Kamala Is Back – and More Radical Than Ever

Despite losing the popular vote, Electoral College, and every swing state, national polling shows that former Vice President Kamala Harris remains the clear presidential frontrunner for Democrats in 2028. But the version of Harris Americans will likely see on the campaign trail appears far more radical than even what they saw two years ago.

It may be tempting to write Harris off following her 2024 debacle. But she retains universal name recognition and a strong political network – including a close relationship with Barack Obama, still the party’s most popular figure and its unofficial kingmaker. She received endorsements from Obama both in 2016 for Senate and in 2024 for her presidential campaign. Democrat primary voters also continue to place real value on nominating a woman or a person of color — both boxes that Harris checks.

Though she has not yet officially announced a 2028 campaign, a July Quantus Insights survey put Harris at 35.3 percent support among likely Democrat primary voters — a 17.6-point lead over California Governor Gavin Newsom at 17.7 percent. Axios’s late-July Democrat power rankings placed her at number one, noting she is “far ahead of every other contender with Black voters, still the most important voting bloc in a Democratic primary.”

But most importantly of all for the left-wing power brokers who wield growing influence within the Democrat Party, Harris has repeatedly proven she will embrace or abandon any position when the political incentives demand it. Right now, that means Harris is more than willing to become a key player in the socialist surge within the party.

Conventional wisdom holds that Harris lost in 2024 because she was inauthentic, weighed down by Joe Biden’s unpopularity, and ran on a progressive platform that was far too extreme for most Americans. But Harris doesn’t appear to buy any of that. In fact, she’s doubling down on far-left policies, embracing a platform that would’ve been considered fringe within the Democrat Party just a few years ago.

“This is a moment where there are no bad ideas, a ‘No Bad Idea Brainstorm’ is what I’d like to call it,” Harris said back in May on the “Win with Black Women” podcast. She floated Supreme Court expansion, Electoral College “reform” (i.e., abolishment), multi-member congressional districts, and the need to “neutralize these red states from cheating.”

By late July, at the National Urban League Conference, Harris had hardened her stance. “I know this is gonna be controversial coming from me, in particular. We need to revisit the Electoral College,” she said. “We need to revisit the point of expanding the Court to 13 justices like we have 13 district courts. We need to revisit, if they so want, statehood for Puerto Rico and D.C.”

Harris even borrowed one of Donald Trump’s 2024 slogans and told Democrats they must win victories that are “too big to rig,” adding that the other side is “ruthless” and that Democrats “need to be ruthless too.”

Court expansion, Electoral College reform, and statehood for D.C. and Puerto Rico were not part of the general election platform Harris ran on in 2024.

These proposals instead track closely with the Democratic Socialists of America’s own “Workers Deserve More” platform, including its explicit call to make the presidency and Supreme Court “chosen by and subordinate to Congress.” Harris has seemingly embraced the progressive effort to tear down any institution that has stood in the way of unchecked power for the political left.

In other words, Harris is saying, if you can’t win the race, change the rules.

Lest there be any doubt about Harris’s open embrace of the hard left, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani confirmed that Harris called him shortly after he took office and that the two “have been in touch over the last few months.”

“Harris has repeatedly demonstrated that her policy positions travel wherever the votes are,” Republican strategist Matt Klink told the Washington Examiner. “DSA doesn’t need her to be a true believer. They need her to be useful.”

Even some sympathetic progressive voices aren’t convinced, however. Radio host Thom Hartmann said that “voters can smell a poll-tested pivot.”

Harris has done this before, abandoning positions from her 2020 primary run — including decriminalizing border crossings and eliminating private health insurance — once she became the nominee facing Trump in 2024. Her positions are whatever she believes her constituency at the time wants to hear.

To hear Harris tell it, however, this blatant inauthenticity had nothing to do with her failure in 2024. Her public account of her defeat has placed far more emphasis on Biden’s delayed withdrawal than on her own inconsistent record. In her campaign memoir, 107 Days, Harris reserves her sharpest criticism for Biden’s decision to seek reelection, calling it “recklessness.”

“Was it grace, or was it recklessness? In retrospect, I think it was recklessness,” she writes. “The stakes were simply too high. This wasn’t a choice that should have been left to an individual’s ego, an individual’s ambition.”

Joe Biden doesn’t seem to blame her, either. He told “The View” in May 2025 that he wasn’t surprised by her loss, instead pointing the finger at discrimination. “They went the sexist route, the whole route,” Biden said. “I mean, this is a woman, she’s this, she’s that.”

At every turn, Harris has displayed an utter lack of humility and introspection about why she lost the race. Worse, she’s going even further down the left-wing rabbit hole that voters said they wanted nothing to do with two years ago.

Given the apparent leftward lurch of the Democrat Party, that strategy just might reward Harris with the nomination yet again come 2028. But if 2024 is any indication, Harris will again have a tough time pivoting to a more palatable platform for the general election. History may be set to repeat itself.