When you see the name “Kamala Harris,” what’s the first word that pops into your mind?
A) Historic
B) Winner
C) Loser
D) Inauthentic
E) Both C and D
If you answered E, you’re correct. And sure, technically, Harris is historic in the sense she’s the first female vice president in history. But that title was bestowed, not earned, all thanks to Rep. James Clyburn (D-SC) reportedly demanding that she be chosen as former President Joe Biden‘s No. 2 if he wanted his endorsement to save his then-failing campaign in South Carolina in 2020. That made her the most infamous DEI hire in U.S. political history.
Earlier this week, the former California senator announced she would not run for governor of her state. This was unsurprising considering that donors are not exactly lining up to hand her the same millions she blew through in the 107 days she ran for president — $1.5 billion to be precise.
On top of that, a July poll from the University of California shows that Harris only received 41% of the vote against an unnamed Republican in a hypothetical matchup, which is a shockingly low number for any Democrat in California, especially one with her kind of name-brand recognition.
Simply put, in political terms, Harris is a losing proposition. Let’s take a walk down memory lane to underscore this point: She was the first to announce her run for president in 2019 to much media hype, with the usual pundits calling her “the female Obama.” And after a brief rise in the polls following an early July 2019 primary debate when she basically called Biden a racist, she looked to be the front-runner for the nomination.
“Kamala Harris had a moment that was two hours long. I mean, a star was born tonight,” CNN’s Van Jones cooed at the time in providing analysis that has aged like milk in a sauna. “She completely dominated the stage, and most importantly, she would kick Donald Trump’s butt, and she proved it tonight. That was — if you had any doubt that you could nominate a woman that would take Donald Trump to the woodshed, she just took it away from you.”
But the more Harris spoke that year, the more voters ran away. Her campaign, devoid of any central theme or optimism, was a mess, with staffers jumping ship and complaining about how difficult it was to work for her. Donations dried up. And in the span of two months after that debate where she wounded Biden, she wasn’t even polling well in her home state of California, even trailing (checks notes) Andrew Yang in polls in the fall of 2019. She dropped out of the race well before the first votes were cast in Iowa.
But thanks to Biden’s promise to Clyburn, Harris was given new life as the old man’s running mate in a race dominated by COVID-19, which turned the economy completely upside down. The basement campaign worked, with Biden and Harris never being challenged or scrutinized by the media in any serious way. The two failed upward to the presidency by eking out wins in the swing states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia, and Arizona.
After taking office, the plan was to present Biden and Harris as a package deal in working as equal partners as president and vice president. To underscore this partnership, Harris was tasked to be “border czar” in an effort to find the “root causes” of illegal immigration. But this was a profoundly contradictory choice given she once compared Immigration and Customs Enforcement to the Ku Klux Klan, called Trump’s border wall “medieval” while arguing that illegal border crossings weren’t illegal.
As expected, border crossings under Harris continued to skyrocket as millions poured over the border each year of the administration, unabated. Harris, who has never been accused of having a strong work ethic, didn’t even bother to visit said border until months after it was assigned as her top priority as vice president. And when she did visit, the location chosen was not illegal crossing hotbeds such as Eagle Pass, Texas, or the Rio Grande Valley, but instead El Paso, Texas, which had significantly fewer crossings and was cleaned up ahead of her short visit.
Under Biden, Harris was also put in charge of “voting rights,” code for efforts to federalize voting laws over having individual states decide, but also failed on that front after Sens. Joe Manchin and Krysten Sinema, both Democrats-turned-independents, joined 50 Senate Republicans in shooting down the measure. She was also tasked with leading the National Space Council, only to leave two U.S. astronauts stranded in space who were eventually rescued by Elon Musk‘s SpaceX at the request of President Donald Trump earlier this year.
As vice president, if just looking at the facts, she gets an F-minus. But yet again, she received another political lifeline after Biden’s brain turned to mashed potatoes in front of the entire world during his disastrous debate against Trump in June 2024. Biden dropped out of the race a few weeks later, with Democrats being forced to turn to Harris thanks to $350 million in campaign contributions to the Biden-Harris campaign that were nontransferable.
We all know what happened from there: Harris didn’t do one news interview for the first six weeks of her campaign, even avoiding The View and MSNBC, clearly illustrating her advisers’ reluctance to have her speak anywhere outside of a teleprompter. When she finally engaged on a media tour, one of her stops included The View, where she somehow flubbed a T-ball question from Sunny Hostin: “If anything, would you have done something differently than President Biden during the past four years?”
Harris, looking skyward in thought, said, “There’s not a thing that comes to mind.”
And that essentially was the end of her campaign. Per Democratic strategist James Carville, “It’s the one question that you exist to answer, all right? That is it. That’s the money question. That’s the one you want. That’s the one that everybody wants to know the answer to. And you freeze, you literally freeze, and you say, ‘Well, I can’t think of anything,’” he said in a postelection analysis. “But when we go back, and history unearths this, it’s going to be right there on The View. And I think her name was Sunny Hostin … asked the question, and that’s the most devastating answer you could imagine.”
He’s 100% correct. Harris was running as the change candidate, yet said she wouldn’t change a thing about the worst presidency we have witnessed in our lifetimes.
She made mistake after mistake: paying millions for celebrities to perform at her rallies, skipping the Al Smith dinner, flip-flopping on every major issue, choosing goofy Tim Walz as her running mate, etc. In the end, Trump won every swing state, the popular vote, and 89% of counties in this country went more red than blue.
If that isn’t failure, I’m not sure what is.
Some are now speculating that Harris decided to forgo running for California governor to opt for another run for president. But here’s a prediction: She will not run for any public office again.
Because, as we just laid out, she has never accomplished anything on a national level unless it was handed to her. She actually would have to fight for the nomination this time. And as we saw in 2019 and again in 2024, the more voters see and hear of her, the more they dislike her: Too scripted, too phony, no guiding principles whatsoever, and a person who simply does not want to put the work in.
Harris appeared Thursday night on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert as the host continued his patently unfunny late-night therapy session for Democrats. The reason she appeared was to promote her new memoir, 107 Days, which is about her 2024 campaign.
At one point, in what is the most tedious late-night interview one will ever see, Colbert asked Harris twice if she could name any leaders in the Democratic Party.
And she couldn’t do it and could only muster, twice, that there are “lots of good leaders.” Even Colbert couldn’t save her.
Failed talk-show host. Failed candidate. Both know how to spend boatloads of money without any return on investment.
COMEBACK KAMALA? HARRIS HOLDS ON TO HER PRESIDENTIAL DREAMS
If Harris doesn’t run again, many Democrats will be breathing a sigh of relief.
Because “the third time’s a charm” doesn’t apply in presidential politics, especially to the likes of Kamala Devi Harris.