On a very regular basis, Donald Trump talks about his 2024 election victory as if it were a lopsided win for the ages. It was, the incumbent president likes to say, “a landslide.”
But Trump’s penchant for rewriting recent history notwithstanding, his win over Kamala Harris was actually quite narrow, at least as far as the popular vote was concerned. The Republican finished with 49.8% of the vote in 2024 to Harris’ 48.3% — the closest American presidential race of the 21st century and the fourth-closest since 1900.
The fundamentals that political scientists prioritize when making presidential predictions were heavily stacked against Harris last year, but she nevertheless managed to run a 107-day campaign against a former president who’d run a non-stop two-year candidacy, and the California Democrat managed to keep it quite close.
So what does she do for an encore?
Among the things that I find interesting about Harris, who’ll sit down with Rachel Maddow on Monday, Sept. 22, for her first news interview this year, is that she’s clearly eager to reenter the public conversation — her new book will be released next week, with a series of events to follow. But there is no playbook for major-party presidential candidates who lose close races and must weigh their future options soon after.
Hillary Clinton lost a close race in 2016, at which point she retired from electoral politics. John Kerry lost a close race in 2004, but he was also a sitting senator at the time, and the Massachusetts Democrat returned to his day job after coming up short. Nearly a decade later, Kerry became a successful secretary of state. Richard Nixon lost a close race in 1960, but he was only 47 years old — relatively young for a national political figure — and the Republican soon after regrouped and prepared for another campaign, culminating in a successful White House bid eight years later. Harris, meanwhile, will soon turn 61, and there’s uncertainty about which of these paths, if any, she intends to follow. Nixon was an incumbent vice president when he narrowly lost, and he ran for governor in California two years later (a race he also lost). Harris has already ruled out that option, but that’s about all we know about her plans. What does the former vice president intend to do now? What’s she thinking about the recent past, the present and the near future? I don’t know, but I’m looking forward to finding out.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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