When Kamala Harris Calls It a Day - 8/4/25

Kamala Harris withdrew from the 2028 presidential campaign last week.

That is not a typographical error. Harris technically only announced a decision not to run for governor of California in a brief and unrevealing written statement. But for all practical purposes, she has effectively concluded her political career.

Harris herself may not realize that she has already taken that seminal step. But just as the former vice president has spent the last several months learning that her home state Democrats are more interested in looking forward than backward, she will learn discover that her party’s voters across the rest of the country have come to a similar conclusion.

This is not intended as criticism, from either me or most Democratic loyalists, but the lack of clamor in party circles for another Harris campaign has been palpable. There is still a faintly interesting but largely irrelevant discussion of how to most fairly apportion the blame between Harris and Joe Biden for the outcome of last November’s election. But even Harris’ most ardent defenders, who understandably argue that 107 days was an insufficient window for her to develop a relationship with the American people, have publicly restrained themselves from displaying any enthusiasm they might have for a repeat performance.

It will be some time before she will need to make any formal decision or announcement, but Harris’ Democratic critics are already making their voices heard. In the meantime, the amount and nature of her public engagement will provide clues as to how serious she is about putting herself on the line again. More importantly, it will give Democratic donors and activists the chance to further consider whether a Harris 2028 candidacy could be more successful than the 2020 and 2024 versions.

The most telling sign of the latter question will come in next year’s midterm elections. We’ll find out how eager Harris is to inject herself into battleground House and Senate races and, more importantly how willing her party’s candidates in those key contests will be to have her on the ground campaigning with them in public. But it’s worth remembering that in the weeks before the 2024 election, Harris was conspicuously not in evidence on the campaign trail with Democrats facing difficult races. While she raised prodigious amounts of money for them and campaigned in the key swing states where they were running, the candidates running in the most challenging races did not appear to be especially interested in appearing in public with their party’s nominee. Unless something notable happens to lessen that wariness, it’s difficult to see those attitudes changing dramatically by next fall.

Over the next several months, Harris herself has the ability to determine how she’ll be perceived both within the Democratic party and among the swing voters who will decide these races. The candidate who lost to Donald Trump was cautious to a fault. While the unmercifully brief time available to her would have created daunting challenges for any candidate, a reasonable case can be made that a less guarded nominee could have capitalized on the opportunity to make the case against Trump more aggressively and creatively than Harris did.

This restraint has been the hallmark of Harris’ career, almost from the beginning. After her bold—almost audacious—first campaign, in which she challenged and defeated the incumbent San Francisco District Attorney, Harris has retreated to a safety-first style of politics. While she was noticeably combative at times during her tenure on the Senate Judiciary Committee when confronting hostile (i.e., Trump-ish) witnesses, her campaigns for statewide and national office have been extremely risk-averse. Her one boldfaced moment in the 2020 campaign came when she wielded her own personal biography in her assault on Joe Biden’s record on forced school busing. But the attack backfired, and she remained relatively subdued for the remainder of her time in the race.

Now Harris is far from the spotlight, and if she wants to reclaim it, she will need to demonstrate a much more forceful presence to assert herself on a political landscape where another two dozen or more potential Democratic presidential aspirants will be vying for attention. Her path forward—if there is one—is entirely within her control. But it will require a fundamentally different attitude than she has displayed in public for many years.