EXCLUSIVE : Inside former VP Kamala Harris marriage turmoil as Doug Emhoff’s scandals are blamed for losing presidency
Kamala Harris was all smiles and affection for her ‘beloved’ second gentleman Doug Emhoff in the immediate aftermath of her crushing presidential election defeat.
But now that President Donald Trump has been sworn into office, for sore loser Harris, it is now all about the blame game, and her target has flipped to her ‘dead weight’ husband.
And as she weighs her political future – maybe a 2026 run for Governor of California or another try for the nation’s top job two years later – she has to consider whether Emhoff is an asset or a liability.
One source exclusively told DailyMail.com: ‘There’s plenty of blame to go around as far as Kamala is concerned and Doug has his share.
‘Doug did Kamala no favors during the election – frankly, he looked like a hypocritical a** after the bombshells that he had got his child’s nanny pregnant while married to his first wife and assaulted his ex-girlfriend on the heels of his ‘I am woman’ crusade.’
Despite their brave united front at the inauguration and at President Jimmy Carter’s January 9 funeral, those close to the couple believe all is not ‘hunky dory’ between them.
And word is the husband of California girl Kamala has already signed up for a job with a Big Apple law firm which would require them to split their time between New York and Los Angeles.
At Monday’s presidential inauguration, the couple presented a united front, though their expressions remained grim as they sat through Trump’s speech, their faces mirroring the tension.
At the inauguration, Kamala Harris and husband Doug Emhoff presented a united front, though their expressions remained grim as they sat through Trump’s speech, their faces mirroring the tension
Emhoff was spotted on an outing near his Brentwood home on Wednesday still wearing his wedding band despite swirling divorce rumors involving Kamala
Harris, wearing a black pantsuit with exposed zippers, sat stoically throughout the ceremony holding an inaugural program in her lap. She was seen crossing her wrists and pinching the program in her fingers as Trump delivered his address.
Emhoff similarly matched the disdain on his wife’s face but took it a step further – grimacing and shaking his head lightly when Trump promised to rename the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America.
The couple left the Capitol building together – briefly shaking hands with Trump and bidding Joe and Jill Biden farewell – with plans to return to California.
But now that Harris has been defeated, she’s reportedly looking to undergo a complete image overhaul to resuscitate her floundering political career – maybe at the expense of Emhoff.
As DailyMail.com exclusively reported, she plans to write a book which could give her finances a multi-million dollar boost.
Harris’s campaign suffered multiple setbacks after DailyMail.com exclusively reported a series of allegations surrounding Emhoff that Harris deftly brushed aside during the final stretch of her political journey.
Emhoff was spotted on a Starbucks run surrounded by Secret Service SUVs on Wednesday
At her desk signing on January 16, she told her communications chief ‘You know me well enough to know that I’m not going to go away quietly’
Jill Biden gives Kamala Harris a long hug and Joe Biden shakes Doug Emhoff’s hand as Donald Trump looks the other way
Emhoff famously stepped away from his own prominent career as an attorney in California to fully support Harris’ political ambitions in 2020 – becoming hell-bent on perfecting his image as a ‘wife guy’.
But behind the carefully curated social media posts and campaign photos, even the strongest relationships face challenges.
The source said: ‘I see the signs that all is not hunky dory in the Harris household.
‘It’s not like she hasn’t had men help further her political career before, the source said, referring to her affair with former San Francisco mayor Willie Brown.
‘But what does Doug do for her now?’
Those closest to her believe she will skip the race for California governor – which she believes is a ‘thankless, no-win job’ – and instead try for president again in 2028.
‘I was with her last week, when she was signing her desk,’ her former communications chief Ashley Etienne told DailyMail.com.
Former US President Joe Biden and former Vice President Kamala Harris bow their heads during the opening prayer of President Donald Trump’s inauguration ceremony
Harris’s campaign suffered multiple setbacks after DailyMail.com exclusively reported a series of allegations surrounding Emhoff that Harris deftly brushed aside during the final stretch of her political journey
Kamala Harris’s husband Doug Emhoff is accused of violently striking his former girlfriend – for allegedly flirting with another man during a booze-fueled altercation in 2012.
A May 17, 2012 email provided by the friends, written by his then-girlfriend gives the location of the hotel in Nice the couple stayed at on the weekend he allegedly struck her
‘He comes up, turns me around by my right shoulder,’ she told DailyMail.com.
