As former vice president and 2024 Democratic nominee Kamala Harris considers whether to run for California governor in 2026 or seek the presidency again in 2028, her party is moving on without her.
“In South Carolina, influential Democrats this weekend were hardly talking about Kamala Harris anymore,” proclaimed Politico.
“Some Democrats in South Carolina, girding for battle to retain their favored status on the presidential primary calendar, went so far as to suggest that a run for California governor could offer a graceful exit from the national stage. ‘I think she should run for governor and be the best governor California has ever had,’ said Amanda Loveday, a Democratic strategist and former executive director of the South Carolina Democratic Party,” the piece continues.
There exist several obvious pitfalls for Harris should she run for president again in 2028. Setting aside her loss to President Donald Trump, she has been buffeted by her association with former President Biden, the renewed discussion on the left about his mental decline, and her role in concealing it.
The conversation is already taking a toll. In a recent AtlasIntel poll, Harris slipped into third place in a very early hypothetical look at the 2028 Democratic presidential primary, behind former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and far-left New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Vice presidents have also had a mixed presidential record as of late. Harris’s own former boss had to fight an uphill battle against a historically large primary field for the Democratic nomination in 2020, and was only saved by an 11th-hour intervention from a liberal establishment horrified that neither Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders nor Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren could defeat Trump in the general election. And of course, Biden’s eventual victory would prove to be pyrrhic. Trump’s own former vice president, Mike Pence, sought the Republican nomination in 2024 but hardly rose above an asterisk level.
Kamala Harris’s Consolation Prize?
In light of the risks of running for president again, there are good reasons for Harris to consider California’s governorship as a viable fallback. She would begin the race with strong name recognition and an established fundraising network. She won the state against now-President Donald Trump by 20 percentage points — an anemic margin that was the weakest for a Democratic presidential nominee in two decades, but 20 points is still 20 points.
Running to succeed California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who is unable to seek another term in office, would keep her politically relevant.
Many California Democrats, however, aren’t terribly enthusiastic about the Harris hot potato. At the party’s convention in Anaheim last weekend, “the former vice president’s political future seemed to be an afterthought,” writes the Washington Post. “Earlier this year,” they say, “the governor’s race looked like an easy target for Harris.” Less so now.
Prominent Democrats such as former Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra and former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa have signalled that they will not defer to Harris should she enter the race. The latter has already hit Harris for covering up former President Biden’s mental decline, a line of attack that is not likely to go away any time soon. For his part, Becerra criticised Harris’s lack of executive experience.
Harris has reportedly given herself until the end of the summer to decide on her next political step. While it’s been broadly understood that Harris would be unable to clear the field if she ran for president again, the assumption until recently was that running for California governor would be a layup. But as opinions of the Biden–Harris administration sour, that’s seeming like less and less of a sure thing.
Harris obviously wants to be president. If she didn’t, she wouldn’t have sought the Democratic nomination in 2020, she wouldn’t have accepted Joe Biden’s offer to be vice president, and she wouldn’t have worked so hard to lock down the Democratic nomination after Biden was forced out of the race. Nearly everybody in national politics sees a future president when they look in the mirror, and vanishingly few of them have come as close to it as the vice presidency. The concern, such as it is, among some of the state’s Democrats that the former vice president views California as “a consolation prize” is not without cause.
The question for Harris, then, is not just whether she wants to be governor of California. It’s if running for governor will help her run for president sometime in the future, perhaps in 2032. If she can reinvent herself in Sacramento, perhaps it might. Time could allow Harris to distance herself from her far-left positions and close association with Biden in a way she was unable or unwilling to do in the 2024 campaign.
But that would require a level of political deftness that Harris simply hasn’t demonstrated, and there’s no evidence that she ever will. California is burdened with serious issues and is perhaps the archetypal example of liberal mismanagement. Having Harris further yoked to California’s chronic ill-governance would be another encumbrance to her presidential aspirations, not an asset. Rather than a path back to Washington, D.C., the Golden State’s Governor’s Mansion could be Kamala Harris’s St. Helena. A comfortable retirement in exile, perhaps, but exile all the same.
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