In today’s edition … Kamala Harris has history against her … Trump is deep in the heart of Texas … but first …
The big news
President Donald Trump backtracked late yesterday, (October 5,@)@^) announcing that he would stop using taxpayer money for ads promoting himself and his administration’s goals.
The ads, notably similar to Trump’s campaign messages but with the disclaimer that they were “Paid for by the U.S. Government,” aired nationwide and drew bipartisan criticism, with many calling them government-funded propaganda.
“The Radical Left is upset with the fact that I am taking Ads, which I consider to be a positive promotion for our Great U.S.A., and paying for them with U.S.A. money,” Trump wrote. He said his outside political organization, MAGA Inc., would run them instead.
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My colleague Natalie Allison has more on this.
Democrats’ Kamala Harris conundrum
It has been seven decades since Democrats nominated someone four years after losing a shot at the presidency.
That’s the issue facing Kamala Harris: Can she break that drought? Should she even try?
I joined Cleve R. Wootson Jr. and Praveena Somasundaram to explore this idea in a story that was published this morning on both the obvious opening and the clear problem facing another Harris bid.
We found considerable admiration for Harris, but also some reservations that if she does run again, she could stifle the field and prevent the party from having a fulsome conversation about what it wants to be.
Jamal Simmons, a longtime Democratic strategist who worked as Harris’s communications director in 2022, captured this dynamic well when he told Cleve that while Harris is very popular among Democrats, that won’t necessarily directly transfer into support for another campaign.
“She’s extraordinarily popular in the party and people are very fond of her and want her to be treated with a lot of respect and deference – given all the due of someone in her position,” he said. “Many people see it as a service what she did in 2024, where she really stepped up for the party, stepped up for Joe Biden, stepped up for the country. There’s a lot of respect for her. But it’s yet to be seen how much of that becomes support for another presidential run.”
If Harris runs in 2028, she would likely become the race’s front-runner immediately.
She has already struggled in that position, too. During the 2020 nomination fight, Harris entered the race in 2019 with huge attention and arguably as the frontrunner to take on Trump the next year. But she couldn’t sustain the big crowds and considerable fanfare, and her campaign ended in December 2019 before a single vote was cast.
“She is instantly the front-runner because she was our nominee the last time, she has an infrastructure that was in place that she can turn on quickly,” Clay Middleton, a former senior adviser to the Biden-Harris campaign in South Carolina and a longtime Democratic operative in the state, told me. “But can you stay up through the course of the entire cycle?”
The key question here is why repeat Democratic nominees for president almost always fail.
For those wondering, the last Democratic presidential nominee who lost a general election four years earlier was former Illinois governor Adlai Stevenson in 1956. Stevenson ran in 1952, won the Democratic nomination and lost to Dwight D. Eisenhower. He ran again in 1956, won the Democratic nomination and again lost to Eisenhower.
Other Democrats have tried it. Hubert Humphrey won his party’s nomination in 1968 and lost the general election to President Richard M. Nixon. He tried to run again in 1972 and lost in the primary to George McGovern, who later lost to Nixon. McGovern later tried but failed to win the nomination again in 1984.
A lot has changed since these failed candidates, and no one issue sank them all. But one universal truth applies to this group and Harris: Most voters want to forget their party’s losses quickly, not relive them.
Of course, scores of prominent Harris supporters would like to see her run. They point to her clear personal advantages, and the reality that South Carolina, a bastion of support for the former vice president, will be the first primary state in 2028. And L. Louise Lucas (D-Portsmouth), the first woman and first Black person to serve as president pro tempore of the Virginia Senate, said rejecting Harris in 2028 could hurt the party with Black women, a key Democratic constituency.
“There’s no question that people would be upset because you see what happened last time,” Lucas said.
You can read the full report here – and I would urge you to; there is a ton of additional reporting in the full piece.
I also wanted to give a shout-out to this newsletter’s readers. I asked a question about the potential 2028 nomination process last month, and some of your answers about Harris – her strengths and weaknesses – spurred this fuller report. I even called one reader, David Wilson, and quoted him in the piece.
“I think she is a great candidate, but I don’t want to see Harris run,” he said. “She already lost, and I don’t think there is a practical purpose when you have a lot of good candidates to put up a loser a second time around. I want new ideas.”