Kamala Harris, the Do or Die Candidate

Few have faced her fork in the road

Every losing presidential candidate of the last quarter century had somewhere else to go. Al Gore, foregoing another campaign, became a celebrity environmentalist. John Kerry served in the Obama and Biden administrations, rising to secretary of state. John McCain returned to the Senate and Mitt Romney, after a hiatus, entered the Senate in 2019. Hillary Clinton had no future in politics after losing to Donald Trump, but she reemerged, in time, as a liberal martyr, and she is more revered by Democrats today than she ever was when running one of the lousier general election campaigns in recent memory. Trump, of course, had already been president, and his defeat in 2020 was merely a pit stop on the way to a third campaign.

For Kamala Harris, there is no obvious way forward in defeat. She is either going to become president of the United States or enter political oblivion. This coin-flip election against the indicted Trump will not offer martyrdom for Harris if the Electoral College doesn’t break her way; she cannot easily trod the path of Clinton as an esteemed stateswoman who, in the eyes of many aggrieved liberals, had the election stolen from her—either by the Russians, James Comey, or sexist voters. For Harris, it really is win or go home. If she’s not in the White House next year, she will have no serious role in Democratic politics. She can certainly make money—she’s a lawyer, a vice president, and a former senator—but greater influence won’t come with it. For that, she’ll need to be president.

A defeated Harris cannot easily return to the Senate in California, where Adam Schiff and Alex Padilla, two men who are not yet senior citizens, will be in office. She could, perhaps, try her hand at governor, running to replace a term-limited Gavin Newsom. The trouble there is that, by losing to Trump, she will still lack a springboard to another presidential campaign. Unlike the other slain Democratic and Republican nominees of the twenty-first century, Harris never won a competitive primary. In fact, she never competed in a single state. In 2019, she was polling so poorly she dropped out before the Iowa caucuses. In 2024, Joe Biden was the nominee until his disastrous debate performance in June forced Democratic elites to reckon with his failure and eventually promote her. She became the first Democratic nominee since the 1950s to not win a single vote in a primary contest. Now, as she struggles to put Trump away, her limitations are plain. She can raise a tremendous amount of money and do more on the campaign trail than a deficient Biden, but she is obviously of lesser political stock than Gretchen Whitmer, Pete Buttigieg, Raphael Warnock, Mark Kelly, Josh Shapiro, or any other leading Democratic senator or governor who would have probably competed in an open primary. None of these Democrats would have dodged the media for more than a month. None of them would have struggled to formulate a straightforward policy vision for the campaign. None of them, more crucially, would have been so devoid of a message, so unable to articulate why it is they want to be president. There are A and B-talents in the Democratic Party and Harris isn’t one of them. Her beating Trump won’t change that.

If Harris does lose, she will represent only defeat—no noble struggle, no liberal lost cause. The 2028 Democratic contenders will act like she doesn’t exist. Some, quietly, are probably rooting for a loss so they can get on with the open primary, four years to rail against Trump-Vance and gear up for a new era. They will not make her mistakes. They will hold press conferences, sit for interviews, do the podcast and cable TV circuits alike, and introduce themselves in a coherent and compelling fashion to voters. They will do this because they are fully capable and because primaries are, ultimately, clarifying processes. They are about survival of the fittest. They prepare candidates for many months of aggressive scrutiny and the grind of a popular election.

Harris was anointed, after all. And many Democrats forgot the lessons that primaries can teach. The open primary created Barack Obama. Hillary Clinton’s bid to forestall one in 2016—to drive every Democrat of note out of the race so a little-known democratic socialist senator from Vermont would end up her sole formidable challenger—revealed her greater weakness. Would she have survived a clash with Obama’s vice president, Joe Biden? The 2016 version of Elizabeth Warren? We will never know. We do know her entitlement and arrogance, inculcated throughout 2015 and 2016, doomed her. She truly believed her Blue Wall would never crack. But here’s a kind word for Hillary Clinton and even the doddering Biden—they all, in their primes, were better at this than Kamala Harris. Biden was a genuine asset for the Obama ticket. Clinton had no trouble sitting for interviews and arguing policy. They had the experience of competing for and winning primary votes. They slogged through Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina. By 2020, Biden was ducking the public too, but he had the excuse of Covid and eventually age. Even he, though, held press conferences.

What does Harris represent? It’s not clear she herself knows the answer. She is a vote against Trump, for stopping Trump in his tracks. That might be enough. Trump, if he loses, will not concede, but he has fewer weapons at his disposal this time. He’s not president. The election will get certified. He will be a loser again, and the GOP may find it easier to move on from a 78-year-old standard bearer. Trump could lose interest in a 2028 run and decide it’s better (and more lucrative) to play martyr. Of course, he’s got his indictments to contend with, and the reality that he can’t fend them all off indefinitely. He needs the presidency to save him from legal jeopardy and possibly prison. This is why he’s so desperate to win. Trump is about Trump. The White House is his only salvation.

Assuming Harris wins, the likelihood is high that she will govern with a Republican-run Senate. It’s been decades since a victor entered the White House without unified control of government. Any legislative agenda Harris proffers will be dead-on-arrival, and she will be unable to fill Supreme Court vacancies that might arise. She will still have plenty of power through the federal bureaucracies and any executive orders she might sign, but we know so little about her potential presidency that it will be difficult to predict how she governs. Her foreign policy will be, to a degree, all her own, and it’s here she can flex the muscle of the United States. Does she have any plan for checking Benjamin Netanyahu in Gaza and the West Bank? For finding peace in Ukraine? We simply don’t know. That’s the reality of the empty campaign before us.