Kamala Harris’s Presidential Campaign Was Run by a Bunch of Lunatics

By Jim Geraghty

Monday, January 19, 2026

 

Kamala Harris has declined to run for governor, published her campaign memoir, and gone on her book tour, where she’s attempted to describe herself as an outsider challenger to the status quo. You might think that the Democratic Party, and the country as a whole, would be done with Kamala Harris.

 

Axios reports otherwise:

 

In a swing through the South, she was greeted like a rock star by enthusiastic crowds of mostly Black men and women, and white women. Many told Axios they want her to run again in 2028.

 

Harris’ appearances — like early polling for the 2028 race — defied top Democrats’ belief that she isn’t popular with the party’s base, and that people blame her for Donald Trump’s 2024 victory.

 

Somewhere, JD Vance and Marco Rubio are reading that sentence and high-fiving each other. The prospect of Harris running again in 2028 has Republicans wishing, “Oh please, oh please,” like that dog in the old Far Side cartoon. It is hard to imagine a clearer, louder signal to the country that the Democrats have learned nothing from their defeat in 2024 than to renominate the candidate who was defeated in 2024.

 

Then there’s this jaw-dropping detail from the forthcoming book by Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro:

 

Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro was already irritated by what he describes as “unnecessarily contentious” questions from the team vetting him to be Kamala Harris’s running mate when a senior aide made one final inquiry: “Have you ever been an agent of the Israeli government?”

 

The question came from President Biden’s former White House counsel Dana Remus, who was a key member of Harris’s vice-presidential search team.

 

Shapiro, one of the most well-known Jewish elected officials in the country—and one of at least three Jewish politicians considering a run for the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination—says he took umbrage at the question. “Had I been a double agent for Israel? Was she kidding? I told her how offensive the question was,” Shapiro writes in his forthcoming book, Where We Keep the Light, a copy of which The Atlantic obtained ahead of its release on January 27.

 

The exchange became even more tense, he writes, when Remus asked whether Shapiro had ever spoken with an undercover Israeli agent.

 

Mmm-hmm. And what, exactly, spurred the Harris campaign’s suspicion that Shapiro had dual loyalties and had secretly been an agent of the Israeli government?

 

And if an agent of any foreign state is undercover . . . how do you know?

 

Occam’s razor would suggest that either (1) the Harris campaign foresaw insurmountable obstacles from having a Jewish, pro-Israel running mate at a time when the Democratic grassroots were growing vehemently anti-Israel, and needed an excuse to conclude Shapiro had flunked the vetting process or (2) the Harris campaign was full of paranoid antisemites who believed that every American Jew they encountered was secretly working for the Mossad.

 

Shapiro writes, “The fact that she asked, or was told to ask that question by someone else, said a lot about some of the people around the VP.”

 

Our Audrey Fahlberg asked the very good question of how Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, up to his eyeballs in fraud scandals involving state spending, managed to come through the Harris campaign’s vetting with no red flags. The paranoia about Shapiro’s alleged dual loyalties is even more absurd in light of Walz’s 30 visits to China, one funded by the Chinese government, his status as a visiting fellow at the Macao Polytechnic University, a Chinese state-run institution of higher education, and so on. And one of the few decisions of the Harris campaign that we can be 100 percent certain was made by the candidate was the selection of Walz over Shapiro. (Selecting Shapiro wouldn’t have won the race for Harris, but she might have at least kept Pennsylvania in the Democratic column.)

 

On election night 2024, the Harris-Walz campaign looked like the Hindenburg — it flew high, proved to be full of hot air, and eventually came to a disastrous end. A bit more than a year later, the Harris-Walz campaign looks like the Hindenburg crashing into the Titanic. It squandered any advantages of incumbency, elevated an incompetent doofus governor over better options, clearly alienated Shapiro, re-empowered the Democratic Party’s most hated foe, and now is exhibiting vampiric abilities of resisting its much-deserved demise.