Bill Maher says he could vote for JD Vance in 2028, calls Democrats 'cowardly' as socialist wing gains ground

HBO host Bill Maher, a lifelong liberal voice, told ABC News he could back Vice President JD Vance for president in 2028 if Democrats keep drifting toward the socialist left.

Maher made the declaration on ABC News' "This Week," where co-anchor Jonathan Karl asked him point-blank whether he could see himself pulling the lever for Vance. His answer was immediate and conditional. "Yes. If this is the Democratic side, yes," Maher told Karl. He framed the 2028 race as fundamentally different from past cycles because President Trump is constitutionally barred from running again.

"My vote is in play because it can't be Trump running, so I'm not living in communist America," Maher said. That single sentence captures the shift: a man who spent decades as a reliable Democratic voter now treating the Republican ticket as a live option, not because the GOP moved toward him, but because he believes his own party moved away.

Maher points to the DSA's 2026 platform as proof the party's left flank means what it says

Maher did not deal in vague complaints. He cited the Democratic Socialists of America's 2026 program by name, pointing to three specific planks: public ownership of the largest corporations and essential industries, full abolition of police and prisons, and abolition of the U.S. Senate. The program is published on the DSA's own website.

"I mean, I know the talking point is that it's not communism, it's socialism. OK, I've read the quotes from the DSA platform from their own mouths," Maher said. "Don't tell me I'm not seeing what I am seeing."

He went further, naming specific states where he sees the ideology gaining a foothold. "I read every day I read about a new person in some Colorado and Wisconsin, somebody who is saying some variation of not defund the police. Abolish the police. No prisons, no police," Maher said. "Like, what world do they think we could possibly live in under these conditions?"

Maher did not name the individual candidates in those states. But his broader point, that the fringe is no longer fringe, landed with specifics that go beyond cable-news punditry. He was reading from a party platform and describing real races.

Three DSA-backed candidates won New York City primaries weeks before Maher's warning

His alarm did not come out of nowhere. Earlier in July, Maher warned that Democrats are "well on their way" to losing in 2028 after three far-left Democratic Socialists won congressional primaries in New York City. Breitbart reported that the three winners, Claire Valdez, Darializa Avila Chevalier, and Brad Lander, hold positions including abolishing ICE, defunding the NYPD, and promoting Marxist ideology. All three were endorsed by Democratic Socialist New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani.

"The Democrats just elected three very far-left Democratic Socialists in New York, who are crazy, like, outright really crazy," Maher said at the time. "So, how are they going to blow it? I don't know, but they seem to be well on their way."

That pattern, DSA-endorsed candidates winning primaries while party leadership stays quiet, is exactly what Maher called cowardice on ABC.

'Democrats are cowardly', and they won't even show up to argue

Maher reserved his sharpest language for the party's leadership class. "Democrats are cowardly. They're cowardly," he said. "Their party is being taken over now by, you know, every day I hear about a new very radical."

Part of what frustrates him, he explained, is that Democratic leaders refuse to engage. Maher has noted repeatedly that prominent Democrats, including former Vice President Kamala Harris, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Mayor Mamdani, have declined invitations to appear on his HBO show "Real Time with Bill Maher." Republicans, by contrast, regularly accept. The New York Post reported that Maher raised this directly with Vance during a recent interview.

"The Democrats don't come, and yet they got my vote. What... it's just odd, isn't it? Why is that? So what is that all about?" Maher asked on ABC.

The complaint is not trivial. A party that will not defend its positions on a friendly platform, Maher voted Democratic for decades, signals either that it cannot defend those positions or that it does not believe it needs to. Neither answer inspires confidence. Maher's willingness to break publicly with his party mirrors a broader pattern of Democratic figures facing backlash for refusing to fall in line with the progressive wing.

Maher told Vance directly: 'My vote is in play'

The ABC appearance was not Maher's first public flirtation with a Vance vote. Weeks earlier, he told the vice president to his face that his 2028 support was up for grabs. "If this is where the Democratic Party is going, where this Democratic socialist, this obsession with Israel, with the Jew hating, they don't believe in capitalism, no prisons. If this is where they're going, my vote is in play," Maher told Vance, as the Washington Examiner reported.

He added a line that captures the absurdity of his position: "It's the people I vote for, they're the ones who won't talk to me! That's odd, isn't it?"

Maher also addressed the pro-Palestinian protest movement that has roiled college campuses and progressive politics. "But you know there's some crazy stuff. You know, when we're cheering for the Intifada, I cut, I'm out," he said on ABC.

That remark fits a pattern. Maher has drawn a line on antisemitism within the progressive coalition for years. The Intifada reference suggests he views the party's tolerance of anti-Israel radicalism as a breaking point, not a policy disagreement.

A decade of friction, not a sudden flip

Maher pushed back against the idea that he has changed. He framed his evolution as the natural result of staying put while the Democratic Party moved left around him.

"I feel very good about [it]. Like 10 years ago, like I did lose fans because, you know, I wasn't going to go along with some of this crazy stuff on the left too," Maher said. "I didn't change really on what I thought about the right, but just, I can't sit and just not notice stuff which people seem to want to do because it's all about my team or your team."

That timeline matters. If Maher began losing progressive fans roughly a decade ago, his current warnings are not a reaction to one bad primary cycle. They reflect a long-running dispute with a party that, in his view, has steadily abandoned the center. The internal fractures now visible in Democratic primaries across multiple states suggest Maher is not the only one who sees the problem.

Maher predicts Democrats win 2026, then lose 2028

For all his criticism, Maher did not predict a Democratic wipeout in the near term. He said Democrats will likely perform well in the 2026 midterms because those races will function as a referendum on the Trump administration. But 2028, he argued, is a different story.

"2028 is a different story because by then this wing of the party, this new wing with all the energy, and it's not just a few people anymore," Maher said.

The distinction is worth pausing on. Maher believes Democrats can win when voters are reacting against the party in power. But when the 2028 primary forces Democrats to choose a nominee, and that nominee must either embrace or reject the DSA wing, the party will face a reckoning it has so far avoided. The question is whether cross-party defections like the one Maher is telegraphing become a broader trend or remain an oddity.

Newsmax noted that Maher's willingness to publicly name Vance as an acceptable alternative represents a significant signal from a high-profile left-leaning media figure, the kind of defection that party strategists dismiss at their peril.

Maher received the 27th Mark Twain Prize for American Humor at the Kennedy Center in Washington on June 28, a recognition that underscores his cultural standing. He is not a marginal figure shouting from the sidelines. He is a mainstream liberal entertainer telling his own party, on national television, that its leadership failures may cost it voters who have nowhere else to go but the other side.

When a party's most prominent allies start shopping for alternatives, the problem is not the allies. It is the product.