Will Kamala Harris Run in 2028?

She asked Sharpton, a fixture in Democratic politics, what he thought of her taking another shot at the White House. During their 20-minute conversation, details of which were first reported by NBC News, Sharpton said he would probably be supportive of her if she chose to run, but also that her legacy was already secure: “You have nothing to prove.” Quitting the endless campaign is easier said than done. When Al Gore was in the same position as Harris, James Carville quipped that running for president is like sex: “You don’t do it once and forget about it.” The next step for any defeated politician is a run for office, and it is perhaps in that spirit that Harris embarked on a book tour, which turned into an extended book tour, which turned this year into a “listening tour.” You could say we’re at the listening stage of grief following her earth-shattering defeat to Donald Trump. There is an argument for Harris to try again in 2028. She drew 75 million votes in 2024, the most of any runner-up in history. She holds a double-digit lead in some early primary polls. Her book was a smashing success, selling half a million copies in its first week. The extension of her book tour was not forced either—she’s drawing sold-out crowds. And she’s proven a popular voice on social media, where a recent TikTok video excoriating the Supreme Court decision on voting rights drew more than 19 million views. In the words of one of her close advisers: “Of course she should run. Why shouldn’t she run?” Harris has kept a tight lid on her plans. When asked by Sharpton at his annual NAN convention if she would mount another campaign, Harris said, “Listen, I might, I might. I’m thinking about it.” As if trying to prove it, she pivoted not-so-subtly into a pitch. “I am thinking about it, but let me, let me also say this: I served for four years being a heartbeat away from the presidency of the United States. I spent countless hours in my West Wing office footsteps away from the oath of office. I spent countless hours in the Oval Office, in the Situation Room. I know what the job is. And I know what it requires…and I’ve been traveling the country the last year…. The status quo is not working…. They don’t want process, they want progress.” “She got an overwhelming reception,” Sharpton says of the appearance. “We were filled to the rafters. People underestimate the people that not only felt she did something miraculous in 107 days, but that she has a base of supporters.” According to multiple sources close to the former vice president, she remains undecided but is strongly considering another run for the White House. “People around her are pushing her to run,” says a person who has spoken with Harris about 2028. “She seemed inclined to seriously entertain it.” (Vanity Fair has reached out to Harris for comment.) In the meantime, she’s been meeting with liberal thought leaders—including one philosopher—and donors to survey their thoughts on the state of the country. She continues to meet regularly with her national security team, and one source familiar with the meetings said it is sometimes discussed how the next president might tackle concerns ranging from Iran to China. In other words, she’s keeping her powder dry while doing everything one would be doing if they were preparing a run for president. Yet despite a certain air of inevitability, the Democratic Party’s movers and shakers are trembling at the prospect of another Harris run. I spoke with more than two dozen Harris campaign staffers, former White House aides, elected officials, political operatives, and big-dollar donors for this piece. Aside from her own close advisers, none spoke enthusiastically about a Harris 2028 campaign. Many with careers in Democratic politics asked to remain anonymous. Some, after praising Harris on the record, asked to speak on background to give more candid opinions about her political future. “No,” says one former Harris campaign adviser when asked if she should run. “It’s obviously a bad idea.” “I have spoken to maybe one person out of a hundred who thinks she should run,” says another. “Whether it’s former campaign colleagues, people around DC, or just people around the country who are like, ‘Oh God, she’s not going to run again?’” “No,” says Mark Cuban, the billionaire who served as a surrogate on her 2024 campaign. “I don’t think she should run for president,” says a top Harris donor. “I have been all over the country for these midterms and I’ve not encountered anybody— anybody—who said, ‘Boy, I really hope Kamala runs,’” says one veteran Democratic operative. “Will she run? Most likely, yes. Should she? Absolutely not,” says a former White House aide. “There is no appetite for the former vice president to return to the campaign trail.” “I can’t really name one person who is excited about the prospect of her running or thinks that it would wind up being a successful endeavor,” says a Democratic consultant. “I don’t know that it’s any different than saying we’re nominating Hillary Clinton again,” says another Harris donor. “And I love Hillary. I love these people, but it’s the exact wrong thing to do.” Harris’s team has heard all this criticism, and they’re prone to dismissing it as petty Beltway