Kamala Harris’s Next Moves? A Big Speech, a Bigger Book, and Perhaps a Run for Office

Kamala Harris was most definitely saying I told you so about Donald Trump. Last week the former vice president made a surprise appearance at a women’s leadership conference in California’s Orange County, giving her first extended remarks since her November 6 concession speech. Harris’s tone was somber, with one major exception. “There were many things that we knew would happen,” she said before departing from her written text. “I’m not here to say I told you so! I swore I wasn’t gonna say that!”

With that, Harris briefly backed away from the mic, laughing and grinning. “I thought she performed incredibly well—one of her best speeches,” says Ashley Etienne, who worked as Harris’s communications director during her first year as vice president and was in the room last week. “The way I read it was, she felt a little lighter in her presentation but heavier in the depth of what she was saying.”

Those eight minutes may have also been a preview of what’s to come: Harris, according to an associate, is now writing a longer and broader speech that will address the chaotic moment the country is enduring, with a tentative aim of delivering it in the next several months. She is also at work on a book. Both moves will stoke even more speculation about Harris’s plans, which are already the subject of considerable debate in her own camp: Should she run for governor of California in 2026 or mount a third presidential bid in 2028? Or none of the above? “She’s taking a second to figure out how she can best serve in this moment,” a senior adviser says. “People are expecting her to only be guided by this blind ambition of, ‘I want to be in charge,’ when in fact a lot of the roles she’s played are because one, she wants to do the job, but two, she knows how she can make the biggest difference.”

Harris has mostly been offstage during President Trump’s first 100 days, drawing some criticism from a Democratic Party in search of leadership. She certainly earned a break, having run a frantic 107-day presidential campaign, which saw her pile up 75 million votes but lose the Electoral College decisively. Harris took a short vacation in Hawaii, put on a stoic face at Trump’s inauguration, and helped distribute food in Altadena amid the January wildfires in Southern California. Harris has also, a friend says, been catching up on her passion for cooking, spending time with her nieces and nephews, and soliciting suggestions for TV shows to binge-watch.

But even though Harris is out of elected office for the first time in 21 years, she is not entirely out of the game. She has been working the phones; focusing on how to improve the party’s state-level infrastructure and social media presence; chatting up donors; and congratulating activists for helping defeat four Republican ballot measures in Louisiana.

Harris has also been assessing the reasons for her defeat, if not dwelling on the what-ifs. “In my experience, she is not the kind of person who ruminates on the past,” says Jamal Simmons, who served as vice presidential communications director in the middle of Harris’s term. “Working for her, sometimes you want to spend time licking your wounds or celebrating your success. She’s thinking about, Here’s where we are—what do we need to do to get to the next place? You’re like, Can we have a cocktail first?”

Her team’s early reading, perhaps unsurprisingly, is that Harris wasn’t the problem in 2024. “What she ran on—health care and housing and small businesses—that wasn’t the wrong message,” says Sheila Nix, Harris’s chief of staff during the campaign and now in private life. “The people who heard that message, they liked it. So it shouldn’t be, ‘Oh my God, throw your hands up in the air. We don’t even know what to say to people.’ No, that’s not true. The values she talked about and the things she cared about were important to the people who heard them.”

One obvious place for Harris to go next is the 2026 California governor’s race—an option too obvious, in the view of some of her advisers, who see quickly jumping into the contest as the political equivalent of dating a rebound boyfriend. Others believe she’ll be unable to stay out of the action for long. “She hasn’t been out of public service during her entire career,” a Harris insider says. “I think it will be difficult for her to pass up a bird in the hand.”

Harris has told allies she will make up her mind by the end of this summer. At least 10 Democrats have already declared their candidacy to succeed the term-limited current governor, Gavin Newsom. Harris would instantly become the front-runner if she were to join the field, and most of the other Democratic candidates would probably step aside, though former Los Angeles mayor Antonio Villaraigosa has said he’d stay in the fight, and he could be formidable in a runoff. “He has a stronger relationship with Republicans in the state than Kamala does, and he has a more real relationship with Latino voters across the state than Kamala does,” says Mike Trujillo, a former strategist for Villaraigosa’s mayoral campaign. In March, former representative Katie Porter, another Democrat in the gubernatorial race, also made an indirect dig at Harris’s delayed decision-making: “No one should be waiting to lead. I think we need to make a case right now.”

Yet Harris needs to determine whether she wants to run for president again in three years before deciding whether she wants to run for governor next year. Her keeping the national option open provided a not-so-subtle subtext for her speech last week: It came as possible 2028 Democratic primary rivals—including New Jersey senator Cory Booker, Illinois governor JB Pritzker, Connecticut senator Chris Murphy, New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and even former Harris running mate Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota—have been aggressively promoting themselves. They are in the middle of the conversation that has been raging for the past few months, about how the Democratic Party can and should remake itself—a discussion from which Harris has been largely absent.

“I think she deserves to be part of that conversation. She’s earned the right to put her thumb on the scale of what’s next here,” a Harris insider says. “Democrats, in general, are lacking messengers who have name ID and respect. And I think people need to remember that she only lost the popular vote by 1.5%.”

Maybe Harris will benefit from maintaining a relatively low profile for now, allowing Trump to flail and giving voters space to forget what they disliked about her. But if she ramps up her visibility without a more potent message, she risks allowing an unflattering conventional wisdom to congeal. “Right after the election, people were like, ‘Oh, she did everything she could,’” a former high-ranking Biden-Harris campaign operative says. “Now the consensus is building that the future of the party isn’t someone like her—an overly cautious candidate who let other people define her and played things extremely, extremely safe. And even in 2028, the Biden baggage is gonna be an issue for her.”

As thoroughly as Harris laughed at her own joke last week, she certainly can’t enjoy being proven right about Trump and watching from the sidelines as he demolishes the federal government and so many democratic norms. Harris closed her speech by vowing, “I’m not going anywhere.” Now she just needs to figure out where, exactly, she wants to go.