Just picture the scene. Election night 2026. Or maybe California primary night.
Either way: The midterms. The big one before the really big one in 2028. And the Democratic Party’s biggest name suffers an embarrassing loss.
Picture it now: A stage, somewhere in the Golden State. An awaiting media, eagerly looking for some idea of what will come next now that she’s been defeated twice in two high-profile races. The words come:
“You don’t have Momala to kick around anymore.”
Yes, apparently, reports are out there that Kamala Harris plans to follow in the footsteps of Richard Milhous Nixon. After losing the 1960 presidential election, the relatively young Nixon went back out to California to mount a quixotic gubernatorial run in 1962 — which he embarrassingly lost, rather convincingly, to Pat Brown, father of Jerry “Governor Moonbeam” Brown.
Nixon was in a bitter mood after the beating and had this to say to the media, a body he wasn’t particularly fond of on a good day:
“You don’t have Nixon to kick around any more, because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference,” he told the assembled press corps. This was untrue, of course: He’d mount a political comeback, become president, and then probably wished he hadn’t, or at least hadn’t hired those White House “plumbers.”
Harris at least wants to imitate Tricky Dick in one way: Reports say she’s considering a run for California governor as her next move, given that current Gov. Gavin Newsom is term-limited to 2026.
Will Kamala Harris run for governor?
Former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy of California, now a retired GOP personage, has a message for her if she decides to go down that path: She’ll be imitating Nixon in two ways, because she’s going to lose if she tries.
“If she came back to California, she would not win the race for governor,” McCarthy said on Fox News on Monday, according to The Hill. “So, I mean, she’s got to rethink.”
There are two things against her, at least according to McCarthy.
First, she’s stepping into the race as governor of the nation’s largest state as her party “is trying to find a new direction.” Not only did it lose the Electoral College with Harris as the standard-bearer, it also lost the popular vote — which President-elect Donald Trump wasn’t even attempting to win, since that and $5.69 will get you 1) a Big Mac at McDonald’s and 2) absolutely nothing else.
However, it was a devastating defeat — and a repudiation of both President Joe Biden and the vice president who replaced him because of his obvious senility but couldn’t think of a thing she’d do differently than he would, other than not be senile.
Second, McCarthy noted, the gubernatorial race in California is going to be a long, grueling process as well — and while McCarthy said that Harris certainly has another chapter to write in her political legacy, she’s “never really done well in long campaigns.”
This is rather an understatement; you’ll remember that she declared early in the 2020 campaign and spent much of 2019 gathering both money and momentum — only to squander both before the year was out and bow out of the race in December before a single primary was held.
Even in the 2024 sprint campaign, where she was given even more money and momentum by a fawning party and media, things began going south once the month or two of “joy and vibes” began dissipating — when actual interviews with adversarial questions took place. (And, keep in mind, this was all with just one presidential debate in which moderator interference made it a 3-on-1 battle royale against Trump.)
There’s also a third problem: no shortage of declared Democratic candidates who have been steeped in California politics much more recently than Harris has been and who don’t view the job as a safety school application for someone who got a rejection letter from her first choice.
Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis and former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa are also in the race, according to the Los Angeles Times, along with others who have built strong coalitions within the state. Keep in mind, too, that California has a jungle primary system, which means that she might well end up against another Democrat in the general elections — who would be more than happy to point out her failings and her use of the office as a fallback option to rehabilitate her image if it meant becoming governor.
Say what you will about Kevin McCarthy, who managed to work his way out of the speaker’s job and then exude soreness in the same petulant way Nixon did after his gubernatorial loss, but the man has a point. She’s been a prosecutor, attorney general, and senator, but she’s never held an executive position — unless you count being Joe Biden’s backup in case something like what happened during his one debate with Trump happened as an “executive position,” which I wouldn’t — and she clearly loses her luster quickly.
Of course, Dick Nixon got back on his feet and became president. Sure, that ended poorly, but that was after five-and-a-half years of his presidency. If Momala loses this time, we’d really better not get her to kick around anymore.
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