In some ways, running for governor of her home state of California seems like an obvious next act for Vice President Kamala Harris when she leaves office this week after narrowly losing a brutal presidential campaign to Donald Trump.
The timing is right: she would have room to file for the office before the primary in June 2026. And in a race with no real frontrunner, she would likely freeze out most Democratic contenders.
Most failed presidential candidates never seek any office again — but when they do, they often give the presidency one more try. Hello Trump II.
“It would be rare for Harris to run for an office other than president,” political analyst and USC professor Dan Schnur said, “but being governor of her home state could potentially be very alluring for her.”
Harris is only 60 — a relative political youngster — with a house in Brentwood she shares with her husband, Doug Emhoff, that escaped the Los Angeles fires. She’s got a nationwide fundraising juggernaut waiting in the wings and the presumed goodwill, tempered by stinging disappointment, of Democrats in California and across the country who had hoped she would be the one placing her hand on the Bible during the presidential inauguration Monday.
“She has notoriety. She has a presence. She has a voice. She has a chance to do a lot of good on the planet, right?” Bill Whalen, a fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and former speechwriter for Republican Gov. Pete Wilson, asked. “The question is, how does she see herself doing good?”
Perhaps she will seek a philanthropic endeavor or a private sector post or join a prestigious law firm. Or maybe she isn’t finished with politics. If not the governorship in 2026, perhaps another run at the presidency in 2028?
Richard Nixon, after all, came home to California after losing the 1960 presidential election, lost the governor’s race in 1962 to Pat Brown (famously telling reporters “you won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore,”) before staging a mighty political recovery, winning his second attempt at the White House in 1968. His legacy was undone, however, by a pair of reporters investigating a break-in at the Watergate Hotel.
Vice President Al Gore devoted himself to climate science after narrowly losing the presidency in 2000 to George W. Bush. That led to him becoming the subject of an Academy Award-winning documentary “An Inconvenient Truth” in 2006, winning a Nobel Peace Prize in 2007, and sitting on the boards of Silicon Valley companies Kleiner Perkins and Apple. Last spring, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
So there’s that route.
With Harris remaining tightlipped about what comes next — her office declined a request for an interview or comment — speculation (and spies) have filled the void.
The New York Post reported last week that Harris’s husband, whose fashion-designer daughter lives in Brooklyn, was spotted touring a $20,000-a-month condo in New York City, suggesting the couple might prefer a bicoastal lifestyle.
U.S. Rep. Lateefah Simon of Oakland, who was ceremonially sworn in by Harris on Capitol Hill earlier this month, said in an interview from Washington that she got the impression that her longtime friend and mentor would be returning to California when the vice president told her, “I can’t wait to see you guys.”
“Her niece is in California. Her grand nieces are in California,” said Simon, who worked for Harris in the late 1990s in the San Francisco District Attorney’s Office and has been a fan since Harris changed policies to view young sex workers as exploited teenagers, not criminals.
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“The VP is going to go where she wants to serve and where she feels like she can have the biggest impact,” Simon said. “Hell, if she goes to the United Nations, whatever she does, I know that the people I care about, women and children and victims, folks who have experienced a deep grief and oppression, will be better off because of her service.”
So what are the factors at play for some of the most obvious options?
First, does she even want to be governor? She had the chance once before when she was state Attorney General and Gov. Jerry Brown was set to term out in 2018. But when U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer unexpectedly announced in 2015 she would leave her office the next year — and Harris’s good friend and potential competitor Gavin Newsom announced he wouldn’t seek the Senate job — Harris reached for it instead. That’s where she quickly made a splash as the fiery junior senator coming into office as part of the Trump “resistance,” which ultimately catapulted her to the vice presidency.
Second, if she were to win the California governorship in 2026 — replacing Newsom who will be termed out — it’s implausible she would enter the 2028 presidential race, since campaigning would begin just one year into her statewide office.
“The downside of running for governor is that she would be foregoing another chance at the presidency,” Schnur said. “The downside of running for president is that no one’s going to back down and hand her the nomination. She’d be fighting in a very crowded and a very competitive primary against a new generation of Democratic candidates.”
When President Biden withdrew from his re-election campaign last summer after a disastrous debate performance against Trump and endorsed Harris to take his place, the likes of Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro and Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer who may have jumped into an open primary were left to wait another day — perhaps until 2028.
But if Harris puts herself back in the mix, she will have to contend with the baggage of her failed campaign against Trump — a convicted felon with numerous sexual assault allegations whose supporters staged a bloody riot at the U.S. Capitol who by any other measure should have been easy to beat. Although her campaign was abbreviated, Harris ran with a record campaign war chest, tremendous momentum and the support of megastar Taylor Swift and other celebrities. And she still lost.
If Harris jumps into the governor’s race, she would be a clear favorite, an early poll shows. But her potential rivals would surely prefer she make her decision quickly. Without Harris on the ticket, U.S. Rep. Katie Porter, who lost her bid for U.S. Senate and hasn’t declared her candidacy for governor, was atop the field, with Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis and former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa the second and third Democrats on the list. State Attorney General Rob Bonta is exploring a run.
The feet-dragging of political heavyweights, however, can yield remarkable consequences: In January 1998, because then-U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein waited so long to finally decide against running for governor, former Monterey Congressman and White House Chief of Staff Leon Panetta was left without enough time to launch an aggressive campaign himself. Who could have foreseen that his altered path would lead him back to Washington, where, as CIA Director in the Obama Administration, he ran the operation that brought down Osama bin Laden?
So there’s that.
The clock may be ticking for Harris to make decisions, Whalen from the Hoover Institution said, but they need serious thought.
“The governor of California is a 24/7 job,” he said, “where trouble tends to find you seven days a week.”