‘I’m completely caught off guard, I’m not bracing, I’m in four-inch heels, wearing a full-length gown and it’s between 2-3am. He slaps me so hard I spin around, and I’m in utter shock.’
Emhoff has since admitted the extramarital affair, saying: ‘During my first marriage, Kerstin and I went through some tough times on account of my actions.
‘I took responsibility, and in the years since, we worked through things as a family and have come out stronger on the other side.’
But he has denied, through an anonymous spokesperson, ever having slapped his girlfriend who said, ‘any suggestion that Doug would or has ever hit a woman is false.’
Emhoff also faced reports from his former colleagues at the Los Angeles law firm Venable, where he worked from 2006 to 2017.
They described a work culture marked by misogyny, claiming that Emhoff allegedly yelled expletives, held a man-only cocktail hour in the office, revoked work perks from women who didn’t flirt with him and preferred only young, attractive associates to accompany him in limousines to professional events.
Harris has never publicly commented on any of the allegations, instead choosing to shy away from the controversy.
But the Democrat’s golden girl – known for her relentless drive – is now tarnished and has now has to face the reality of her marriage potentially crumbling following her loss to Trump.
There’s a very popular explanation for Trump’s win. It’s wrong.
A Democratic data expert’s autopsy of the 2024 election perpetuates a comforting fiction.
Donald Trump did not win the 2024 election — the Democratic Party lost it.
So argues Michael Podhorzer, a former political director of the AFL-CIO and author of the highly influential Substack, Weekend Reading.
Podhorzer’s recently published newsletter on how Trump “won” — he insists on those quotation marks — garnered lots of attention among Democratic insiders. In it, he explains that America didn’t “shift rightward” in 2024 but “couchward.” American voters’ “basic values or priorities” did not become more conservative. Democrats lost merely because turnout among “anti-MAGA” voters collapsed.
Podhorzer does not pair his diagnosis of the Democrats’ woes with any detailed prescription for remedying them. But he suggests that the party does not need to “move right”: Its task isn’t to win over swing voters who sympathize with the Republican message on immigration, crime, inflation, or any other issue. Rather, it is to mobilize young, disaffected anti-Trump voters by alerting them to the dangers of Republican rule and addressing their desire for “systemic change.”
The demobilization of such voters in 2024 had two primary causes, in Podhorzer’s account: First, the media, the Biden administration, and Democrats in Congress all failed to convey the “existential dangers” that a second Trump administration posed. And second, “justifiable disaffection and anger” with a “billionaire-captured system” left many anti-MAGA voters too cynical to bother with the electoral process.
Some aspects of Podhorzer’s analysis are both correct and salutary. He is right to insist that the 2024 election did not reveal a broad mandate for the conservative movement’s agenda. Trump’s national margin was exceptionally narrow and Republicans just barely managed to eke out a House majority.
This said, I think Podhorzer’s big-picture take is wrong. Democrats’ problem in 2024 was not merely that it failed to mobilize cynical, anti-Trump voters. The party also lost the arguments over inflation, immigration, and crime to the Republican Party. Trump did not convert a supermajority of Americans to conservatism. But he did convince a critical slice of voters that he was the better option on at least some of the issues that they cared about most.
1) Voters who backed Biden in 2020 — and then stayed home in 2024 — are not necessarily resolutely anti-Trump.
Podhorzer’s argument assumes that Biden voters who stayed home in 2024 could not have done so out of sympathy for any of Trump’s messages. But there’s little basis for that assumption. Low-propensity voters are less ideological than reliable ones, and voters often choose to sit out elections because they are conflicted, agreeing with some of what each party has to say. There’s reason to think that this dynamic drove part of the Democrats’ turnout problem in 2024: Both polling and geographical voting patterns indicate that low-propensity voters became more Republican-leaning during the Biden era.
2) Young, first-time voters turned against the Democratic Party.
The electorate’s youngest voters appear to have been far more right-wing in 2024 than in 2020. This is not a problem that can be attributed to mobilization. Republicans seem to have simply had greater success in appealing to first-time voters last year than they have for a long time.
3) In the Biden era, American voters did become more conservative in some of their values and priorities.
Contrary to Podhorzer’s suggestion, there is considerable evidence that voters grew more right-wing in their attitudes toward immigration and criminal justice and more likely to prioritize those issues. Meanwhile, the electorate also grew more confident in the GOP’s economic judgement.
