Kamala Harris has emerged from her den, apparently refreshed. Last week, she delivered a winsome keynote at a benefit gala in San Francisco, then made a surprise appearance at the Met Gala, the party of the year for New York City high society, and this week headlined a closed-door benefit for the Democratic National Committee. She reportedly will decide by the end of the summer whether to run for California governor.
It’s a lot of Kamala, and the sudden wave of public appearances—after a monthslong political hibernation following her November defeat to Donald Trump—has prompted discussions within the Democratic Party about her possible return as a presidential candidate in 2028.
Democrats are “divided” about it. There are many skeptics, but others are leaving the door open. “Time will tell,” Senator John Hickenlooper of Colorado told The Hill this week. “Every election is different.” Others express doubt that there is a better candidate, or say she was unfairly disadvantaged by the brevity of the 2024 campaign and could succeed in a more conventional election cycle.
Please, no.
Living under a far-right authoritarian regime that is gutting every American institution that keeps people safe, alive, and connected to a thriving civilization, we have to keep asking ourselves how we got here—and how we can get out. And the most important factor in Donald Trump’s win was that Kamala Harris lost.
Trump has run for president three times, and Harris is the only person to have lost the popular vote to him. In 2024, he had no special magic; if anything, he was marred as a felon and a failed coup leader. A major part of the problem was Harris, who embodies the change-nothing politics of Hillary Clinton without the latter’s political savvy and the cautiousness of Joe Biden without his populist instincts.
Harris is not lacking in charisma. She has better fashion sense than most politicians (see again: Met Gala), a great smile, and can deliver a decent speech. But she embodies the stereotype of the out-of-touch political elite that Democrats should be rejecting. She’s in the news right now precisely because she attended fancy parties in New York and San Francisco. Her proximity to the Silicon Valley rich kept her from embracing even a Biden-level of populism and helped her lose the 2024 election. Her brother-in-law, Tony West, a lawyer with deep corporate connections, had considerable influence on her campaign, which emphasized “freedom” rather than voters’ material well-being, wealth redistribution, and curbing oligarchic power.
This inattention to the working class was even a departure from Bidenism. One reason Harris lost was that she failed to embrace what was sometimes popular about her own administration: investing in American jobs (the CHIPS Act, among others), capitalist-friendly pro-climate policy (the Inflation Reduction Act and aggressive agency-level regulation of pollutants); making people’s lives better and more economically stable (child tax credits and countless pandemic-era measures). Harris didn’t talk much about any of that during the campaign.
Harris also failed to distance herself from what was unpopular about the Biden administration. The administration never took responsibility for inflation or put forth a convincing plan to curb high prices. Harris was part of that collective error. Even worse, she never distanced herself from Biden’s foreign policy, especially his indefensible enabling of the Israeli genocide in Gaza. (One postelection poll showed that anger over Gaza may have contributed to many Biden 2020 voters’ decision to stay home in 2024.)
Perhaps worst of all, Harris has shown no real leadership during the second Trump administration, when the Democratic Party has been sorely in need of it. These recent speeches at high-dollar benefits are the first anyone has heard from her in a while. (In April she attended a summit on Black women leadership at a Ritz-Carlton in Orange County, California, and in March an AI conference in Las Vegas.) Sure, it was heartening that, in her remarks at the Emerge gala, she praised the courage of figures like Representatives Maxwell Frost, Jasmine Crockett, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen—but why hasn’t she been among them?
The next party leader should not come from the social circles of the coastal superrich, especially not when there are others doing the important work of visibly talking to people in red states, like Bernie Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez; traveling to El Salvador to free the unjustly imprisoned, like Van Hollen and some members of Congress; disrupting business as usual, like Senator Cory Booker; or simply refusing to go into hiding after a crushing election defeat, like Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, Harris’s wrongly sidelined veep candidate, who has been speaking out against Trumpism for months.
It may have been the right decision for the party to nominate Harris for 2024. She was the sitting vice president, and the Biden team was in such deep denial about his viability, and for so long, that a dramatic change of course seemed messy if not impossible, given the election calendar. And for a few weeks—remember “Brat Summer”?—many of us enjoyed her fashion sense and optimistic vibe, and hoped for the best. It seemed like maybe she could win.
Alas.
For the Democrats to even discuss Harris 2028 makes them look weak, like they’re out of ideas about how to counter Trumpism. They should buck up: Their bench is not that shallow! Many potential candidates are being mentioned already—this article alone mentions 17—and it seems certain that many more will emerge in the coming year.
Republicans’ delight over Harris’s reemergence should tell us all we need to know. Fox News hosts were visibly joyful at the idea of Harris running for president again. “This is such great news,” said Trump adviser Jason Miller. “This is like Christmas in May.” Or as White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said, beaming, “I think I speak for everyone at the White House: We encourage Kamala Harris to continue going out and speaking.”
