‘shameless In A Good Way’: Rahm Emanuel Is Already Shaking Up 2028

GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. — This is how Rahm Emanuel eats a salad: He rips open its clear, clamshell container with two hands. He grabs the ramekin of the dressing. He pours it across the salad. Then he picks up the salad container, shaking it with an intensity and ferocity that forces the balsamic throughout, giving no quarter to the greens and the grilled chicken.

This is material information, mind you, for his would-be 2028 Democratic presidential primary rivals. Because how Rahm eats a salad is how he does anything and everything: with intent and with verve and without mercy.

The next presidential election is more than two years away. But Rahm, 66, is already saturating old — and new — media with his small-bore policy rollouts and white papers, spending hours cultivating Beltway and battleground state reporters with on and off-the-record bull sessions, like this one at a deli amid a three day swing through Michigan in February.

“My view is you got to be able to be comfortable in the classroom and the Situation Room and everything in between,” Emanuel told me a few weeks after the Michigan swing, before he headed to Wisconsin to hold a town hall and stump in the state’s upcoming supreme court race. “This job? You got to know your way around, and it's going to be demanding. I’m going to emphasize both what I think is important for the American people to hear and to know about, and the second kicker is: It reflects my experience, and others may not have that.”

The 2028 Democratic presidential field — whether they realize it or not — has a Rahm Emanuel problem. His campaign is likely to be a rolling Sister Souljah moment for the Democratic Party’s left-leaning orthodoxy, particularly on social issues. His pugilism and his critique of the party’s leftward lurch will create a gauntlet his would-be rivals will have to navigate. And years in politics — plus countless hours on CNN — have helped him further hone his sharp-edged debate blade.

“Electorally I don’t think he’ll be a threat, but he has an ability to shape the race in other ways,” says one Democratic adviser to another potential 2028 contender, granted anonymity to candidly assess an Emanuel candidacy. “He’s good at getting reporters to cover him and he is shameless in a good way: He’s not afraid of putting himself out there.” Or, as another Democratic strategist likely to be involved in advising a left-leaning candidate put it: “He’s both provocative, but trying to lay down a marker that he thinks is popular with a broader electorate.” This person, also granted anonymity to be frank without drawing Emanuel’s wrath, added, "He will spice up the race.”

Not all Democratic operatives hold an Emanuel candidacy in high esteem. Asked what she thinks of an Emanuel campaign, Rebecca Katz, the Democratic strategist who represented Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral campaign, simply said, “I don’t.”

But he’s good at making himself hard to ignore.

He has released no fewer than eight policy proposals, from a social media ban for children under 16 to a predictive markets ban for federal employees and their family members to age limits on politicians running for office. He has said he would campaign in forgotten parts of the country, and during his recent Michigan trip he demonstrated he’s in his “wearing safety glasses and touching heavy machinery alongside blue-collar workers in a battleground state” era. He also just hit up battleground Wisconsin, and on Monday will visit New Hampshire’s St. Anselm Institute of Politics for the storied Politics and Eggs event before heading to early-primary South Carolina — the surest sign yet he’s looking to be a 2028 contender. Meanwhile, he has established a weekly routine of jetting from a CNN appearance, where he is an on-air contributor, to back home in Chicago, where he cranks out columns for The Wall Street Journal and records a handful of podcasts a week, including one about fly-fishing, his favorite pastime.

The notion that he is merely trying to troll the Democratic presidential field and rein them back toward the center has given way to the idea that he is actually serious about running himself.

“He is out there throwing ideas out and traveling and being provocative and stirring the pot and moving the debate, and I don’t think it’s a prelude to a podcast,” says David Axelrod, the former senior adviser to President Barack Obama who worked with Emanuel when he was Obama’s chief of staff.

Emanuel already has a roughly-half-dozen skeleton campaign team to help with travel logistics and bug reporters about their stories, he tells me. “Although, I drive them as if there were 20,” the hardcharging Emanuel says. “Right, Matt?” He turns to Matt McGrath, his trusted aide and former mayoral press secretary who is traveling with Emanuel on his political excursions to places like Water Valley, Mississippi and La Crosse, Wisconsin. “Matt’s gonna be happy when you write your story, so he doesn’t have to take a call twice a day from me, like, ‘Where’s Adam on this? What’s going on?’”

