A Democrat who was handed a major nomination only to lose what the party considered to be a winnable general election against a detested Republican rival comes back four years later seeking to run for an open seat and finds no deference from a large field of primary opponents.
That may well be the situation facing former Vice President Kamala Harris in 2028. But the exact scenario is already playing out in Wisconsin for Mandela Barnes, the state’s former lieutenant governor who in 2022 narrowly lost a race to Senator Ron Johnson and is now planning a campaign to replace Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat who is not seeking re-election.
Ms. Harris’s book release last month prompted a round of fretting about the prospect of her running for president in 2028. Similarly, in Wisconsin there is a broad feeling of lament in the party about the possibility of another campaign from Mr. Barnes while Democrats are in search of new ideas and new candidates.
“Mandela would be the front-runner the moment he got into a campaign for the Democratic nomination, but I do not anticipate any scenario where you would see a repeat of 2022 where the other candidates bow out,” said Joe Zepecki, a Wisconsin Democratic operative who is not involved in Mr. Barnes’s deliberations.
Across the country, a similar dynamic is at play. In recent days there has been backlash against Senate Democratic leadership after the party’s campaign committee endorsed Gov. Janet Mills of Maine against Graham Platner, the midterm candidate who has generated more energy than any other to date. In Texas, James Talarico, a state legislator, is running on a platform to change the party in a primary against former Representative Colin Allred, who lost a Senate race last year. And in Michigan, Mallory McMorrow, a state legislator, is running an outsider campaign for the Senate against Representative Haley Stevens and Abdul El-Sayed, who ran for governor in 2018.
Ms. Harris has not made a public indication about her future plans.
“It’s hard to say sitting here in 2025 what Democrats are going to be shopping for in 2028,” said David Axelrod, the former adviser to President Barack Obama who has become one of the party’s elder statesmen. “It’s a fair guess that they’re going to be looking forward and not back.”
Already, several Wisconsin Democrats have begun campaigns for governor, a field that includes the state’s current lieutenant governor and a progressive state legislator who was one of the first to endorse Mr. Barnes’s 2022 Senate campaign and has long been one of his ideological compatriots.
Mr. Barnes plans to enter the race for governor as well, according to two people who have spoken with him recently. Publicly he has said he is considering joining the race and will announce a decision in the coming weeks.
Through an aide, Mr. Barnes declined to be interviewed.
The apprehension about Mr. Barnes, 38, is less about his age or a connection to a detested party establishment than it is about a desire to avoid renominating a candidate who recently lost.
Mr. Barnes served two terms in the State Assembly before he lost a primary against an incumbent state senator in 2016. Two years later he won the primary for lieutenant governor and then the general election as part of the Democratic ticket with Mr. Evers. He has long campaigned as a progressive, sponsoring legislation to eliminate cash bail and helming a climate change task force as lieutenant governor.
The field of Democrats running for Wisconsin governor already includes David Crowley, the Milwaukee County executive; Francesca Hong, a state representative from Madison; Missy Hughes, who served as Mr. Evers’s top economic adviser; Lt. Gov. Sara Rodriguez; and state Senator Kelda Roys from Madison.
The other Democratic candidates and their campaigns declined to engage directly about the prospect of Mr. Barnes entering the race.
“I welcome a spirited primary,” Ms. Roys said.
Phillip Walzak, a senior adviser to Ms. Hughes, said: “The people of Wisconsin are hungry for new leaders.”
While Mr. Barnes in 2022 fashioned himself as a dynamic newcomer emblematic of the party’s future, he lost by 1 percentage point while Mr. Evers, on the same ballot, won by more than 3 percentage points.
Mr. Evers, who has never been accused of being the nation’s most exciting governor, declared in his victory speech that “boring wins.”
A poll conducted this month by Platform Communications, a Republican political firm in the state, found that Mr. Barnes had support from 16 percent of Democrats, a figure twice as much as any of the announced Democratic candidates in the race but not necessarily high enough to intimidate primary rivals.
Even some of Mr. Barnes’s allies have been startled at the resistance to a new run. Dan Shafer, a progressive journalist in Milwaukee, wrote that he was “genuinely surprised” when only 21 percent of his followers on X responded to a poll saying Mr. Barnes should run for governor.
The leading Republican candidate is widely considered to be Representative Tom Tiffany, whose district covers a wide swath of rural northern Wisconsin. Josh Schoemann, the Washington County executive, is also running.
With Mr. Tiffany looming in the general election, the state’s Democrats increasingly find themselves comparing the situation to the uneasy prospect of Ms. Harris running again in 2028.
Dave Cieslewicz, a former Madison mayor, said there were fond feelings in the party for both Mr. Barnes and Ms. Harris, though he said there was little desire to build a new campaign around either of them.
“I was happy to vote for her, but I wouldn’t support her again for the nomination because I don’t think she can win,” Mr. Cieslewicz said. “It’s the same kind of calculation I’m making about this race for governor.”
Since he lost the 2022 Senate race, Mr. Barnes has stayed active in the state’s politics with a political action committee. He would enter the governor’s race with a far broader fund-raising network than any of his Democratic primary rivals. Since the beginning of September, he has shared his email list with at least 13 other Democratic candidates in races for governor, Senate and House across the country, each of whom asked potential donors to split donations between themselves and Mr. Barnes’s PAC.
There remains angst about Mr. Barnes’s 2022 race, which Democrats in Wisconsin and beyond viewed as winnable.
“He proved to us beyond a shadow of a doubt that he can’t run hard enough and give us a winning campaign on a statewide basis,” said Barbara Lawton, a Democrat who served as lieutenant governor for eight years.
Quentin James, who leads Collective PAC, a group aimed at building Black political power that supported Mr. Barnes’s 2022 campaign and has spoken with him about a potential run for governor, said it was harder for Black candidates to get a second chance after losing a general election. Still, he said, Mr. Barnes will have to explain his 2022 performance should he undertake a 2026 bid.
“These questions, while they may seem tough, I think they are fair,” Mr. James said. “They need to be asked and he needs to be comfortable in answering them.”
Mr. Barnes himself complained in 2022 about a lack of financial help from outside the state. Representative Gwen Moore of Wisconsin, who said she would remain neutral in the primary for governor, blamed the Senate Democrats’ campaign committee for not investing enough in the race.
“They prioritized other races,” she said. “I will forever be disappointed in them.”
Mr. Barnes has been touchy about his defeat.
During a 2023 videoconference attended by dozens of former elected officials and Democratic strategists, Mr. Barnes accused Lis Smith, the Democratic strategist best known for her work on Pete Buttigieg’s presidential campaign, of damaging his campaign with critical social media posts, according to two people who participated in the session. Ms. Smith replied that Mr. Barnes ran a lackluster campaign and deserved to lose, the people said.
Ms. Smith declined to comment.
Reid J. Epstein covers campaigns and elections from Washington. Before joining The Times in 2019, he worked at The Wall Street Journal, Politico, Newsday and The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
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