Given these realities, if Democrats accept Podhorzer’s thesis — and conclude that they do not need to win over Republican-curious voters, but can win solely by mobilizing staunch anti-Trumpers desperate for “systemic change” — they will likely have a more difficult time winning White House in 2028.
Perhaps more importantly, unless Democrats manage to win over some Trump voters, they will have little hope of winning back Senate control. It is worth remembering that Joe Biden’s 2020 coalition only delivered a bare majority in Congress’ upper chamber — and that majority hinged on the fluke that was Joe Manchin. Thus, to regain the power to pass legislation and appoint judges without Republican permission, Democrats must not only mobilize their coalition, but broaden it.
If you’re losing voters to “the couch,” you’re probably losing arguments to the other party.
The foundation of Podhorzer’s analysis is one incontrovertible fact: The Democratic Party’s presidential vote tally fell by far more between 2020 and 2024 than the GOP’s increased. Kamala Harris received 6.26 million fewer votes than Biden had in 2020, while Trump improved on his own tally from four years ago by just 3 million.
When interpreting this drop in Democratic turnout, Podhorzer puts enormous weight on one survey question from AP VoteCast (which is like an exit poll, but more reliable). Each election, VoteCast asks Americans whether they voted primarily “for” their candidate or “against” the other one. Between 2020 and 2024, the percentage of Americans who said they were voting “against” Trump declined considerably. In raw vote terms, the survey implies that 41 million Americans cast a ballot primarily “against Trump” in 2020, while just 26 million did so in 2024.
From these data points, Podhorzer concludes that 1) Democrats didn’t lose because the American electorate moved right, but rather because their party’s turnout collapsed and 2) that turnout collapse was driven more or less entirely by the demobilization of resolutely anti-Trump voters.
But Podhorzer’s interpretation of this data is dubious. The fact that more voters said they were casting a ballot “against Trump” in 2020 than in 2024 does not necessarily mean that disaffected “anti-Trump” voters sat out the latter election en masse.
For one thing, VoteCast’s question forces Democrats to choose between saying they are primarily “for” their party’s nominee or “against Trump.” Thus, a Democratic voter who wasn’t that inspired by Biden in 2020 — but was excited to elect the first Black woman president last year — might have told pollsters she was primarily “anti-Trump” in 2020 but mainly “pro-Harris” in 2024. In Podhorzer’s framing, such a person would count as a “missing anti-MAGA voter,” since they contributed to the “anti-Trump” total in 2020 but not in 2024. But this hypothetical Democratic voter didn’t go anywhere, they just became more passionate about the Democratic nominee.
And Podhorzer’s own data suggests that a lot of Democratic voters fall into this exact bucket. According to the figures he presents from VoteCast, only 25 percent of all voters in 2020 said they were primarily “pro-Biden.” Four years later, 32 percent said they were mainly “pro-Harris.” Thus, part of the decline in the “primarily anti-Trump” vote is attributable to an increase in Democrats’ enthusiasm for their party’s standard-bearer.
More critically, just because a given voter cast a ballot “against Trump” in 2020 does not mean that they still strongly opposed him in 2024. And this seems like an especially unsafe assumption to make about a voter who chose to sit out the latter election.
To be clear, it is surely true that many “Biden 2020, Living Room Couch 2024” voters were staunchly anti-Trump. But it’s likely that some within this bloc chose to abstain last year because they had grown more sympathetic to aspects of Trump’s message.
As I’ve previously noted, the forces that lead a party’s voters to switch sides — and the forces that lead them to drop out of the electorate — are often largely the same.
According to a study by the Ohio State University political scientist Jon Green, Obama voters who exhibited high levels of sexism — or agreed with Trump on immigration, gun control, climate change, or another major issue — were more likely than other Obama voters to defect to the GOP in 2016. That isn’t terribly surprising. More interesting, however, is that these very same qualities made an Obama voter more likely to sit out the 2016 election. Thus, Trump’s advocacy for conservative culture war positions, and exploitation of sexist resentment against Hillary Clinton, simultaneously won over some Democratic voters while demobilizing others.
Green’s basic finding — that when voters feel more torn about the choice facing them in an election, they become less likely to turn out — is buttressed by a larger body of political science research. The distinction between persuasion and mobilization is therefore a flawed one: Attempts to persuade swing voters — through direct mail or television ads — often have the effect of demobilizing the other party’s base, likely by increasing its ambivalence.
