'Testing the waters': Sen. Chris Van Hollen weighing run for president

Chris Van Hollen. Take a second with that one. This is a senator best known lately for flying to El Salvador to advocate for the release of an accused MS-13 gang member, and now he's looking at the country and thinking "yes, me, president." That tells you something about where the Democratic bench actually stands right now, because if your marquee move of the last few years is a photo op defending a deported gang affiliate, you are not exactly riding a wave of momentum into 2028.

The "testing the waters" language is doing a lot of work here too. It's the classic move for a politician nobody's clamoring for. Nobody drafts Chris Van Hollen. He has to draft himself, quietly float his name, and see if anyone notices. That's not a groundswell, that's a press release dressed up as suspense.

What's actually revealing is the timing. Democrats are still nowhere on a coherent 2028 message, still fighting over who lost the last election and why, and instead of a bold new face emerging, you get a 66-year-old Senate lifer from Maryland with no national profile to speak of trying to get ahead of a crowded field before it forms. That's not vision. That's positioning.

If this is the caliber of candidate testing the waters this early, the water's pretty shallow.