As former Vice President Kamala Harris considers another run for president, she is also signaling that she has no problem with a public airing of what went wrong last time — telling donors she believes the Democratic National Committee should release its buried autopsy of her failed 2024 campaign, according to a person who has heard the conversations.
While she indicated to donors that she had no issue with releasing it, Harris has not discussed the postmortem with DNC Chairman Ken Martin and did not know about his decision to keep it under wraps until it happened, this person said.
Like most prospective candidates, Harris is staying involved in political affairs. That includes touring the country, giving speeches to state parties, developing the framework for a policy platform and sounding out fellow Democrats about her next chapter.
What’s unique about Harris is that while she tries to orient toward the future, many in her party are actively fighting over whether to keep examining the flaws of her last campaign.
Harris has privately sought counsel from allies about her future, and she publicly acknowledged at a National Action Network event in New York last month that she is “thinking about” another bid. Harris lost the electoral vote to Donald Trump in 2024, 312-226, and the popular vote by 1.5 percentage points.
The subject of the autopsy’s release has grown into a flash point in the party, and it is dogging Martin, who had promised to conduct a comprehensive review of the defeat and share it with the public. Neither Martin nor the DNC responded to a request for comment.
A discussion over the intraparty drama comes as Harris is sounding out friends and party luminaries about what she should do in the run-up to 2028.
She recently asked the Rev. Al Sharpton for his advice on her next steps, according to a person familiar with their conversation. Sharpton told her that she has nothing to prove, having been the first woman and the first woman of color elected to the vice presidency, according to a person who detailed their conversation. In her 2024 bid for the White House, brought on by the late withdrawal of President Joe Biden, Harris collected more votes — 75 million — than any previous runner-up.
Her legacy is secure, Sharpton told her. But he also admonished her that she should consider the possibility that it might be diminished if she were to run and lose again.
“She is being encouraged to run by a lot of people around her and by a lot of people around the country,” Sharpton said in a telephone interview. “She is definitely getting a lot of push, and I think it will ultimately impact her decision.”
Even without the autopsy, there are a number of data points for Harris to consider as she thinks about the risks and rewards of what would be her third shot at the presidency — following 2024 and a 2020 bid for the Democratic nomination that foundered before the first votes were cast.
In early polls of potential candidates, Harris has consistently led the pack for months —though strategists note that some of that may be based on name recognition.
She has a national fundraising network that she kept active to help the DNC pay off debt from her 2024 campaign. And she found highly receptive audiences during a monthslong, 33-site tour to promote her bestselling book about that election, “107 Days” — a journey that took her to dozens of vote-rich communities for Democrats, including midsize cities in Southern states with large Black populations.
At the same time, many Democratic insiders dismiss Harris outright, saying she carries too much Biden-era baggage, that she had her chance and lost despite vastly outspending Trump.
Some even whisper to one another that the party will be doomed in 2028 if it nominates another woman or another person of color after Harris and Hillary Clinton lost the 2024 and 2016 elections to Trump. And others say the energy in the party is behind not her but a faction that is angered over the Biden-Harris administration’s funding of Israel and by Harris’ sidelining Gaza supporters during her campaign.
Interviews with more than a dozen people close to the former vice president paint the picture of a politician who is both moving forward in ways that would be helpful for setting up a run and also declining to view every decision she makes through the prism of how it affects her chances of electoral success.
After all, she just bought an $8 million home in tony Malibu, California, which is hardly the real estate option a team of political consultants would have recommended when voters are railing against concentrated wealth.
Still, Harris remains in contact with key operatives and donors, making sure to keep the door open to a run.
“She’s working to keep relationships warm on all levels,” a former adviser said.
Outside her circle, all indications are that she is preparing for a comeback bid.
“Everyone assumes she’s running,” said Chuck Rocha, a Democratic political strategist who was a top adviser on Sen. Bernie Sanders’ 2020 presidential campaign.
Book tours are common precursors to White House bids. Harris and her team have informally held strategy meetings, which centered on the book tour and are now moving into talks about her role in helping candidates in the midterm elections.
Recently, the DNC’s national coalitions director, Gabriel Uy, told colleagues he was leaving to take a job with Harris.
“I will also be working for VP Harris again, so let’s keep in touch,” Uy said, according to a copy of the email obtained by NBC News.
