Vice President Kamala Harris hasn’t given up on the White House just yet. According to reports from CNN and The Washington Post, Harris and her allies are weighing another potential White House run against other possible options, including a run for California governor in 2026. “She remains undecided herself, unsure how to channel feelings she has, for now, worked into stock lines like ‘you haven’t seen the last of me,’ and ‘I’m not going quietly into the night’ repeated to supporters who ask her what’s next,” CNN said, citing “several people who have spoken with the vice president directly.”
I propose that Harris shift her gaze away from the White House and focus on a run for California governor — or some other kind of public service. Harris was undoubtedly dealt a bad hand in the 2024 election. But she is also exactly the wrong kind of figure to try to lead the party going forward in an era of populism and rapidly shifting coalitions.
If Harris were to run for president again, she would be saddled with many of the vulnerabilities that defined her during her first general election run.
Harris isn’t entirely to blame for her loss to Donald Trump. She was handed the reins at the last minute, and she was the vice president of an extremely unpopular president. She was also a figurehead of the incumbent party during a global trend of inflation that laid waste to governing parties all over the world. When President Joe Biden stepped aside and backed her as the party’s presidential nominee, she started her campaign in a deep hole.
Yet despite her manifest intelligence and poise, Harris revealed few instincts for how to climb out of that hole. In an election in which she was running to succeed an unpopular president, she struggled to articulate what, if anything, she would do differently as president. The defining theme of the campaign was Americans’ negative feelings about the economy — that, despite cooling inflation, everything still felt too expensive. But Harris lacked a clear economic message that reflected an understanding of the cost-of-living crisis.
If Harris were to run for president again, she would be saddled with many of the vulnerabilities that defined her during her first general election run. In addition to being encumbered by a toxic association with post-pandemic inflation, Harris is also closely linked with the spike in immigration during the Biden presidency. Despite a partywide pivot to the right on immigration, Harris failed to persuade the electorate that she could be trusted on the issue. That’s a pretty serious mark against her, given the sustained salience of immigration in political debate across the Western world.
Meanwhile, there are plenty of other potential candidates out there who would have no comparable baggage. In the Post article, which is based on “interviews with more than 20 current and former Harris advisers, donors and confidants,” some Harris allies cite Trump’s comeback from a loss as reason for optimism about Harris, a sign that one loss shouldn’t be viewed as insurmountable. But it’s an odd analogy: Trump won before he lost and developed a fiercely loyal base, and many of his diehard supporters don’t even acknowledge his 2020 loss. But more important than whether Harris could win is whether she should run at all. While the vice president is sharp and telegenic — as shown in her debate performance — too often she struggled to articulate a clear vision. Her website didn’t have a policy page until just a few days before that debate with Trump, and her “opportunity economy” was difficult to parse. Harris’ attempt at popular front-style politics — which placed an emphasis on working with Never Trump Republicans such as former Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming — led her to try to be a lot of different things to a lot of different people. Harris isn’t the only Democratic nominee to fall back on a combination of vibes and technocracy, but the combination is particularly ill-suited to this populist era, and it makes her exactly the wrong kind of person to resurface as the Democratic Party faces an identity crisis. Democrats need a presidential nominee who can authentically brandish economic populism and win back working-class voters drifting from the party. One hopes she recognizes that there are a lot of ways for her to contribute to the nation that don’t involve prolonging her party’s worst political instincts.
Zeeshan Aleem is a writer and editor for MS NOW. Previously, he worked at Vox, HuffPost and Politico, and he has also been published in, among other places, The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Nation, and The Intercept. You can sign up for his free politics newsletter by clicking the link at the top of this bio. 
