A Harris run is bad news for Californians hoping for their government to get any better. But it might be good news for Republicans anyway.

Kamala Harris now says that she will decide by the end of the summer whether to run for governor of California in 2026. The fact that she is thinking already in terms of a timeline to run for a specific office is a pretty strong signal that Harris — who has been in public office all her life and seems to have nothing else to do at the moment — is going to run.

With Gavin Newsom term-limited, there may not be another Democrat with the stature and fundraising prowess to beat Harris in California’s jungle primary system — for example, Katie Porter looks diminished after her loss to Adam Schiff, and Karen Bass isn’t exactly in great shape to angle for a promotion. While California voters may finally be unhappy enough with their lot to think about electing a Republican for the first time since 2006, the GOP’s cupboard of plausible candidates is also pretty thin, and the dynamics of a midterm election with Donald Trump in office and his 2024 opponent running a nationalized campaign means that Republicans will be very unlikely to beat her.

So, a Harris run is bad news for Californians hoping for their government to get any better. But it might be good news for Republicans anyway. If she clears the field of primary challengers, that almost guarantees that the top Republican will make the November ballot (not a sure thing in the jungle primary). Anybody who can send out emails saying “I’m running to stop Kamala Harris” will raise a truckload of money. And recall that the chief reason why midterm elections tend to go badly for the party in power is that anger against the president drives his opponents to the polls, while the president’s own party — without him on the ballot — often lacks such a unifying figure against whom to rally. Democrats were able to solve that problem in 2022, at least well enough to blunt their losses in the House and save some key races for the Senate and the governorships, by treating Trump as a de facto parallel incumbent. Anti-Trump turnout was key. By putting Harris on the ballot — not just Trump’s vanquished opponent but an avatar of the Biden-Harris administration — Republicans in California, and maybe to some extent elsewhere, may be able to deploy a similar strategy. It will help nationalize that effort if other prominent Biden officials such as Pete Buttigieg are also running for major offices. But even if the effect is just confined to California, that could prove crucial to sustaining Republican turnout in critical House races.

We don’t know yet how bad the midterm environment will be for Republicans. But if it’s in the bad-but-not-catastrophic range where campaigns can be won and lost at the margins, having Kamala Harris to kick around could prove joyful indeed.