Democratic politicians and activists want to leave former Vice President Kamala Harris in the party’s past. Given the party that they have cultivated, they aren’t going to get rid of her very easily.
The Democratic group Third Way held a conference last week where “few elected officials, strategists or activists volunteered her name when discussing 2028.” Among them is the sentiment that they have already seen what they need to see from Harris, and the party shouldn’t nominate a retread loser in 2028. According to South Carolina state Sen. Brad Hutto, “I think we’re going to be reluctant to pick somebody who didn’t win last time.”
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Hutto may want to think again. For one, Harris is still regularly leading 2028 Democratic presidential primary polls. Harris leads in 270ToWin’s polling average, leading outright in half of the polls compiled for the average. Part of this could certainly be that Harris is a placeholder name among Democrats who don’t want to think about the primary too much before the 2026 midterm elections. But she is still beloved by Democratic voters, with a 90% favorability rating among that group as of January.
It is also easy to see Harris’s argument against the idea that her loss is representative of her skills. Ever since she lost, she and her supporters have been running around talking about how she was set up to fail with a shortened campaign after President Joe Biden belatedly dropped his reelection campaign. Her post-campaign book was titled 107 Days to remind everyone that Harris did not get a full campaign calendar.
Harris is obviously going to lean into her status as the first black woman to be a major party presidential nominee (and first black woman to be vice president). She will ask (and potentially shame) voters if they want to cast aside the black woman who was (in her view) set up for failure.
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On top of that, the Democratic Party reoriented its primary calendar to empower black voters. Harris already leaned into identity politics hard over the past several years, but she is going even further now. One of the only major endorsements she has given recently was to Rep. Jasmine Crockett over state Rep. James Talarico in the Texas Democratic Senate primary. It doesn’t matter that Crockett lost; Harris is positioning herself to win the black vote in the primary and give herself an opening to accuse the party (and potentially other challengers) of being racist for calling her a loser and wanting to move on.
The Democratic Party’s obsession with DEI forced Harris on them when Biden made her his affirmative-action running mate. Now, that obsession has been baked into the party. Harris is not going to vanish without a fight, and without testing just how committed the party is to the DEI talking points it regularly spouts. She isn’t going to be handwaved away in a primary, no matter how much some in the party want to dump her after her 2024 loss.
