Kamala Harris’s Ambition Haunts California Democrats

By Noah Rothman

Monday, July 28, 2025

 

There’s still time for former Vice President Kamala Harris to beg off a run to succeed Gavin Newsom in California’s governor’s mansion. As such, it’s hard to assess the degree to which Harris skeptics in the Golden State are genuinely terrified by her flirtations with a gubernatorial bid or whether they’re exaggerating their trepidation to convince her to recalibrate her ambitions. Either way, California Democrats are rubbing their temples today.

 

As CNN’s Edward-Isaac Dovere reported, even her critics confess that Harris “would be a favorite to win the governor’s race” in “deep-blue” California — an observation that admits her victory would be attributable less to her political acumen than California voters’ bovine insouciance, upon which local Democratic office seekers have come to rely.

 

And yet, Harris will still “have to answer for former President Joe Biden” and her role in the failed but nevertheless attempted coverup of his deteriorating condition. In addition, “possible ambivalence about her candidacy could hurt Democratic chances in swing districts.” If her candidacy fails to “generate enthusiasm” among Democrats while irritating and, thus, activating Republican voters, Harris could get herself elected while still serving as a net negative for her party.

 

“She comes in with baggage,” one unnamed state-level Democratic lawmaker told Dovere. “I think it would only fire up Republicans and hurt our ability to win the four to five seats that we need to win to win the House and hold on to three seats that we just flipped in 2024.” Indeed, Harris’s political star has faded to such an extent that Dovere didn’t have to rely on anonymous quotes from cowed California Democrats. Some even bashed her on the record.

 

“Once you’re the vice president of the United States, there’s only one place to go. It’s president,” said Representative Jimmy Gomez. “For me, if I was vice president and, all of a sudden, I lose, it would be a fallback to me. I hate to put it so bluntly.”

 

Even if these brushback pitches are part of a campaign of elementary psychological manipulation, which is insulting enough, the rebukes Harris has received from her fellow Democrats for being a drag on Democratic prospects generally are especially ruthless. After all, much the same could have been said of Barack Obama.

 

When the 44th president took office in 2009, his party controlled 257 House seats, 57 seats in the Senate, 28 governorships, and 62 of the country’s 99 state legislative chambers. By January 2017, the GOP had reduced the party’s footprint to just 194 House members, 46 senators, 17 governors, and 29 state-level legislatures. Over his tenure, Obama presided over the loss of nearly 1,000 Democratic lawmakers. The president himself acknowledged the scale of this down-ballot disaster and attempted to reverse it by making 150 endorsements at the state legislative level. Not that his intervention helped matters. Republicans picked up control of two more chambers on Election Night in 2016.

 

To this day, few Democrats are willing to acknowledge that the star power Obama commanded for himself did not translate into lasting political power for his party. That omertà persists along with Obama’s personal celebrity. He remains, after all, a strong Democratic fundraiser, and the party’s partisans still regard his tenure in the Oval Office warmly.

 

Harris has been denied these dispensations. Her tenure at the Naval Observatory under Biden is nowhere near as well-regarded, perhaps because Harris commands no celebrity, and the effort to fabricate a cult of personality around her was such an obvious contrivance that it exploded on the launch pad.

 

In the absence of any measurable charisma and given that her candidacy comes with notable risks to the party’s overall political position, California Democrats are liberated. They don’t feel obliged to pretend as though she’s the answer to their problems. Indeed, they tacitly concede, Harris may be indicative of the party’s problems.

 

This level of candor and rationality is rare in a party that so frequently buys its own manufactured hype. That says a lot about Democrats, but it says even more about Harris.