KAMALA’S EMOTION TOUR. Did you know that former Vice President Kamala Harris’s book tour is still going on? It seems like her book, 107 Days, came out years ago. (It was really in late September.) Today, as the world moves on, her events can seem like therapy sessions — and possible 2028 prep — with fawning moderators and crowds that love her.
They’re still working through their emotions about Harris’s loss to President Donald Trump. “It’s a little traumatic for all of us,” the moderator of a recent event in Nashville said to Harris. “I just wanted you to win so f*****’ bad.” The crowd, which appeared to be mostly women, went wild. The moderator, Tim Miller, a personality for the Bulwark, a publication associated with the Democratic dark money group Defending Democracy Together, continued: “After the election, when I called my husband the next day and I was like, ‘How’s our daughter doing?’ and he said, ‘She asked me why I took the sign down, and so I had to tell her.’” A sadness fell over the crowd. Then, finally, came the question for Harris: “How do you deal with, like, the weight of all of us that was on you?”
Harris uses such events to go through her own emotions about the election. In Nashville — at the city’s fabled Ryman Auditorium, for you country music fans — she recounted the pain of election night and the realization that she had lost: “I couldn’t, I was so inarticulate,” Harris said, “I couldn’t say anything except ‘my God, my God, my God, my God,’ when I learned the results.” Even with a year to contemplate events, she seemed no more articulate in Nashville than she had been during the campaign.
Later, it was time for more emotion, this time in the form of the moderator’s anger at President Joe Biden for not handing the race over to Harris earlier or allowing her to be more independent of him: “I’m just back to those emotions I mentioned earlier,” Miller said to Harris. “Here’s the anger part that’s coming up in me. And I just have to do this. I just have to ask this part because to me, this is where I get frustrated with former President Biden, who I have nothing but respect for. But this was so consequential of an election, and the stakes were so high… and I appreciate that you wanted to have loyalty, I really do, but like, that’s a two-way street, right? And I feel like it was incumbent upon him to say to you — what did he call you? Kid? Kamala? Veep? — whatever he called you, to say to you, you go do what you need to do. If you need to throw me under the bus on a few things, you go do that, because we’ve got to beat this motherf*****. And instead, he did the opposite of that.” At the mention of the m-word — thought to be one of Harris’s favorites — there was more wild applause. And of course, no one had to ask who “this motherf*****” was.
The m-word popped up again from time to time. Miller wanted to know whether Harris was really a nanosecond away from calling Trump a “motherf*****” at their only debate. Harris wouldn’t say, but left the clear impression that the answer was yes. Of course, the crowd loved it; you really can’t call President Trump a “motherf*****” enough at a Harris event.
So what is going on? Obviously, some Harris supporters are still quite emotional about the events of 2024. Harris and her supporting cast are giving them a comforting experience. But in Nashville, as she has in other locations, Harris also politicked for local Democratic candidates. She expressed great love for the “Tennessee Three,” the state lawmakers who used a bullhorn and an angry crowd to take over the state House floor in 2023. Among Democrats, they are heroes for staging what others might call a mini-insurrection.
Is this Harris’s 2028 campaign? Look at it this way: If she were running in 2028, this would be the kind of thing she would be doing. That doesn’t mean she’s definitely running, but it certainly doesn’t rule it out, either.
Polls show Harris in second place in the nascent 2028 Democratic race, five points behind California Gov. Gavin Newsom in the RealClearPolitics average. That’s not a great place for a candidate who was Vice President of the United States and the party’s presidential standard-bearer in the last election. But it’s not out of the game, either. And if Harris’s book tour is any evidence, the former VP has a hard core of emotional support, especially among women voters who saw her as the last thing standing between themselves and what they believed would be the horror of a second Trump administration.