All this provides us with theoretical reasons to suspect that many “missing anti-MAGA” voters became more sympathetic to Republican messaging between 2020 and 2024. And empirical data reinforces this impression.
Polling in 2024 consistently showed Trump gaining ground with disengaged, low-propensity Democratic voters. In May, the New York Times/Siena poll showed Biden (then, the presumptive Democratic nominee) winning only 75 percent of Democratic voters who had sat out the 2022 midterms, even as he won virtually all high-turnout Democrats.
Meanwhile, last year’s election results showed that Democrats gained vote-share in neighborhoods that had high turnout rates in 2022 and 2020, but lost ground in neighborhoods that have chronically low turnout rates. Combined with the available polling, this seems indicative of a broad shift toward Trump among constituencies with a low propensity to vote and a history of supporting Democrats.
The most intuitive explanation for this shift is inflation. Low propensity voters tend to be less partisan than reliable voters (and so, more likely to evaluate incumbents on the basis of economic conditions) and less affluent (and so, more likely to resent rapid changes in consumer prices). And a YouGov poll of “disengaged voters” from July 2024 found that “prices and inflation” were their top concern, and that they had more negative views of both the economy and Biden than engaged voters did.
The kids are all right (or, more of them are than in the past)
Podhorzer’s analysis focuses on the behavior of Biden 2020 voters. He notes that, according to VoteCast, only 4 percent of such voters backed Trump in 2024. From this, he concludes that any movement toward the GOP was negligible.
But this leaves first-time voters out of the picture. And several data points indicate that such voters were sharply more conservative in 2024 than they had been in the recent past.
In NBC News’s exit poll, Trump won first-time voters by 55 to 44 percent. This was a massive reversal from 2020, when Biden won them by 32 points in the same survey. And a large part of Democrats’ woes with first-time voters seems attributable to the declining liberalism of young Americans. In 2020, Biden won voters under 25 by 34 points, according to NBC’s exit poll. Four years later, Harris won them by just 11.
Exit polls are highly flawed. But Democrats’ performance with young voters looks even worse in more reliable data sources. For example, AP VoteCast shows Harris winning voters under 30 by just 4 points in 2024 after Biden had won them by 25 — a development that suggests the youngest, newly registered voters were unusually rightwing last year.
Meanwhile, election returns show that Democrats lost more ground between 2020 and 2024 in younger parts of the country than in older ones.
Finally, the fact that the youngest zoomers are aberrantly conservative is also apparent in some states’ voter registration data. Voters 18 to 25 in North Carolina were more likely to register as Republicans than Democrats over the past four years, a break with that purple state’s historical pattern.
It is odd that Podhorzer does not grapple more with this development, since his pre-election analysis presumed that younger voters were so reliably and overwhelmingly anti-MAGA, Democrats didn’t need to worry about winning over swing voters so long as they energized America’s youth. In June 2023, he explained “there’s no reason to listen to those who still think Democrats need to focus on winning back Trump-leaning voters instead of simply doing everything necessary to maintain the support of those who have already rejected Trump/MAGA and continue to turn them out, along with mobilizing those voters aging into the electorate.” (In the same piece, Podhorzer also argued that there was no reason “to listen to those who panic at any survey which shows Biden substantially behind,” as the midterm and special election results “consistently show that the voters in the key Purple states reject MAGA/Trump when the choice is clear.”)
One could try to reconcile Gen Z’s right turn with Podhorzer’s thesis by attributing it entirely to depressed youth turnout among young Democrats. Yet as noted above, polling suggests that politically disengaged Americans were more Republican-leaning this cycle than engaged ones.
People’s political identities tend to be most malleable when they are young. Therefore, the fact that voters who came of age under Biden were unusually likely to become Republicans seems indicative of a rightward turn in America’s political environment — and one that could potentially reverberate for years to come.
In the Biden era, Americans did grow more conservative in some of their views – and more trustful of Republican economic management
Podhorzer suggests that America couldn’t have shifted “rightward” because voters’ values and priorities are largely stable. As he writes, “A collapse in support for Democrats does not mean that most Americans, especially in Blue America, are suddenly eager to live in an illiberal theocracy.”
But this is a strawman. No one is claiming that the typical resident of California wants to live under an American Taliban. Rather, the question is whether marginal voters — those who lack strong partisan attachments — became either more conservative in their issue preferences or priorities during the Biden era.
And the answer seems to be yes.
