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Kamala Harris might run for president again in 2028. Please, no | Arwa Mahdawi

I’ve got some good news and some bad news for you today. The bad news is, well, everything. As you may have noticed, the world is on fire. The good news, however, is that a savior may be at hand. Kamala Harris, a politician who has never won a presidential primary and lost the popular vote to Donald Trump in 2024, hasn’t ruled out running for president again.

Harris has kept a fairly low profile since November 2024, focusing most of her energy on promoting 107 Days, her account of her truncated presidential run, and appearing as the guest of honour at the 2025 Australian Real Estate Conference. But she has also made it clear that she still has an eye on the White House: in an interview with the BBC last October, Harris said she was “not done” with politics and strongly suggested she might run for president again. Harris echoed these sentiments in a conversation with the podcaster Sharon McMahon last week. “I might,” she said when asked if she will run again.

Harris has also dipped a foot back into politics recently. The former vice-president publicly backed Jasmine Crockett, who co-chaired her 2024 national presidential campaign, in the heated Texas Democratic Senate primary: her first time backing a Democrat ahead of a primary since 2024. If Harris was looking to this as a test of her political capital, she will have been disappointed: Crockett lost to James Talarico on Wednesday.

It would be very satisfying to see Trump’s misogynistic reign end with a woman in the White House. But let’s be very clear here: unless she fundamentally changes as a politician, that woman is never going to be Harris. The sooner Harris realizes that and abandons her presidential ambitions the better for all of us. We can’t afford to have the run up to 2028 be a battle of Democratic egos. We can’t waste time with infighting or divert much-needed resources to vanity campaigns. To chart a path out of the destruction that Trump 2.0 is wreaking, we need to throw everything we have at uniting behind a winner.

I have done everything I can to give Harris the benefit of the doubt; to see her as a winner. She was handed an impossible task in 2024 because of Joe Biden’s hubris and, to begin with, she made the best of it. She seized on the joy that people felt at the possibility of change, and she ran with it. But in that truncated campaign, in which she refused to break with Biden, she also exposed why she will never be president: she lacks authenticity and conviction. She seems more concerned about her wealthy donors than the issues facing everyday Americans.

Nowhere were Harris’s shortcomings more obvious than her silence on the genocide in Gaza. It was clear to anyone paying attention that her equivocation on Gaza – her refusal to even have a Palestinian speak at the Democratic national convention – would cost her votes. Polling appears to confirm this. So too does a secret report by top Democratic officials, which won’t be released, reportedly because some DNC officials are worried that releasing it might embarrass the party. And yet she refused to change course. Not even in her terrible memoir, 107 Days, could she seem to understand where exactly she went wrong.

There are a lot of liberals who get hot and bothered when you bring up Palestinian or trans rights or other issues that they consider “fringe”. Just let it go, they say. You’ve got to make some sacrifices for the greater good. What they’re really saying here, of course, is: “I don’t care about Palestinians and you shouldn’t either.” But Harris’s failings on Gaza go well beyond Palestinians. They illuminate why the Democratic party is so unpopular: with its obsession with “centrism”, it seems to stand for nothing other than the comfort of its elite donors. More than that, it seems to have little interest in listening to young people, let alone fighting for them.

Nor does it seem particularly capable of fighting for democracy. Last year, during a conversation at the University of Michigan, the author Ta-Nehisi Coates observed: “We are at a moment right now where people are asking themselves why can’t the Democratic party defend this assault on democracy ... and I would submit to you that if you can’t draw the line at genocide, you probably can’t draw the line at democracy.”

Democracy, I don’t need to tell you, is not exactly thriving right now. I’ve been writing all this as if it’s a given that we’re going to have free and fair elections in 2028. Alas, that is not a given by any means. Last Thursday, the Washington Post reported that pro-Trump activists are urging the White House to declare a national emergency to help sway the 2028 election. The order would reportedly use claims China interfered in the 2020 election in order to declare an emergency and empower the president to ban mail ballots and voting machines, arguing they were vectors of foreign interference. To be clear, there is no evidence China interfered in 2020. The Washington Post notes that “a 2021 intelligence review concluded that China considered efforts to influence the election but did not go through with them”.

Trump, who is not doing well in the polls, has also floated the idea of not having elections and running for an unconstitutional third term, multiple times. In January, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said the president was “joking” and “being facetious” when he told Reuters that “we shouldn’t even have an election”. A number of Democrats don’t find these jokes particularly funny, though. In a rare public address on Friday, Biden warned that Trump will attempt to “steal” the midterms. And while it’s unclear just how far the Trump administration will be able to go to influence the midterms and 2028 election, they are already working to try to pass legislation, such as the SAVE act bills, that would suppress voting.

Ultimately, it is impossible to predict what 2028 will be like. But as we look to the future, we must be careful not to keep repeating the mistakes of the past. We are at a pivotal moment for democracy. The Democrats cannot keep running the same milquetoast candidates and pushing the same uninspiring agenda and hoping that this time it works. “We’re not going back,” Harris kept telling us during her brief run. She would do well to heed her own advice.