bitterness. “I think it’s crazy,” says the first current Harris adviser. “She got more votes than anyone else who’s thinking about running. She has national experience.” “She almost beat Trump last time, even in terrible circumstances of a short campaign, Biden’s unpopularity, inflation,” says a former White House official. “And there should be no reason that she wouldn’t be well-placed to beat Trump’s successor under better circumstances.” The adviser adds: “I think it’s just such a Washington thing to say, ‘Oh, well, she shouldn’t run.’” It is certainly a Washington thing: At this year’s Gridiron dinner—an annual white-tie gathering of the DC elite—one top news anchor cracked a joke on stage: “There’s a lot of excitement for Kamala Harris running for president…among Republicans!” But even outside of the capital, I hear it from liberals all the time: She’s not running, is she? “The challenge for the party is she will have the highest name ID,” says a second former White House aide. “There’s a sizable chunk of the base that is very fond of her and will default to her in early polling and she’ll look like the front-runner. But I think for the majority of Americans, they just don’t want to look back. They want to look forward.” Voters don’t like losers. After his narrow defeat to President Bush in 2004, John Kerry remained popular among Democrats and considered another bid in 2008. He ultimately withdrew from consideration as the party came to prefer new blood in the form of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. “The last presidential nominee dominates the national conversation a bit until a new figure rises,” says one Democratic operative. “After 2004, it took a while before Barack Obama rose out of the ashes of that campaign.” Either way, the seasoned politicos told me, Harris has less time to decide than it might appear. “It’s not too early,” says one of the former Harris advisers, “if she is going to run and she wants to get staff.” A third former White House aide, who worked on multiple presidential campaigns, agrees: “If anything, it’s late.” Other candidates have already started building the foundations of their operations, even if they’re waiting until after the midterm elections for a formal announcement. California governor Gavin Newsom has been running a de facto campaign, as has Rahm Emanuel. But despite her name recognition, Harris has been a quieter force on the national stage. “From the day that election ended, Democrats were hungry for leadership and looking for someone to be a fighter,” says the third White House aide. “And then ICE descends on LA and she is just absent. Gavin Newsom, to his credit, stepped into the breach, started throwing punches at Trump, ran through the redistricting thing, did himself a lot of favors in the bucket of Democrats who want a fighter. And she was just gone.” (Harris issued a statement condemning ICE during its operations in Los Angeles.) It hasn’t been easy for Harris to find the right way to show up at the top level of American politics. Her allies and advisers are keenly aware that she faces different standards and expectations as a woman of color running for higher office. Newsom, they note, doesn’t have to worry about being seen as “aggressive” on a national stage. Many of Harris’s donors are in California, which will present a problem should she challenge Newsom for the nomination. “Once she became vice president, she did not cultivate her base in California at all,” says the first Harris donor. “Donors never heard from her. She was in her own world. And she deserved it, she earned it, but she is not a retail politician.” Some Democratic operators I spoke to suggested Newsom could hoover up the donor dollars in the Golden State. Since leaving the White House, Harris has returned to her home state, moving into an $8 million house in Malibu with her husband, Doug Emhoff. She’s been quietly taking meetings at the Malibu Country Mart, a strip mall just off the Pacific Coast Highway, though even “strip mall” means something different in Malibu: There’s a Chrome Hearts store within. Many of those I spoke with wish Harris had run for governor of California, believing she would have waltzed to the nomination and solved a problem that’s now bedeviling Democrats as they struggle to find a suitable candidate. Harris felt there wasn’t enough time to make a decision on running for governor so soon after the 2024 defeat, the first adviser explains, and opted to steer clear of the race out of uncertainty about whether she wanted the job. “At the time she had to decide, she just wasn’t sure,” the adviser says. A key argument against Harris running for president again goes back to California in 2020, when she’d mounted her first run for the White House. “She wasn’t getting traction,” the aide recalls. “It was unthinkable to not be the front-runner in the primary in a state where you had held the office of attorney general.” She ended her campaign before the Iowa caucuses. “The worst thing she could do to herself is run again and not even make it to Iowa,” says the first White House aide. “Because I don’t know a donor that would be interested in giving to her campaign.” Harris has long struggled to lay out a vision for what she represents. “The biggest problem I have with Kamala Harris is not ‘will she run or will she not run,’” says the third White House aide. “It’s, ‘What do you want to do if you win?’ She just has not articulated that.” When the mood was radical in the summer of 2020, Harris ran as a far-left progressive. In 2024, she sought to moderate—a tall order in just 107 days. She ended up coming off as “opportunistic,” says one former campaign adviser. The most haunting moment from the campaign remains that appearance on The View, when Harris was asked what she would do differently from Joe Biden and said nothing “comes to mind.” “It’s going to go down in history as the worst candidate answer ever,” says the veteran strategist. “Seventy-five percent of the American people wanted change. It’s like going to a convention of vegans, opening a hot dog stand and saying, ‘You may think you want lentils, but no, fuck you, all I got is meat.’” To this day, watching Harris speak, it’s hard not to marvel at her spectacular unease with the kind of off-the-cuff moments required for success in politics. In person, sources say, she's quick-witted and fun. But on-camera moments can be a different proposition. “She has no natural ability to show people who she is without some kind of obfuscation or evasiveness,” says the first White House aide. “Those are severe handicaps, and those are not behaviors that you learn as a candidate or a politician easily. That evasiveness is something that voters can detect and smell and it just means that they believe the candidate fears something. I think we’re over that.” One argument for Harris to consider 2028 is that she didn’t have enough time to mount a real campaign in 2024. It’s a point she makes in her book, which mounts the case that she could have beaten Trump with more time. President Biden’s disastrous decision to run for a second term and his late parachute-pull to exit the race did her no favors. “Joe Biden fucked her,” says the third White House aide. “He fucked her. And according to her book, he called her the morning of the debate to be like, ‘I heard your donors are talking shit about me.’ He was the fucking worst. He’s a prick.” There is ample evidence, however, that more time wouldn’t have helped. “She was at her highest at the beginning of her general election candidacy,” says the second White House aide. “As people got more exposure, support declined as she ran that supposedly great campaign.” It was the same problem in 2020. “Both times that she’s run, her support has declined as people got exposure.” And the concerns that voters had with Harris in both elections will only be exacerbated in 2028. “The Democratic Party is angry,” says the Harris fundraiser. “The campaign in ’28 has got to be like a peaceful revolution. Anybody who has too long a résumé is screwed. I wouldn’t just put Kamala in that category; I’d put all the front-runners in that category.” “The Democratic brand is bad,” says one top Democratic operative. “The best way any party can improve that is through a new leader, a new presidential candidate, a new standard-bearer.” Mark Cuban doesn’t think Harris should run again given how bruising the campaign was for her national image. “It has nothing to do with Kamala, her ability to govern, or her qualifications,” he tells me. “Certain words and people have been so thoroughly demonized that it’s not a question of what they can do. Unfortunately for Kamala, she is one of the people who have been so completely demonized.” It’s not just Cuban. Harris drew a surge of support from donors in 2024, spending a staggering $1.5 billion in just three months. There seems markedly less excitement this time around from those with the deep pockets that make presidential campaigns possible. “I’ve heard that donors are not particularly enthusiastic,” says a former Harris aide. “People are always going to be nice and respectful about that, as they should be. But I don’t know that they’re going to be like, ‘Let’s do this losing thing again.’” “God knows we have to have a Democrat in the White House next time around,” says the first Harris bundler. “Donors are going to think very heavily about whom they get behind and why. That’s going to be a challenge for her, because I don’t think she can make a compelling case for herself behind closed doors with high-end donors and organizations.” For now, Harris is mostly basking in the warm glow of supporters at events and fielding petitions from candidates seeking her support and circling up with the small team of advisers she’s kept with her as a civilian. But the chance for another term in the White House is an alluring prospect for anyone in this game. “Political relevance is a hell of a drug,” says the former White House aide. “It’s true for the principals and the elected officials, and it’s true for the people around them. Look at the lies that the top coterie of Biden officials told themselves and the world about his mental fitness and ability to do that job.” In late April, at a summit in Chicago, Harris was asked what she’s learned about herself as she’s had time to reflect over the last few months. “I don’t like losing,” she said, breaking into a laugh as she looked out into the audience. “We don’t either!” an attendee shouted back.