Welcome in, everybody. This is NextUp, with Mark Halper. I am Mark Halprin substituting for Mark

Halperin on the editor-in-chief of the live interactive video platform two-way, and your host here and your

guide to everything that's next up. Very happy to have you Nexters back in and maybe some new folks.

Glad to have you here in this holiday season. An exciting show today. Our guest is the governor of Arkansas, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who is in her first elective office. She's governing Arkansas, the first daughter of a governor of the state to govern the same state. Her dad, Mike Huckabee, of course, was the governor there. Excited to talk to her. I've known her for a long time. Covered her for a long time. And she has made big, aggressive moves in her state to try to change things. She started out with education. We're going to talk a lot about that, but also on the economy. And, of course, her state's economy fueled in part by the presence of the Fortune One company, Walmart, the biggest company in the world.

And we'll talk about how that's impacted things there.

Sarah's going to join us in a minute.

But first, I'm excited to debut for you what will be a regular feature here.

It's a segment called 8 for 28.

It's about the Democrats who are thinking of running for president and might run for

president. And the focus on eight for 28 is not about the general election. It's about who the

Democrats are most likely to nominate. And what I'm going to lay out for you today is my one through

eight most likely to least likely are the top eight Democrats who I think are positioned to be the

Democratic nominee. Not going to talk about the Republican

nomination fight today, although we'll do plenty of that too. We're going to talk about the Democrats.

And again, it's all focused on this question, who will be nominated? I've covered this stuff

and this question since 1988. And I would say I feel pretty good about the reporting I've done.

It is the thing I say I know it absolutely best, but it's one of the things I know best for my long career doing this is what do you look at to say who's got the best chance?

Lots of people have opinions about this, but I believe the reporting I've done, which I'll lay out for you today, pretty rigorous in trying to determine where we are now. Doesn't mean things won't change, but where we are now. And this thing's underway. Make no mistake about it. When people say, well, it's early and people aren't going to formally announce until the midterms, that's true. I don't think anybody will announce until probably December of next year, so one year from now.

But if you look at the activities of Gavin Newsom, a Governor Shapiro, Pennsylvania, Rahm Emanuel,

whose contract with CNN puts them on TV nearly every day, Rokana, who's had a really strong

year moving up in the process.

People are doing stuff.

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