The one thing that Kamala Harris absolutely, definitely, most certainly does not want to talk about is whether she is thinking about running for president again.
“It’s three years from nooooow,” the former vice president pleaded in an interview last month, sitting in a leather chair backstage at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville before one of the final stops on her nationwide book tour. “I mean, honestly.”
Ms. Harris is busy selling books — a lot of them. She is not yet selling herself.
Old advisers, both allied and estranged, have squinted from afar at her book tour, wondering what exactly her strategy is, or if there is any at all. She has done little to distance herself from former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. besides admitting aloud that it was “recklessness” on her part not to have discouraged him from running again. There has been virtually none of the strategic repackaging that a future candidate typically does, the buffing out of flaws and shining up of strengths.
Defeat hit Ms. Harris deeply. She had not felt such grief since the death of her mother, she has said, a line that sears even as she repeats it so often as to become a talking point. She spent the early months of 2025 cooking and cocooning away from the cameras.
But it has been a year since her loss to President Trump, the traditional period of mourning.
Friends and allies swear she is more relaxed now. She is certainly more relaxed about swearing.
On a recent long-form podcast, the likes of which she got so much heat for avoiding last year, Ms. Harris let fly a two-word phrase — rhyming with “bucket” — to describe her new ethos. She says she is now on her “freedom tour.”
This is Kamala Harris unleashed. But it is still Kamala Harris, the profanity a proxy for plain-spokenness. She is the first woman to serve as vice president, and well attuned to the double standards of gender and race. Lawyerly language remains her safe space, and she still defaults to acting as if every question is part of a deposition where answers can and will be used against her.
She has mostly been a bystander in the Democratic Party’s raging debate over its direction. Should Democrats veer to the left or center? More populism? More progressivism? Both? Neither? What exactly should the party stand for?
“This sounds really corny,” she said in the wide-ranging interview with The New York Times in Nashville. “But we have to stand for the people. And I know that that sounds corny. I know that. But I mean it. I mean it.”
This portrait of the former vice president at a pivot point was reported through interviews with more than two dozen current and past advisers and others close to her, many of whom requested anonymity to speak candidly.
Ms. Harris has made clear she doesn’t “feel burdened” — yes, she still uses that phrase — by where she fits in the punditry pecking order or the polls or the cable chyrons. She is enjoying the freedom from what she calls the “transactional” constrictions of campaigning, of asking people for a vote.
Her place in history is already secure, and she knows it.
“I understand the focus on ’28 and all that,” she said in the interview. “But there will be a marble bust of me in Congress. I am a historic figure like any vice president of the United States ever was.”
The crowd in Nashville was just starting to line up around the block. Big, cheering, adoring. Only two politicians in America have pulled off nationwide tours this year and packed so many venues. One is Bernie Sanders. He is 84, a figure in his final act. The other is Ms. Harris, 61.
After years of being hailed as the future — the “female Barack Obama” label came as early as 2009, when she was still just a district attorney — Ms. Harris is suddenly at risk of her time having passed.
Yet people aren’t just showing up for her. They’re paying to see her.
“Thousands of people are coming to hear my voice. Thousands and thousands,” she said. “Every place we’ve gone has been sold out.”
The question is what she wants to say.
Can Harris build back better?
Inside her husband’s Los Angeles golf club in June, Ms. Harris gathered her political brain trust to think through whether she should run for governor of California.
There are no shoo-ins in politics. But the path to such a prestigious office is rarely more paved than it was for Ms. Harris at the time.
Her team made two presentations, according to three people with direct knowledge of the strategy session. Option one was to run for governor. Option two was to focus on a new nonprofit group that would research and promote issues she cares about.
There was no presidential presentation.
A month later, she officially passed on a run for governor, and the next day revealed she had written “107 Days,” a diary of her abbreviated 2024 candidacy. The book tour spanned 17 cities, three countries and lasted more than half as long as the campaign she was memorializing.
The book takes small swipes at potential 2028 rivals: She didn’t consider Pete Buttigieg for vice president because she didn’t believe America was ready for a ticket with a Black woman and a gay man. She was disappointed in Tim Walz’s debate performance. She found parts of Josh Shapiro’s vice-presidential interview off-putting.
But the dishiest details are her private feelings about and frustrations with Mr. Biden.
“I’m not going to talk about my conversations with him,” she said in the interview when asked about any post-book fallout with the former president. She interrupted a follow-up question: “I’m sure it’s on your list,” she said with her familiar laugh. “You can check that you did.”
Onstage in Nashville, she was asked, basically, if Mr. Biden had done her dirty. If he had doomed her by dropping out so late and privately urging her not to distance herself from him.
