It hasn’t even been a week since Donald Trump won the election, but politicos are already dreaming about who should run in 2028, and former First Lady Michelle Obama’s name keeps cropping up.
When the Obamas issued their statement on the election results, social media users deluged them with comments calling for the former first lady to run.
Oddsmakers already have her as the number two choice next cycle, behind Vice President-elect JD Vance. Even Joe Rogan, the Trump-supporting apostle of male opinion this election, said this week Obama would win “in a landslide“ if she ran.
While Obama has never expressed public interest in running for president, it’s easy to see why so many want her to: she remains extremely popular.
Back when Joe Biden was still the struggling Democratic choice for 2024, an Ipsos poll from July showed that Michelle Obama was the only Democrat who could beat Donald Trump in a hypothetical matchup.
When the Obamas left the White House in 2016, the outgoing first lady was more popular than the president.
Speculation, or perhaps wishful thinking, was so intense that Michelle Obama would swoop in and rescue the Democrats this election that the first lady’s office was compelled in March to announce she was not going to run.
“As former first lady Michelle Obama has expressed several times over the years, she will not be running for president,” Crystal Carson, director of communications for her office, said at the time.
Michelle Obama has long made it clear she doesn’t have aspirations for political office herself.
“Politics is hard,” she told Oprah in 2023. “And the people who get into it … you’ve got to want it. It’s got to be in your soul, because it is so important. It is not in my soul.”
She “detests” questions about running for the White House, Obama told the BBC in 2022.
Those around the former first lady have been similarly clear.
“She has said over and over again, this is not her world. She’s not going to do it,” her biographer Peter Slevin told NewsNation.
Obama has long talked about the challenging impact of entering politics on her own life and family.
“Politics felt mean,” she told NPR in 2018, “and I could see how disruptive it could be to family life, how all consuming it could be.”
“Politics was never ever anything I would have chosen for myself. ... It was very difficult being married to a man that felt like politics was his destiny,” Obama added.
