Former Vice President Kamala Harris still hopes to be president.
That’s the most obvious conclusion to draw from Harris announcing over the course of 24 hours that she is not running for governor of California but is releasing a new book about her failed 2024 presidential campaign.
Harris’s book won’t be about failure, of course, but it will seek to reframe her loss in a way that presents her as a viable choice for Democrats going forward. Titled 107 Days, one area of focus will be the campaign’s brevity.
“Just over a year ago, I launched my campaign for president of the United States,” Harris said in a video announcement posted on social media on Thursday. “One hundred seven days traveling the country, fighting for our future — the shortest presidential campaign in modern history. Since leaving office, I’ve spent a lot of time reflecting on those days, and with candor and reflection, I’ve written a behind-the-scenes account of that journey. I believe there’s value in sharing what I saw, what I learned, and what it will take to move forward.”
A spate of books has already been published about the 2024 campaign this year. In most of them, Harris is a secondary character behind President Donald Trump and former President Joe Biden. This book, due out on Sept. 23, will presumably be different.
Harris’s decision to forgo the California governor’s race makes sense if she has her eyes on 2028. It is a difficult job in a state with serious problems that many see as a model of liberal misgovernment. While she first ran for president and was nominated for vice president as a freshman senator, she couldn’t easily abandon the governorship for a third White House bid less than two years into it. An unsuccessful run for California governor after losing a presidential election two years earlier nearly ended Richard Nixon’s political career.
“You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference,” he famously said after conceding the 1962 California gubernatorial election.
That turned out not to be true. Nixon even went on to win the presidency in what was considered perhaps the greatest political comeback in U.S. history, pre-Trump.
But even that took six years, not two. It was pulled off in a highly unusual set of circumstances: the assasination of John F. Kennedy followed by other high-profile assassinations, Lyndon Johnson’s 1964 landslide followed by a steady erosion of his political capital over the next four years to the point that he pulled a Biden rather than seek reelection in 1968, the tumult of the Vietnam War, and the splitting of the Democratic Party.
Better to try to replicate what Trump did, run for president again as his party’s previous nominee with no new losses on his resume, than Nixon.
Understandably, Harris would feel like the 2024 race just barely got away from her. She won 48.3% of the popular vote, which is better than George W. Bush in 2000 or Bill Clinton in 1992, when they won the presidency, to Trump’s 49.8%. Yes, she lost all the battleground states. But the margins were mostly razor-thin, and Trump flipped six of these seven states from 2020 to 2024.
Harris also leads most national polls for the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination, though not by Trump-like margins, and thanks in part to having higher name recognition than the others.
But the Democrats haven’t renominated their previous presidential election loser since Adlai Stevenson in 1956. As popular vote winners, Al Gore and Hillary Clinton had even stronger claims to seek a rematch. Neither ever ran for president again, and most Democrats didn’t seem to mind.
Grover Cleveland, the only president besides Trump to serve nonconsecutive terms, was the last Democrat to win after losing and running again. That was in 1892.
Harris’s biggest obstacles aren’t historical precedents, however. Democrats remember the flaws of her campaign. She blew $1 billion and massive media goodwill, had no compelling answer to how she would be different from Biden, and was an overly cautious, indecisive communicator.
Like the title of Harris’s book, her defenders point out that she ran a truncated campaign. However, the lack of a second act after her rollout, which at least succeeded in restoring Democratic morale, suggested she needed a shorter campaign. She similarly fizzled out in her first run for president in 2019. (She didn’t make it until the votes were actually cast in 2020.) Maybe she could have done better with her own campaign team rather than one inherited mainly from Biden, but staffing was never really her strong suit.
Harris’s long-standing flaws, briefly masked by joy, were exposed once again before the campaign’s end.
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Maybe primary voters will forget. It is harder to imagine that Democratic donors will. If Democrats do well in the midterm elections, a fresher face is likely to emerge. If Democrats have a disappointing midterm cycle, they may become too desperate for a retread.
Harris, nevertheless, keeps the flame alive. Former President Barack Obama talked about the audacity of hope. Harris will try to power through the voters’ verdict of “nope.”