Is Kamala Harris the Democrats’ 2028 Answer

Kamala Harris, 2028 Kamala Harris is signaling she wants to keep a 2028 presidential run viable. Axios reports she's expanding her 107 days book tour into early 2026 stops that overlap with key Democratic primary constituencies. And she's re engaging party leaders at the Democratic National Committee's winter meetings in Los Angeles. Now, historically, it's uncommon for major party nominees. A major party nominee who loses the general election to win the nomination. Again, the most notable exceptions are Grover Cleveland, if you remember Grover, like it was just the other day. Not Adelaide Stevenson in the 50s. Richard Nixon, who did in fact win the nomination in 60, lost, but then went on to get it in 68 again and win. And then Donald Trump, of course. But that's a bit of an exception because he did win the presidency the first time he got the nomination, claims he won it the second time even though he didn't, and then got the nomination a third time. Now, Harris still benefits from high name recognition, but current polling also shows she carries meaningful negatives, as in really high negatives, which is why some Democratic insiders question her electability. Okay, what's the real message here? Kamala Harris is making noises that she might want to run for president again. I don't think she has a chance of getting the Democratic nomination. Furthermore, I don't think she really wants to run, but she wants to keep the buzz going to sell more books and there's nothing wrong with that. Let's dig a little deeper here. So I am someone I'm going to anger some of you. I'm going to say something that is almost guaranteed to get me banned from the top hundred podcast talking about news and politics ever. I'm going to go ahead and tell it to you right now. I don't think Kamala Harris is that bad. I think she'd be a thousand times better president than the current president we have. I realize you're not supposed to say that if you're a man, a part of the bros podcasting, especially an older man, an older white man. You're supposed to say she's crazy. She's a radical. Sorry, didn't see it that way. But she does have flaws. I don't think she is a uniquely skilled political talent. Now, she had to have some skills or she wouldn't have been able to work her way up the political ladder. In California, which is a state that has more people than the vast majority of countries in the world, its economy is bigger than all the but a handful of entire countries in the world. I'm sorry, you don't get to the top of that political heap without some talent. But do I think she's a Bill Clinton or a Barack Obama or a. Or Ronald Reagan or Donald Trump? No, I really don't. And the Democratic party since the 50s, and that's so far in the past. That's before I was even born. And I'm no spring chicken. The Democratic Party generally follows the procedure, okay, you had a chance, you got it. We gave you our all. But now, shoo, shoo, go away. Nobody ever heard from Michael Dukakis again. Most people don't even know if he's alive. So it doesn't really work that way for the Democratic Party. Now, the Republicans aren't much different. I mean, the Exception was really 1968 with Richard Nixon, and there was a gap there. He didn't. He lost in 1960. He won the Republican nomination, but he lost the general election. They didn't turn around and give it to him again in 64. He had to be out in the wilderness for eight years, then he got the nomination. Now, if anyone were going to get the nomination again, as a Democrat who got it once lost, you could make the case that Al Gore should have, because he actually won millions of more votes than George W. Bush did in 2000. Nobody remembers that because George W. Bush did win the Electoral College and he did serve as president, and nobody ever really heard from Al Gore again. So, again, there's kind of this precedent. You get the nomination, we give it your all, you give it your all, the party backs you. But if you lose time to let someone else have a chance, and frankly, both parties have pretty much done that. Again, Trump's the aberration, as he is in many things. I don't think that's necessarily a bad policy, because the other thing for Kamala Harris is she didn't just lose, she didn't lose by a lot. I mean, it was only like one and a half percentage points, but she lost to the most unpopular politician in the history of the country in terms of pure negative ratings. So it be one thing if she lost against a widely beloved incumbent running for reelection, that would be one thing, but that's not what she was doing. She was running against someone widely hated, widely despised, someone who, the last time he'd been in office, lost more jobs during his tenure than any president since Herbert Hoover. And she still lost to him. So I have a hard time imagining what the rationale would be to say, you know what? She deserves another chance. Now, if she does run, the nomination will not be handed on a silver platter to her the way it was last time. She'd have to earn it. And if she could actually get the nomination, then she would have shown she has a lot more political chops than most people currently give her credit for, certainly political insiders. She did famously run for president in the previous cycle before the last, and she didn't do well, didn't get any votes, really had to drop out very early when she was running against Joe Biden back in 2020. So she's not shown that she's a particularly strong candidate at the national level. Let's look at some of the numbers. Right now, she has a 40% favorable rating, but a 54% unfavorable rating. That's not that different from Donald Trump. According to RCP average, it's a 42% favorable, 54% unfavorable. She does remain at the top of polling at this stage for the Democratic primary, but that's mostly a function of name id. I don't think it's that relevant. People do seem to forget how close the election was. She got 48.3% of the vote in 2024. Donald Trump received 49.8%. But let's not forget she was way ahead in the polls for a long time last fall, and she still lost. She lost not one, not two, not five, but seven. Seven swing states. All the swing states that are really important for a Democrat to win if there's going to be a Democrat president, she lost all of them. In Wisconsin, she lost by not a lot, but 29,397 votes. In Michigan, she lost by 80,000 votes. It was only 1.4%, but still not that close. In Pennsylvania, she lost by 120,000 votes. That's a very important state. One reason why a lot of Democrats are giving scrutiny to Governor Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, presumably he could carry his own state. Georgia lost by 115,000 votes. Democrats need to win. Georgia, Nevada, 46,000 votes. Trump won that by 3.1%. North Carolina, my. Essentially my home state where I grew up, she lost by 183,000 votes. Arizona, Trump won by 187,000 votes. And that's a state where Democrats can win and have won. So I'm just not quite sure what the rationale is for giving her another shot. If she does run, she's going to have to earn every single vote. Look, folks, life is unfair. She's done very, very well for herself. She became the vice president. She became arguably the second most powerful person in the world. She got to serve in the position as vice president, and now she's so famous that she can get book deals, Netflix deals, speaking gigs for the rest of her life. She's going to be treated like royalty and she's going to have unlimited opportunities to cash in. Heck, Al Gore became almost a billionaire from his connections and getting on the boards of Apple and Google and places like that. So she can become fabulously. I don't mean affluent or upper middle class or upper. I mean she can be fabulously wealthy by just leveraging her fame, which may be what she's doing here. I have a sneaking suspicion that she's going to act like a presidential candidate because that's going to sell more books, that's going to juice the speaking fees that she can charge. Gets attention more, more and more people in a piece. Maybe she'll get a network TV commentator job. There's a lot of opportunities that flow your way if you're not only famous, but people think you might become President of the United States. So it's smart of her to do that. But my gut tells me, A she won't run. B, if she does run, she won't get the nomination. C, if she does run, she does get the nomination, she won't win.