Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro (D) raised more than $10 million in the fourth quarter and ended the year with a staggering $30 million on hand, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reports.

The Atlantic profiles Gov. Gavin Newsom (D), noting that he has a 30-page file on why the Democrats lost the 2024 presidential election.

“He starts listing them: incumbency, inflation, interest rates, Israel—and that’s just the letter I. ‘Yes, too woke,’ he adds. ‘Yes, 107 days,’ referring to the short campaign after Joe Biden’s forced withdrawal.”

“But the California governor distills his party’s problem down to one word. Weak. Newsom slaps his hand on a marked-up hardback of Bill Clinton’s memoir, brought down from the shelf a minute earlier. ‘Given the choice,’ he tells me, summing up a crucial Clinton insight—one many Democrats still can’t quite seem to grasp — ‘the American people always support strong and wrong versus weak and right.’”

“Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro has been dealing with one big thing that sets him apart from other potential 2028 Democratic presidential candidates: a divided state Legislature and all the tricky political compromises that come with it,” NBC News reports.

“Shapiro frequently talks up his handling of this split, particularly in recent weeks after navigating a budget impasse that lasted more than four months.”

“The top Democratic contenders to succeed Donald Trump in the Oval Office excoriated the president for his overnight strike on Venezuela on Saturday, sharply criticizing the president’s foreign policy and trying to drive a wedge between the president and voters wary of foreign entanglements,” Politico reports.

“Trump, they argued, launched the operation to distract from a souring political situation on the home front.”

White supremacist Nick Fuentes threw his support to California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) over Vice President JD Vance in a possible 2028 presidential race because Newsom is more “handsome,” Mediaite reports.

Los Angeles Times: “Uninterested in a competitive Republican primary in 2028, Turning Point USA plans to deploy representatives across Iowa’s 99 counties in the coming months to build the campaign infrastructure it believes could deliver Vance, a Midwesterner from nearby Ohio, a decisive victory, potentially short-circuiting a fractious GOP race, insiders said.”

“It is the latest move in a quiet effort by some in Trump’s orbit to clear the field of viable competitors. Earlier this month, Marco Rubio, the secretary of State previously floated by Trump as a possible contender, appeared to take himself out of the running.”

Said Rubio: “If Vance runs for president, he’s going to be our nominee, and I’ll be one of the first people to support him.”

Politico: “White House hopefuls in both parties are maneuvering for the post-Trump era. Here’s where they stand at the end of 2025.”

“Vice President JD Vance plans to literally fly above MAGA’s rising civil war — campaigning coast to coast in the midterms and sticking close to President Trump, while building support for an expected presidential run in 2028,” Axios reports.

“Vance has to get ready for a national campaign. But he can’t look too eager, since President Trump isn’t one to share the spotlight.”

“Vance aides say he’s focused on next November’s midterms, not thinking about 2028. But talking with outside Vance allies and others familiar with his thinking, Axios stitched together the VP’s five-pronged plan for making 2026 pay off later.”

Zachary Wolf: “The next presidential election is several eternities away from now in terms of politics. Only a fool would try to predict the form of the political conversation in three years, much less a few months in the unpredictable Trump era.”

“But we do know the next election will offer Americans new choices on the right and the left. There won’t be a Trump, a Clinton or a Bush anywhere near the ballot.”

Noah Rothman: “Vance has made a choice here, and it’s a clarifying one. His allies are telling us straight that this is all about JD Vance — his political ambitions, his position as Donald Trump’s most likely successor, and, by extension, their own prospects when Trump is gone. Those voices claim that if you object to the rehabilitation of outright antisemitism on behalf of actual Nazis — not some tortured Democratic metaphor for fascism but the actual NSDAP circa 1920 to 1945 — you’re the paranoiac here.”

“Vance will pretend as though he is disinterestedly arbitrating a political dispute on the right, but he’s not. He has intervened in it on behalf of his allies and their revisionist historical project. If Vance’s contention is that the figures like Shapiro, who aren’t nobly attempting to talk sense to the talker class, are maliciously bifurcating the conservative movement and sowing division, the vice president’s implicit outlook is that interventions like Shapiro’s are the problem. That is an effort to shackle the interveners and arrest the rehabilitative process. Whatever else that is, it is not a neutral disposition.”

Franklin Foer: “On Sunday, J. D. Vance was presented with the simplest moral test: denounce commentators who traffic in medieval blood libels, who deny the Holocaust, and who endlessly harp on evil Jewish cabals.”

“The test was forced on the vice president. By the time he addressed the Turning Point USA conference this past weekend, it had turned into a referendum on latter-day Father Coughlins who have acquired substantial and growing audiences on the right. Among them is Candace Owens, whose YouTube channel has 5.7 million followers. She argues that there is a powerful, secret sect within Judaism practicing pedophilia. Meanwhile, Tucker Carlson, who has 16.8 million followers on X, has shared his microphone with an unabashed fan of Adolf Hitler and with historians who minimize the Nazi dictator’s evil.”

“Democrats eyeing 2028 presidential runs are losing weight, upgrading their wardrobes and changing their hairstyles — a time-honored tradition for White House hopefuls that has taken on new urgency in the TikTok era,” Axios reports.

“The makeovers by former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, Michigan Sen. Elissa Slotkin and others are the latest signs that the pre-primary has begun.”

Washington Post: “With the future of the party up for grabs in a Donald Trump-less 2028 primary, Cruz has in recent months positioned himself as a loud voice for a more traditional, hawkish Republican foreign policy. He’s also urging the GOP to rid itself of popular MAGA pundit Tucker Carlson, whom he argues is injecting the ‘poison’ of antisemitism into the movement with his broadsides against Israel. Carlson has rejected that characterization.”

“As he feuds with Carlson, Cruz is weighing a second presidential bid, according to a person close to the senator and another briefed on his thinking, who spoke like others on the condition of anonymity to disclose internal conversations. A White House run would be politically risky for Cruz, 55, putting him on course to collide with Vice President JD Vance, who many Republicans expect to enter the 2028 race.”

Wall Street Journal: “The vice president will be the closing speaker Sunday at the mega conference held here. Behind the scenes, Turning Point is setting up infrastructure to boost his potential 2028 presidential bid. The conservative group is planning to put representatives in all of Iowa’s 99 counties ahead of the presidential primary. Iowa is an important early state in the presidential nominating process, and Turning Point is already trying to build grassroots support for Vance there.”

“Erika Kirk, the widow of slain conservative activist Charlie Kirk, said Thursday the group her husband founded would work to elect JD Vance president in 2028 as infighting over the future of the GOP took center stage,” the Washington Post reports.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) said she would coast to victory if she were ever to square off against Vice President JD Vance in a presidential election, Mediaite reports.

Said Ocasio-Cortez: “Listen, these polls, like three years out are, you know, they are what they are. But let the record show I would stomp him. I would stomp him!”