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It is hard to see what kind of political career Kamala Harris will ever have again. This makes her unique among recently vanquished major-party nominees — barring a remarkable shift in circumstances, there really is nowhere else for her to go.
Every defeated presidential nominee, until Harris, had a place within their party after the crushing loss. Al Gore became a famed environmental activist; John Kerry enjoyed years as a senior statesman in the Obama administration; and even Hillary Clinton, who never returned to elected office or another Cabinet, hovered over the party as the martyr of 2016 — if not for the Russians or James Comey or misogyny, some liberals might say, she would have been the nation’s first female president. After 2008, John McCain returned to the Senate, and Mitt Romney, a few years later, became a senator himself.
The media tour Harris has undertaken for her recently published memoir is a reminder that the former vice-president is going to struggle to have a place in the political firmament. She will not run for governor of California (she had no vision for the office anyway). She has mulled a 2028 presidential run, where she is no longer the polling leader. But what’s the point, really, of another presidential bid? What’s her argument? What does she have to say about this current moment, and how does she propose either defeating the MAGA movement in another election (J.D. Vance, Donald Trump running illegally) or rebuilding the nation in the aftermath of these next four years?
Harris, from both a politics and policy standpoint, has never been a true leader of the party, and her presence now is a reminder of how badly Joe Biden’s team erred in 2020 when they picked her for the ticket. Harris had been a shambolic presidential candidate, bleeding cash and dropping out before the Iowa caucuses. There were many other more capable politicians, women especially, who could have been elevated that year. Had Harris been a stronger politician, the disastrous Biden reelection saga may not have played out like it did. An elderly, senile president could have passed the baton more easily to a capable VP who seemed ready to battle Trump again. Biden’s inner circle didn’t trust Harris, and they ended up handing her the nomination only after the infamous televised debate Biden had with Trump. Harris became the Democratic candidate without having won a single primary vote.
Every ex–presidential candidate is free to write a memoir and make themselves heard. They are free to have regrets. The most newsy bit from Harris’s 107 Days is her confession that she would have preferred Pete Buttigieg as a running mate over Tim Walz but defaulted to the Minnesota governor because, she fretted, a Black woman paired with a gay man would have been too much of a political risk. Harris can be commended for her candor, but the decision also reveals her middling political acumen and relative gutlessness. There are homophobic voters in America, but far fewer of them than there used to be. Republicans in Congress no longer rail against same-sex marriage. Buttigieg, unlike Harris, has proved himself to be an adept enough politician, someone who ran competitively for the presidency in 2020. If Harris truly thought him the best, why not just pick him?
The trouble for Democrats in 2024 was that they were the incumbent party in an era of high inflation, and voters blamed them for the migrant surge at the border. It was these two issues that defined the election, and Harris (and Biden) never had much of a solution for either. Her campaign was muddled, absent any greater vision for the country, and it was far easier for the average voter to know where Trump stood and what he might do than to understand, when all was said and done, what Harris wanted for the country. Warning about the dangers of MAGA — even if these warnings were correct — was never enough.
Democrats are desperate for leaders now. It’s notable that, other than releasing her memoir, Harris has mostly removed herself from the political fray. That’s her right. But if she truly wanted, she could offer an alternative pathway for this country and a way for frustrated Democrats to feel that they are heard. Bernie Sanders will never run for president again, but he travels the country railing against oligarchy and attempting to channel the rage of the anti-Trump vote somewhere. Harris doesn’t have to do that, but she could have prescribed, in her book, a fleshed-out vision for the future of the Democratic Party or even allowed readers to imagine what a Harris administration might have been like. Harris is not alone in her failure to articulate what the near future might look like, of course. Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries are frustrating the base, and few of the potential 2028 candidates have offered a compelling path forward. Harris is as much symptom as she is cause, emblematic of the political failure that has made President Donald J. Trump possible.
