Too good to check or too bad to check? To a large extent, it depends on whether Democrats fall into the Kamala Harris trap twice.
After losing the 2024 general election campaign, Harris claimed to have been trapped into supporting Joe Biden's policies and choices rather than running against them. That claim reinvents history to some extent, as Harris had plenty of opportunities to take a different approach, including during an infamous exchange with Sunny Hostin on The View. Hostin asked Harris what she would do differently from Biden – whose popularity had cratered – and Harris couldn't articulate an answer. To be fair, articulation has never been a strong suit for Harris.
Well, that was then, but this is the Communist Now, baby! Kamala apparently wants to explore the DemSoc candidate she could be, unburdened by the Biden that has been. Axios reports that the former veep and the most disastrous Democrat presidential nominee since Michael Dukakis wants to reinvent herself as an ally of Zohran Mamdani and the Democratic Socialists of America:
Kamala Harris privately called New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani last week and has been holding lengthy, closed-door meetings with other prominent progressives — including pro-Palestinian activists.
Why it matters: It's the latest sign the former vice president is laying the groundwork for a potential White House run in 2028 — and looking to strengthen or repair her relationships with left-wing Democrats.
She's not looking to repair her links to the Left wing. Harris wants to strengthen ties to radicals at the expense of the rest of her party. At the same time, Axios published this and also reported that House Democrats have been "staggered" by losses to the DSA and Mamdani's activist allies. (I'll have more on that later today.) Rather than act as a stabilizing leader within the party that anointed her to the ticket, Harris has chosen to toss its leadership and members under the bus to chase the radicals.
Party leadership isn't the only entity Harris will throw under the bus, either. Israel will become a target for Harris in her new run for the presidency:
Harris and her team also have been reaching out to pro-Palestinian activists during the past year, including at least one who helped lead the "Uncommitted Movement," which grew out of opposition to former President Biden's policy on the war in Gaza.
Worth noting: the American electorate still largely supports Israel against Hamas and Hezbollah, as the Harvard-Harris CAPS poll shows consistently. This position may get a lot of attention, but it remains a fringe position in American politics. Harris may not have actively courted the Dearbornistan contingent in 2024, but she and Biden made it clear that they leaned in that direction during the entirety of the war after Hamas' October 7 massacres. Harris wound up losing every swing state in the election and became the first Democrat to lose the presidential popular vote in 20 years.
That's what makes this good news ... for Republicans. Harris is an entirely incompetent campaigner, and the conventional wisdom has been that a presidential bid wouldn't survive first contact with her primary opponents. Harris enjoys a significant lead in primary polling thus far – ten points over her nearest competitor, Gavin Newsom, in RCP's aggregation – but she's not on the campaign trail, and largely not speaking publicly at all. Harris always did far better as a theoretical candidate than she ever did as an actual politician on the stump.
If Harris gets DSA backing for her campaign, though, that may very well inoculate Harris against her own incompetence. Even bad debate performances may not slow her down if Mamdani and the radical activists get behind her. If Kamala makes it to Iowa and New Hampshire, something she couldn't manage on her own in 2019, the communists will likely steamroll her competition, especially in caucus states. The DSA's impact has been mainly limited to safe, urban Democrat districts, but those are overrepresented in Democrat primaries and especially caucuses. Needless to say, Harris best fits the DSA profile among Democrat contenders at the moment as a black female who already has grievances against the Democrat establishment, even if those grievances are nonsense on stilts in reality.
If Harris wins the nomination with this strategy, it sets up the GOP for two key arguments. First, they can ask voters if they want to return to the same incompetent cabal that hid Joe Biden's dementia for four years and the policy failures that produced. They can also attack Harris as an agent of socialist/communist revolutionaries, which will resonate in all of the rest of America outside of those deep-blue districts in which the DSA mainly exerts its influence. The bad news, though, will be that a Harris nomination would greatly expand the DSA's credibility, unless it results in a landslide loss for Democrats. And while that's possible, much will depend on the choice of Republican nominee and the success in the next two years of Donald Trump on economic issues.
Still, better to run against Harris than practically anyone else in the ring thus far.