In 2019, Uy worked in Nevada for Harris’ 2020 presidential primary bid before she dropped out. Uy, a loyal strategist, also served in the Vice President’s Office of Public Engagement and Intergovernmental Affairs. He did not respond to a request for comment.
Nobody who spoke to NBC News said Harris has made a decision. Insiders stress that she wants to remain prominent in the political arena, whether or not she chooses to run.
In particular, said a person close to her, Harris has identified a series of issues that she wants to advance that fit into three buckets: reviving the “American Dream,” the intersection of artificial intelligence and the public interest, and boosting civic education. In a recent speech to the Arkansas Democratic Party, Harris spoke at some length about the economic challenges pushing prosperity out of reach for many Americans.
“We have arrived at a place where the American people are experiencing: An economic system that’s failing working people. A rigged political system. And a weakened civic life,” Harris said, according to prepared remarks. “Fueling righteous anger and cynicism, division and isolation where once there was a feeling of common cause. Today, we have a certain collection of leaders who have sensed this epidemic of disconnect and distrust and sought to exploit it for their personal gain.”
She is expected to repeat that message Thursday in an address to Nevada Democrats.
Harris believes, as do some in her inner circle, that if she runs for president again, she will not be under the same constraints that she operated under in 2024 — a short window of time and strict adherence to the policies of the administration she was serving in — according to the person close to her.
Allies say it was insulting that some party leaders, despite her role as vice president, suggested Harris had a duty to run for governor of California this year or that the 2024 loss disqualified her from another presidential bid.
“I find it offensive for people to say to a qualified Black woman: ‘Shut up and go away,’” said Antjuan Seawright, a South Carolina-based strategist who advised the 2024 campaign. “We don’t hear that same approach with others who may not look like Kamala.”
Some advisers see the party anger around Biden beginning to dissipate and theorize that it could significantly fade by 2028.
Harris still owns a valuable fundraising list and, unlike many potential presidential candidates, has the benefit of time. Some former aides said they believe there is a pressure campaign going on right now to force Harris to make an announcement. But they say she uniquely can wait longer than other prospective candidates. Most hopefuls have to spend exorbitant amounts of time and money to make themselves household names. Harris is instantly recognizable to nearly every American.
A former aide said an underappreciated aspect to another Harris run is that she already has gone through the rigors of a national campaign. She’s battle-tested, has learned from mistakes, has endured intense scrutiny, and her negatives are already built into her candidacy.
Even as Biden now tries to rehabilitate his reputation, anger at the Democratic establishment remains palpable. The party regularly earns low marks in polling and focus groups.
The tenor of the party has already vastly shifted since Harris’ 2024 campaign, with many voters calling for more aggressive fighters who call out a corrupt system and demand fairness in wages and health care and with social services. New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist, shot to national prominence in the wake of dissatisfaction with the party base, and excitement is already building for a potential presidential run by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y.
And the base has moved left on many issues, not the least of which involves the military funding of Israel.
“I don’t know how she runs from Israel, and I don’t know how she runs from Biden, and she’s not good at threading the needle,” said a prominent Harris donor who still talks to her. “If she’s the lead horse, it will be easy to cut her legs. She comes with baggage.”
The person close to Harris previewed a potential pivot. She is signaling privately that she has more to say about the Middle East now that she is freed from the Biden White House policy, this person said, adding that she is likely to do so after the midterm elections. That could be done from the perspective of a party elder or from the perspective of a candidate seeking votes, this person said.
More broadly, her defeat has many Democrats looking for a new direction. Already, much of the energy in the party’s primaries has been centered on newer faces willing to buck the establishment.
Govs. Gavin Newsom of California, JB Pritzker of Illinois, Andy Beshear of Kentucky, Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania and Wes Moore of Maryland are among the most often-mentioned potential contenders, along with Ocasio-Cortez and Rep. Ro Khanna of California and a crop of senators that includes Mark Kelly of Arizona, Chris Murphy of Connecticut, Cory Booker of New Jersey and Chris Van Hollen of Maryland.
The quickly evolving shadow primary has not stopped some Democratic leaders from demanding answers about what went wrong in Harris’ 2024 loss, including how her campaign and the DNC together burned through $1.5 billion in campaign cash in 107 days. While the DNC elected Martin chair since then, he has gone back on his own vow to release findings of the DNC-commissioned autopsy. A person involved in the party’s finances said it could present a structural problem for Harris because some donors remain uneasy about where their money went.
