This column is being republished with permission from its original home on Substack. For more from Liz Mair, subscribe here.
Though we’re still 54 days out from the 2026 midterm elections, the 2028 presidential race seems likely to be well underway shortly. With that in mind, I’ve been thinking about a potential candidate that—so far as I am aware—no one else is even talking about: Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy.
I’ve vaguely known Duffy for a long time. I first encountered him in 2008; he struck me as very personable and much smarter than people expected—because he’s cute (yes, he is!), people assume he’s dumb. He had easy-to-spot raw political talent, so it wasn’t surprising to me that, after retiring from the House and becoming a lobbyist, Duffy would return to politics—though I might not have guessed he’d run for Wisconsin Governor before joining a presidential administration.
Now, the Department of Transportation is not normally a job where future stars of a political party go to shine, it might be said. (Duly noted that Pete Buttigieg is trying to relaunch his political career after having that exact job just a few years back). Nonetheless, Duffy continues to grab attention. And I think he’s someone whose star could continue to rise.
The conventional wisdom is that Duffy, while being probably among Trump’s most competent Cabinet secretaries, is also kind of a lightweight, still too much wedded to his now long-ago status as a reality TV star, too willing to drift into TMI-sharing and shirking-tough-work-for-the-limelight (though perhaps less of it, relative to his old The Real World days).
But I think these episodes might signal why, and how, Duffy could have a third act in his political career, after the second Trump administration is done and dusted. If he wants it.
Duffy is a totally acceptable variety of conservative for pretty much everyone in the GOP coalition. Social conservatives like him because he has about 53 children. (OK, not really, but he does have nine.) Economic conservatives like him because he was firmly within the GOP mainstream during the Tea Party era. MAGAs like him, or at least don’t dislike him, because he’s adapted just fine to their movement.
To that, though, Duffy adds something I think is vastly more important: The ability to grab broader voter attention and cultivate nontraditional supporters via pop culture.
Conventional wisdom says that the way you build a political base is by holding as high-profile a government office as you can get, unfurling and instituting lots of good and ideologically-consistent-with-your-tribe policies, and ginning up the core base of your political party by advocating policies they want and promising to deliver if they put you in office. Extra points for coming off as a “warrior.”
But when you stand back from this, it’s sort of strange that this conventional wisdom continues to be applied so consistently. Mostly, it results in a ton of “also-rans” who give really scripted, uncomfortable, and stodgy debate performances and short cable news interviews, raise a bunch of money, and tap out after Iowa or New Hampshire. That’s something, but as should be obvious, it’s not a very reliable pathway to winning.
If Donald Trump showed us anything, it should be that the easiest and fastest way to grab the attention—and votes—of a huge swath of Americans, and principally those who pay almost zero attention to politics, is simply by leveraging celebrity and the image and brand you have cultivated through pop culture, not service, wonkery, or political media.
Oh sure, Trump appealed to lots of people, including those who do spend better than ten percent of their day thinking about politics and policy, because contrary to the dominant Never Trump narrative, there actually are broad policy themes he believes in.
The point is, though, policy is not front and center with Trump; personality, and the sense that people “know” him—for decades sealed through tabloid headlines tens of millions of Americans saw and took on board, and then his starring on The Apprentice—is front and center.
Trump won in 2016, and therefore remained a viable political option in 2020 and 2024, because he had a huge profile in pop culture, not politics. It meant people saw him as inherently successful, an outsider who could effectively manage government and deliver for them.
People will say Trump is an aberration, but I don’t think this is really true. Many successful politicians, and not just in America but around the world, have parlayed their celebrity profile into political results. Ronald Reagan parlayed his celebrity into a lengthy career that culminated in a two-term presidency. Boris Johnson, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and Arnold Schwarzenegger are just a few of the other names that jump out.
And strategists inherently know this, even if they eschew putting it into practice in any real concerted sense. Why do you think they always want to book their candidates onto late-night comedy shows and The View?
This leads us back to talking about Duffy—and, a little bit, JD Vance.
Vance may have gotten his start as a famous author whose life story was memorialized by Hollywood. That was immensely helpful in him winning his 2022 Ohio Senate race and becoming Trump’s VP. But since then, he has drifted very much towards a total focus on the political realm. He loves him some political podcasts, engaging with political media, sparring on social media over political topics, and so on. He has become perhaps the administration’s rightwing edgelord podcast bro, which is something, but firmly embedded in pop culture it ain’t.
Duffy’s instincts, both with his podcast between 2021 and 2024, and the more recent (if not wholly successful) reality TV road trip series, hint at an ongoing interest in getting back to the kind of content that most people—which is to say people who, even in the era of Trump when political coverage is wall-to-wall and almost unavoidable, spend about five minutes a day engaging with media content—prefer. It’s easy to see him transitioning out of the Department of Transportation and going right back to that world.
Yes, Fox News is the most-watched channel. And if you’re planning on running for President as a Republican, it’s obviously important to have a presence on the network. But that’s what every Republican running for President (and quite a few Democrats, too) will aim for. What they won’t aim for, and not just because their strategists won’t tell them to, but because they’re utterly uninteresting for this market, is the reality TV-game show vein of content that gets you on the radar of normies, low-propensity (but margin-of-victory-delivering), and not massively political Americans. These are people who Trump could get in 2016, which Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, and John Kasich could not. They’re what made the math work.
Duffy could corner that market—if he wanted to. And if he thinks he might ever want to run for the big job, he probably should.
This column is being republished with permission from its original home on Substack. For more from Liz Mair, subscribe here.
