Kamala Harris Can Aim for Governor or President — But Not Both

The vice-president has a big decision to make on next steps. Photo: Will Oliver/Bloomberg/Getty Images

For a while, every major presidential loser becomes one of the front-runners for the next cycle. There was talk in Democratic circles of Gore ’04, Kerry ’08 and yes, even Clinton ’20. So unsurprisingly, Kamala Harris’s name comes up frequently when battered and bruised Democrats plot a comeback. When voters were asked to identify their preferred 2028 Democratic candidates in a recent Emerson College poll, Harris was the choice of 37 percent, with 15 rivals registering in the single digits (Harris’s fellow Californian Gavin Newsom was second with 7 percent).

There are, however, reasons Harris might truly be more viable going forward than previous presidential losers were. By all accounts, she was handed an extremely unusual and difficult task when her boss, Joe Biden, terminated his candidacy in July and endorsed her as his successor. The Biden-Harris ticket was pretty clearly in deep trouble after the 46th president’s poor performance in his one debate with Donald Trump, and inevitably the freshly minted candidate inherited a campaign structure, personnel, record in office, and agenda over which she had relatively limited control. If nothing else, she gave Democrats fresh hope heading toward the 2024 endgame, generating historic levels of financial support and keeping her party fully united. Her defeat, moreover, was arguably attributable to handicaps that would not be relevant to a future presidential race, particularly her struggle to project a “change” message while serving as sitting vice-president of the United States, compounded by a sour public mood and widespread amnesia about her opponent’s actual record.

So the idea of Harris ’28 isn’t just a chimera based on rapidly fading memories of the best parts of the campaign just completed. But there is a very crowded Democratic bench of politicians less associated with past defeats and carrying less baggage than the 2024 nominee (including unpopular issue positions she took in her unsuccessful 2020 presidential candidacy). Most of them are currently serving in high elected office and thus have built-in ways to remain in the public eye as Trump 2.0 unfolds.

There has been discussion of an interim political step for Harris: the governorship of her home state of California, which will open up in 2026. Her longtime ally and rival Newsom is term-limited and is almost universally assumed to be preparing his own 2028 presidential bid, a project that has been underway for decades. Harris has won three statewide elections in the Golden State after holding a series of prosecutorial positions in the Bay Area that made her a political and even a social celebrity. Multiple politicians have been eyeing the governorship (notably two-term lieutenant governor Eleni Kounalakis, the early 2026 front-runner; two-term state controller Betty Yee; two-term superintendent of public instruction Tony Thurmond; and former Los Angeles mayor Antonio Villaraigosa), but the conventional wisdom is that a Harris candidacy might clear the Democratic field pretty quickly.

The key question is whether Harris really wants to go back to Sacramento after her stint in national politics and whether that might compromise or even eliminate future prospects for a second presidential run. Her advisers are reportedly split on what she should do, as CNN reports:

Some believe a repeat run, after quickly improving her reputation and raising more than $1 billion over her surprise 100-day race, should be hers for the taking. Others worry that in a longer campaign, against some of the other major Democratic contenders who already sat out 2024 in deference first to Joe Biden and then to her, Harris might fizzle out and follow her loss to Donald Trump with the humiliation of being rejected by her own party.

The governor’s race, meanwhile, looks like a layup: Harris was elected statewide three times and served 10 years combined as state attorney general and U.S. senator, and when asked by CNN, several major candidates made clear either directly or through aides that they would likely step aside if she got in.

It’s reasonably clear that signing on to one of the country’s most demanding nonfederal offices would make a quick presidential comeback difficult if not impossible. So if Harris still has the presidential itch but wants to run for governor in 2026, she’s likely taking a White House bid off the table until 2032. At that point, she’ll be 68 years old, six years younger than Trump was this year. It’s also possible there will be a Democratic incumbent already in the White House that year or, conversely, that an unsuccessful Newsom candidacy in 2028 will sour national Democrats on Californians.

The Sacramento Scenario for Harris will draw comparisons to Richard Nixon’s decision to run for governor of California in 1962, two years after his own narrow presidential loss to John F. Kennedy. Nixon lost to incumbent Democratic governor Pat Brown (father of Jerry Brown) in an upset, trashing his presidential ambitions even in his own eyes (as evidenced by his Election Night “last press conference“). But of course, he did eventually win the White House after a long and difficult comeback. Given California’s current Democratic leanings, a 2026 Harris bid looks less politically perilous than Nixon’s, though she would be judged on a curve against recent Democratic landslides in the state and she likely hasn’t forgotten a near-loss to a Republican in her first statewide race back in 2010.

Perhaps the most important question for Harris in mulling a gubernatorial run is whether she actually wants the job given California’s recent fiscal problems and the likelihood that the state is entering a period of perpetual political and legal warfare with the Trump administration. She can certainly find other ways to remain in the national political conversation if that’s her real goal. Returning to her stomping grounds out west makes sense as a career capstone, rather than as a way station to the presidency.