ANAHEIM, Calif. – As hundreds of California Democrats gathered at their party’s convention this weekend, a half-dozen gubernatorial candidates hustled from room to room courting them. The main potential contender who could upend the race – Kamala Harris – was nowhere to be seen.
Since returning home to California, Harris has kept a low profile as she weighs whether she will enter a crowded field of contenders vying to succeed term-limited Gov. Gavin Newsom in 2026. She may also be positioning herself to seek the Democratic presidential nomination again in 2028. The former vice president has flown so far below the radar that she was almost an afterthought for many delegates at this gathering of party insiders.
Harris, who will decide on the governor’s race by late summer, according to several people with knowledge of her thinking, appeared briefly Saturday afternoon in a video message to delegates. She offered no hints about her future – simply encouraging activists to keep fighting the GOP’s efforts to cut health care, education and programs to address the climate crisis.
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While her appearance on the jumbotrons initially drew cheers, many delegates continued their side conversations in the convention hall as the video played.
Now that more than six months have passed since the presidential election, some prominent figures on the left, including Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont), are also more openly criticizing the Harris campaign’s strategy and questioning why so many working-class voters chose Donald Trump over the vice president. Speaking at the California convention on Saturday night, Harris’s running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, raised alarm about the Democratic Party’s image, arguing that many voters view them as a “deer in headlights” and said they are at risk of becoming “roadkill.”
Though Harris handily won California with 58.5 percent of the vote, her 20-percentage point margin over Trump was smaller than Joe Biden’s 29-percentage point margin over Trump in 2020.
In more than two dozen interviews at the Anaheim gathering, many Democratic delegates spoke with reverence and appreciation for their 2024 presidential nominee, but also ambivalence about whether she should run for governor.
“I think she’d be fine. I mean, she’s already been a state leader, right?” said Pasadena delegate Denise Robb, who said she canvassed for Harris in Reno and Las Vegas “from sunup until sundown” last year. “It’s just that she lost the presidential race and she’s been almost – gone. We don’t hear from her. We don’t see her.”
The 63-year-old professor, who said she would prefer a more “unapologetically progressive” nominee for governor, said if Harris runs she hopes she will “get some fire” outside the trappings of a presidential campaign “because she really just needs to be herself.”
After taking a selfie Friday night with former congresswoman Katie Porter – who declared her candidacy for governor in March – Amanda Day, a 43-year-old delegate from Merced, said her support for Harris in the presidential race wouldn’t automatically translate to the governor’s race.
Day said she would lean toward Porter because she has spoken in personal and relatable terms about the financial struggles she has faced as a single mom with high living costs in California and how she would try to fix them.
Day also predicted that Harris’s record as the state’s attorney general would draw fresh scrutiny as it did when Harris ran for president in 2019. Day cited her own concerns about the high incarceration rate of Black and Hispanic people during those years.
“I liked her as a presidential candidate, but it was a different job,” Day said. “Coming back to California is a whole other story. She has history here.”
Earlier this year, the governor’s race looked like an easy target for Harris. Many political insiders assumed that she would automatically clear the Democratic field because of her popularity within the party, her deep connections with its elites and her extensive network of donors across the country.
But former Los Angeles mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and former Health and Human Services secretary Xavier Becerra have made it clear that they won’t leave the race if Harris enters. Porter said in an interview this weekend that she would make that decision if the time comes.
Republicans are eager to take on Harris once again, in part because her candidacy could create lucrative fundraising opportunities for longshot GOP candidates like conservative commentator Steve Hilton and Riverside Sheriff Chad Bianco. A spokeswoman for Harris did not respond to requests for comment.
Villaraigosa has argued that Harris needs to answer questions about whether she covered up Biden’s cognitive decline, after revelations in the new book by journalists Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson. And he has pointed to Harris’s struggles with working-class voters to argue she is not the strongest Democratic messenger at a moment when cost of living concerns are still top of mind for most California voters.
The former Los Angeles mayor has long warned that the Democratic Party is at risk of becoming the party primarily of people with a college education. He has centered his campaign on costs since he announced his bid last summer, including focusing on his advocacy for an “all of the above” energy policy that acknowledges the historical importance of the oil and gas industry in California.
“You can’t continue to be a party of just people that drive a Tesla and not people that drive a pickup or ride the bus like my mom,” Villaraigosa said in an interview. He questioned why Harris embraced a message of “joy” during her campaign in 2024.
“Tell that to somebody struggling to make ends meet – to the hotel worker who lives in the desert in the Coachella Valley, drives to Los Angeles, works in two different hotels, sleeps in the parking lot between those two shifts and stays there for three or four days and then goes back home,” Villaraigosa said. “I think I’m speaking for a broader cross-section of California.”
Becerra, who like Harris served as California’s attorney general before joining the Biden administration, has touted that he has more executive experience than his current and potential rivals.
When pressed on whether he was suggesting that his job running HHS during the covid-19 pandemic was more challenging than the role of vice president, Becerra said he couldn’t say precisely what Harris went through as vice president. But he noted that he was “the CEO for the largest public health agency in the world” with a budget twice as big as the Defense Department and five times bigger than California’s budget.
“I parachuted in right in the heart, the depth of the covid pandemic. So we had to figure out how quickly save lives,” Becerra said in an interview. “I’m hoping to prove to folks that I’m that CEO who can deliver results, because I have gone through it at the levels you would expect from the governor of the fourth largest economy in the world.”
But Harmeeth Nijjar, a 29-year-old recent law school graduate from Malibu, said Harris’s experience as a prosecutor and the skills that she showed taking on Trump during their presidential debate would be key assets given that California’s governor would be continually facing off against a hostile administration.
“A zealous advocate for this state and the people of this state is really important for California,” Nijjar said.
“She deserves something,” Nijjar added, “some level of influence on what’s going on in this country right now.”
Becerra, Porter and three other female candidates for governor – Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis, Toni Atkins, the former leader of the California State Senate, and former state controller Betty Yee – all continually crossed paths at the convention as they made their pitches at caucus meetings and had one-on-one conversations with delegates on the sidelines.
Watching all the candidates mingle after getting Becerra’s cellphone number for a more extensive chat, Jimmie Woods-Gray, the 82-year-old former chair of the Los Angeles County Democratic Party, said for the moment she was most drawn to Becerra’s “down to earth,” approachable style and his past performance in each of his roles. When asked whether she would support Harris over Becerra, she paused: “Maybe,” she said. “I’m still open.”
“I just want Kamala to either tell us she’s running or she’s not running,” Woods-Gray said. “You know, that’s when the game really starts.”