This is most apparent on the issue of immigration. In May 2020, 34 percent of voters told Gallup they wanted immigration increased, while just 28 percent said they want it reduced. By June 2024, support for cutting immigration had soared to 55 percent, while that for increasing it had fallen to 16 percent. This marked the first time since 2005 that a majority of Americans had supported cutting admissions.
Podhorzer notes that Democrats’ support dropped off most steeply in blue states, and takes this as a sign that America shifted couchward rather than rightward, since he considers it implausible that voters in blue states could have become substantially more conservative.
Yet polls showed voters in New York, California, and Illinois all turning against immigration over the past two years, with 58 percent of Empire State residents agreed with the statement, “New Yorkers have already done enough and should try and slow the flow” of migrants.
Meanwhile, California passed a ballot measure in November that lengthened prison sentences for drug and theft-related crimes, while Oakland and Los Angeles ousted their progressive prosecutors. That same day, Colorado voted to increase minimum prison time for violent offenders.
This punitive turn in blue-state criminal justice policy likely reflects rising popular concern with crime during the Biden era. In Gallup’s polling, the percentage of Americans who considered crime in the United States an “extremely or serious problem” jumped from 51 percent in 2020 to 63 percent in 2023.
If voters grew more conservative in their attitudes toward crime and immigration during the Biden years, they also gave those issues higher priority. Between 2020 and 2024, the percentage of voters who said that immigration was “very important” to their vote in the Pew Research Center’s polling jumped from 52 percent to 61 percent. The share who deemed “violent crime” very important jumped more modestly from 59 to 61 percent.
Finally, it is also clear that voters came to view Republican economic management more favorably over the course of Biden’s presidency. In 2020, voters told Gallup that Democrats were better able to keep America prosperous than Republicans were by a margin of 48 to 47 percent. By 2024, the GOP led on that question by a margin of 50 to 44 percent.
Nostalgia for the pre-inflation, Trump economy seems to have led many voters to reevaluate the Republican’s tenure. In April 2024, a CNN poll found 55 percent of Americans saying Trump’s presidency had been a success, up from 41 percent in January 2021.
Thus, the America of 2024 was more hostile to immigration, more hardline on criminal justice policy, and more confident in the GOP’s superior economic wisdom than the America of 2020. I think that constitutes a rightward shift.
Dismissing Podhorzer’s diagnosis of the Democrats’ plight does not necessarily compel one to reject his prescriptions for the party’s future.
It seems entirely possible that Democrats could win the White House in 2028 without moving right on any issue, not least because Biden and Harris already moderated the party’s stances on immigration and crime considerably. At present, Democrats appear more likely to moderate excessively on immigration than insufficiently, with most of the party lining up behind the reckless Laken Riley Act in recent days.
And Podhorzer is surely not wrong that Democrats should seek to increase the salience of Trumpism’s most extreme aspects, nor that the party should speak to voters’ discontent with the economic system (although, it is important not to mistake anti-institutional sentiment for lockstep backing of the entire progressive economic agenda).
Nevertheless, I think it’s important for Democrats to be clear-eyed about the nature of their problems. The party’s failure to retain credibility on economic management, immigration, and crime made some Americans see MAGA in a better light. Some of that failure is attributable to bad luck. But Democrats will still be ill-equipped to preempt similar setbacks in the future if they refuse to admit that this one occurred. Trump really did win the 2024 election. There’s no use in denying it.
Kamala Harris roasted for ‘word salad’ advice to LA fire victims as lame-duck VP winds down term: ‘Classic Kamala’
“It’s critically important that, to the extent you can find anything that gives you an ability to be patient in this extremely dangerous and unprecedented crisis, that you do,” Harris said in her wordy message to Californians eager to get back home.
One X user described the vice president’s message as “Classic Kamala.”
“‘Be patient’ means the same thing but listen to this word salad instead,” another person tweeted.
A different social media user remarked on how they continue to be amazed by “how long it takes her to get to the point.”
“So basically, these victims should be unburdened by what has been,” read one X user’s summary of Harris’ remarks, which referenced one of the vice president’s most famous word-salad catchphrases.
Several supporters of President-elect Donald Trump chimed in to argue that the country “dodged a bullet” on Election Day, and reminded people Harris’ “word salads” will soon be a thing of the past – at least in the White House.
“Yes. Be patient,” one Trump supporter wrote, before adding, “Competent leadership will be here in one week.”
“Word salads are off the menu after January 20th,” another X user posted, referring to Trump’s inauguration date.
