The candidate who refuses to stay in the background
Rahm Emanuel keeps doing the sort of things people do when they are serious about a presidential campaign, which is inconvenient for everyone else in the Democratic Party. He has been crisscrossing battleground states, floating policy ideas, and making clear that he does not intend to spend 2028 politely applauding from the sidelines.
In Michigan, Emanuel recently toured a millwright’s training center in Wayland, where he wore safety glasses and posed beside heavy machinery. He then moved on to Wisconsin for a town hall and a stop tied to the state’s upcoming Supreme Court race. On Monday, he is scheduled to appear at New Hampshire’s St. Anselm Institute of Politics for the long-running Politics and Eggs event before heading to early-primary South Carolina. That is a fairly obvious paper trail for someone who insists he is merely, in the industry’s favorite phrase, exploring.
He has also rolled out no fewer than eight policy proposals, including a social media ban for children under 16, a ban on predictive markets for federal employees and their family members, and age limits for politicians running for office. He says he wants to campaign in the country’s forgotten places. So far, he appears to be doing the part where he goes there.
Not just trolling, despite the obvious temptation
For a while, Democratic insiders assumed Emanuel was mostly trying to annoy the left and drag the party back toward the center. That theory has faded. The emerging view is that he is actually in this for real.
“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, who worked with Emanuel when Emanuel was Barack Obama’s chief of staff.
Emanuel says he has assembled a roughly half-dozen-person skeleton campaign team to handle travel logistics and keep reporters apprised of his movements. He jokes that he drives them “as if there were 20.” One of those aides is Matt McGrath, his longtime fixer and former mayoral press secretary, who has been traveling with him on these excursions.
“I’m going to emphasize both what I think is important for the American people to hear and to know about,” Emanuel told me a few weeks after the Michigan trip, “and the second kicker is: It reflects my experience, and others may not have that.”
That experience is the main feature of the pitch. Emanuel has been a top staffer at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, worked in the Clinton White House and campaign, served in Congress, helped run Obama’s White House, became mayor of Chicago, and later served as ambassador to Japan in the Biden administration. Since leaving Tokyo, he has kept up a steady schedule of television appearances, columns for The Wall Street Journal, and multiple podcasts a week, including one about fly-fishing.
As Emanuel puts it, quoting Bill Clinton, “Ideas are the most underappreciated thing in politics.” He clearly intends to keep reminding everyone.
A message aimed at the party’s center
Emanuel’s argument is a critique of where Democrats have drifted since the Clinton years. He wants the party to regain white working-class voters, the old Clinton-era “Bubba” bloc that has moved hard toward Donald 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 heading out on one of his recent trips. “So I don’t talk about it, and I’m just gonna go.”
That is the kind of line that makes centrist Democrats smile and left-leaning activists reach for the nearest complaint form. But it also explains why Emanuel is hard to ignore. One Democratic adviser, speaking anonymously to assess a possible 2028 rival, said Emanuel may not be a major electoral threat but could still shape the race simply by dominating attention. Another strategist said he is “provocative” while trying to set a broader-electorate standard. “He will spice up the race,” this person said.
Not everyone is charmed. Rebecca Katz, the strategist who represented Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral campaign, offered the concise version when asked about an Emanuel run: “I don’t.”
Emanuel, for his part, thinks the field is weak.
“The answer to that is: It’s a jump ball,” he said. “Even for the frontrunner, it’s a jump ball.”
The résumé is the point
People around Emanuel do not think he is running as some sort of intellectual exercise or as a stalking horse for another moderate Democrat.
“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 Democratic pollster John Anzalone, who worked with Emanuel during his Chicago mayoralty. “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.’”
Matt Bennett, vice president of the center-left group Third Way, which says it plans to spend $50 million to help a “combative centrist” win the Democratic nomination, made a similar point. “This idea that Rahm is just in it to kind of change the dialogue is wrong,” he said. “I think he’s in because he thinks he can win, and I think he might be able to.”
Axelrod also argues that Emanuel’s biography gives him a sweep of experience unmatched by other potential contenders. That may be true. It is also the sort of sentence people say when they are trying to explain why a campaign might be either formidable or exhausting.
The left may have its own file on him
Emanuel’s biggest problem may be that he offers progressives a very large target.
He is easy for Republicans to like, which in itself is not the same thing as winning a Democratic primary, but it does help explain his recent media life. 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 presidency and other branches of government, a proposal that would keep him from serving a full second term, won praise on Fox News.
He also likes to say he is “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,” a line aimed squarely at Democrats who have centered transgender rights in culture-war fights while he tries to refocus the party on education.
That said, Emanuel’s own history makes the purity test difficult. As mayor in 2016, he closed a loophole in Chicago’s human rights ordinance that had required a government-issued ID to access public accommodations such as bathrooms, something critics said discriminated against transgender people. At the time, Emanuel said the change reflected the city’s values and would help ensure there was no discrimination in Chicago.
When I asked him about the apparent reversal, he leaned back into his familiar answer: too much talk about bathrooms, too little about classrooms. He said he had supported bathroom access but never lost sight of reading scores, math scores, and graduation rates, which he said continued to rise. “My attitude is, it’s different to be a culture of acceptance, which I’m for, than to be a culture of advocacy,” he said.
The deeper criticism from the left is not really about rhetoric. It is about record.
One strategist likely to work for a left-leaning candidate said Emanuel could be attacked through the Obama-era bailout, arguing that the people who wrecked the economy kept their bonuses while ordinary Americans absorbed the damage. Another said the left would feel free to say things about Obama’s administration that they would never say about Obama himself. Emanuel’s long association with that era makes him vulnerable to exactly those attacks.
Chicago is still the issue
If Emanuel has a weak spot, it is probably Chicago, where his record still lives rent-free in the minds of plenty of Democrats.
As mayor, he fought with the Chicago Teachers Union, oversaw school closures to save money, and dealt with the police killing of Laquan McDonald, who was walking away from an officer. His approval numbers sank as low as 18 percent, and near the end of his tenure some polls put him in the 30s. Yet a 2024 Harris poll found that among the three mayors since Richard M. Daley, voters thought Emanuel had performed best.
That has not softened the opposition from his old union foes. Stacey Davis Gates, now president of the Chicago Teachers Union and its political director during the standoff with Emanuel, said bluntly: “Rahm Emanuel shouldn’t even have consideration. He closed over 50 schools on Black children on the south and west sides of this city. That should disqualify him, hands down.”
So yes, Emanuel can still work a room. In Wayland, the apprentices around him laughed at his rough humor and his missing middle finger, which he lost to an Arby’s meat slicer when he was 17. He has a way of turning scars into stagecraft.
Michigan may be his best early state, according to one adviser to a potential left-leaning rival. South Carolina looks tougher. New Hampshire and Nevada look worse. “I don’t see the path,” the adviser said.
Emanuel, naturally, disagrees. Asked who the median small-dollar donor to a “Rahm for President” campaign might be, he answered: “People that want to see change. 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, on the phone, he returned to fly fishing, which he admits is not exactly standard issue for a guy like him. Obama used to tease him about it. His wife, Amy, likes it. It calms him down, he said.
It also gives him one more thing to claim he has mastered.
“After 20-plus years, I have a very good cast,” Emanuel said. “And I can read the water well.”
