It's never too early to talk about the next election.
CNN reported over the weekend that Vice President Kamala Harris is weighing her options, including trying to succeed Gavin Newsom as California's governor in 2026 or even making another presidential run in 2028. With a handful of polls showing Harris leading the potential field of candidates, speculation about another run won't stop unless and until she puts an end to it herself. Nevertheless, there is virtually no chance that Harris will be the Democratic nominee in 2028 after losing an election whose dire consequences we have only barely started to experience.
The Democrats have not re-nominated a losing candidate since 1956. After the post-1968 reforms that gave primary voters the keys to presidential nominations, no losing candidate has won (or even tried to win) a single delegate in a subsequent nomination contest since Hubert Humphrey in 1972. Sure, it's a sample size of seven defeated candidates, but none of them mounted a serious effort to be the party's standard bearer a second time. And that's not a record that's likely to change in 2028.
As they did after 2016, party elites are currently in the process of assessing what went wrong, replete with painful public arguments between the party's factions that are about as much fun to watch as witnessing a couple shouting at one another in a quiet restaurant. There have already been so many diagnoses of the 2024 disaster that the post-mortems probably need a post-mortem. Unhappily for Harris' 2028 aspirations, though, almost everyone has found a way to place some of the blame on her and her campaign.
For left populists, the Harris campaign's focus on tax credits and its puzzling "We're not going back!" theme left a lot of policy substance to the imagination and needlessly ceded insurgent territory to President-elect Donald Trump and allowed him to position himself as the candidate of change. For those on the center-right, Harris was largely done in by some fringe positions she adopted to placate activist groups while seeking the presidency in 2019, some of which the Trump campaign ruthlessly exploited in ads portraying her as a far-left radical. And many Democrats were stunned by the Harris campaign's inexplicable embrace of unpopular Bush-era Republicans like former Rep. Liz Cheney as a stunt to attract support from moderate and former GOP voters.
These are all competing, and often irreconcilable, explanations of the party's defeat. In his book about the Democrats' 2020 nomination process, Learning From Loss, University of Denver political scientist Seth Masket called them "stories we concoct about why a complex set of events came out as it did, which can be "very powerful in guiding the behavior of parties and political actors" as they seek to avoid a repeat performance. Masket showed that enough Democrats believed that sexism and "identity politics" played a part in Hillary Clinton's defeat to guide primary voters to Joe Biden, an elderly, moderate white man. And while narrative-makers are engaged in a similar struggle today, it's telling that virtually no one thinks that Harris was even the best choice in 2024, let alone in 2028.
It is certainly true that within weeks of becoming the nominee, Harris erased what had seemed to be deeply ingrained negative perceptions of her as vice president, and ended the campaign with better net favorability numbers than her opponent. On the trail and at rallies, she was buoyant, charming and sharp, and she ran a tight ship with few leaks and comparatively limited drama. Swapping her in for President Biden almost certainly spared the party an even more comprehensive drubbing.
But Harris also stumbled in multiple high-profile interviews, and failed to convince voters that her run was driven by core principles. Her "Not a thing comes to mind" comment when asked what she would do differently from Biden in an October appearance on "The View" is what most people will think about, but it wasn't actually a gaffe. Uncritically embracing Biden's record was a strategic decision made very early on in Harris' campaign, and neither she nor her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, were able to or even interested in separating themselves from the unpopular albatross in the White House. Sorry, but those are not instincts that Democratic voters are going to be interested in trusting again four years from now.
The only modern nominee who really had a chance of capturing the nomination again after losing the general election was Al Gore in 2004. The perception that the Supreme Court had put its thumb on the scale in 2000 for Republican George W. Bush, ending the closest election in American history, gave Gore some legitimacy with party stalwarts that few other defeated candidates could claim. That Gore had also narrowly won the popular vote while losing the Electoral College made his defeat especially painful and unjust. He led public opinion polling of the Democratic race throughout the first two years of Bush's term before a surprise announcement in December 2002 that he would not seek the party's nomination.
Whatever face-saving speculation her camp is engaging in today, Harris is likely to find her way to that outcome much more quickly than Gore did, and if she doesn't, primary voters will do it for her. They may not know who they want yet, but Democratic primary voters, to borrow a phrase from the Harris campaign, aren't going back.
David Faris is an associate professor of political science at Roosevelt University and the author of It's Time to Fight Dirty: How Democrats Can Build a Lasting Majority in American Politics. His writing has appeared in The Week, The Washington Post, The New Republic, Washington Monthly and more. You can find him on Twitter @davidmfaris.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
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