Kamala Harris lost. Some donors are still funding a ‘victory.’
The “victory” part didn’t pan out for the Harris Victory Fund. But the funding part remains alive and well on the bank statements of some Democratic donors.
Two months after Vice President Kamala Harris’ loss to Donald Trump, the joint fundraising committee her campaign set up with the Democratic National Committee is still charging monthly recurring donors to the committee. And some donors are not happy.
“It’s silly, out of touch, and needlessly takes advantage of our most loyal supporters,” said a Democratic operative who shared screenshots of their donations. The person was granted anonymity to describe the situation without fear of professional reprisal.
The operative didn’t flinch at a December charge, given the wrap-up expenses associated with any campaign (though the Harris camp entered late November with more than $1.8 million in cash).
But a January charge? The Harris donor said the committee solicited no explicit approval to continue the donations after the election, though it sent emails saying, “Thank you for your generous monthly commitment,” and that the donations will continue “until you contact us.”
The ongoing debits constitute the latest dust-up over the ethics of online fundraising — particularly when it comes to signing up small-dollar donors for recurring credit-card contributions that get set on autopilot.
The 2020 Trump campaign raised gobs of cash in part by making it increasingly difficult for donors to see that they were signing up for monthly automatic donations, including hiding it in pre-checked boxes buried in fine print. Those tactics helped result in more than a half million refunds totalling $64 million for the last two and a half months of 2020 from the Trump campaign, the RNC and joint committees — far outpacing their Democratic counterparts.
The Harris Victory Fund situation is different: No one appears to be disputing that they signed up for monthly withdrawals. But should those contributions continue even after victory has slipped away?
Harris herself told Democrats to “stay in the fight,” a DNC official said. And while a Harris Victory Fund donation page remains active on ActBlue, the fund itself is now defunct and any contributions go directly to the DNC.
“Those HVF donations are going to help Democrats across the country as we rebuild the party,” the official said, adding that donors can cancel anytime.
The fact that the funds are now being redirected, however, raises another ethical quandary: Is that fair to donors who contributed to an entity with Harris’ name on it? The soon-to-be-ex-VP won’t have any access to the money as she evaluates her political future and whether to run for president again, governor of California or stay out of politics.
To many political pros, that is one of many reasons why it should be a best practice to cease drawing on donor bank accounts after Election Day.
A senior digital staffer on Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign said all of their recurring donations ended within a few days after his loss. That person said the Harris fund’s decision to continue tapping small-dollar donors was “super shady” and tantamount to “grifting.”
“These people didn’t sign up to be paying bills in January,” the Republican said.
Mike Nellis, head of the Democratic online fundraising firm Authentic, said when his clients’ campaigns end in defeat, “there’s an expectation that they’re going to shut down the recurring donations because there’s no need.”
But Nellis, who was a senior adviser to Harris’ 2020 presidential primary campaign, said he was OK with the DNC continuing to pull donations from Harris donors.
“If you’re rolling the committee into something that’s gonna continue to have an impact such as the DNC or another political campaign, I’m more than comfortable continuing the recurring donations so long as it’s transparent to the donor and compliant with ActBlue and the FEC,” he said.
What’s next for Kamala Harris?
Questions are swirling over Vice President Harris’s next move as she readies to exit the White House in the wake of her loss to President-elect Trump.
Early polling suggests Democrats want to see Harris back in the running for the Oval Office in 2028, despite her defeat this cycle. But some in the party speculate the vice president could seek another office — for starters, the governor’s mansion in California — or pursue avenues outside electoral politics to help bolster the resistance against a second Trump term.
“She still has a long career ahead of her,” said Democratic strategist Kate Maeder. “She’s young for politics in this country, and I think that folks are really excited to see what she does next, because she’s built such a powerful following around her, and I think that that will carry through after the election.”
Election Day was a bruising night for Democrats. Trump swept all of the swing states and made inroads in blue strongholds as most of the country shifted rightward, and the GOP secured both chambers of Congress to pave the way for a trifecta of power in Washington next year.
But in her speech conceding the 2024 race to her Republican rival, Harris stressed she will never give up on “the fight that fueled” her fast-tracked bid.
The outgoing vice president, 60, “still has a fight in her,” Maeder said. “Whether it’s around public policy or it’s fighting the good fight in the private sector, I think it’s left to be seen.”
