Democratic candidates rush to define themselves ahead of primary season

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Democratic candidates rush to define themselves ahead of primary season

The 2028 Democratic primary may be a year off, but many of the would-be candidates have already begun a soft launch with voters.

Potential candidates such as Govs. Gavin Newsom of California and Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania are turning to newly penned books and late-night appearances.

Kamala Harris, the former vice president-turned-2024 Democratic nominee, conducted a months-long book tour and is making her way through a string of Rust Belt and red states before she wraps up in April.

Others, including Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, are using podcasts, festival stages, and high-profile interviews to tell their stories — and to make the case for why they should be their party’s next standard-bearer.

“It’s the wild, wild west out there,” Democratic strategist Rodell Mollineau said. “There’s no leader of the Democratic Party, a lot of noise out there and a lot of clutter so defining yourself is a smart thing.”

“You can’t manufacture authenticity so these candidates need to make sure whatever they’re doing … is real,” Mollineau said. “Voters can smell BS, so putting yourself out there means doing it in an authentic way.”

Newsom, widely seen as the early front-runner, will next week release his new memoir, “Young Man in a Hurry: A Memoir of Discovery,” a book The New York Times called one of its “most anticipated” of the year.

In the lead-up to the book launch, Newsom and his family were featured in a Vogue spread, where they were photographed by Annie Leibovitz.

In the book, the California governor details his undiagnosed dyslexia and writes about the dichotomy of his parents’ divorce and how he shuffled between life with his mom — who worked three jobs to support her children — and life with his father, who moved in the Getty family’s social circle and was surrounded by wealth.

Newsom — whose aides have been planning the book launch for months — is expected to saturate the media ecosystem with interviews and campaign-style stops in places he’ll need to win to gain his party’s nomination, including South Carolina and New Hampshire. He is expected to launch his book in Nashville, Tenn., a red state, and will also travel to Atlanta.

Newsom’s book launch comes a month after Shapiro rolled out his book, “Where We Keep the Light: Stories From a Life of Service,” which leaned heavily into how Shapiro wants to present himself: as a suburban dad, an observant Jew and a “problem-solver.”

To promote the book, Shapiro sat for a long interview with “CBS News Sunday Morning,” speaking about everything from his upbringing to his thoughts on the campus protests that spread around the country in response to the war in Gaza.

The governor also appeared on “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” last month where he discussed the love letter he wrote in college to his now-wife — and how he found out later that she did a “dramatic reading” of it with her friends.

“A few months ago, I went to her 30th college reunion, and they were recounting passages from that letter that they still remember,” Shapiro recalled. “But I got the girl at the end of the day, and we’ve been married for 28 years.”

Late night continues to be a popular way to drive a personal narrative.

In an appearance on “The Daily Show” with Jon Stewart last week, Beshear playfully dodged a question about which of the governors who are thinking about running for the Democratic nomination would be the best president. He looked at the audience and didn’t say a word.

At one point, Beshear even turned the question to Stewart: “Are you doing it?”

Many Democrats say they are happy to see an early primary playing out, with candidates making the case even before the midterm elections have taken place.

“I have for a long time thought that this primary should start as soon as possible. For many reasons,” Democratic strategist Joel Payne said. “There’s a desire and an eagerness for leaders to step in and step up. I think the primary process is a good opportunity to do that as an experiment for the party.”

“You’re going to see people add dimension to their personas,” Payne added. “In order to be a real national figure, you have to have the time to develop that persona.”

And, as Payne warned, “There’s a higher risk to being irrelevant than being overexposed.”

Buttigieg in recent months has appeared everywhere from GQ — where he talked about masculinity and raising boy-girl twins— to Kara Swisher’s popular podcast.

Late last year, he took the main stage at the Texas Tribune Festival alongside The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg for a wide-ranging conversation.

Howard Dean, the former governor of Vermont who ran for president in 2004, said the Democrats thinking about a potential run are doing exactly what they need to be doing this far out from the nominating contest.

“You have to start early because you have to introduce yourself to the people who are going to give you money, and the tech people, and the grassroots people,” Dean said in an interview.

The former governor said the late-night interviews, while pointed at times, are useful because it “allows people to take their measure of you while under some fire,” he said. “It’s important to see how you do on the big stage.”

Podcasts, he said, also bolster an image and are “helpful to both the candidate and the listener.”

“Ambition bleeds through any attempt to be congenial, and if you don’t have that quality of real connection with people, it’s going to be a real handicap, and that’s going to come out in podcasts,” Dean said.

Books, on the other hand, don’t add much dimension, he said.

“I wouldn’t read most of them,” Dean said, including his own precampaign book, which he acknowledged that a senior aide wrote in a hurry after interviewing the governor.

“I don’t believe in those books unless you have something to say,” he said.

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