When Republican pollster Sarah Longwell asks Trump voters who should lead the country next, the name that keeps surfacing isn't JD Vance or Marco Rubio. It's Candace Owens, a media personality who has never held elected office, never run a campaign, and never managed a government agency. And she's outpacing the sitting vice president in the one place that matters most to political operatives: the unscripted, unfiltered conversations of ordinary voters.
That finding, drawn from focus groups Longwell conducted with Trump voters in February 2025, deserves more attention than it's getting from a political class still gaming out the 2028 primary as though it will follow the usual rules.
Longwell, a self-described Republican strategist who has spent years running focus groups with Trump voters, reported in The Bulwark that Owens is "one of the most frequently mentioned non-politicians when participants are asked about potential future presidents." More than Vance. More than Rubio. More than any of the conventional names that populate cable-news speculation segments.
The focus group participants Longwell quoted weren't fringe activists or internet provocateurs. They were Biden-to-Trump voters, the kind of swing-state converts both parties spend billions trying to reach.
Mycal, a Biden-to-Trump voter from North Carolina, put it simply:
"I think Candace Owens is great. I would vote for her in a minute."
Daniela, another Biden-to-Trump voter from the same state, went further. She offered a counterfactual that should sting Democrats and intrigue Republicans in equal measure:
"If we would've swapped out Candace for Kamala, they would've had this in the bag."
Set aside whether that's true. The fact that a voter who switched from Biden to Trump believes a Black conservative woman would have beaten Trump, and says so voluntarily in a focus group, tells you something about the kind of crossover appeal Owens has built.
The conventional 2028 conversation revolves around figures like Vance and Rubio. Both hold high office. Both have institutional backing. Both have the résumés that Washington insiders consider prerequisites for a presidential run.
But résumés don't generate the kind of grassroots enthusiasm Longwell is documenting. Recent polling has shown Rubio and other establishment figures leading early 2028 primary surveys, yet those numbers measure name recognition as much as genuine voter energy. Focus groups capture something polls often miss: intensity, affection, and the willingness to volunteer a name without being prompted.
Owens generates that kind of response. Vance and Rubio, at least in Longwell's sessions, do not, or not nearly as often.
Vance, for his part, has spent recent months in a supporting role rather than a commanding one. He was held back at the White House during sensitive Iran ceasefire negotiations, a signal that his portfolio remains limited even within the administration he serves.
That kind of sidelined positioning doesn't build the grassroots mythology a future presidential candidate needs. Owens, operating entirely outside government, has no such constraints. She sets her own agenda, picks her own fights, and answers to no one but her audience.
Longwell's observation that Owens's appeal "cuts across age groups and partisan lines", extending beyond the MAGA base, points to something the Republican establishment has been slow to internalize. The old gatekeepers no longer control who gets to be a serious political figure.
Owens built her platform the way Trump built his: by going directly to voters through media, bypassing the party apparatus, and generating loyalty that institutional endorsements can't match. Her podcast recently featured Hunter Biden as a guest, a pairing Longwell described as "the melding of two of the internet's main characters." Whatever one thinks of that booking, it demonstrated Owens's ability to command attention across political lines in ways that sitting senators and governors simply cannot.
The comparison to Trump's own rise is unavoidable. In 2015, the political class dismissed a celebrity businessman with no government experience. They pointed to his controversies, his lack of policy depth, his unconventional style. Republican voters didn't care. They wanted someone who spoke their language, fought their fights, and refused to apologize for it.
Owens occupies a similar lane. She is not a policy wonk. She is not a legislator. She is a communicator with a massive audience and an instinct for the cultural battles that animate the Republican base.
Longwell's piece flags that Owens has drawn controversy, including allegations of promoting antisemitic conspiracy theories and public disputes with fellow conservative commentator Charlie Kirk. The specifics of those controversies aren't detailed in Longwell's account, which makes it difficult to assess how seriously Republican primary voters would weigh them.
What the focus group data suggests, at minimum, is that the voters Longwell spoke with either don't know about those controversies, don't care, or have decided they're outweighed by what Owens offers. That pattern, too, echoes the Trump experience. Voters who feel ignored by the establishment tend to forgive a great deal in candidates who make them feel heard.
Whether Owens could survive the scrutiny of an actual presidential campaign, opposition research, debate stages, the relentless grind of retail politics, remains an open question. Vance himself has learned that even holding high office doesn't guarantee political leverage, as his recent public appearances have underscored.
But viability questions are premature. The point isn't whether Owens will run. The point is what her prominence in voter conversations reveals about the state of the Republican Party and the kind of leadership its base is hungry for.
The Republican base is telling anyone who will listen that it wants fighters, not functionaries. It wants people who built their followings outside the system, not people who climbed the ladder inside it. It wants cultural warriors who speak plainly, not politicians who speak carefully.
That impulse produced Donald Trump. It may yet produce another outsider candidate, whether Owens or someone like her.
The party's institutional wing can dismiss this as a passing fascination. It can point to Owens's lack of governing experience, her controversies, her absence from the donor circuits and policy conferences where presidential campaigns are traditionally assembled. Vance has been doing the traditional work, voting in primaries, stumping for vulnerable incumbents, that party insiders consider essential groundwork for a future run.
But traditional groundwork didn't stop Trump from bulldozing a field of governors and senators in 2016. And the voters in Longwell's focus groups aren't asking about legislative records or policy white papers. They're asking for someone who fights.
Longwell herself is a Never Trumper, hardly a natural ally of either Owens or the MAGA movement. That makes her findings harder to dismiss as cheerleading. She isn't promoting Owens. She's reporting what she sees in the data, and what she sees should unsettle every Republican who assumes the 2028 primary will be a conventional affair.
The real lesson here isn't about Candace Owens specifically. It's about the gap between the Republican establishment's assumptions and the Republican base's desires. That gap has been widening for a decade. The party's donors, consultants, and elected officials keep producing candidates who check institutional boxes. The base keeps gravitating toward figures who break them.
Owens may never run for president. She may never hold any office. But the fact that Biden-to-Trump voters in North Carolina are volunteering her name, ahead of the vice president of the United States, tells you everything you need to know about where the energy in the Republican Party actually lives.
Washington can keep pretending the next primary will be an orderly affair. The voters have other plans.
