‘she Totally Blew It’: How Kamala Harris Wasted A Year To Make Her Case

Kamala Harris has kept the door open to running for president again in 2028. What she failed to do over the past year, even one-time supporters and allies of the former vice president say, is give voters a reason to reconsider her if she does.

For Harris, according to interviews with nearly 20 Democratic Party donors and strategists in California and across the country, it was a missed opportunity to redefine herself — and ultimately a wasted year.

“She totally blew it,” said Doug Herman, who was a lead mail strategist for Barack Obama's 2008 and 2012 campaigns. “She hasn’t gotten into the mix.”

Harris has offered voters almost nothing in the way of specifics about how she would remake a Democratic Party hungry for change after another term of Donald Trump. She hasn't spoken to how she would expand her own appeal to the voters who rejected her and she remains as reticent of media as ever, continuing to favor appearances before friendly audiences and at times drawing fire for shutting out news organizations altogether. She has entirely sidestepped the ideological civil war consuming the Democrats and has acted more like a party elder at a time when voters and donors are demanding a break with the past.

“I don't see anything different myself. It seems like more of the same to me,” said Jim Hodges, the former governor of South Carolina, the first state on the Democratic nominating calendar. “Right now Democratic primary voters … are very anxious about a Trump acolyte being in the White House in 2028. And they want to select someone who they think has the best chance to win, but who also meets these requisites: fresh, new. I hear a lot of talk about that — ‘we don’t need recycled candidates.’”

Many of Harris’ supporters are coming to that same conclusion, including in her home state, where several donors told POLITICO they’re actively shopping for candidates to back and have no desire to see Harris run. Even some who say they’d ultimately support Harris if she prevails are doubtful she can break through.

“I am looking at all kinds of candidates for 2028, and she’s not necessarily one of them,” said Laurie Black, a San Diego-based donor and longtime Harris supporter. “It’s not that I don’t think she’s qualified … [but] I want to support a winner in 2028, and I just don’t know if the vice president has the juice this time.”

Another California-based fundraiser could not think of a single person in their circle who wants Harris to run again.

“She probably could raise grassroots money because she has fabulous lists,” said the fundraiser, who was granted anonymity to discuss private conversations. “But there are no obvious big donors that have indicated they want to go down that route.”

Perhaps worse for Harris is not that strategists and donors are down on her 2028 chances but that they’re not talking about her at all. The discourse about her among other 2028 hopefuls and plugged-in donors has been practically silent, a sign that few believe she will actually jump into the race, let alone prove to be a threat.

Harris has said she has not decided if she’ll run in 2028. If she does, she’ll have the advantage of near-universal name ID. She continues to lead in early 2028 polling, and the success of her best-selling campaign memoir “107 Days” speaks to goodwill she maintains with swaths of the Democratic base.

The book might once have marked a turning point for Harris. On one hand it was an opportunity to remind readers how much she had been hampered by the truncated campaign she inherited from Joe Biden — and to argue, implicitly, that should she run again, she would not face the same constraints. But it was also an opening to recast herself as a politician. And as she began promoting the book, she suggested her loss had called into question some of the convictions she had held onto since the start of her decades-long career in public service.

She called the political system “broken” and told Democrats they shared the blame for a “flawed status quo.” After the Supreme Court overturned key parts of the Voting Rights Act, she urged Democrats to get comfortable with “a certain kind of ruthlessness” in pursuing changes to the nation’s democratic institutions: the Electoral College, the Supreme Court, lowering the voting age to 16 and exploring statehood for Puerto Rico and Washington DC. She said Black people should be “transactional voters,” making explicit what they expect of politicians who are trying to earn their support.

“That's not a safe position. The safe position is ‘vote blue no matter who,” said Ashley Etienne, a Democratic strategist and former communications director for Harris during her vice presidency. “It really creates an opportunity for her to speak on behalf of Black voters and to Black voters and meet them where they are and on their own terms in a way with a level of honesty and candor that nobody else in the field is going to be talking about.”

But if Harris showed an inclination after leaving office to recalibrate, it never materialized. On policy, Harris has stuck to familiar territory, focusing on affordability, artificial intelligence and voting rights — all issues she has championed or worked on throughout her career. A person close to Harris said it was more authentic for the former vice president to build on themes she’s long been passionate about, rather than turning to new topics.

Even then, the few specifics she has offered have sometimes backfired; her praise for a new initiative to shape AI policy launched by venture capitalist Ron Conway — a donor to a pro-AI super PAC backed by industry executives — was widely panned on social media as out of touch with Americans’ anxiety about the technology.Harris has likened her approach to the post-vice presidency to a listening tour, meeting with students, activists and everyday Americans in more private settings to get a sense of what’s on the public’s mind.

“What she's doing is — “I'm going to do the spring training, I'm going to develop my muscles. I'm going to get stronger. I'm going to test some new messages out … gather as much intel as I can about the mood of the nation, and then reintroduce yourself,” Etienne said.

Aimee Allison, the president of She The People, a national network boosting women candidates of color, said donors she hears from are keeping an open mind, including about Harris.

“People are writing Kamala Harris off a little too soon, and I don’t think people should be so hasty,” Allison said. “I have 32 people running right now and I give her better than a one in a 32 chance.”

But Harris’ message — or any idea that she is transforming as a politician — does not seem to be penetrating.

“The one thing that everyone is disappointed in, whether you're a swing voter or you're a base voter, is that they feel like she hasn't done anything with this time,” said a Democratic pollster who conducts focus groups with voters across the country and was granted anonymity to discuss internal research. “They just aren't hearing from her at all, and so the only thing they remember from her is losing the last election. That's the most recent memory in their minds.”

Harris has been active boosting Democrats in the midterms, appearing with Michigan Senate contender Abdul El-Sayed and candidates in battleground House districts in California. But among voters who have taken notice of her appearances, the pollster said, “even that’s mixed. For all the people who say, ‘recently I saw that she was in Michigan' or whatever, you hear an equal amount of people saying, ‘I heard she wanted to come here, but the candidate didn’t want her.’”

For most of her career, Harris was a change candidate even without campaigning on sweeping change, in part by virtue of being the first Black and Indian woman in every office she’s held. Former aides say she could be wary of pushing dramatic policy overhauls, fearing that would surpass voters’ appetite for change.

She developed a habit of backtracking on more ambitious campaign proposals after pushback, like her call to eliminate private health insurance in the 2019 Democratic primary and her anti-price gouging plan in 2024.

“Frankly, this is Kamala's biggest weakness — her inability to have these big ideas,” said Herman. “She doesn't have these big policy concepts because it's not been part of who she is. She's an attorney. She is a lawyer who works in prosecutions, and it's not in her bones to do this stuff.”

Nor has talking about policy been a strong suit. Accused at times of offering “word salad” in her past campaigns, Harris still defaults to discursive statements of values and calls for conversations around hot-button issues instead of declaring where she stands. She remains reticent to speak with mainstream media outlets, though she’s been more open to longform podcast interviews. And she still relies on well-worn anecdotes from past stump speeches, like recalling attending civil rights protests as a toddler with her mother wheeling her in a stroller.

“If I were here, I would never say that stroller story again in my life,” said one longtime associate who was granted anonymity to speak candidly. “She’s never been very good at updating her memorized riffs.”

That’s a major problem for Harris. In South Carolina, Hodges said, “People are looking for fresh faces. And I think that there's a distaste over the outcome of the last election and a sense that we need to move on and do something new and try something new.”

He said, “That's a bit unfair to Vice President Harris because of the circumstances under which she ran, but you know, life's unfair.”