Her Turn

By Nick Catoggio

Thursday, July 23, 2026

 

An amusing quote from Democratic strategist Minyon Moore, speaking to New York magazine: “You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to understand that right now we need leaders that can take us in a different direction and bring us back together as a party.”

 

The leader she had in mind who will supposedly unite the American left and steer it toward new horizons is … Kamala Harris.

 

Literally no one in the Democratic Party is less of a visionary than the former vice president is. Her defining trait is chasing political trends out of expedience, not conviction, which helps explain why she often struggles to defend her positions in interviews.

 

Even her own supporters don’t pretend otherwise. “She is looking for where the wave is going and is determined to ride it,” an unnamed Harris ally told New York of her 2028 plans, summarizing the MO that she’s followed throughout her career. “Her mindset is that I should have won [in 2024], and I am going to do it my way because my way would have won, and it was all these consultants that were telling me to take this position or that position, and it was their fault.”

 

“My advisers made me chase the wrong trends so from now on I’m going to pick the trends I chase” is a very Kamala Harris approach to politics.

 

The trend she’s chasing right now is progressivism, unsurprisingly.

 

Axios reported weeks ago that Harris has been in touch with socialist wunderkinds Zohran Mamdani and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and has reached out to pro-Palestinian activists who resented the Biden administration’s position on Gaza. If that sounds familiar, there’s a reason: Harris also tacked hard to the left in her 2019 primary run, hoping to gobble up support from Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.

 

Her strategy at the time seemed to be to try to consolidate the black vote (remember her early busing attack on Joe Biden?) and combine it with enough progressive support to make her unstoppable. That playbook is now being dusted off again, it appears, as she and other establishment Democrats inevitably try to ingratiate themselves with the party’s rising DSA wing.

 

“Like It or Not, Kamala Harris Is the Front-runner” for 2028, the New York piece provocatively declared. She has universal name recognition, a ready-made “her turn” narrative after her near miss in 2024, an inside track with her party’s large African American constituency, and a decent lead in nearly every early primary poll that’s been conducted this year. It’s her race to lose, no?

 

Dear God, let’s hope not.

 

Undervalued.

 

I do think Harris’ chances of winning the presidency are undervalued, although I sense I’m in the minority about that. “She will never win an election at a national scale. Never,” another Democratic strategist confidently assured New York.

 

I dunno—she got pretty close in 2024! In a terrible environment for her party, with Joe Biden’s liabilities on inflation and immigration hanging around her neck, Harris came within a few points of winning numerous swing states.

 

She’s a replacement-level Democratic politician, sure. But that was almost good enough to beat Donald Trump, who had a solid economic record and loads of charisma to run on. Why wouldn’t it be good enough to beat J.D. Vance, who will have neither of those advantages in 2028 and who may well end up having to answer for a calamity in Iran?

 

Even some Trump voters are lukewarm about the current vice president. It wouldn’t be hard for Harris to make the case that she’s the lesser evil relative to a postliberal Tucker Carlson acolyte whose economic views aren’t that different from her own.

 

At this point the Harris skeptics will pipe up to say that winning the general election isn’t her main problem. Winning the primary is, and the “lesser evil” approach won’t work for her there. The field will surely include one or more earnest progressives, offering the left a more authentic option than the trend-chasing former VP. And the rest of the Democratic electorate will wrestle with the fact that she did, after all, lose to Trump. She can’t be the most electable option before the party, virtually by definition.

 

Plus, Kamala Harris doesn’t wear well. She almost certainly benefited from her late entry into the race in 2024, as it spared her from having to do more of those cringe-till-you-die interviews for which she’s become known. Had she been her party’s nominee from the start, she might have bled support for months before ultimately losing to Trump in a landslide. That’s the situation she’ll face in 2028 in a Democratic primary, in theory.

 

All of that is fair enough. However.

 

While she failed dismally to consolidate black Democrats in 2019 and underperformed with black voters in 2024 relative to Biden in 2020 and Hillary Clinton in 2016, there’s reason to believe Harris will have better luck next time. Her stature has changed, for one thing: As a former vice president and presidential nominee, she’s become the most accomplished and well-known African American politician in U.S. history not named “Barack Obama.”

 

In January, Axios noticed that Harris had begun receiving “rock star” receptions at political events held in the Deep South, where enthusiastic crowds of “mostly black men and women, and white women” turned out to greet her. Local politicians in attendance gushed about her too. Memphis Mayor Paul Young called her “a trailblazer” whom “many of us look up to” whereas John Horhn, the mayor of Jackson, Mississippi, told her, “You don’t know how much you mean to Mississippi. You don’t know how much you mean to America.” Both men are African American.

 

Stature isn’t the only reason black Democrats might be more likely to rally around her in the next cycle than they were in 2019, though. Redistricting is another obvious one. Majority-minority districts throughout the South have been endangered by the Supreme Court’s recent ruling on the Voting Rights Act; Congress is now likely to have fewer African American members—maybe far fewer—than it had in the past. With their representation in the federal government shrinking, besieged black voters might see special value in putting forth a black woman for the presidency.

 

Tensions within the Democratic coalition could help Harris too.

 

Black Democrats have been a pillar of their party for decades, but other constituencies may be gaining influence at their expense. There’s the ascendant DSA faction, of course, which is mostly white. And there are Hispanics, a group the left desperately needs to win back after shedding so many of their votes in 2024. If the 2028 primary becomes a contest between factions for dominance over the party, African American voters might have extra cause to favor Harris.

