Kamala Harris’s Advisers Are Delusional

By Noah Rothman

Monday, July 20, 2026

 

New York magazine’s David Freedlander assembled a variety of juicy quotes from Democratic insiders for his piece on Kamala Harris’s insatiable hunger for power. Most of those insiders seem only to want Harris to go away.

 

Some took the diplomatic track. They’d profess their undying affection for the former vice president but also wonder if she can raise the requisite funds or stay focused on the future given her inextricable association with Joe Biden’s administration. Others were less tactful. “I hope she runs,” said one Democratic strategist. “Because then she will lose and we will never have to hear from her again.”

 

As Freedlander observed, Democratic  political professionals are inclined to respond either with that fury or with a “heavy sigh followed by a long pause” when the subject of Harris’s ambitions arises. Democrats haven’t recovered from the trauma they experienced in 2024. And as long as Harris’s advisers continue to torment them with the delusions that they’re deploying to draw Biden’s veep back into the limelight, they won’t.

 

To the claim that nominating Harris would only force Americans to relitigate the Biden years, for example, her brain trust offers this compelling rejoinder: Nuh-uh.

 

“Look how quickly voters forgot about Trump’s first term,” said one Democrat in Harris’s orbit. “People have short attention spans and short memories, and for all the criticisms that could be directed at Biden today, who knows what they [will] think 12 or 16 months from now.”

 

That’s just nonsense. Americans hadn’t forgotten about Trump’s first term by 2024. Not only did they remember it, they remembered it fondly. Trump’s “nostalgia bump” was revealed in surveys of American voters and widely reported in mainstream outlets. Harris’s allies are asking Democrats to internalize a revisionist history of the 2024 campaign. That’s a lot to ask of anyone, much less those who owe you nothing.

 

Just as Americans still remembered Trump’s first term by 2024, they remember the Biden administration today. And their outlook has not improved. For instance, Donald Trump’s approval rating when it comes to immigration is, today, underwater. His heavy-handed approach to deportations and the sometimes-deadly confrontations between ICE agents and protesters in the streets have left a sour taste in voters’ mouths. But Trump’s troubles have not redounded to the Democratic Party’s benefit.

 

In May, with ICE-related scandals dominating the  news for months, CBS News’s pollsters found that only 34 percent of voters believed the Democratic Party had “the better approach to immigration right now.” Trump and the Republicans? Thirty-eight percent. Voters remember not just Biden’s lax approach to border enforcement (with which Harris is intimately affiliated) but also the financial hardships they struggled with during the Biden years. While just under one-third of respondents said Democratic policies would “help” reduce their costs of living, 41 percent said they expected those policies to “hurt” their prospects.

 

The former vice president’s aides know they have an uphill battle ahead of them if they’re to recapture the party from Harris skeptics. Oddly, their response to that adversity has been to attempt to muscle the party’s establishment into submission.

 

Presumably, it was Harris’s boosters who were quick to remind Freedlander that women and minority voters “are the backbone of the Democratic Party,” and Harris is both. Democratic institutionalists should know, therefore, that “any attempts to knock her down a peg will risk getting into thorny issues of race and gender.” Oppose her ascension too strenuously, they seem to warn, and Democrats risk “bogging down the party with questions about identity.”

 

That’s not even a thinly veiled threat. But is it credible? Harris staffers think so. “A number of staffers for potential 2028 candidates pointed to the recent Texas Senate primary,” Freedlander wrote, “in which James Talarico ultimately prevailed over Jasmine Crockett but did so at the risk of alienating key Democratic constituencies in the process.”

 

What are they talking about? Talarico’s victory over Crockett has not riven the Texas Democratic Party with racial strife. To survey the latest New York Times/Siena College poll of that race, Texas Democrats are perfectly happy with their party’s Senate nominee. Talarico enjoys the support of nearly two-thirds of young voters, 56 percent of women, 60 percent of Hispanics, 80 percent of black voters, and 94 percent of the Democratic Party. Indeed, one of the demographics with whom Talarico performs best is Harris 2024 voters, 95 percent of whom are backing the Democratic candidate.

 

Maybe the Democratic Party can be cajoled and coerced into giving Harris another shot, but Freedlander’s piece won’t persuade her critics to keep their qualms to themselves. Harris’s aides seem to have utterly misread the landscape, and they vastly overrate the leverage their candidate has over the party she seeks to commandeer.