Stop Writing Off Kamala Harris

Vice President Kamala Harris (D-CA)

I am generally loathe to write about a future election when the current one is not done, but I was struck the other day by a unique quirk in having two presidents face off against each other in a post-22nd Amendment world.  Joe Biden will, regardless of what happens in 2024, never run for president again (his age will make that impossible), and while there's a slim possibility that Trump would run in 2028 (Trump's supporters don't care about his age), I honestly doubt he would attempt to unless he was the incumbent (and openly defying the 22nd Amendment, which is a discussion for a different article).  Regardless, there is a strong probability that in 2028, we will have no incumbent president running.  This isn't rare, and in fact it has happened twice in the past twenty years (2008 & 2016), but there's something that neither of those two years had happening that will be near-certain in 2028: we will have a sitting vice president running for the White House.

This didn't used to be as unusual as it would be now.  Since 1952, in every election where an incumbent couldn't run, the vice president has run for the White House save for 2008 & 2016.  The open-seat elections include 1960, 1968, 1988, & 2000.  In fact, before 2008, you'd have to go back to 1952, when Vice President Alben Barkley declined to run, which in retrospect was a good thing as he died in what would've been his first term as president (he was, and still is, the oldest man ever to hold the office of Vice President).

This has opened up something of a myth about the vice presidency being a lousy platform to the White House.  Of those four elections I just name-checked, only one (George HW Bush in 1988) won the election, while the other three (Richard Nixon in 1960, Hubert H. Humphrey in 1968, & Al Gore in 2000) lost unusually close elections (in Nixon & Gore's cases, elections that historians still wonder if they actually won).  So you're going to read a lot of puff pieces about how Kamala Harris (or the Republican Vice President, whomever he or she may be) is doomed in 2028, and I'm going to be real here-this far out, don't buy it.

There's a tendency in political prognostication to assume politics is prophecy, that it's preordained who will win based on trends or history, but that's not really the case.  Everyone will come up with random historical models (my favorite being the forty years model, and not just because it would strongly indicate the Democrats will win the 2024 and 2028 elections), but they're all kind of hooey, so I want to be clear here-a sitting vice president gains a lot from that position, particularly when it comes to winning the nomination (which in 21st Century America is most of the battle)...but it is by no means a way to win the White House on its own.

I'm saying this particularly because of naysayers to Harris's chances in 2028 (which is the primary reason that I'm writing this article now instead of in January when it's obvious who the sitting vice president in 2028 will be...I'm tired of people disparaging Harris).  I want to be clear on what is and isn't true about her chances in 2028.

First off, should Harris win reelection in November, she will automatically become the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination in 2028.  Sitting vice presidents in the modern political system have so many advantages that in many cases, people don't even run against them.  Al Gore won every single state in the 2000 primaries, and Richard Nixon won pretty much every election that had actual votes in 1960.  Harris, unlike Joe Biden this past year, though, won't be unbeatable, and you can see that in 1968 and 1988.  Hubert H. Humphrey likely would've lost the 1968 nomination to Sen. Robert F. Kennedy had Kennedy not been assassinated, and in 1988, George HW Bush lucked out after getting third in Iowa when Pat Robertson failed to catch on in New Hampshire, and Sen. Bob Dole's views on taxes was exploited (along with a critical endorsement from Gov. John Sununu, who would later be rewarded by becoming Bush's Chief of Staff).

So Harris will be the frontrunner in 2028, but other leading Democrats like Gretchen Whitmer, Pete Buttigieg, Gavin Newsom, & Raphael Warnock will not be scared off in the same way they could've been in in 2024.  But the other thing that should be taken into consideration is that Harris's campaign for the White House in 2020 should not be an indicator of whether she'll win or not.  Harris, were she to win in 2028, would join a long list of presidents who ran & lost their first primary only to come back and win not only the nomination but the general election.  Lyndon Johnson, Ronald Reagan, George HW Bush, and Joe Biden all ran for the presidency in previous nominating cycles, lost the nomination, and then went on to become president, just like would be the case with Harris.  Other candidates like Hubert H. Humphrey, Bob Dole, Al Gore, & Hillary Clinton all ran for the nomination, lost, and then was their party's nominee again (and, admittedly in all cases, also lost the general proving that maybe the voters were right to decline them in the first place).  All of this is to say-Harris losing in 2020 means nothing.  She's a different candidate now, and history teaches us that that means she'll be able to run a different campaign.

No, what will cost Harris in 2028 isn't stats, but simply the attitude of the country.  She will be running for a third Biden term, and really a fifth Obama/Biden term.  If the country wants that, she'll win, and if they don't, she won't.  No VP can escape their predecessor, and even ones with popular predecessors (Nixon in 1960, Gore in 2000) can tightly lose because they don't capture that same charm.  But don't write her political future off based on the past or stats just yet.  2028 is miles away, and the only thing we can say for certain is that Kamala Harris will be a name we'll hear a lot in the years leading up to it.