The small corner of public discourse that is online political punditry imploded on July 20th when David Freedlander of New York Magazine published an article claiming that Kamala Harris is the frontrunner for the 2028 Presidential election. His thesis is interesting, and has spawned rebuttals, but the main takeaway from his piece are his insights on Harris’ thought process. An unnamed Harris supporter talked to the former Vice President and told Freedlander the following:

“Her mindset is that I should have won, and I am going to do it my way because my way would have won, and it was all these consultants that were telling me to take this position or that position, and it was their fault.” 

There is no information provided about how close this person is to Harris or how substantive their conversation was. However, if you take the insight at face value and assume it is an accurate representation of Harris’s thought process, then the former Vice President deserves to burn out even more quickly than she did in 2020.

It is no revelation that Harris lacks a sense of personal responsibility. It is untraditional for candidates to publicly apologize for losing an election, but when you call the winner of the election a threat to democracy, then you should feel profound remorse for failing to inhibit said threat. However, Harris never apologized, nor did she use her newfound platform to perform significant work in protecting the marginalized she claimed to represent. Instead, she wrote a book about how hard she had it on the campaign trail. She was so bitter about her shorter-than-normal election timetable that she titled the book “107 Days.” What should be a sense of guilt is an entitled sort of self-pity. In her mind, the deported immigrants and the gunned down American citizens are not the primary victims of the 2024 election—she is. That mindset is pathetic and, more importantly, unpresidential. The way to move on from Donald Trump, a bitter loser with a victim complex in search of vindication, is not to elect Kamala Harris as she is very similar to Trump in her sense of entitlement to the Presidency.

A cynic may say that selfishness, fecklessness, and ambition without direction are not new to politics. However, even if the degree to which Harris exhibits these character defects was typical, she has another major problem: a lack of platform. Despite ample time to prove herself as a Senator, Vice President, and presidential candidate, nobody has any idea what she stands for. Harris may still be trying to figure this out for herself, as a former aide told Freedlander that “she is looking for where the wave is going and is determined to ride it.” If she rides a progressive wave, she will have to deal with flak from progressive Democrats who remember her 2024 campaign. If she rides a more moderate wave, she will get similar backlash from centrist Democrats. If she obfuscates, then she will run into the same issue she did in 2024 and burn out before she can count to 107. She, like Trump in 2024, does not deserve another chance to convince voters that she believes in anything.

Kamala Harris has a name that people recognize, but in a just world, that would come as a disadvantage when her name calls to mind the aforementioned burdens. The best Democratic candidate would be a name few people know. A candidate associated with the baggage the Democratic Party has accumulated over the past 10 years would inhibit an effort to truly move on from the Trump era. As recovery programs have been saying for decades, “the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” So, unless Democratic donors want Marco Rubio to be the next President, they should not give a dime to Kamala Harris.