In the spirit of full disclosure, I have met Stephen A. Smith, although I doubt that he remembers it. Back in 2011, I was working for ESPN, helping to start a Web site called Grantland. Our offices were in L.A. Live, a sprawling commercial theme park, in downtown Los Angeles, that housed the Staples Center and a handful of overpriced restaurants serving “California cuisine.” Most of the site’s early employees had moved for the job, meaning that, while we were all excited, we were pushing through the particular form of loneliness that hits so many transplants who arrive in Los Angeles and realize that, because you are in traffic all the time, you are alone and annoyed way more than you used to be. The months surrounding any digital-media launch are riddled with anxiety, misery, and sometimes great elation. Time gets warped: one morning, you knock out thirty e-mails and edit three posts; other days, you stare at the same gnarled paragraph, randomly highlighting words with your cursor, and, when you finally look up at the clock in the upper right-hand corner of your screen, you notice that four hours have passed and everyone else has left.
On the day in question, I was sitting in a row of cubicles with another editor. Everyone else had gone home, and, I imagine, he wanted to kill me. (Justifiably—no jury would have convicted him.) Suddenly, the door to the office swung open, and in walked Stephen A. Smith in a black suit. He scanned the room and, seeing two content farmers who needed a shower and a haircut, shook his head. “What are you still doing here?” he asked quietly. And then, with the theatrical sforzando brio that has become the standard for sports debate in America, he shouted, “They’ve got free tacos in the other building. Go!”
We went. There were, in fact, free tacos. I have liked Stephen A. Smith ever since.
Over the past three months, Smith has teased a possible run for President in 2028. I have enthusiastically posted about this on social media for a variety of reasons, including, I admit, an admiration for any man who sees two miserable plebes in the ESPN offices and tells them about the free food. The details of Smith’s potential run have shifted around a bit: In November, he told the hosts of “The View” that he was a “fiscal conservative and a social liberal,” and, while he supported a “live and let live” mentality, he wondered why liberals had allowed hot-button issues, like transgender athletes participating in sports, to define their platform. He also said that he would run as an independent because he wasn’t going to be “bought and paid for.” Last week, when asked by his friend Sean Hannity about the possibility of a run—a subject that gained steam online after a survey of potential 2028 primary candidates showed him polling at two per cent, just a point behind the former Vice-Presidential candidate Tim Walz and the Pennsylvania governor, Josh Shapiro—Smith said that he could beat any Democratic candidate who was under consideration, including Kamala Harris. Smith is almost certainly a fiscal conservative, but people reposted a 2009 tweet of his that reads “I loved hearing Bernie Sanders. He personifies my views as an Independent.”
Since the election, I have
written about the need for a “hostile takeover” of the Democratic Party and the potential for new candidates who stand far outside of the establishment’s tepid, catastrophic choices. The policy positions of these candidates, I believe, do not matter as long as they are within reason—which means that everything from full-bore leftist economic populism to staunch, performative centrism is on the table. Liberal voters are angry about pretty much everything right now. They’re mad that Joe Biden decided to run again for President; they’re mad at Washington insiders and the media for withholding information about Biden’s decline; they’re mad at some vague entity they usually call “the D.N.C.” for not coming up with a better strategy to defeat Donald Trump; they’re mad that the Democrats have not put up more of a fight against Trump and Elon Musk post-election. All this alarm and losing has made Democratic politics a rather miserable and humorless endeavor. What’s required for 2028 is a combative, attention-grabbing candidate who can punch the Democratic establishment squarely in the face.
“They need to cleanse the Democratic Party as we know it,” Smith told me in a phone call on Wednesday. Career politicians and consultants should still have some say in how future campaigns should be run, but he believed the Party, as a whole, had adhered to a litany of failed ideas and practices. “The Republicans said, ‘We want Donald Trump,’ ” Smith said. “They’ve been that way for ten years now. The Democrats say, ‘It’s Hillary’s turn, now it’s Biden’s turn, now it’s Kamala Harris’s turn.’ ” This succession of entitled candidates not only ignored voters who were indicating they wanted change; the Party swapped out kitchen-table issues for a series of alluring, and ultimately destructive, ideas about justice. “Woke culture and cancel culture ravaged the country,” Smith said. “The Democrats were way more focussed on that than the economy, immigration, and crime.”
