The other day, California’s lame-duck Gov. Gavin Newsom made what looked like a high-minded promise in an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper. If Kamala Harris ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2028, Newsom said, he would not run.
“I know her base of supporters, I know her friends,” Newsom told Tapper. “I wouldn’t do that to people. I wouldn’t put them in that position.”
Is Newsom just being gracious and courtly? Not exactly.
Far more likely is that Newsom is trying to smoke out Harris’s intentions, since they would indeed be drawing on the same donor base. Newsom and his backers need Harris to declare, or get off the (donor) pot.
I am no fan of Gavin Newsom as the Democratic nominee in 2028, but Harris would be even worse. It is astonishing that polls and pundits rate her as the front-runner. This has to be just inertia and name recognition.
Harris, let’s recall, performed dismally in the 2020 primaries because she wasn’t clear about what she stood for. She suffered from the same deficits when she became the party’s accidental nominee in 2024 and her campaign lacked a coherent, forceful message. She both tacked intermittently populist and campaigned with billionaire Mark Cuban. In one memorable fudge, Harris said she would increase taxes on the wealthy but not as much as Joe Biden would have. Say what?
But is Harris planning to run? At the very least, she is testing the waters.
The New York Times got hold of a July memo in which aides to Harris proposed a pitch to donors, emphasizing Harris’s value in turning out the Democratic vote this November, especially among Black voters. The memo proposed, “What is needed is the operational funding to move the principal at the cadence required to Turn Out the Vote and win in November 2026.”
Harris’s people offered to have her come and campaign with Democratic candidates. However, candidates in Alaska, Iowa, and Kansas, according to the Times, “have pre-emptively and publicly uninvited her from campaigning with them.” That speaks volumes.
One candidate who did invite Harris in is Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, who has a lot of fence-mending to do with Michigan’s African American community. Black voters supported his primary opponent, Haley Stevens, by wide margins (she carried Detroit by 28 points). Harris is said to be esteemed by older Black voters.
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However, the Black electorate has been lukewarm overall on Harris. Black turnout was higher in 2020 than 2024, and Biden won a larger percentage of the African American vote (over 90 percent) than Harris, who got 83 percent.
Let’s not forget: Harris has never successfully competed to win a nomination in a presidential primary. The 2028 field will have some fresh and compelling contenders.
If Harris does run again, she is likely to get trounced once the primaries get serious, for the same reasons that she did so badly in the 2020 primaries—even more so because she blew an urgently winnable election in 2024.
Harris’s failure left us with a second Trump term and incipient fascism. I doubt that primary voters will forgive that and take the huge risk of giving Harris a second chance to fail again.
Newsom, meanwhile, has just facilitated a sellout settlement of the state’s antitrust suit against Paramount and vetoed a bill that passed the legislature almost unanimously to enhance California public-worker pension rights. A Wall Street Journal editorial called the veto “Gavin Newsom’s Finest Hour.” Newsom vetoed two other progressive bills for good measure. He’s also on the wrong side of the ballot initiative for a one-time tax on billionaires.
If we can take Newsom at his word, at least one of them will not run. That’s a mercy.
