Kamala Harris has been lying low since her defeat in the presidential race, unwinding with family and senior aides in Hawaii before heading back to the nation’s capital.
But privately, the vice president has been instructing advisers and allies to keep her options open — whether for a possible 2028 presidential run, or even to run for governor in her home state of California in two years. As Harris has repeated in phone calls, “I am staying in the fight.”
She is expected to explore those and other possible paths forward with family members over the winter holiday season, according to five people in the Harris inner circle, who were granted anonymity to discuss internal dynamics. Her deliberations follow an extraordinary four months in which Harris went from President Joe Biden’s running mate to the top of the ticket, re-energizing Democrats before ultimately crashing on election night.
“She doesn’t have to decide if she wants to run for something again in the next six months,” said one former Harris campaign aide. “The natural thing to do would be to set up some type of entity that would give her the opportunity to travel and give speeches and preserve her political relationships.”
Most immediately, Harris and her advisers are working to define how and when she will speak out against Donald Trump and reassert her own role in the Democratic Party. Closing out her term as vice president, she’s set to preside over certifying the November election she lost to Trump, and then appear at the once-and-future president’s inauguration on Jan. 20.
“There will be a desire to hear her voice, and there won’t be a vacuum for long,” a person close to Harris said.
At the same time, Harris and her husband, Doug Emhoff, will have a long checklist to plow through before they leave the Naval Observatory for good.
They have to decide whether they’ll take up permanent residence at their home in Los Angeles, or establish a base elsewhere. No matter where Harris and her family live, some around her have expressed concerns about safety, as her Secret Service protection expires six months after stepping away.
Following her meteoric rise in Washington and California, there are internal questions about standing up a federal committee to raise money. It will be the first time in two decades that the former senator and career prosecutor will be out of public office. That means she’ll be standing up a personal office and nurturing her massive online presence without the organizing principle of day-to-day governing.
“You just got to let them marinate in their own success, their own failures or their own mistakes or their achievements. This is personal,” said Donna Brazile, a close ally of Harris’ and campaign manager for Al Gore, the last vice president who ran for president, lost, and never ran again. He instead made climate change the cause of his life.
Brazile recalled how Gore was given months before people demanded an answer about his next moves and that over the last few months Harris, despite her defeat, has earned “a lot of political capital. You don’t squander that by making snap decisions.”
While other Democrats have lost presidential races and been forced to regroup, none in the modern era inherited the nomination roughly 100 days before the election. Indeed, most of the prior losses occurred after a carefully planned, and often arduous climb to the top. Harris, 60, is comparatively young.
“There is no one — no one — who actually can relate to what she’s been through these last four months. No one,” said Paul Maslin, the Democratic pollster. “And I wouldn’t begrudge her at all to take some time and figure this out.”
But others close to Harris believe that the current news cycle and speed at which the Democratic Party might start making decisions will force Harris, who tends to deliberate for long periods, to make some early decisions.
In interviews with Harris aides and confidants, as well as Democratic luminaries, there’s broad acknowledgement that Harris represents an “X factor” in the next Democratic primary. While some Democrats are dismissive of a 2028 run — and few, if any, prospective opponents would defer to her — Harris notched more than 74 million votes and was able to build good will among a large group of Americans.
The good news for Harris, according to her allies, is that her standing in the party increased the longer that she ran her short campaign, which is rare in electoral politics. Her allies believe that the toxicity that surrounded John Kerry or Hillary Clinton after their losses is unlikely to taint Harris’ political future in the same way.
They point to her running a race as a more moderate candidate (a break from her 2019 primary run) as a boon to whatever choice she ends up making as the party seems poised to do its own writ large move to the center.
“She proved a lot of skeptics wrong as a political athlete. And her standing with the public is as good as any Democrats with the name I.D. that she has,” a Harris ally told POLITICO.
A snap poll of the 2028 field found Harris at 41 percent, a significant lead over the others: Gavin Newsom, Josh Shapiro, Tim Walz, Pete Buttigieg, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Gretchen Whitmer, JB Pritzker, Andy Beshear and several others who all were in single digits.
But Harris’ advantages are not unique. Similar surveys taken in the two months after the 2016 campaign, for example, found Clinton with a large lead for 2020, with majorities of Democrats saying they wanted her to run in the next cycle.
“I can’t conceivably imagine the party turning to her a second time,” said one Democratic strategist granted anonymity to speak candidly.
If she opts not to run in 2028, the earliest clues about her political future could come around whether she runs to succeed Newsom in California, a prospect POLITICO first reported in May. Her office pushed back strongly at the time. Yet the mere idea of her running again in California has frozen the field and kept some fundraisers on the sidelines.
While there’s disagreement among people who know Harris well about what office she should run for, there’s emerging consensus that she probably can’t do both — compete for governor and then turn around and start a presidential campaign a few weeks later.
The calendar alone would make that difficult, with the 2028 primary gearing up immediately after the midterm elections. Harris confidants also point to the demands on a governor’s time, and the expectation of the electorate that she would stay home and dig into the state’s mounting challenges around the high cost of living, homelessness and crime.
“It’s a real job,” is how one of the people close to her put it, contending they were at first dismissive of the idea she might do it, but now feel like it’s possible.
And if she doesn’t run for governor, Harris will have to consider the cost of staying out of an open race in a state where other high-profile offices are not likely to come up soon. Both Senate seats will be filled for the foreseeable future by relatively youthful incumbent Sens. Alex Padilla, 51, and Adam Schiff, 64.
Advisers and aides to several other candidates conceded that a gubernatorial run would almost certainly clear the field of serious challengers, leaving a mix of Democratic also-rans and unproven self-financed candidates to take her on.
The state hasn’t elected a Republican to the office since Arnold Schwarzenegger nearly 20 years ago, and Harris, who would be about 70 after two terms, could view the governorship as a capstone of her political career, or potentially pass on 2028 and still run for president in 2032, if there’s an opening.
“She is not someone who makes rash decisions. She takes, sometimes, a painfully long time to make decisions. So I would pretty much guarantee you she has no idea what her next move is,” said Brian Brokaw, a former Harris aide who has remained close to her circle.
“Could she run for governor? Yes. Do I think she wants to run for governor? Probably not. Could she win? Definitely. Would she like the job? I don’t know. Could she run for president again? Yes,” Brokaw said. “Would she have a whole bunch of skepticism from the outset, because she has run in a full-length Democratic primary where [in 2019] she didn’t even make it long enough to be in the Iowa caucus, and then she was the nominee this year?”
He added: “On the other hand, people can learn a lot from their previous adversity, too.”