McGrath laughs.

Emanuel may joke, but he is serious about running and not just acting as a stalking-horse for another moderate Democrat, those who know him say.

“I don’t think you have the personality and drive of Rahm Emanuel to do this as some type of academic exercise to be picked up by other people who want to be president,” says John Anzalone, the Democratic pollster who maintained Emanuel as a client during his Chicago mayoralty and still keeps in touch with him. “The fact is that someone like Rahm and his personality and his drive goes into it saying, ‘Hey, man, I'm looking at this field, and I got just as much chance as anyone else.”

“This idea that Rahm is just in it to kind of change the dialogue is wrong,” add Matt Bennett, vice president of the center-left think tank Third Way, which says it will spend $50 million to ensure a “combative centrist” in the vein of Emanuel wins the Democratic presidential nomination.” I think he’s in because he thinks he can win, and I think he might be able to.”

But can a figure who came of political age in the Bill Clinton era — and who has not been on the ballot in a decade — really win a Democratic primary in the age of Donald Trump?

Talk to Emanuel for any amount of time and you get the sense that he sees a weak field.

“The answer to that is: It’s a jump ball,” Emanuel told me. “Even for the frontrunner, it’s a jump ball.”

Since decamping from Tokyo after his stint as ambassador to Japan in the Biden administration, Emanuel has been rebuilding his profile with TV hits and white papers.

“Bill Clinton always used to say this, which I think is true: ‘Ideas are the most underappreciated thing in politics,’” Emanuel says.

Emanuel’s Clinton references speak to his long and winding career in Democratic politics and underscore the range of his resume: DCCC top staffer in ’88, Clinton campaign and White House, Congress, Obama White House, mayor, ambassador.

“When you consider the breadth of his experience — counselor to one president, chief of staff to another, member of Congress, part of congressional leadership, the mayor of Chicago and then ambassador to Japan, where he really was sort of the captain of the Asian team when he was over there, he’s got a huge sweep of experience that no one else would have in that race,” Axelrod says.

Emanuel’s ideas amount to a critique of what he sees as the long drift of the Democratic Party from Clinton to Joe Biden. He wants to help Democrats win back white working-class voters — the Clinton-era “Bubba” voters that have gone hard for Trump. “I’m not into Democrats sitting on the 30th floor of a Manhattan highrise in their Lululemon outfit with their Yeti cup, talking about, ‘We should go to places that we don’t go’ and then never go,” Emanuel told me before embarking on this trip. “So I don’t talk about it, and I’m just gonna go.”

But it’s far from clear that the ideas Emanuel is pitching match what the Democratic base craves. The winning message for a U.S. Senate race in his own backyard was, simply, “Fuck Trump,” with a side of “Abolish ICE.” At a moment when California Gov. Gavin Newsom has built his still-early lead on trolling memes and AI slop as much as his successful gerrymandering push, Emanuel’s hope for an “ideas” primary may be quaint and quixotic. We are not too far past a presidential election, after all, that saw the current president make political hay from photo opps that included working the drive-thru at a shuttered McDonald’s.

But his ideas also tell a comprehensive and persuasive story about its decline.

“The party lost focus, thought demographics was destiny, became intellectually flabby,” Emanuel says. “By way of example: Jimmy Carter creates the Department of Education. Bill Clinton creates public school choice and Teachers of Excellence. Barack Obama does Race for the Top. We have a 20-point advantage over Republicans on education. Now, you’re a pretty smart guy, Adam. This is a table filled with pretty smart people about politics,” he says, looking at his political team who’d joined us for lunch at the deli.

“Anybody want to tell me what Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’ education agenda was?”

Silence.

After a long beat: “The answer to what the problem is is in that [non]-answer.”

But Emanuel’s run could also be an opportunity for the left to punch him over the Obama legacy, too. One potential line of attack could focus on the economic bailout, according to the strategist likely to be involved in advising a left-leaning candidate: “The guys who wrecked the economy took their million-dollar bonuses. You never tried to claw them back. It was a disastrous recovery, because you cut it short.”

