Governor Kamala Harris would be a disaster for California, and the Democrats
Americans are a benevolent people: we like to give our political losers a runner-up prize.
Hillary Clinton may have lost out to Barack Obama in the 2008 presidential primaries, but she got to serve a full term as his secretary of state after the election. Former Massachusetts senator John Kerry had to wait longer after he lost to George W Bush in 2004 – but he also finally got to act as President Obama’s top foreign affairs advisor after Clinton stepped down.
And while President Obama did not offer a job to his 2012 Republican opponent Mitt Romney, the state of Utah did. Romney ran for, and won, a Senate seat in the 2018 midterm elections, giving him a platform to continue to speak up – and often against – the Trump administration.
So it’s certainly conceivable that Vice-President Kamala Harris could be looking at her own consolation prize.
The Democratic nominee may have lost the electoral college, the popular vote, and every swing state. But as many noted after she delivered her concession speech, the VP was already making noises about a return. “While I concede this election,” she told the crowd at Howard University in Washington, DC, “I do not concede the fight that fuelled this campaign.” It’s a fight she pledged to “never give up”.
Where might she take this fight?
One strategy after a momentous loss is to return to where it all began. And there is an early indication that Harris might be called home.
Support at home
A poll conducted shortly before election day found that 46 per cent of registered voters in California were open to the idea of supporting Harris were she to run for governor in 2026. The poll, carried out by the University of California at Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies and the LA Times, found that her support among registered Democrats exceeded 70 per cent, while almost half of respondents said they were “very likely” or “somewhat likely” to back the Oakland, CA native.
It seems like the kind of move that the Democratic Party – in its current form anyway – would be delighted to support. California governor Gavin Newsom has long been tipped by parts of the party establishment as a possible presidential nominee. After he finishes his second term in the Golden State, putting Harris in California, and preparing Newsom for a presidential run, would be for many Democratic loyalists an obvious and easy swap.
But it would also be more evidence that the party has little interest in learning from the massive mistakes made in this election cycle. California has come to represent a particular type of progressive politics the country boldly rejected on November 5. The last thing the party should do is double-down on those perceptions.
California is no doubt still a deep blue state – but Donald Trump closed the vote share gap there by 9 percentage points, while mismanagement and bad policy have seen millions emigrate to redder, more dynamic parts of the country.
California ranks the second-most indebted state in the US, thanks to the kind of messy public spending voters rejected at the polls when voters gave Trump a mandate to return to DC to slash the size of the federal government. What residents get for this money remains very unclear, not least because California also sits at the top of the league table for homelessness: a crisis in the making for decades, for which neither Harris nor Newsom seem to have any answers.
Were Harris to return to California, given what we know about her politics, she would be unlikely to curb the exodus from the state. The policies she ran on in the presidential race – an extension of Bidenomics, with more taxing, more spending, and more environmental regulation – are exactly what’s holding the state back from returning to its glory days. And if she were to go back to the lock-em-up approach she adopted as attorney general towards non-violent drug offenders, it would be unlikely to resonate now in a state that has voted for marijuana legalisation.
If California could course-correct in the next four years, it would be the biggest indicator to the country that the Democrats had listened. A Harris retreat to home-turf would be the biggest indicator that nothing had changed.