Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) said Sunday that Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) making a run for the presidency in two years wouldn’t affect his own potential choice to do so. “If your fellow progressive Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez runs…
Page A4From§Eachthe supper edition — 30 August 2026
Khanna Says AOC 2028 Run Has 'No Bearing' On His Plans; Cruz Says There's 'Time' To Decide
As it ran on the front
Congressman Ro Khanna was asked this week whether Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez running for president in 2028 would affect his own thinking about entering that race, and he said it would have no bearing. Around the same time, Senator Ted Cruz was asked about his own 2028 plans and said there will be a time to decide. Both are reasonable things for a politician to say, and it's worth defending them as such, because refusing to commit two and a half years out is not evasion, it's just — it is evasion, actually, let's not pretend otherwise, but it's the normal, low-cost kind that every officeholder does, so it's fine.
Here's the honest case for both non-answers: announcing a national campaign this far out buys you nothing but extra years of opposition research and no upside, since the invisible primary runs on donor calls and staff hires, not press conference declarations. Khanna saying a colleague's decision has 'no bearing' on his own is, strictly read, a true statement — his filing deadline doesn't move because hers does — and it also happens to be the exact sentence a person says when they'd rather not rule anything in or out. Cruz saying 'there will be a time' is the same maneuver from the other side of the aisle, which at least proves the tactic is bipartisan, which I suppose is its own kind of accountability, or its own kind of nothing, hard to say which.…
…(cont) What makes this worth writing down instead of shrugging at is that it happened twice, from two different parties, within days of each other, using almost interchangeable language, about the same future election. That's not evidence of a conspiracy. It's evidence of a script — every ambitious officeholder in Washington has read the same memo about not committing early, and the memo works, because two years from now nobody will remember that either man ever dodged the question, only whether he ran.
So call it what it is: not a lie, not a scandal, just the sound two parties make when they'd both rather keep every option open than give the other side a talking point eighteen months before the filing deadline. That's not a defense. That's just the whole thing, described accurately.
“Two guys, two parties, same non-answer: 'no bearing' and 'there will be time' both mean 'ask me after I've checked the polling.' Nobody's naming a plan, everybody's holding a seat at the table, and the seat's getting reserved a full two years before anyone has to actually vote.”
“Congressman Khanna is being straightforward, his decision genuinely doesn't depend on what a colleague does, that's just political maturity — and Senator Cruz saying there's time to decide, that's just prudence, not everyone needs a five-year plan announced on command, that's not dodging, that's just — okay, it's a little bit dodging.”
The receipts
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) gave further indications that he intends to run for president in 2028, saying “there will be a time” when he would decide. In an appearance on NBC News’s Meet the Press, Cruz was asked directly if he was “seriously…
Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) said that fellow progressive Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s (D-NY) decision whether to run for president in 2028 wouldn’t affect his own decision. In an appearance on CNN’s State of the Union, Khanna was asked…
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.