There are only two lanes to the Democratic presidential nomination two years from now, and one of them is already blocked — by Kamala Harris.
Get ready for the Kamala comeback, followed, in all likelihood, by a replay of her crushing defeat by the Republican nominee.
Believe it or not, the ex-VP occupies what counts as the “center lane” within the party, and for most of the last three decades that’s the one that’s led to the nomination.
Republicans used to be the party of orderly succession, even if the candidate whose turn had come looked like a certain loser: think Bob Dole in ’96.
But recently, it’s been Democrats who’ve tended to pick a party elder as their nominee:
Al Gore, as a sitting VP, might not have been remarkable in 2000, but in ’04 it was John Kerry, in ’16 Hillary Clinton, and in 2020 Joe Biden — with only Barack Obama butting ahead of the line in 2008.
Democrats like a known quantity, a reliable liberal who isn’t too overtly radical; the radicalism can wait until after Election Day.
So they’re leaning to running Harris again, even if donors aren’t happy about it: They blew nearly $2 billion on her campaign and aligned PACs in 2024, only for Harris to lose every battleground state to Trump.
It won’t be donors who decide the party’s 2028 nominee, though, and ordinary Democrats actually find Harris reassuring.
She’s a familiar face, after all, commanding practically universal name recognition.
Harris checks the identity-politics boxes that may be as important as winning to Democratic primary voters: Their ticket must have a woman, and it can’t be all white.
And after being vetted as a VP and undergoing the trial-by-fire of the ’24 campaign, Harris isn’t likely to surprise voters with any extremist tattoos or sexual-assault allegations — things that can’t be taken for granted among Democrats nowadays.
Then there’s the revenge motive: What better way to repudiate the Trump era and reverse the ’24 humiliation than by making the woman he defeated president?
Democratic primary voters are still smarting from Hillary Clinton’s drubbing in 2016: by 2028, the election of America’s first female president will have been postponed 12 long years, and feminists in the party aren’t willing to wait any longer.
These are the reasons Harris tops almost all polls of 2028 Democratic hopefuls, with an 11.6-point lead in the RealClearPolitics polling aggregate as of mid-July.
“She comes in with 99 percent name ID and everyone else is going to have to raise money and buy it,” a former Harris aide tells New York’s David Freedlander.
The donors might prefer just about anyone else, yet they’d have to pour an enormous amount of cash into another candidate just to make him or her recognizable.
Hellbound and Down 