Her answer began with “I think there are many variables that were at play” and eventually landed on “perhaps.”
The circumstances of Ms. Harris’s loss meant that many sympathetic Democrats blamed Mr. Biden.
Yet in the year since, she has not capitalized on that good will. She has let others lead the fight against Mr. Trump, and has slipped in the way-too-early 2028 primary polls. One pre-Thanksgiving survey in New Hampshire placed her in the single digits, in a distant third place.
Ms. Harris does not fear losing to other Democrats if she runs again, one person close to her said. She is unconcerned about potential rivals seizing the spotlight because she is already so well known, another added. She believes she has more time than anyone to decide about 2028, said a third.
Behind the scenes, Ms. Harris has been re-engaging.
Her team has formed a political action committee called Fight for the People, and she has reached a deal with the Democratic National Committee to pay roughly $7 million for her email list, two people briefed on the arrangement said. A first payment has been made. She plans to ramp up her political activity in 2026.
She called Zohran Mamdani, the incoming mayor of New York City, the day after he won, offering advice on how to hire his staff and serve as an executive.
“I do not think he’s a scary face for the Democratic Party,” she said of Mr. Mamdani, a 34-year-old democratic socialist, praising the excitement he has generated from younger voters.
She also called the moderate Democratic women who won governorships, Abigail Spanberger in Virginia and Mikie Sherrill in New Jersey. All told, Ms. Harris made more than 40 congratulatory calls after the election — to new state senators in Mississippi, incoming city council members in South Carolina and even a school board trustee in Idaho.
It was among the most calls to other elected officials she had made so quickly since Mr. Biden dropped out. And it was exactly the kind of thing that a person planning to run for president might do.
What kind of change does she believe in?
The elevator pitch of Ms. Harris’s ideology remains as elusive as ever.
In public and in private, she has been exploring issues of trust, misinformation, social media, community and artificial intelligence. She is particularly obsessed with young people and their growing disillusionment, which she shares.
“For now, I don’t want to go back in the system,” she told Stephen Colbert in her first interview about her book. “I think it’s broken.”
It was a striking statement from a politician who spent her career inside government, a Black woman who had to persuade her family of the value of working in a prosecutor’s office, of making change from within. But what she sees as the “capitulation” of American institutions to Mr. Trump — law firms, universities, the news media — has shaken her confidence in the old order.
Now she faces a crossroads — between her instincts as an incrementalist insider and the present demands of so many for transformational thinking.
The mission statement of her new nonprofit group, KDH for the People, is so broad as to be unobjectionable to almost anyone: “To strengthen communities across America through the promotion of economic opportunity, justice and protection of fundamental freedoms.”
If Ms. Harris were to run again, it is almost anyone’s guess what the campaign would be about.
“The vice president is a lawyer who is very practiced at presenting other people’s cases. The challenge for her is to present her own case,” said Jamal Simmons, who served as Ms. Harris’s communications director for a year of her vice presidency. “I think Kamala Harris needs to be very clear with herself about what she is willing to expose — and advocate for — and how much of herself she is willing to put onto the altar of public examination.”
In her book, she laments her botched appearance on ABC’s “The View” in 2024, when she said that “nothing comes to mind” about what she would have done differently from Mr. Biden. Yet even in the recent interview with The Times, the first mistakes she cited were more strategic than substantive.
She said she would have rearranged the order of the administration’s priorities, focusing first on extending child tax credits and paid family leave. Pressed for an actual misstep, she added not doing more to pressure Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel for how he was waging the Gaza war “as it related to innocent Palestinians.”
She is focused on affordability now, and praised the recent shutdown strategy to fight for health care subsidies.
The day after it ended, Ms. Harris called Senator Jon Ossoff of Georgia, who is the party’s most endangered incumbent and had opposed the vote to reopen, to offer her support in any way he needed, according to two people who described the call.
But in the interview, Ms. Harris declined to say anything about the moderate Democrats who ended the shutdown — “I’m not going to engage in a circular firing squad” — or about Senator Chuck Schumer, the Democratic leader, whose place in the party is under increasing pressure.
“We need to focus on where we are now and moving forward,” she said.
‘She raises money and she excites crowds’
Ms. Harris did not hesitate when the actress Sophia Bush asked her at a recent event what, in hindsight, she would write on a Post-it note to herself on the first day of her 2024 campaign.
“Get more days,” she said.
But it is not apparent whether more time would have helped or hurt.
Ms. Harris met the big moments in 2024, especially the convention and the debate. But her candidacy lost steam in the long interludes in between. She similarly rocketed out of the gate in her 2020 presidential primary run with a splashy kickoff and a scorching first debate. She dropped out before a single vote was cast.
