An early look at the 2028 presidential race reveals two contradictory things: Former Vice President Kamala Harris is the front-runner, and she is seemingly out of step with her party’s current mood.
Harris, the 2024 Democratic nominee, leads the hypothetical presidential field by 12.1 points, according to the RealClearPolitics polling average. She is ahead in seven of the eight polls included in that average since May, often by double digits. The two most recent surveys, conducted by Quantus Insights and the Financial Times, show her clearing a third of the vote while no other Democrat breaks 20%.
At the same time, Harris would run as the establishment candidate as an anti-establishment wave is overtaking the Democratic Party. Outright socialists are beating entrenched incumbents and longtime elected officials in primaries.
These two facts cannot coexist forever. One of these trends has got to give.
Harris’s biggest problem is that she lost the 2024 presidential election to President Donald Trump. Losing to Trump is the No. 1 thing that makes progressives angry at Democratic leaders.
Harris is the only Democrat to lose the national popular vote to Trump in three tries. She received 6.8 million fewer votes than former President Joe Biden did in 2020. She lost all seven battleground states, including Nevada, the only state in this batch that didn’t go for Trump in either 2016 or 2020 and voted for Hillary Clinton. With the exception of Biden, no Democrat is more directly responsible for Trump returning to the White House than Harris.
Democrats may be willing to give Harris a pass they didn’t offer Clinton, John Kerry, Al Gore, or any of their defeated presidential nominees since Adlai Stevenson in 1956. (Stevenson then went on to lose to Dwight Eisenhower a second time.)
Harris’s circumstances are different, however. She had to replace Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket after he turned in a debate performance so bad that it raised questions about his stamina and cognitive abilities. She ran an abbreviated campaign, as she notes even in the title of her memoir, 107 Days. She couldn’t convincingly distance herself from Biden, who remained the incumbent president and reportedly insisted there be “no daylight” between them. (Biden denies saying this.)
Some might be willing to give Harris a mulligan in this context. Trump came back from his 2020 defeat to win the presidency again, though many Republicans believed his frequent assertions that he didn’t really lose, and Richard Nixon bounced back from his narrow 1960 defeat eight years later. Why not Harris?
Disaffected progressives do not take such a magnanimous view of Harris’s 2024 campaign. Losing to Trump also makes her ill-suited to make an electability argument against progressive primary opponents.
Darializa Avila Chevalier, the new Democratic congressional nominee who upset Congressional Hispanic Caucus Chairman Adriano Espaillat (D-NY) in a primary, may be more representative of socialist sentiment on this subject. Among her deleted social media posts is one saying “F*** Kamala Harris.”
Even though many of the movement’s top elected officials actually defended the big-spending Biden-Harris administration in real time, the socialists’ theory is that corporate-friendly Democrats like Harris and the Clintons lost working-class voters and only they can win them back.
There is also the matter of Israel. The war in Gaza, bitterly opposed by left-wing activists, unfolded on her and Biden’s watch. This deflated progressive support for Harris in 2024 and has since emerged as a huge issue in Democratic primaries. Liberal Rep. Dan Goldman (D-NY) got blown out by 30 points practically on Israel alone.
Harris wrote in 107 Days that she “pleaded” for Biden to show more empathy to the Palestinians. “He couldn’t do it: while he could passionately state, ‘I am a Zionist,’ his remarks about innocent Palestinians came off as inadequate and forced,” she concluded of Biden. But she wasn’t a fan of pro-Palestinian hecklers on the campaign trail either. “The issue was not binary, but the outcome of this election certainly was,” she wrote.
The former vice president has tried to mend fences here amid her outreach to left-wing activists. Some have their doubts. “Why should we trust her now?” Palestinian American progressive strategist Rania Batrice asked Axios. “If this change is real, she has an opportunity to prove it. Until then, skepticism isn’t just understandable, it’s warranted.”
In the 2020 election cycle, Harris ran for president as a progressive. She ran away from many of those positions in 2024, though often through anonymous quotes given by aides to news outlets. She runs the risk of looking absurd by adopting yet another political persona if she cozies up to her party’s hard Left.
It’s possible that in the aftermath of Graham Platner‘s implosion, the momentum has already begun to shift away from the socialists. But that seems like a risky bet.
Harris could nevertheless catch a lucky break.
GRAHAM WAS ONE OF THE MOST INFLUENTIAL, IF UNLIKELY, LEADERS IN TRUMP’S WASHINGTON
The energy inside the Democratic Party is with the socialists. But Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) may be too old to run again. He was born before Biden and Trump. By Election Day 2028, he’ll be 87. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani is foreign-born and thus constitutionally ineligible to run. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) could decide to run for the Senate seat currently held by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) instead.
Do the socialists have a deep enough bench to beat Harris? If not, could she overcome the Democrats’ vibe shift? Those are two big questions facing the party ahead of 2028.