Harris is among a small handful of vice presidents in recent history who tried for the presidency and lost, and each took different paths in the aftermath, noted Joel Goldstein, a professor emeritus at Saint Louis University’s law school and an expert on the vice presidency. Richard Nixon mounted an unsuccessful bid for California governor before his comeback White House win in 1968, and Hubert Humphrey returned to the Senate. Al Gore never ran for political office again, focusing on environmental activism and earning the Nobel Peace Prize.
“So there’s a lot of different options available to her,” Goldstein said. “I would think that if she wants to remain active in presidential politics, that that’s certainly something that’s open to her … if that’s the course she wanted.”
“If she decided she wanted to run for president in 2028, she would start out as a favorite,” said Jim Kessler, a co-founder of the left-center think tank Third Way. “I don’t think a prohibitive favorite, but definitely someone who would start out on top, would be able to raise money, is known by voters, and who acquitted herself very well in her short campaign against Trump.”
But early lists of possible 2028 contenders are already crowded with Democratic rising stars, including California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D), Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D), Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro (D) and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg. A stacked field might make it difficult for Harris to reseize the momentum she saw this year.
“I think she would struggle to win a primary in 2028 and that’s just too long to go between now and then … when you have so many of the people sitting out there who are going to run, likely to run,” said Democratic strategist Fred Hicks.
Instead, there might be another opening for Harris in her home state of California, which is already seen as a bastion of blue-state resistance to the incoming Trump term.
Newsom is term limited and ineligible to seek reelection when his seat is up in 2026, leaving the governor’s mansion up for grabs.
A poll from the University of California, Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies and the Los Angeles Times this month found nearly half of California voters would be likely to support her if she were to enter the 2026 gubernatorial race.
Doing so could put her in “a prime position to fight against Trumpism for the latter part of his term,” Hicks said. Newsom’s office has said California officials are ready to “Trump-proof” state laws, and the state attorney general is similarly on alert to resist controversial Trump policies. But both the governorship and the attorney general seat will be on the ballot in 2026.
As she campaigned for the White House this year, Harris touted her experience as a prosecutor in California. She served as San Fransisco district attorney and then state attorney general, making history as the first woman, first African American and first Asian American in both offices. She ascended in 2017 to the U.S. Senate, where she represented the progressive stronghold until she joined the Biden administration.
Running for a four-year term as governor would likely take Harris out of 2028 contention, but it wouldn’t necessarily mean she’d never try for the Oval Office again, Hicks said, pointing to 2032 and stressing Harris’s young age relative to Trump and President Biden, both more than 20 years her senior.
But regardless of which path Harris picks, “she can and should become the face of the Democratic resistance,” Hicks contended.
Attorney and Democratic strategist Abou Amara said the California gubernatorial race, another presidential run or even a step into the advocacy world all look like they’re on the table for Harris, but “Goal No. 1” is to “really preserve flexibility as she moves forward.”
“Another part of this question is: What does she want her capstone to be on her political career?” Amara said.
And as the dust settles on 2024, experts also expect Harris may wade into the Democratic Party’s soul-searching efforts and tell her own story of what happened in the race. After her 2016 loss to Trump, for example, Clinton chronicled her bid in a memoir aptly titled “What Happened.”
“I think that will absolutely be part of the next eight to 12 months, to decompress what happened,” Amara said. “I expect her, whether it be through speeches or writing a book, to really lay out her understanding of what happened. Because Democrats are going to squabble back and forth with different theories … but I think it would be important to hear directly from her.”
Experts and Democratic operatives alike stressed that, just a few weeks past Election Day and two months before the White House changes hands, it’s early to peer into the crystal ball for Harris’s future. Still, the consensus prediction is that the outgoing vice president will stay in the game and remain a change-maker figure for the party as it rebuilds after 2024.
“I do think that she deserves some well-earned time to rest and think about her next steps,” Maeder said. “I think that she proved to the Democratic Party and to the nation that she has something to offer when it comes to leadership and the next generation of leadership that the Democratic Party is so hungry for. And so what she does next, I think that’s left to be seen.”
White House insists Biden, Harris have ‘one of most successful administrations in history’ despite 2024 loss
White House says Biden-Harris leaving office with ‘best economy in the world’
Just weeks after Vice President Kamala Harris’ overwhelming loss to President-elect Trump in the 2024 presidential election, the White House released a memo that hailed the Biden-Harris administration as one of the most successful in history.
The memo shared on Monday highlighted how President Biden and Harris took office during the COVID-19 pandemic and a “reeling” economy, before going on to call their administration “one of the most successful administrations in history” which “will be leaving behind the best economy in the world.”