“As a political athlete, Vice President Harris excels and performs at her best when there’s urgency,” said Herbie Ziskend, who served as an adviser to Ms. Harris while she was vice president.
Plenty of Democrats now see her as a symbol of a painful past. Her defeat after raising and spending $1.5 billion in 15 weeks left a particularly sour taste for major donors.
Ms. Harris still has enviable political assets, including passionate support from two core Democratic constituencies: Black voters and women. As she walked last month through Fisk University, a historically Black college in Nashville, young Black women literally leaped for joy.
Black voters, particularly in the South, have swung the party’s last two open presidential nominating contests. Ms. Harris has made a point of traveling through the South on her book tour. Her stop in Birmingham, Ala., was so popular that the venue added a second event.
“That’s what so many of the white boys — the Josh Shapiros, the Gavin Newsoms of the world and even Pete, although I would vote for Pete — that’s what they miss about Kamala,” said Bakari Sellers, a former South Carolina legislator who has been an informal Harris adviser, referring to the governors of Pennsylvania and California and to Mr. Buttigieg, the former transportation secretary. “She is so important to so many people.”
At the Ryman, Ms. Harris drew one of her loudest ovations when she knowingly described a future president as “whoever she may be.”
Michelle Obama, the former first lady, recently cast doubt on the country’s willingness to elect a woman as president. Ms. Harris does not have such reservations. “I do believe the country is ready,” she said.
Minyon Moore, a close Harris confidante who is a senior D.N.C. member, said Ms. Harris’s future in the party could be whatever she wanted.
“There are two things she does well: She raises money and she excites crowds,” Ms. Moore said. “Two of the things you need: people and money. And I would add a third. She has a love and passion for this country.”
A ‘very talented’ California rival
Ms. Harris’s career has risen in tandem and in tension with Gov. Gavin Newsom of California ever since they were sworn into office in San Francisco on the same day two decades ago.
Their relationship is complex, to say the least. In her book, she needled him by revealing that he never returned her call the day Mr. Biden dropped out. “Hiking. Will call back,” he texted.
(Incidentally, Mr. Newsom said on a podcast at the time that he had been on a treadmill; an aide clarified that he was initially on a treadmill and later went on a hike.)
Mr. Newsom has questioned why the episode was included, given that he endorsed her so quickly. He texted Ms. Harris to ask her this after her book came out, he recounted recently to a video game streamer.
He said she had a pithy reply of her own: “On book tour. Get back to you later.”
“Anyway,” Mr. Newsom said with a laugh, “that’s the relationship.”
Representatives for both declined to comment on the texts.
He did not give a speech at her convention — logistics was the excuse — and this year it can be hard not to hear his critiques of the party’s failures as swipes at her, even if he doesn’t quite say so. “We got our asses kicked and it wasn’t just Kamala — she had, there was difficult circumstances for anybody,” he told the streamer.
The Newsom and Harris circles of advisers have always overlapped. But Mr. Newsom has now subsumed Ms. Harris’s former network to a startling degree.
Her former chief of staff is now his. Her former chief consulting firm is now his. Her former campaign manager ran Mr. Newsom’s redistricting ballot measure campaign.
Meanwhile, her political orbit is still shrinking: Sheila Nix, currently her top adviser, is leaving at the end of the year. Also gone is her Secret Service detail, which Mr. Trump stripped early. Mr. Newsom quickly dispatched California Highway Patrol officers to fill in.
So can Ms. Harris envision a President Newsom?
“He has to make that decision if he wants to first,” she said, later adding: “I think Gavin is very talented. I really do. And I think we have many talented people.”
A new way forward?
Ms. Harris’s book is certainly selling.
Her publisher said it had sold more than 600,000 copies across all formats, making it the best-selling memoir published this year.
The book was the animating force of Ms. Harris’s political life in 2025. Now the rollout is over, though more events are planned next spring in Phoenix, Denver and California.
So what’s next?
The midterms loom, along with the question of how much and where she will campaign after a mostly quiet 2025.
Ms. Harris said one of the best parts of not running for office had been listening to people instead of talking at them. Her nonprofit group has been organizing closed-door listening sessions.
“I can’t be relevant if I don’t have a sense of where people are,” she explained after meeting with some younger male gig musicians.
The trip was her first to Tennessee since early 2023, when she raced to arrive the day after the State House expelled two young Black Democrats for a gun-control protest.
That forceful visit was seen by many Democrats as a key moment in finding her voice.
Ms. Harris, however, has a correction to that timeline.
“You tell them,” she said, “I never lost my voice.”
Shane Goldmacher is a Times national political correspondent.
The post Kamala Harris Isn’t Ready to Be Written Off appeared first on New York Times.
