Kamala Harris and 2028
By 
It’s increasingly clear that Kamala Harris is going to run for president, starting her campaign officially next spring or summer (presidential campaigns are now routinely 18 months long so we’re not very far away, which raises a whole host of issues for any Republican thinking about challenging Trump, but we’ll fall off that bridge when we come to it).
Some preliminary thoughts on this:
(1) Harris and the Democratic party as a whole did remarkably well in the 2024 election, although the punditry in particular and the media environment in general is in total denial of this fact. The post-Covid elections around the world were absolutely catastrophic for incumbent parties, and the Democrats in the USA did better than just about anybody else, losing the presidency by an extremely narrow margin, and suffering only modest losses overall in Congress and state elections.
(2) Still, in American politics, losing makes you a loser, unless you’re Donald Trump, to whom none of the normal rules apply. Thus the knee jerk reaction to a Harris candidacy is going to be extremely negative, which is a fact that itself is of considerable practical significance, no matter how unfair it may be given the first point about how well she did in context.
(3) The claim that we’ve seen that the American public won’t elect a woman president is absurd, and it’s embarrassing that intelligent people make it. We have a sample of two, one which featured the woman winning the popular vote by millions and losing the idiotic Electoral College by about 17 votes cast in Depressing Springsteen Song Ohio etc., and the other which featured (1), which again was a very impressive performance. My own view is that Boring Old White Guy was a template that made sense given the very specific and unique conditions of the 2020 election. The Biden dead enders at LGM never wanted to acknowledge that consistently large majorities of Democratic voters who were asked about it didn’t want Biden to run again, or if they did acknowledge this they invoked the interesting theory that the all-powerful editorial page of the NYT was responsible for that fact. Less facetiously, I don’t dispute that Biden Old coverage had some negative effect at the margin, but the consistently large majorities of Democratic voters who didn’t want to see him run in 2024 weren’t at the margin — they were the core, and that, ultimately, is why Biden’s spectacular face plant in the debate gave us Harris.
(4) Point (3) does emphasize that Harris got the nomination under unusual circumstances to say the least, which makes her little better than stillborn 2020 nomination campaign (she withdrew from the race in December 2019) a legitimately disturbing data point. But she does have great name recognition, which is worth a lot in this moron country, and that’s a legitimate strength with which to start a 2028 campaign.
(5) Ultimately I’m agnostic about whether she would be the best candidate for the Democrats in 2028, but that’s what primary campaigns are supposed to be for. One thing I’m absolutely sure of is that the whole “you have to nominate a straight white guy with no skeletons in his closet” impulse is a product not of rational calculation, but of PTSD from 2016, 2024, and the basic nightmare which has been the last decade in America. The Democratic party in 2026 looks a lot more like Kamala Harris than it does like Joe Biden, and while the primary process isn’t necessarily going to reflect that, obviously, it certainly shouldn’t start from a place of denying that reality, which is where the initial reaction that the we can’t nominate another woman, or a non-white candidate, or especially a non-white woman, comes from.