Vice President Kamala Harris is working on determining her political future.
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The 60-year-old insists she’s not ready to back down after getting demolished by Donald Trump in the U.S. presidential election and becoming the first Democrat to lose the popular vote in two decades.
Harris has told her closest allies that she is “staying in the fight” and plans to consider what the future holds in the coming weeks, sources told Politico.
It’s been speculated that she could run for governor of California in 2026 or maybe even make a second bid for the presidency in 2028.
“She doesn’t have to decide if she wants to run for something again in the next six months,” one former campaign aide told the outlet.
“The natural thing to do would be to set up some type of entity that would give her the opportunity to travel and give speeches and preserve her political relationships.”
While some Democrats are looking to former first lady Michelle Obama and California Gov. Gavin Newsom to run for president in four years, a post-election poll from Echelon Insights has Harris dominating a hypothetical 2028 Democratic primary, the New York Post reported.
That said, would she want to endure that again?
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Given that Newsom’s term is limited, a gubernatorial run could be better suited for the state’s former prosecutor and attorney general.
“Could she run for governor? Yes. Do I think she wants to run for governor? Probably not. Could she win? Definitely. Would she like the job? I don’t know. Could she run for president again? Yes,” former Harris aide Brian Brokaw told Politico.
“Would she have a whole bunch of skepticism from the outset, because she has run in a full-length Democratic primary where (in 2019) she didn’t even make it long enough to be in the Iowa caucus, and then she was the nominee this year?” he continued.
“People can learn a lot from their previous adversity, too.”
Harris had just over 100 days to take over Joe Biden’s campaign efforts and reintroduce herself to Americans as their possible leader, arguably too little time to sell herself and her policies to voters.
Now, with more time to map out a game plan, Harris needs to figure out where she fits in within the Democratic Party.
“There will be a desire to hear her voice, and there won’t be a vacuum for long,” a source with close ties to Harris told the outlet.
“She is not someone who makes rash decisions. She takes, sometimes, a painfully long time to make decisions,” Brokaw noted, but added that she likely still doesn’t know what the future holds.