A new University of New Hampshire poll puts Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Pete Buttigieg atop the state's 2028 Democratic presidential primary, while former Vice President Kamala Harris has collapsed to single digits among the voters who once backed her.
The University of New Hampshire Survey Center surveyed 648 Democratic primary voters and released its findings on July 22, 2026. Ocasio-Cortez drew 22 percent support, edging Buttigieg at 21 percent. No other candidate broke double digits. Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly landed at 9 percent, California Gov. Gavin Newsom at 8 percent, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders at 6 percent, and Harris at just 5 percent. Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro and Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker rounded out the field at 2 percent and 1 percent, respectively.
For a party still searching for direction after two consecutive presidential defeats, the numbers tell a pointed story about where the Democratic base is heading, and whom it is leaving behind.
The trendlines sharpen the picture. In October 2025, Ocasio-Cortez sat at 14 percent in the same New Hampshire survey. Nine months later she has climbed to 22 percent, an 8-point jump that puts her at the front of the pack. That trajectory suggests the progressive wing's hold on the party's activist base is tightening, not loosening, even as Democratic leaders publicly court the center.
Newsom moved in the opposite direction. He polled at 15 percent in October 2025 and has since shed nearly half his support, falling to 8 percent. For a governor who has spent the better part of three years positioning himself for a White House run, according to Breitbart's analysis, the decline is difficult to spin. Newsom has courted national media, picked public fights with Republican governors, and built a campaign-in-waiting apparatus, and New Hampshire Democrats are walking away from him anyway.
A federal DOJ investigation into Newsom has added another weight around his candidacy, giving Democratic operatives reason to look elsewhere.
Harris's slide is steeper still in percentage terms. She dropped from 11 percent to 5 percent over the same period, a more-than-halving of her support in a state where she needs every vote if she runs again. Democrats pushed Joe Biden out of the 2024 race after concluding he could not win, then handed Harris the nomination. She lost. Now the voters who were supposed to rally behind her are drifting toward a 36-year-old congresswoman from the Bronx and a former Transportation secretary.
The national picture looks better for Harris, on paper. The RealClearPolitics polling average for the 2028 Democratic primary puts her at 27.9 percent nationwide, with Newsom trailing at 16.6 percent. That 11.3-point national lead gives Harris a claim to frontrunner status in the aggregate.
But New Hampshire has a way of humbling national frontrunners. The state's primary voters are famously independent-minded, and a 5 percent showing in an early-state survey is the kind of number that discourages donors, chills endorsements, and invites challengers. Harris's political instincts have drawn scrutiny before, her terse public reaction to the DOJ probe of Newsom raised eyebrows about how she handles intra-party competition.
And the gap between her national number and her New Hampshire number, 27.9 percent versus 5 percent, raises a question Democrats cannot afford to ignore: Is her national support broad but shallow, built on name recognition rather than genuine enthusiasm?
Whether this poll ultimately matters depends on a decision the Democratic Party has not yet made. In 2024, the party stripped New Hampshire of its first-in-the-nation primary status and elevated South Carolina, Nevada, Michigan, and Iowa in the early calendar. The move was widely understood as a concession to Black voters and other key constituencies who felt the overwhelmingly white New Hampshire electorate did not reflect the party's coalition.
Democrats have not finalized the 2028 primary schedule. South Carolina, with its large Black population, is widely expected to retain an early slot. The party faces a familiar tension: it needs Black voter turnout to win general elections, but its most energized primary voters in states like New Hampshire are gravitating toward candidates, Ocasio-Cortez and Buttigieg, who built their brands on progressive ideology and media savvy rather than deep ties to Black communities.
The behind-the-scenes maneuvering around the 2024 nomination left scars that have not healed. Jill Biden's memoir revealed that Harris pushed for an endorsement within minutes of Biden's withdrawal, a detail that undercut the narrative of a seamless, united transition and hinted at the raw ambition driving the party's internal fights.
Buttigieg's second-place finish at 21 percent is notable for a former Cabinet secretary whose tenure at the Department of Transportation drew sustained criticism. Supply-chain failures, a toxic train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, and questions about his management style dogged him throughout his time in office. Yet New Hampshire Democrats are placing him one point behind Ocasio-Cortez and well ahead of every governor and senator in the field.
That says less about Buttigieg's record than about the alternatives. When a former Transportation secretary with a thin governing resume polls ahead of sitting governors from California, Pennsylvania, and Illinois, the bench is not as deep as party leaders claim.
Sanders, who won New Hampshire's Democratic primary in 2016 and built his national movement from the state's town halls, sits at 6 percent. The senator who once electrified the progressive base has been overtaken by the congresswoman he helped inspire. Ocasio-Cortez carries his policy agenda, Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, student-debt cancellation, but wraps it in a younger, more media-fluent package.
For conservatives watching this race, the shift matters. Sanders was a protest candidate who pushed the party left from the outside. Ocasio-Cortez is a mainstream contender who could actually win the nomination. The policies are the same; the packaging is more dangerous.
Shapiro's 2 percent and Pritzker's 1 percent are the numbers that should alarm Democratic strategists most. Both govern major states. Both have spent freely on national profiles. Both have positioned themselves as pragmatic alternatives to the party's progressive wing. And neither can crack the top five in a small-state primary poll of 648 voters.
If the party's moderate lane is this empty two years before the first votes, the 2028 primary is shaping up as a contest between the progressive left and whatever remains of the Obama-era center, with the left holding a clear advantage among the voters who actually show up.
The broader question hanging over all of this is whether the Democratic donor infrastructure will consolidate behind a candidate early enough to avoid a fractured primary, or whether the party will repeat the chaotic late-stage maneuvering that defined 2024.
A single state poll of 648 voters two years before the primary does not decide anything. Margins this early are soft. Candidates who lead now often fade. And New Hampshire may not even vote first in 2028.
But polls measure something real: energy, name recognition, and the direction of a party's base. Right now, the Democratic base in New Hampshire is moving toward a congresswoman from New York's 14th District who has never held statewide office, never managed a state budget, and never won a competitive general election. Her chief rival is a former Cabinet secretary best known for being absent during a transportation crisis. The governors and senators who were supposed to represent the party's serious governing wing are polling in the low single digits.
Democrats spent 2024 telling voters they were the party of competence and experience. New Hampshire's Democratic primary voters, at least, do not appear to have believed them.