“Criticism that the left has of the Obama administration — which they don’t utter toward Obama because of his position in the party and who he is — they will have no hesitancy going after him,” this person added.

Emanuel’s own-the-libs broadsides of his own party on platforms like Megyn Kelly’s podcast has won him some Republican fans. Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie has called him “incredibly smart,” “tough” and a “reasonable guy.” His call for a mandatory retirement age of 75 for the president and across branches of government — which would prevent him from serving a full second term — won plaudits in a Fox News segment.

He likes to say he’s “done with the discussion of locker rooms, I am done with the discussion of bathrooms — and we better start having a conversation about the classroom,” attacking Democrats’ rhetoric in favor of trans rights and centering much of his proposals for reform around education.

But that all belies his own role in the Democratic shift leftward on cultural issues. As mayor in 2016, Emanuel closed a loophole in the city’s human rights ordinance that required people to show a government-issued ID when accessing public accommodations like bathrooms — which critics argued discriminated against transgender people. “Can I say it’s a problem? I don’t know that individually,” Emanuel said at the time. “[But] this has been a request of the transgender community, and we’re gonna make the changes to reflect our values and to make sure there is no discrimination in the city of Chicago, whether it’s washrooms in the city, but also in our schools.”

I asked Emanuel about that about-face.

“I’ve always….” he started. “Here’s, here’s the thing. I mean, just uh, look. As I said before, and I’m gonna say it again, way too much about bathrooms and locker rooms and not enough about classrooms. Now, in 2016, did I deal with bathroom access? Yes, I passed the bill. But I never lost, never took my eye off the ball on reading scores, math scores and graduation rates, and they continue to rise.” He continued: “My attitude is, it’s different to be a culture of acceptance, which I’m for, than to be a culture of advocacy.”

It’s his record in his hometown of Chicago that could be Emanuel’s deepest obstacle to gaining traction in a crowded field. That’s where he warred with his own party and the Chicago Teachers’ Unions and dealt with the police killing of Laquan McDonald, who was walking away from an officer, posing a potential problem with Black voters. His polling sank to as low as 18 percent; near the end of his tenure, some polls pegged his approval rating in the 30s. But a Harris poll in 2024 found that of the three mayors since Richard M. Daley, voters thought Emanuel performed best.

Emanuel’s battles with the teachers union still linger. While he oversaw gains in reading scores and graduation rates, he also closed elementary schools to save money — a move the union viewed as retaliation for a strike.

“Rahm Emanuel shouldn’t even have consideration,” says Stacey Davis Gates, the president of the Chicago Teachers Union who was the organization’s political director during its standoff with Emanuel. “He closed over 50 schools on Black children on the south and west sides of this city. That should disqualify him, hands down.”

As Emanuel wended through the millwright’s training center in Wayland, Michigan, his ease with the apprentices was apparent. Standing next to a miter saw, he waved his right, middle-fingerless hand — he lost part of the appendage to an Arby’s meat slicer at age 17 — as if to say, What’s the worst that could happen, losing another one? The workers nearby laughed and seemed to take to his earthy humor and profane manner.

It’s no coincidence Emanuel spent the better part of a week in this blue-collar battleground state that the DNC approved as a finalist to remain as one of the 2028 early states. “Michigan might possibly be his best state,” said the adviser to a potential rival who is likely to run from the left. “I don’t see a lot of traction in South Carolina. I certainly don’t see a lot of traction in New Hampshire nor Nevada. … I don’t see the path.”

As Emanuel finished up his salad, I asked him whom he thought the median small-dollar donor might be to a “Rahm for President” campaign.

“People that want to see change,” he told me. “Change and strength. There’s nobody who walks away and says, ‘You know, Rahm’s kind of weak and woke.’ So we’ll see if there’s an appetite. If there isn’t, I’ll just work on fly fishing.”

A few days later, over the phone, we were talking about fly fishing again. He admits it’s out of character. Obama teased him about it. But his wife, Amy, likes it.

It relaxes him, he told me. It also offers transferable skills.

“After 20-plus years, I have a very good cast,” Emanuel told me, “and I can read the water well.”