Democrats were handed their worst defeat in decades last month, losing the popular vote and every swing state to President-elect Donald Trump. Despite this, Democrats have largely spared Harris of blame, with allies already talking about how she could come back and clear the field to run again in 2028.
The vice president hasn’t directly signaled what her next move will be, but allies and advisers told the Washington Post that her first move is likely to start an independent political group to maintain her email list, fundraise for other Democrats, and go on a speaking tour.
Some advisers even see a silver lining in her loss, arguing that the campaign helped boost her image.
“She is ending this race in a very different place than other nominees that have lost,” one Harris adviser said. “Her approval is higher. People were very happy with the race that she ran. She reached people that she never would have reached as the vice president on the ticket. Do the same rules apply as previous nominees that have lost? Nobody knows.”
Her main backers argue that the 2024 campaign was unwinnable for Democrats, given a wider anti-incumbent trend and President Joe Biden’s damage to the ticket, and that Harris outperformed expectations.
One Harris adviser claimed she has been inundated with messages and calls from legions of supporters, including many young supporters, urging her to continue her political career.
Even though Harris’s career in the Senate was distinguished by a staunchly progressive record, by some estimates being the second-most liberal senator of the 21st century, aides said her new centrist turn is closer to her “true self.” Any future campaign is likely to resemble her 2024 platform rather than 2020.
Among her most likely moves is a 2026 California gubernatorial run after Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) terms out.
Harris’s updated strategy is likely to take lessons from her 2024 loss. Her deputy campaign manager, Rob Flaherty, offered some clues in an interview with Semafor.
In the interview, Flaherty bemoaned the inability of the campaign to appear on sports or sports-adjacent media, claiming that sports culture in general had shifted in favor of Trump and the Republicans.
“Sports and culture have sort of merged together, and as sports and culture became more publicly and sort of natively associated with this Trump-conservative set of values, it got more complicated for athletes to come out in favor of us,” he said. “It got more complicated for sports personalities to take us on their shows because they didn’t want to ‘do politics.’”
Flaherty ceded that Trump’s campaign better navigated the internet, building up an alternative digital media ecosystem that helped Trump make decisive gains in demographics such as the young male vote. The Harris deputy campaign manager argued for a counter by investing in their own digital partisans.
“We need a whole thriving ecosystem. It’s not just Pod Save America, though I think we should have more of them. It’s not just Hasan Piker. We should have more Hasan Pikers. It’s also the cultural creators, the folks who are one rung out who influence the nonpartisan audience. Those things all need to happen together,” he said. “And the reality is, it’s not going to be big media organizations. It’s going to be a network and a constellation of individual personalities, because that’s how people get their information now.”
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Piker is a socialist streamer who has garnered significant popularity and infamy online. Though commanding the loyalty of a large cadre of followers, he has also drawn scrutiny for controversial comments, such as saying that “America deserved 9/11.” The comments got him momentarily banned from Twitch, though he backtracked by claiming the comments were meant to be satirical.
“They’re never going to not trust the New York Times, and they’re never going to distrust the Washington Post,” he said. “But I think that in a Trump era, you’ll start to see frustrations with the mainstream media come to a boil. And I think there will be smart people who try to fill the gap — more individuals who create content on left and center-left messaging.”
