Before explicitly telling Al Sharpton she was considering running for president again on Friday afternoon, former Vice President Kamala Harris had not exactly been hiding her ambitions. The book tour for her campaign memoir ”107 Days” is now longer than its title. She’s started holding fundraisers for state parties and has issued a handful of endorsements — everything you would expect a presidential contender to do more than two years out from the 2028 election.
“Listen, I might. I might. I’m thinking about it,” Harris said on Friday at the Sharpton-hosted National Action Network conference in New York. “I served for four years being a heartbeat away from the presidency of the United States. I spent countless hours in my West Wing office, footsteps away from the Oval Office. I spent countless hours in the Situation Room. I know what the job is and I know what it requires.”
While Harris has been met by large crowds at her book stops — and was greeted with a wave of unbridled enthusiasm at the Sharpton event — the broader Democratic Party apparatus is not exactly rushing to encourage her to run, a sign of how difficult the former vice president might find it to convince Democrats to run it back at a time when seemingly everyone thinks the party needs major change.
“Why would we do the same thing all over again?” one operative who works closely with major Democratic donors told HuffPost. The operative requested anonymity to speak frankly about one of the most powerful people in Democratic politics.
Similarly, a consultant working on several closely contested congressional races said he would advise candidates to avoid campaigning with Harris in the fall. “Democrats need to make this a change election, and basically anyone with ties to the Biden administration stands for the opposite of change,” the consultant said.
The reception Harris received on Friday, however, was a potent reminder of the strengths she would bring to any run. “Run again!” the mostly Black crowd yelled at her at one point, giving her a standing ovation at another. While a host of other potential 2028 candidates — including Maryland Gov. Wes Moore, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, California Rep. Ro Khanna and former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg — also appeared at the conference, only Harris was greeted with a sizzle reel of moments of her interacting with Sharpton.
The devotion Harris, the first female vice president and the first Black woman to lead a national ticket, has from Black party loyalists would also go far in a primary, since southern states with heavily Black electorates wield significant power under the Democratic Party’s delegate system.
“I’ve been traveling the country the last year, I’ve been spending a lot of time in the South and many other places,” she said. “And the one thing I’m really clear about also is the status quo is not working, and hasn’t been working for a lot of people for a long time.”
But other Black candidates, including Moore, who also generated a standing ovation during his speech, and New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker, who is set to speak on Saturday, could challenge her grip on the key constituency.
Harris has held a consistent but small lead in way-too-early public polls of the 2028 Democratic primary, generally leading a top group of candidates, which also includes Buttigieg, New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and California Gov. Gavin Newsom. (Most of the other potential candidates simply are not well-known enough nationally to make a dent in polling.)
But concluding too much from her reception at NAN would be a mistake. It’s hard to imagine a friendlier crowd for Harris than the mostly older Black crowd at NAN, who cheered a Sharpton-led jeremiad against generational change earlier in the week.
“People talk about, ‘Well, I wish so-and-so would step aside, make room for me,’” Sharpton said on Wednesday. “Nobody stepped aside for me. Nobody stepped aside for anybody. If you are what you should be, you don’t have to have nobody step aside.”
Very few other branches of the Democratic Party are similarly disinterested in change, generational or otherwise: Progressives want to move the party to the left, moderates to the center. Latino and Black voters, who stayed home or voted for Republicans in record numbers the first time Harris headed a presidential ticket, have similarly signaled a desire for a new and different Democratic Party.
Over the course of her 40-minute conversation with Sharpton, Harris mostly attacked Trump, particularly savaging his decision to go to war with Iran. But she provided little insight into where she thought the party should go or what had gone wrong during the Biden administration. When asked about declining Black support for the party, Harris suggested the relationship between Democrats and Black voters should be more “transactional.”
“I’m saying it’s OK to also give people permission to be transactional, and to say, if you will get my vote, this is what I expect,” Harris told Sharpton. “I expect to get something out of this.”
Many Democrats remain grateful for Harris’ performance in the final days of 2024, believing she saved the party from an utter wipeout and are not eager to openly discourage her. But donors, in particular, still have real questions about her campaign decision-making, such as her refusal to distance herself from the unpopular Biden and her focus on democracy rather than zeroing in on economic concerns.
The donor adviser noted Harris’ book portrays her simply running out of time to beat Trump, even though polling showed Harris actually losing ground to Trump over the course of the race.
“Right now, people ask these questions quietly,” the operative said. “If she runs, they will ask them loudly.”