In July, Kamala Harris briefly re-emerged from the political wilderness to announce that she would not be running for the governorship of California in 2026. The former vice president had given the matter “serious thought” in the six months since leaving office after losing the 2024 presidential election, but after “deep reflection” she had decided against it. Her heart wasn’t in it, her allies briefed reporters, and anyway, they whispered, she still saw a national role for herself.
Now Harris is back touring the television studios to promote 107 Days, her new book about that ill-fated presidential campaign, and it is clear she is still contemplating another run. Appearing on the Rachel Maddow Show on 22 September in her first television interview since the election, she was asked whether she would consider running again in 2028. “That’s not my focus right now, that’s not my focus at all,” Harris replied, which is politician speak for yes, she is indeed considering it, or at the very least, she is not prepared to rule it out.
Maddow tried again. “When you said you were not going to run for governor of California, were you saying you were never going to run for anything ever again, or were you just saying you were not going to run for that office right now?” Harris demurred. “That was the decision before me, and I made the decision not to run for governor of California,” she said. The exchange made clear that no, Harris is not saying that she does not plan to run for office again, and yes, unfortunately for the Democrats, this is exactly what a second Harris campaign would look like.
Harris is a highly accomplished woman, who was a historic vice president, and would undoubtedly have been a perfectly competent president. Unlike the current holder of that office, there is no indication she would have ordered politically motivated investigations of her opponents, sent the military into American cities, tried to seize control of the federal reserve, attempted to silence comedians, or launched a trade war against numerous US allies. But merely not being Donald Trump was not enough to win the White House in 2024, and neither is it a realistic strategy for the Democrats to regain the presidency in 2028.
For better or worse, American elections are not won on qualifications and evidence of competence or character, but on the ability to mount a compelling argument and lead a movement. By contrast, Harris still seems unable to give a clear answer to basic questions about why she lost and how her party should take the fight to Trump. Her instinct is to equivocate, and circle back to her talking points, rather than risk saying what she really thinks.
When asked whether she endorsed the rising Democratic star Zohran Mamdani in his race to become mayor of New York City, for instance, Harris declined to mention his name. “Look, as far as I’m concerned, he’s the Democratic nominee and he should be supported,” she said, deploying a bizarrely passive formulation. Pressed directly as to whether she endorsed his candidacy, she replied, “I support the Democrat in the race, sure,” before pivoting to talk about other “stars” in the Democratic Party. Perhaps she was worried about the video clip of her endorsing the democratic socialist candidate coming back to haunt her in a future presidential campaign, which is exactly the sort of calculated obfuscation that helped to doom her campaign.
Then there was her response to Maddow’s question about her decision to select Tim Walz as her running mate, instead of Pete Buttigieg, who Harris describes as her personal first choice in her book. Maddow, who is gay, said it was “hard to hear” the former vice president say that Buttigieg “couldn’t be on the ticket because he was gay”. “That’s not what I said,” insisted Harris, who then went on to make clear that it was, in fact, exactly what she had meant. As a black woman running for the presidency, with such a short campaign, and such high stakes, she explained, the idea of choosing a gay man as her running mate was “a real risk”.
Throughout her new book, and the accompanying television interviews, Harris stresses the unprecedentedly compressed nature of her 2024 campaign. She seems to be convinced that, if only she had more time, she could have prevailed over Trump and made history. The clear inference is that, with enough time, in another campaign, she could yet succeed. But even as she was defending her loss, she was making clear why she could not win.
“Maybe I was being too cautious,” Harris conceded of Buttigieg. That much, at least, was true. Harris’ reflexive caution and her apparently endless capacity for equivocation hampered her candidacy from the start. She still does not seem to be able to give a compelling answer as to what went wrong then, and what she would do differently next time, which should be disqualifying for the Democrats if they are serious about recapturing the White House in 2028.
[Further reading: Has Donald Trump become woke?]
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