Welcome to Washington Secrets, your insider guide to who’s up and who’s down in the nation’s politics. Today we run through the odds that Kamala Harris will be the 2028 Democratic nominee for president, explain just why the Epstein files have created a political crisis in London, and bring you the newest thing in political comedy …
Former Vice President Kamala Harris had her shot and blew it. Why would anyone think a losing candidate, associated with such a dismal showing in 2024, would be worth backing in the 2028 presidential election?
So runs the conventional thinking around the Democratic primary. But Secrets loves nothing better than upending conventional thinking, particularly when there is money to be made.
New polling and analysis from the experts at J.L. Partners suggests that Harris (who has just overhauled her social media presence in a sign that she is preparing to run) is desperately underpriced on betting markets.
Last night, she was running at 6% on Kalshi, a prediction market that covers everything from the Super Bowl result to whether President Donald Trump will sign an executive order this week. The numbers put her behind Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), Gov. Josh Shapiro (D-PA), and Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA), who led the field at 31%.
“For most of last year, she topped polls of Democratic primary voters and registered Democrats overall,” J.L. Partners wrote in its latest American Pulse newsletter. “For most of 2025, we were telling our clients this was a function of name recognition – it isn’t unusual for the former nominee to top the polls, especially of disengaged voters, because they are the most well-known.”
So far, so conventional. But the firm has begun polling a much tighter cohort of Democrat primary voters (based on their voting record and declaring themselves eight or above on a 10-point scale of likelihood to vote), using criteria that weed out the name recognition effect.
The results show Harris ahead of Newsom in the nomination race, 30% to 21%. Pete Buttigieg is third on seven points, Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ) on four, and Shapiro on four. Ocasio-Cortez comes in on three (tied with Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN), Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ), and Gov. J.B. Pritzker (D-IL)), which suggests that the firm has indeed selected out name recognition effects.
And there is another point. Harris’s support is built on black voters.
“Among white Democratic primary voters, she is tied with Gavin Newsom on 25 per cent apiece,” the newsletter says. “But with Black Democratic primary voters, she has a twenty-nine point lead over Newsom, with 39% to 10% (no one else breaks 5%). Making up one in three voters in presidential primaries on the Dem side according to Third Way, that is a sizeable and influential group that could propel Harris to victory.”
Not only does she have a polling lead, but she is well ahead with perhaps the most important constituency of all in picking Democratic nominees.
Harris has not ruled out another run (telling an interviewer at the end of last year, “I am not done”). And she is in the middle of an extensive book tour promoting her campaign memoir, 107 Days. Tonight, she is in Montgomery, Alabama, with dates running all the way into April — a handy way of remaining in voters’ minds.
This morning, she rolled out her revamped KamalaHQ social media presence, rebranding it as Headquarters and saying that it will be an “organizing project for next generation campaigning.”
Secrets would never promote gambling or encourage readers to indulge. But it does seem as if Harris might be worth a flutter. Even if she does not win the nomination, she will almost certainly surge at some point (and this morning, her Kalshi odds were up to 8%), allowing the astute investor an opportunity to cash out.
READ MORE: MY NIGHT WITH KAMALA: HARRIS’S ‘I TOLD YOU SO’ TOUR COMES TO RICHMOND
Mandy’s hotline to No. 10
Secrets is reminded of an anecdote from last year when Lord Peter Mandelson (Mandy to his friends and/or enemies) was living it up as British ambassador to the United States. He was holding court on the terrace of the glorious Lutyens-designed residence, offering British journalists his take on U.S.-U.K. relations, weeks before he was fired for his connections with the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
When his cellphone rang in the middle of the chat, it was easy for reporters to identify the caller. He had, after all, left the phone face up on the gin-and-tonic table before him. It was Morgan McSweeney, No. 10 Downing Street’s chief of staff.
“No,” Mandelson said as he answered. He could not talk because he was surrounded by journalists.
But there was another wordless message for his audience: Mandelson was demonstrating that he had a hotline to Sir Keir Starmer, U.K. prime minister.
So while coverage of the Epstein files in the U.S. this week has focused on sex crimes and a who’s who of the moneyed elite (with Trump barely mentioned in the headlines, despite cropping up time and again in the files), in Britain, it has plunged Starmer into a deep crisis. The prime minister may have moved fast to strip Mandelson of his last remaining privileges, yet there is no escaping Starmer’s close ties to the disgraced politician, and the crisis rumbles on at the heart of the government.
McSweeney was a protégé of Mandelson, one of the most important figures in the Labour Party of the past four decades. McSweeney repaid the favor by pushing hard to have his mentor installed in Washington.
And Mandelson’s key attribute, alongside his smooth charm, was being able to say he had a hotline to No. 10, bypassing the usual Foreign Office structure, with its pen-pushing bureaucratic class, to get things done with Trumpian speed, as journalists saw when his phone rang.
His cellphone rang again a little later. This time, it was Reinaldo, Mandelson’s husband, apparently asking when he could get rid of the journalists so they could have dinner.
READ MORE: STARMER APOLOGIZES TO EPSTEIN VICTIMS FOR APPOINTING MANDELSON AS AMBASSADOR
Kat Cammack brings the jokes
Secrets is a little sluggish today after staying out too late at the Washington Press Club Foundation’s annual congressional dinner. It is a tough audience for the speakers. A roomful of well-lubricated politicians and journalists is not necessarily always in listening mode after dinner.
Nancy Pelosi, former House speaker, was all but drowned out by chit-chat. Luckily, Rep. Kat Cammack (R-FL) came armed with plenty of jokes at her colleagues’ expense.
She riffed on motherhood.
“It absolutely changes you,” she said. “Though not nearly as much as it changed Mike Johnson when he walked in on me breastfeeding baby Auggie. The man still can’t look me in the eye.”
And she took aim at her colleague Rep. Byron Donalds (R-FL), who sat at the end of the top table, ribbing him about running for governor while serving as a congressman.
“You, sir, are single-handedly bringing down the unemployment rate in the African American Community,” she said.
Everyone heard that line, and the anxious gasps that followed.
Lunchtime reading
The British fixer to the elite who made connections for Epstein: A secretive British fixer acted as Epstein’s connection to Westminster and Silicon Valley elites, visiting his island and working to disguise his pedophile history. Ian Osborne, 42, exchanged hundreds of emails with Epstein, offering to introduce him to tech billionaires and British politicians.
To win back the House, Democrats take the fight to deep-red areas: “In a change versus status quo election, in the overwhelming majority of instances, the absence of formal political experience is not a weakness, it’s a strength,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) said in a recent interview at his party’s headquarters, sitting at a table scattered with maps of the House battlefield.
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