 

Yesterday, for instance, the New York Times reported that party leaders are torn over whether to let South Carolina or Nevada hold the first primary of the 2028 campaign. Nevada appeals to some partly because of its large population of Hispanics—and the head of South Carolina’s Democratic Party, which is mostly black, resents it and isn’t being shy about letting people know.

 

“If Nevada gets elevated over South Carolina, it would be because of their Latino vote,” Christale Spain, the chair of the state party, complained. “So you would then be telling black voters that you matter less than brown voters. And I refuse to believe that our party wants to send any type of message like that.” Spain is African American.

 

If the 2028 primary ends up as some sort of litmus test on whether black voters “matter less” than brown voters (or white, overeducated, downscale DSA dweebs), another Kamala Harris nomination begins to look less far-fetched. Any scenario in which she consolidates African American Democrats makes her a formidable contender to lead her party, full stop.

 

Having said that, I still wouldn’t bet on her.

 

No confidence.

 

Buried within the new Fox News poll is this hair-raising nugget:

 

By 2-to-1, voters say it is more important to elect new people than keep those with experience.

 

Overall, 19% say they want revolutionary change in the nation’s government, while many others want substantial (38%) or dramatic (23%) change.

 

Almost twice as many Democrats (52%) as Republicans (28%) want dramatic or revolutionary change.

 

Does “Harris 2028” say “dramatic or revolutionary change” to you?

 

As things stand, the dynamic in the next election is shaping up to be 2008 on steroids. That year, driven by widespread exasperation at Republicans over the economy and a mismanaged war in the Middle East, the electorate sought a dramatic break with politics as usual in its choice for president. That’s also where the next cycle is pointing, except this time the exasperation will be leavened with a metric ton of resentment stemming from the GOP incumbent’s embarrassing corruption, illiberalism, and buffoonery.

 

“Revolutionary” might be too strong a word to describe the vibe, but 2028 is likely to be considerably more “hopey-changey”—maybe without the “hopey” part—than even 2008 was.

 

Apart from Joe Biden himself, it’s hard to think of anyone less suited to that zeitgeist than his vice president, an incarnation of the vacuous Democratic establishment that delivered the White House to Donald Trump not once but twice. She’s a consummate politics-as-usual candidate who’ll be competing to win the support of a party that’s desperate for a vision. As noted previously, Kamala Harris doesn’t do “vision.”

 

She’s ill-suited to 2028 in another way.

 

It’s been almost a decade since America had a leader who seemed fit for the job. With the Trump era over at last, the country is destined to be hungry in the next cycle for a president whom it can feel confident about. That’s not Harris. The trend-chasing, the halting answers in interviews, her undistinguished performance in the (admittedly thankless) role of VP: Nothing in her past indicates she has the political chops needed to dig this country out of the disgraceful hole it’s created for itself.

 

It’s trivially easy to imagine Harris’ job approval sinking below 50 percent—and never recovering—in her first few months in office as the public loses confidence in her, especially once progressives inevitably find some pretext to declare that she’s sold them out. In her defense, that type of early and inexorable disillusionment is common in modern presidencies. But not all modern presidencies begin with Americans screaming: Please, for the love of God, just put someone in charge who I don’t need to worry about every day.

 

We urgently, urgently need a candidate next time whose case for the office rests on something grander than “lesser of two evils” logic.

 

Democrats might be wise to all of this already. It’s true, as I said, that Harris leads in most early primary polling, but that lead is soft. She’s averaging under 30 percent in the RealClearPolitics tracker, no great shakes for the most famous nonretired politician in the party. And some surveys even see her trailing: A new Emerson poll has her in fifth place at 8 percent whereas recent data from New Hampshire puts her at 5 percent there, far behind Ocasio-Cortez. I’m skeptical that the party would roll the dice on a figure as far left as AOC in a national election, but there’s no question that her politics meet the Democratic moment better than Harris’ do.

 

Another problem for the former VP is that, even with demand for “dramatic or revolutionary change” peaking, electability will still matter to primary voters in 2028. Who seems like a better bet in that regard: someone who lost to a twice-impeached, quadruple-indicted coup plotter in 2024 or someone who won a swing state—in a landslide—in 2026? Because Democrats are likely to have multiple candidates who fit that bill by year’s end.

 

It feels like a cosmic joke given the left’s hostility to Israel that the two most prominent examples are both Jewish. Everyone knows about Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, who’s on his way to another rout this fall, but the hot new thing in Democratic politics is Georgia Sen. Jon Ossoff. Ossoff is very young (i.e., not yet 40), has raised an obscene amount of money, has shrewdly turned committee hearings into a crowd-pleasing showcase of his ability to make Republicans squirm, and, unusually, seems well-liked by both progressives and liberals.

 

He stands a decent chance of winning reelection comfortably in a battleground state where comfortable wins, especially for Democrats, are rare.

 

If Ossoff and Shapiro close the deal this fall, they’ll become instant top-tier contenders for the presidency in 2028—to the point where I’d put good money on one of them ending up on either the top or bottom of the Democratic ticket. And before you say “A Jew on the ticket in this Hamas-loving party?”, don’t underestimate how leftists might value having an easy rebuttal to Republican charges of bigotry. How can you say we’re antisemitic for loving Hamas when our choice for president/vice president is Jewish?

 

And so, while I can’t tell you that Kamala Harris won’t be the nominee, I can say with almost metaphysical certainty that Democrats will have options who are both more likely to win a national election than she is and more likely to inspire confidence in the presidency than she would. Whether that still matters in a decadent America, where each party is constantly radicalizing the other into making moronic choices, is a separate question.