Oh No, Is Kamala Harris Running for President Again?

While all the caveats apply about the election being so far away that at this same time in the 2008 cycle, Senator Barack Obama did not exist, there is a clear trend appearing in the early polling, centered around the most reliable asset in American politics: name recognition.

Race to the WH’s average of the nascent 2028 primary polls has Kamala Harris leading at 21.1 percent, followed by the Fox News whisperer Pete Buttigieg at 17.4 percent, then outgoing America West governor Gavin Newsom (12.7 percent) and Alexandria “Don’t screw this up lefties” Ocasio-Cortez (11.9 percent). As it stands, that’s the upper crust of the early 2028 chase, none of whom have formally announced they are running, and only Newsom has sweatily announced, while I believe that Buttigieg has subtly announced on his podcast tour while leaving the door open to the Michigan Senate seat or governor’s office. Kamala Harris has largely been silent on her future prospects until now, and we know that they don’t include being governor of her home state, at least not this election cycle. While it may seem absurd to talk about a presidential primary so far away, for people actually planning to run, talking about it now is necessary to prepare the infrastructure to actually do it in a few years. Presidential politics is unfolding as we speak.

And Kamala Harris has an opportunity to run the campaign she decided she didn’t want to run in 2020 before anyone could start voting. While I am sympathetic to Harris in that she was put in an impossible position in 2024, that does not excuse her long history of refusing to plant her feet in the ground (fun fact: in 2019 she co-sponsored Bernie’s Medicare for All bill, then ran on a health care plan in 2020 that included private health insurance companies). For all her natural talents as a politician, she fails at the basic task of giving voters an identity to hold on to, providing her with an indefinable mystery that both helps and hurts her.

In one sense, she is an earnest attempt to accomplish the old joke about polling proving that a generic Democrat is the most popular Democrat in the party, but that amorphous strategy only gets you so far. It’s like the political equivalent of a sports team falling back into a soft zone coverage. You’ll give up a little here and there and try to play the overall percentages with the long-term in mind, and if you maintain your structure, you should be able to get by. But the problem with this soft zone strategy is that when winning time comes around, someone has to actually make a play, and Kamala Harris has never been able to make a play outside of California.

Yes, it’s early, but these polls aren’t meaningless. Look at how relatively stable the 2008 primary polling was from 2006 up until Barack Obama made a play and galvanized a diverse group of supporters around an anti-war message.

People tend to coalesce around the names they know and like before any real campaigning has begun, and then it’s on the campaigns to keep those voters around and build on that support from the large group of “don’t know” polling respondents. Both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton did that in 2008, where they used their elevated floors to run away from the rest of the field into a two person race at the beginning of the year, which means that there is a very real possibility that we are just 29 months away from the white-hot AOC-Kamala primary of 2028 that tears the Democratic Party to shreds once and for all.