapiro actually seems like he gets it.”
The issue for Shapiro, as McHenry sees it, could be that the very things that would make him a potentially formidable general election opponent may not appeal to Democrat primary voters.
“You can imagine two, three years down the road in early polling, him against J.D. Vance, or whomever Republicans nominate. I think he’s going to be super competitive, but I don’t know that he’s going to be that competitive in a Democratic primary,” McHenry told the DCNF. “In a sense, some of the folks who’ve already run for federal office have an advantage in running to the primary, because they’ve already tacked fairly hard to the left to win that primary, and it’s just a different consideration. If you’re a successful governor, you probably aren’t like the crazy left-wing, pro-Hamas crowd on the Democrat side, and frankly, a lot of the successful governors on the Republican side aren’t like the MAGA folks.”
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