Smith also believes that the Party cannot overly engage in “demagoguery” against Trump because the American people have grown tired of that message and are looking, instead, for someone who will take a more analytical approach. “If he’s doing something good, let’s say so, ” Smith said. “If he’s doing something harmful, let’s say so.” He has his reservations about Musk, but he does not object, in theory, to someone performing an audit of the federal government and trying to find pockets of waste and inefficiency. “Why are we reacting like this when we haven’t even discovered everything he’s found?” Smith asked.
I certainly don’t agree with everything Smith says about Trump, Musk, or the Democratic Party—I place a lot more value in active resistance, and I don’t think the economy can survive much more of the wealth inequality that’s created by fiscally conservative politics—but, since the Inauguration, I have wondered what will happen when the chaos of executive orders and DOGE cuts are either subsidized or normalized. Does the electorate really have it in them to do the whole resistance thing again? I imagine the answer to that question will hinge, in some part, on what the Administration actually does. Will they actually make cuts to Medicare and Social Security? Will they actually reduce inflation? But opposing what will amount to nearly fifteen years of Trumpism will require a more precise touch. One of the problems establishment Democrats might have is that so many of them don’t have much of a message outside of “Trump’s bad.” In the past, that might have been enough to grab the public’s attention, but the problem with basing so much of your platform on opposing one man is that you end up making him the most famous person on the planet in the process.
New media mostly trades in “authenticity,” one of the worst, most amorphous words in the English language. Adversarial figures who call out the establishment, such as Bernie Sanders, do extremely well with podcast hosts like Joe Rogan, who said of Sanders, “I loved the guy. I love what he represents.” In this past election, Rogan threw his support to Trump. By the measures of the old media, this shift represented some fundamental change in Rogan’s politics and world view, but I don’t think that Rogan has changed at all. He sees the world, as do millions of his listeners, as divided between truthtellers and the lying “establishment,” which is currently personified by the Democratic Party and its fealty to academic and medical experts. Under that rubric, preferring Sanders to Biden, in 2020, and Trump to Harris, in 2024, makes sense. This, I believe, is the way many voters make up their minds. They first decide whether to trust the person and then, if they do, get on board with the platform.
During the past two elections, “the left can’t meme” has become a standard explanation of why the Democratic Party can’t match Trump’s online energy. This is mostly true, not only because the Party’s leadership seems to prioritize conventional celebrities such as Beyoncé and Taylor Swift over algorithm kings like Theo Von but also because their candidates don’t play well on the new media. When Harris appeared on the extremely popular podcast “Call Her Daddy,” the exchange felt like a rehashing of her campaign’s talking points with fluffier-than-usual pillows on the set, making the footage disappointing and staid. Trump, for his part, talked with Von about cocaine addiction—a clip of which went viral. Although I’m sure few people made up their minds based on that interview alone, the cumulative effect of Trump’s algorithm conquests, including a video of him playing golf with the pro Bryson DeChambeau, made him seem much more human and thoughtful than Harris.
Musk and Trump’s attack on what they see as Democratic honeypots, whether U.S.A.I.D., N.G.O.s, or federal research grants, are politically motivated and almost certainly misguided. (Musk, for instance, posted on X that U.S.A.I.D. had sent fifty million dollars’ worth of condoms to the Gaza Strip when, in fact, the aid was going to Gaza Province, in Mozambique.) But I imagine they will also uncover a fair amount of actual bloat and corruption. In the past, the liberal establishment’s response has been to gloss over the actual instances when things don’t quite add up and point out that the other guys are worse. That might very well be true, but this past election showed that the American public actually does care about the lies that liberals sometimes tell, especially about the fitness of the sitting President. There’s a decent chance that, by 2028, Americans will be so desperate for any normalcy that they will vote for anything that feels stable and institutional, but I don’t think that institution should be the Democratic Party of 2024. The damage is too severe.
