Vice President Kamala Harris has offered no hint of what she may do next after her bid for the White House failed, but a recent poll in her home state of California in late October showed that if she were to run for governor there in 2026, nearly half of voters were open to supporting her.
Forty-six percent of registered voters, in California, when asked if they would back Ms. Harris for governor if she were not elected president, answered that they were very likely or somewhat likely to vote for her, according to the poll conducted by the University of California at Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies and co-sponsored by The Los Angeles Times. While the hypothetical situation it asked about did not include a named challenger, the poll found the appetite for a Harris candidacy among Democrats, who outnumber Republicans 2-to-1 on the state’s voter rolls, at 72 percent.
The poll was conducted from Oct. 22-29, before former President Donald J. Trump defeated Ms. Harris in the Nov. 5 presidential election.
Gavin Newsom, California’s current governor, is serving his second term and cannot seek another when he steps down in two years. The race to take his place as the leader of the nation’s most populous state is expected to draw interest from numerous top Democrats.
Ms. Harris won in the West Coast, the Northeast and a smattering of other states, but was swept in seven key battleground states by Mr. Trump and is on pace to lose the popular vote to him. Originally from the Bay Area, she served in increasingly powerful roles in California over the course of her political career, including as state attorney general and U.S. senator, before being elected vice president in 2020.
Ms. Harris — who has kept a home in the upscale West Los Angeles neighborhood of Brentwood with her husband, Doug Emhoff — has not discussed her future plans.Representatives for the vice president did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Wednesday about the poll.
During the truncated race between Mr. Trump and Ms. Harris, who replaced President Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket in the summer, Mr. Trump made a point of bashing California.
He frequently blamed Ms. Harris for crime, energy costs and other problems there, arguing that she and Mr. Newsom personified liberal policies that were failing the state and its largest cities, including San Francisco, where Ms. Harris served as district attorney during the early 2000s.
Mr. Trump even held a campaign rally in California, a blue bastion that has more electoral votes than any other state and has not backed a Republican for president since George H.W. Bush in 1988.
In last week’s election, Ms. Harris secured California’s 54 electoral votes and is 21 percentage points ahead of Mr. Trump, with about 79 percent of the vote counted in the state.
Governor Newsom, who was elected in 2018 and re-elected in 2022, is widely viewed as harboring presidential ambitions of his own. After Mr. Biden’s disastrous debate performance against Mr. Trump in June and before he dropped out of the race, Mr. Newsom was among several prominent Democrats being mentioned as potential replacements on the ticket. But he quickly moved to tamp down the chatter and later sought to use his warchest to challenge Republicans in red states, criticizing their support for abortion bans.
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