Kamala 2028 by default?

Kamala D. Harris, the career mediocrity who fell backward into a major party presidential nomination before ceding every swing state in the Electoral College to Donald Trump last fall, isn’t ruling out yet another bid for the big chair.

Harris has been making the rounds to promote her newish campaign memoir, 107 Days, and, during a recent sit-down with the BBC, indicated that she’s considering an encore. 

“I am not done,” declared the former vice president. “I have lived my entire career a life of service and it’s in my bones.” Whether collecting taxpayer-funded paychecks while opening the country’s borders, advocating on behalf of the fanciful Green New Deal and lying to the American people about the mental acuity of their commander-in-chief qualifies as a “life of service” in the same way that, say, a veteran, police officer, or firefighter’s might is dubious, but it’s true enough as far as the expression goes.

Still, even the most loyal, masochistic of Democratic partisans must be flabbergasted by Harris’s presumption. This is a woman who nearly lost her first statewide race in California to a Republican, flamed out in her first White House campaign, was handed the vice presidency in large part because she checked the correct demographic boxes, played the role of right hand in a widely-reviled administration, was named her party’s presidential nominee without earning a single vote four years later because her boss was no longer compos mentis, and then was soundly defeated by an eminently beatable candidate. 

Why anyone, least of all herself, would hold that she has something more to give in politics, is a mystery if you look only to virtues intrinsic to Harris herself. 

She isn’t a smooth or savvy operator. Quite the opposite, she’s a walking word-salad station who has staked out positions far to the left of the median American. She doesn’t have a core electoral constituency to whom she appeals and can fall back on when the going gets rough. Indeed, Trump made significant gains among black and hispanic voters – and more modest ones among women – in 2024. And worst of all, she’s a proven loser. There is absolutely nothing in her electoral track record to suggest that she’s anything but a below average political talent who produces below average outcomes for her party.

And yet, despite her plentiful deficiencies and the decided lack of enthusiasm for a Harris redux among her fellow Democrats, there is some reason for Harris to believe that come 2028, she could actually win the nomination she was bequeathed in 2024. 

The Democrats’ failure to build a palatable, center-left bench could lead them, by default, back to Harris

At the moment, the wind is at the back of the radical left in the fight for the soul of the Democratic party. Zohran Mamdani’s rise in New York City, as well as Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Bernie Sanders’s Beatlemania-like tour across the country, demonstrates that its activist wing has all of the energy and momentum it could ever want behind it. Moreover, while the Biden administration failed in large part due to its embrace of unpopular progressive policies, many continue to labor under the misimpression that the Joe Biden who ran his approval rating into the ground was the tough-talking, Blue Dog-adjacent Democrat that he was back in the 20th century, rather than the legacy-chasing, left-wing airhead that he turned into in the White House.

It is also only this faction that has a clear favorite to be its champion in the primary fight to come. Ocasio-Cortez is the best pure political talent in the entire party. As a young, true-blue believer in the cause with a knack for communicating and connecting who will have spent nearly a decade in the national spotlight by the time she’s launching her campaign, Ocasio-Cortez will quickly consolidate Sanders’s coalition around her – and is well-equipped to build upon it.

All that renders her a favorite to land the nomination, but some Democrats rightly fear that the general electorate would resoundingly reject her.

She has no equal in the party’s establishment, the cohort of empty suits who would implement a diluted version of her agenda, though. This group seeks to saddle Americans with much of what they’ve already rejected – gender ideology, anti-growth climate policies, and a laissez-faire approach to border security – but without explicitly embracing the socialist label, or the language of the average Middlebury campus activist.

Those who might run in this lane all face significant headwinds. Former mayor and transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg is the most gifted, but black voters are allergic to his smug, McKinsey shtick. Governor Gavin Newsom of California can bob, weave, dip and dodge with the best of them, but his ambition and inauthenticity shines through in every syllable. Senator Cory Booker’s Spartacus act is a running gag. Senator Chris Murphy is Wonder Bread with Iranian flag packaging. Governor J.B. Pritzker of Illinois is a big nepo-baby whose case for a promotion collapses at the first mention of his state’s largest city. 

Should no one else emerge, the Democrats’ failure to build a palatable, center-left bench could lead them, by default, back to Harris. Her existing name recognition – and the months-long astroturf campaign to build her up last year – arguably sets her apart from the field; and there is precedent for coalescing around imperfect establishment candidates. Look no further than 2020, when the entire party got behind Biden to stop Sanders. 

Ultimately, though, Harris is more a symptom of Democrats’ maladies than a cure for them. The only question is whether that matters, given her competition.