The new-media prerequisites for the ideal 2028 Democratic candidate, then, are as follows: They must attack the Party establishment in attention-grabbing ways. They must produce content around the clock. And they must feel “authentic.” Stephen A. Smith is a living meme whose rise to the first ranks of sports media came through his willingness to always be onscreen, his theatrical fights, and a profound understanding of how the Internet was changing traditional media. And, because he has shown no shyness in calling out everyone from Donald Trump and J. D. Vance to Joe Biden, he reads as an independent truthteller—far more so than, say, Josh Shapiro or Gavin Newsom, who still seem like they’re doing Barack Obama impressions, or even a supposed outsider like Mark Cuban. (That said, a primary debate between Smith and Cuban would be must-see television.) If the Party has a problem drawing young men who believe that the excesses of wokeness have left them behind, could there be a more appealing figure than the guy they’ve been watching argue about sports for the past decade?
Smith’s specific political beliefs are mostly undefined—which is a good thing. He believes in universal health care but doesn’t believe any American should pay more than half of their income toward taxes. Tax hikes for social programs should require more transparency about where tax dollars are currently being spent. (This is why Smith thinks someone needs to be in the Musk role, even if it’s not Musk himself.) His vision of social politics is similarly cautious. On television, Smith presents himself as a realist. When Colin Kaepernick, for example, revealed that he hadn’t voted for President in 2016 after months of sideline protest, Smith went on CNN and said that Kaepernick had “compromised everything he was standing for” and had disrespected his “ancestors” who had “bled and fought and died for him to have the right to do that.” His social politics have mostly voiced the same conservative impulse to preserve and fight for the spirit of equality but to avoid radicalism, however defined.
Most liberals are not interested in full-fledged identity politics but are committed to basic decency and Smith’s “live and let live” attitude. They don’t want trans people to be harassed and demeaned, they don’t want their hardworking undocumented neighbors swept up in ICE raids, and they don’t want their Black co-workers to be discriminated against. They resist—but rarely rebel—when these socially liberal politics wander into something more like social engineering, whether overhauls of their children’s school curriculum or forced “diversity statements” on job postings. (I also think that Smith would reclaim some of the Black male voters who fled to Trump because of immigration and the culture wars.) Any Democratic candidate in 2028, whether an economic populist or, like Smith, an independent centrist, will have to align with laissez-faire social-liberal politics.
If Smith runs—and, if it’s not obvious already, I think that he should—he will likely sell pragmatism to the American people. Both parties are corrupt, increasingly extreme, and ruled by destructive ideology. The vast majority of Americans understand this, but they feel locked in to voting for candidates who have been bought off by special interests and donors. Smith’s centrism, then, will not be an eclectic collection of policy choices but, rather, be a narrative appeal to normalcy. If he starts campaigning now—which means showing up on every possible platform to talk politics—he can emerge as the rational voice amid the chaos of the Trump-Musk Administration and upstage the Democratic establishment without having to raise a dollar or send a single mailer. (His way of talking about his prospective primary opponents—which amounts to “You think I’m worried about them?”—is pitch-perfect.)
Smith sees his role, then, as someone who can call out everyone who gets in the way of this potential compromise. “I’m qualified to be a hell-raiser,” he said. “I’m going to bring the rain. Nobody is safe with me. Not a Democrat. Not a Republican. No one.”
In previous columns, I’ve written that the next candidate should be either a so-called radical centrist like Smith, who runs to the center of everything, or a Bernie Sanders-like figure who can energize young people and the working class on a platform of anti-oligarch economic populism. If establishment politicians accuse Smith or this still unknown left challenger of not being serious enough for the job, they should point out that the Democrats, the supposedly serious ones, tried to run a clearly diminished eighty-one-year-old and then swapped him with someone who didn’t even make it to Iowa when she ran for President a few years earlier. The “serious” Party should produce a “serious” candidate before they start defining who is and is not serious.
Run, Stephen A. Why not? ♦