At the same time, at least one progressive group has charged that the secrecy around the autopsy could aid a Harris 2028 run. Her discussions with donors, indicating a preference for releasing it, suggest that she sees greater risk in siding with Martin.
Meanwhile, the DNC’s own documents showed that despite vastly outspending Trump, the Harris organization was flawed in its manner of outreach and field efforts.
“Despite making 300+ million phone calls in 2024 — more than any campaign in history — only 3% of the calls the Harris campaign made actually resulted in a contact with a voter,” the DNC documents say.
Harris still has a flex that many of her would-be competitors do not, those around her say: winning over Black voters, particularly Black women.
Her efforts to play up the advantage are evident in the geography she has visited in the last several months. She has hit cities with large Black populations like Philadelphia, Detroit, Houston, Atlanta and New Orleans. She has been to South Carolina, and Thursday she heads to Nevada, both of which are making bids to become early states in the Democratic primaries. In 2024, Harris demonstrated strength among female Black voters, the heart of the party.
Democratic nominating rules award more convention delegates to congressional districts that have been most loyal to the party in recent elections, a set headlined by majority-Black districts. If a candidate can consolidate support from the Black community, he or she can collect delegates by the bushel in cities and states with large Black populations.Memorably, it was South Carolina’s majority-Black Democratic primary electorate that revived Biden’s flagging 2020 campaign and forced several other top contenders to pull the plug on their own bids and consolidate behind him.
In addition to the big cities on her book tour, Harris has beaten a path through Southern states where the Black share of the overall population is high. Her stops have included Birmingham, Alabama; Durham and Greensboro, North Carolina; Jackson, Mississippi; Nashville and Memphis, Tennessee; Savannah and Macon, Georgia; and Richmond, Virginia.
“You don’t have to win all of the early states,” said a party official who has been heavily involved in recent presidential campaigns. “You need to win South Carolina. Maybe take one of the other early states and then you sweep through the Southern states. That’s when delegate counts are so key and important.”
A party elder noted that there are other prospective candidates who are Black and who would fight Harris for the support of Black voters, including Booker and Moore, as well as non-Black candidates who could splinter the community’s vote in key states. Harris would be better off courting Black voters if she did not have to compete as hard for their support, the party elder said.“She would almost have to clear the deck to get the kind of momentum she would want,” he said.
For nearly two decades, since Hillary Clinton first ran for president in 2008, Democrats have been wrestling with the question of whether a woman can win a bid for the White House.
Former first lady Michelle Obama stoked the fires of that debate late last year and again early this year by saying that America is “not ready“ for a female president and that “there are men out there that were not going to vote for a woman.”
None of the Democratic men who are flirting with presidential bids have said their gender is an advantage — or that Harris’ should be a disqualifier — but it would be political malpractice to do so in a party in which the majority of voters are women. A related question is whether the woman who lost the last election can win the next one.
“Proving electability will again be tricky, though, for Harris and any nonwhite, non-male candidate,” said Ali Vitali, an MS Now host and author of the book “Electable: Why American Hasn’t Put a Woman in the White House … Yet.”
“Candidates do exist in the context of the moment they run in, so female candidates — fairly or not — will have to prove they can win,” Vitali said. “Maybe it’s as simple as reminding voters anyone is electable if you vote for them.”
In reaction to NBC News’ publication of Harris remarks to donors, critics expressed skepticism around how genuine her intentions were, given that she had not talked to Martin directly about them.
“More than four months have passed since Martin announced he was reneging on his promise to release the autopsy,” said Norm Solomon, who heads the grassroots group RootsAction, which has been at the center of many calls to make the report public. “But Harris still hasn’t made any public statement that she believes it should be released. Saying so privately to some big donors is very different than publicly calling for transparency from the DNC, which is badly needed.”
Other potential 2028 contenders, including Khanna and Newsom, have urged the report’s release.
Rahm Emanuel, the former Illinois congressman and chief of staff to President Barack Obama who is exploring a 2028 White House run, did not mince words about whether the DNC should air it all out.
“We are all adults. If we can’t handle an after action report on how we spent 4 billion and lost then we are all third grade soccer players and get a medal for effort,” Emanuel said in a text message. “God help us.”
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