“Under President Biden and Vice President Harris’ leadership, 16 million jobs have been created, and we’ve gotten women and people of color back in the labor force at record rates,” the memo stated. “A record 20 million new business applications have been filed, and inflation is down to near pre-pandemic levels.”
The White House added that “our success” in these areas was due to “passing and implementing legislation that rebuilt our nation’s infrastructure, made the largest investment in climate action in history, lowered prescription drug costs, and spurred a manufacturing renaissance.”
The memo quotes unnamed “business leaders” calling the U.S. economy “among the best performing economies” in decades.
The latest jobs report released earlier this month, however, appears to show a different story.
The Labor Department report shows that just 12,000 jobs were created in October, far below estimates of up to 120,000 and were the lowest in four years. The unemployment rate was 4.1%, in line with expectations.
President Biden bowed out of the 2024 presidential race in July following a dismal debate performance against former President Trump. Vice President Kamala Harris then led the Democratic ticket, ultimately losing to Trump. (Andrew Leyden/NurPhoto via Getty Images, File)
The cumulative effect of inflation has continued to weigh on many Americans.
The Labor Department’s inflation report for October found that the consumer price index — a broad measure of how much everyday goods like gasoline, groceries and rent cost — was up 2.6% from a year ago for the U.S. as a whole, in line with expectations as inflation ticked higher amid a broader cooling trend.
Days ahead of the presidential election, Trump campaign national press secretary Karoline Leavitt argued that “this jobs report is a catastrophe and definitively reveals how badly Kamala Harris broke our economy.”
President-elect Trump overwhelmingly defeated Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election, winning both the Electoral College and popular vote. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images, File)
On Election Day, the will of the American people was reflected in the vote totals and appeared to show a referendum on the policies of the Biden-Harris administration.
Trump beat Harris with a resounding 312 electoral votes to Harris’ 226, and with over 2 million more votes in the popular vote.
California governor? Another White House run? Kamala Harris unsure of next steps after losing election: report
Vice President Kamala Harris is searching for the next steps in her political career after losing the election, some former aides told Politico.
“She is not someone who makes rash decisions. She takes, sometimes, a painfully long time to make decisions. So I would pretty much guarantee you she has no idea what her next move is,” former Harris aide Brian Brokaw told Politico.
Harris has maintained a low profile after losing to President-elect Donald Trump. She arrived in Kalaoa, Hawaii, on Tuesday for a vacation from her campaign schedule and duties as vice president.
Everything from running for governor in her home state of California to another presidential run could be on the table. Current California Gov. Gavin Newsom cannot seek another term in 2026 and reportedly has White House aspirations of his own.
“Could she run for governor? Yes. Do I think she wants to run for governor? Probably not. Could she win? Definitely. Would she like the job? I don’t know. Could she run for president again? Yes,” Brokaw told Politico.
“Would she have a whole bunch of skepticism from the outset, because she has run in a full-length Democratic primary where [in 2019] she didn’t even make it long enough to be in the Iowa caucus, and then she was the nominee this year?”
Some former aides say that Harris has limited time and political capital to decide whether she wants to run for office.
“She doesn’t have to decide if she wants to run for something again in the next six months,” one former Harris campaign aide told Politico. “The natural thing to do would be to set up some type of entity that would give her the opportunity to travel and give speeches and preserve her political relationships.”
Another person in Harris’ orbit emphasized that time is running short for Harris to make a decision.
“There will be a desire to hear her voice, and there won’t be a vacuum for long,” a person close to Harris reportedly said.
The timing of the vice president’s trip to Hawaii following her loss has generated questions, especially amid reports that the Harris campaign spent $1.5 billion in 15 weeks. (Victor J. Blue/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
The timing of the vice president’s trip to Hawaii following her loss has generated questions, especially since some Democratic National Committee (DNC) staffers have been surprised by sudden layoffs amid reports that the Harris campaign spent $1.5 billion in 15 weeks on a losing effort.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre defended the Harris vacation during a Thursday briefing, arguing there was nothing “wrong” with the vice president taking a vacation.
“The vice president has taken time off to go spend time with her family. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. I think she deserves some time to be with her family and to have some downtime. She has worked very hard over – for the last four years, and her taking a couple of days to be with her family, good for her. Good for her,” Jean-Pierre said.
Fox News’ Michael Lee contributed to this report.
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