Governor Kamala Harris? Give me a break.
After losing the 2024 presidential election, speculation is swirling that Vice President Kamala Harris will come home to California and run for governor in 2026.
However, we won’t know she’s really serious until she unfriends Tim Walz on Facebook.
Earlier this month Politico reported that, “the vice president has been instructing advisers and allies to keep her options open — whether for a possible 2028 presidential run, or even to run for governor in her home state of California in two years. As Harris has repeated in phone calls, ‘I am staying in the fight.’”
Need more proof? Harris has yet to shut down her “Joy” Pinterest board.
Brian Brokaw, a former Harris aide, summarized Harris’ prospects to Politico as, “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.”
Is this form of answering questions annoying? Very.
So, let me get this straight. She doesn’t want to run, but could probably win. Hmm…the exact opposite of her run for president.
Doesn’t sound like a ringing endorsement to me.
In fact, it sounds like if she were to succeed Gavin Newsom as governor, we’d just end up with another absentee landlord using the office as a springboard to make a stab at the White House.
Been there, done that.
On traits we look for in a president, “a sense of entitlement” is pretty low on the list.
Besides, I’m not so sure that she’d just waltz right into the governor’s mansion in Sacramento, anyway.
Running for an office simply because it would benefit your career is a horrible reason to run.
Generally speaking, successful candidates have the same story — they see a problem, think they have a solution, and they possess the proper skill set to implement those changes. Oh, and great hair.
If not, why bother? Isn’t there something better you could be doing with your time?
And, if not, what does that say about you?
In fact, we have numerous examples of Vice Presidents and Vice Presidential candidates losing races for offices they never should have run for, in an effort to stay relevant.
The most famous example is probably the 1962 race for California governor, when then Vice President Richard Nixon challenged one-term Democratic Governor Pat Brown.
Pat Brown ended up beating the former VP by five points, prompting Nixon to declare that his political career was officially over and famously stated, “Just think how much you’re going to be missing. You won’t have Nixon to kick around any more.”
Side note: I don’t know if you’ve heard…as it turns out, the kicking of Dick Nixon had only just begun.
In 2002, incumbent United States Senator Paul Wellstone died in a plane crash 11 days before his attempted re-election against the Republican former mayor of St. Paul, Norm Coleman. Minnesota Democrats were sent scrambling to find a candidate to replace him on the ballot.
Who better to pinch-hit than former U.S. Senator from Minnesota, Vice President of the United States and 1984 Democratic nominee for president Walter Mondale?
The problem was that Mondale hadn’t been VP for over two decades and was not really relevant in the eyes of most Minnesota voters.
How irrelevant? Mondale’s campaign slogan in 2002 could have been, “Is that guy still alive?”
Coleman ended up besting Mondale by a little over two-and-a-half points and marked the last time a Republican won a U.S. Senate election in the reliably blue state of Minnesota.
Mondale’s VP nominee, New York Congresswoman Geraldine Ferraro, ran for a seat in the United States Senate from New York, in 1992 and in 1998, and never made it out of the primary.
And finally, in 2022 former Republican Vice Presidential nominee Sarah Palin ran to represent Alaska in the state’s lone seat in the House of Representatives.
Did she lose? You betcha! Palin ended up being defeated by Democrat Mary Peltola, in a state that President-elect Donald Trump won by 10 points in 2020 and in a district that was Republican-held for nearly five decades.
If Kamala Harris wants to run for governor of California, nobody is going to stop her. But don’t dust off your Joy Mobile just yet, Kamala. History has proven that this move would not be without risk. Particularly when your primary motivation is building your résumé.