Mitch Landrieu for president? The former New Orleans mayor wants to test the 2028 waters

New Orleans (CNN) — Quietly, someone no one had been thinking about as a 2028 contender showed up to a meeting of Democratic activists here and started to incept a presidential campaign – including for himself.

It helped that the meeting was in the city that gave Mitch Landrieu the accent with which he squeezes three soft syllables out of the second word in “New Orleans.”

“You can begin to dream about the America that should be. Because we are not going back to where we were. It’s like when New Orleans got destroyed by Katrina,” he told a gathering of the Young Democrats of America attached to an otherwise ho-hum seasonal meeting of the Democratic National Committee this month.

“We grabbed our past – that was important, that told us who we are,” Landrieu added. “We got rid of the mistakes we made. And we looked forward to a new day where we can make New Orleans the city it should have been if we had gotten it right the first time.”

He was riffing without notes.

“You get to construct a new day, if you win,” he said. “And that is what 2028 and beyond is going to be about.”

More Democrats were with Landrieu that night upstairs at the famous Galatoire’s restaurant in the French Quarter – elected officials, operatives and influencer Carlos Espina, who has 14 million TikTok followers and had keynoted the main DNC meeting earlier that afternoon.

Multiple people in the room who listened to his toast told CNN later they’d been surprised how much it felt like a soft launch.

Upward of two dozen Democrats are already writing books, touring potential early primary states or otherwise setting up presidential campaigns-in-waiting. Most are better known than Landrieu. But with few registering as more than a blip in early polls, plenty of less familiar names see an opening to make their case and see if they can catch on.

Walking along the Mississippi River the next afternoon after yet another speech, this time to the DNC executive board, rousing them to be as hard-nosed as necessary to win big in this fall’s midterms, Landrieu bit harder than most when acknowledging that what would be a dark horse presidential run is very much on his mind.

“Whether I’m the president or one of a hundred of my best friends are president, I am at a point in my life where I really feel like the future of the country is at stake,” Landrieu told CNN. “And so, people say, ‘What, are you going to run for president?’ Maybe.”

A native son

In the run-up to the 1976 election, with America was still reeling from Watergate, New Orleans Mayor Moon Landrieu thought about running for president, seeing a path for an outsider conciliator in a race that ultimately put another southerner, Georgia Gov. Jimmy Carter, in the White House. (The way Mitch Landrieu tells the story, it was his grandmother who was most disappointed, saying when Moon Landrieu passed on a campaign, “All the other mother’s sons are running for president, and mine’s not.”)

Mitch Landrieu is one of nine children, a former state lieutenant governor who ran for mayor after Katrina ravaged his hometown and lost before winning four years later.

Last week, as he led a mini-tour of the waterfront he worked to revitalize, Landrieu could point to the ferry system to the city’s west bank with its new terminal, the land he’d swapped with the railroad to build three miles of parks, fountains and walkways, where he could point out how new sewage and water systems, revamped schools and libraries stood in spots that were once under 17 feet of water.

The workers setting up for the French Quarter festival who greeted him with hugs, the many people who called out “Hey Mitch!” or “We need you back,” the man with the candied pecan sampler tray who insisted on a selfie – each moment could have been a scene in a future campaign commercial. So was the way Landrieu did a few seconds of an impromptu soft-shoe after putting a $20 bill into the box of a street performer working with a strip of cardboard and foil on his shoes.

Coming up in and governing this city, where he sang “Ave Maria” in the choir loft in the cathedral on Jackson Square and met his wife while he was playing Che in “Evita” in the theater across the street, has also given what those who know Landrieu say could be a particularly important political advantage.

Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas, who was a Landrieu admirer long before hearing the toast at Galatoire’s and then following him to dance out on Bourbon Street, calls Landrieu “one of the most charismatic people in American politics today.” Lucas compared Landrieu to former Vice President Kamala Harris and Maryland Gov. Wes Moore.

“In a game where it’s still retail, in a game where it’s a whole lot of South Carolina and who’s actually speaking to and relating to the people there in a lot of places, Black politicians for example, he’s got unique strengths that really only Vice President Harris, I assume Gov. Moore, have right now,” Lucas said.

Asked to boil down what he was trying to say, Lucas, who is Black, explained, “He’s a White dude who fits in everywhere.”

New Orleans is still home to a lot of suffering, as the many homeless people dotted between the tourists and musicians along the walk made clear. Here and across the country, Landrieu said, he can feel what he says is hurt that becomes resentment that becomes anger, from too many Americans feeling like the social contract has been broken.

He often tells a story of sitting with a group of older coal miners in West Virginia, summarizing their thoughts: “Y’all needed us to help save the world by creating fuel so that our warships could go save democracy. So we went down to that hole. And we stayed at that hole for 30 years or 40 years. And I sucked all that shit in my lungs. I broke my back,” he said.

“And now, one, you’re going to tell me I’m stupid. Two, you’re going to tell me I’m bad. And three, you’re not going to pay my retirement. And then you’re going to tell me, ‘Listen, no problem. We’re going to teach you how to code.’”

Did he miss his chance already?

Landrieu has been down this road before. Even his biggest boosters acknowledge his last big flirt fizzled, when a 2020 Democratic primary run was planned to segue from the national tour for his 2018 book, “In the Shadow of Statues: A White Southerner Confronts History,” based off his searing 2017 speech explaining his decision to take down four Confederate monuments.

He told allies around that time that he wouldn’t run if Joe Biden entered the field. Ultimately, Biden ran and Landrieu didn’t.

Now, Landrieu thinks, his Katrina experience could fit into a moment different from the same time in than President Donald Trump’s first term, when many Democrats were thinking that the Republican would be a blip. He also isn’t sure that other Democrats have the same interest in building a coalition of Trump supporters and other voters that may have left their party.

After Biden won, he brought Landrieu into the administration to manage the implementation of the bipartisan infrastructure bill and then to be a co-chair of the re-election campaign.

Then Landrieu passed when some urged him to run for DNC chair himself after the 2024 election, thinking he’d be the right person to speak for the Democrats as they tried to rebuild.

At the Young Democrats gathering, an aide set up an iPhone on a tripod to record Landrieu’s speech. But he hasn’t taken any of the real preliminary steps toward putting together a prospective operation, staff, fundraising base or framework that would be necessary to turn an interest into a campaign.

These days, a believe-it-when-they-see-it tone quickly creeps into his boosters’ voices as they talk through their conversations with him, but also a wistfulness as they can’t help but dream about what might happen if he went forward with a campaign.

Landrieu is now 65. He acknowledged what several people close to him told CNN about his thinking: If he’s going to run for president, this is probably the last chance.

He points admiringly to New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who became a phenomenon not because of name recognition or money in the bank, but a compelling vision told via cheap and viral online videos.

As for those who’ve been making moves that could give them head starts, Landrieu noted, “they’re all good. I would just say that it’s really hard to be the front-runner over three years.”

“And on top of that,” he adds, somewhat downplaying what people thought of Trump and Biden’s initial prospects, “the last two presidents we’ve had have been people that nobody ever thought was going to be president when it all started.”

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