They Just Might

Former Vice President Kamala Harris is still considering a political comeback.

Asked if she would run for President in 2028, she said that she just "might" do so.

To those who think she should try for the Presidency again, let me refresh your memories.

How many primaries and caucuses did she win in her 2020 presidential campaign?  Zero.

How many primaries and caucuses did she actually compete in in her 2020 presidential campaign?  Zero.  She had to end her candidacy in 2019.

How many swing states did she win in the 2024 general election?  Zero.

How many Democratic presidential candidates other than Harris have lost the popular vote in the past twenty years?  Zero.

Well, at least she has a perfect record.

You know, it's really galling to hear Harris say she might run again after losing to Trump in 2024 and not see her being ridiculed en masse when Martin O'Malley, who showed a real feistiness in going after Trump when he ran for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination, got laughed at when he said that he might run again in 2020 after he lost to Trump in 2016, and . . . oh, wait, that was Hillary Clinton!

Good luck with another run for the Presidency, Madam Former Vice President.  The Democrats, as repeatedly noted here, are notorious for shunning and turning away failed presidential nominees.  They don't get to make comebacks.   They don't get a second chance.  They don't even get a lousy speaking slot at the next Democratic National Convention.  They are complete . . . losers.

And that certainly includes Harris.  In fact, she's even less popular than Donald Trump.  Seriously.  In an NBC News poll released this week, Donald Trump - who has led the country into another unjust war in the Middle East, destroyed the economy, sicced ICE on native-born U.S. citizens - including journalists - suspended civil liberties, dismantled federal government services, and has taken away people's health insurance - had 41 percent of people surveyed respond favorably to him.  Harris had a 36 percent favorable response.

Is it any wonder why advertising genius Donny Deutsch laughed at the Democrats on television two days after Trump forced Harris into early retirement? 

Oh, and lest you think I'm being a nasty ol' white man beating up on a woman of color, I'm also here to tell you that Gavin Newsom, Harris's fellow Californian, is even less popular; he only got a 27 percent favorable response.  It's not really surprising.  Newsom has trolled Trump and ridiculed him every chance he gets and has been instrumental in bringing Donald's poll numbers down.  But that should not be construed into thinking that Newsom himself is popular.  In fact, he has been held in great - and justified - suspicion among progressives, who have noted that Newsom does not want to tax billionaires because of the wealth they benefit for the economy, he started a podcast because he apparently has too much time on his hands as governor of California, his podcast included guests such as Steve Bannon and the late Charlie Kirk, and, while talking with Kirk, he agreed with him that it is "unfair" in allowing transsexual women to compete in women's sports.

Gavin Newsom is not the savior of the Democratic Party, people.  He's a smooth-talking technocrat who takes superficially liberal positions and hopes his suave demeanor and his perfect hair will compensate for his lack of substance.  In other words, he's the Gary Hart of California.

I hope Democrats don't get sold on Harris or Newsom in 2028 simply on name recognition alone - or because they're not Vance or Rubio (or Trump, who's already plotting on how to stand for a third term).  As for whom the Democrats should nominate for President in 2028 - assuming there'll be two candidates for th3e office - they must remember Smokey Robinson's mother's advice.

They'd better shop around.  Just not in California.     

Democratic Disarray - October 2025 Edition

Kamala Harris announced that she might run for President again in 2028.

The party is thrilled.

The Republican Party, that is.

Kamala Harris ran the best campaign she could have run in 107 days, but her best wasn't good enough.  That's because she wasn't good enough as a candidate.  Voters and donors had made that clear during her first presidential campaign in 2019.  (She didn't make it to 2020.)  She likely wouldn't have been the nominee had Joe Biden announced his withdrawal as a candidate for re-election sixteen months earlier than she did, and, as Steve Schmidt recently pointed out, she saw Joe Biden up close and personal and should have intervened to get him to acknowledge his fragility and his decline before he set out to run again.  

Again: Harris should not have been Vice President.  She should have been Attorney General, not Merrick Garland.  She would have been more aggressive in going after Trump than Garland was.

And just to show you how screwed up the Democrats are overall, consider their genius in fighting gerrymandered redistricting in Texas.

You might recall that, this past summer, Texas Democrats in the state legislature took buses to Chicago (the Chicago bus station is shown above) and holed out there during the effort to pass a redistricting plan in order to deny the Republicans a quorum.  After only a couple of weeks in Chicago, the legislators returned to Austin because they had made their case and let the plan pass, vowing to challenged the new district maps in court.

Wait, what?

Texas Democratic legislators would hve had to stay in Chicago until early December to force the Republicans to withdraw the plan and attempt to reintroduce it in 2026.  One Texas Democrat explained that the legislators would have had to make numerous sacrifices to stay in Chicago that long, and it would have been impossible for them to be away from their families for so long.

Right.

You know, if these people had been involved in the Western Front campaign in the Second World War, we'd all be speaking German.  "We can't stay in the Bastogne to fight the Nazis in December; we have to be home for Christmas!  And Junior is in big basketball game the Monday before!"

These are the Democrats?

Nuts.

Kamala Out of the System

Much like Hillary Clinton released a memoir of her failed presidential campaign against Donald Trump titled "What Happened," former Vice President Kamala Harris has a new memoir of her failed presidential campaign against Donald Trump, titled "107 Days" (after the length of her campaign), though it should be titled, "What Happened?"  Because the added question mark would be highly appropriate.

Harris appeared with Stephen Colbert on his late-night talk show a few days after he - like Harris eight months earlier - had become irrelevant.  She lamented that the system of government in America is broken, and that she plans talk to people about their lives while she tours the United States to promote her book, saying that, by not asking for anyone's vote, she can talk to them in a way that is not transactional.  All of this comes as Harris has announced that she will not run for governor of California in 2026.

"I believe, and I always believed, that as fragile as our democracy is, our systems would be strong enough to defend our most fundamental principles," she told Colbert.  "And I think right now that they’re not as strong as they need to be."

By talking to people on her book tour, Harris is planning to do exactly what she could have done as Vice President if President Biden had made it clear from the start that he would be a one-term President, which, I now believe, is what he should have done all along.  He should have decided privately that he would not run again in 2024 and wait until after the 2022 midterms to make his decision public.  That would have given Harris plenty of time to talk to Americans in a non-transactional way to help her decide whether to run in 2024, as Biden's earlier withdrawal, had it happened, would have allowed other Democrats to run and make the primary/caucus campaign more competitive.

And what does Harris plan to do when her book tour is over?  She plans not to return to government "for now," but that tease may indicate another presidential run in 2028, and many Harris supporters believe she is entitled to try again, since a 107-day campaign was clearly insufficient at defeating Donald Trump.  But let's look at the big picture.  In a live recent podcast he hosted, journalist Ryan Lizza asked listeners to weigh in on whom they thought should be the 2028 Democratic presidential nominee, and they responded with the names of numerous Democrats, but the name of one particular Democrat was never mentioned.  Guess which Democrat.