Harris gives California governor’s race a serious look
Kamala Harris is leaning toward entering the California gubernatorial race, sources familiar with the former vice president’s thinking tell The Hill.
While the sources caution that Harris hasn’t made a final decision yet and is still considering all her options, they say she has made it clear that she is not done with public service and is giving the race strong consideration.
Those who have spoken to Harris about the possibility of entering the race say it has given her a renewed sense of excitement and, as one source put it, “a glimmer in her eyes.”
“She has a lot of people in her ear telling her that it makes the most sense and she can do the most good,” said one source who has spoken to Harris about a potential run.
But another source close to Harris pushed back on the idea that she is inclined to enter the contest. The source said the topic of the gubernatorial race is dominating many of the conversations she is having simply because of the fast-approaching 2026 match-up.
Either way, the sources say Harris is sticking to a self-imposed end-of-summer deadline in deciding whether to wade into the already-crowded governor’s race, where the contest includes former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and former California Attorney General Xavier Becerra, who was also a member of the Biden administration as secretary of Health and Human Services.
The former vice president is planning to take some time off in July, when sources say she hopes to further reflect on the next step in her political career.
Harris's office did not comment for this story.
In recent weeks, Harris has been participating in a string of conversations about the political climate in the state and the issues on the minds of Californians, the sources say. She has been particularly interested in the issues facing younger voters and has been holding lengthy discussions about the future of artificial intelligence (AI).
Harris has kept a relatively low profile in recent months after a devastating loss in the 2024 presidential election — a race she thought she could win. While California has been in the headlines for a rash of news events, including the protests over Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids in Los Angeles earlier this month and the wildfires that ravaged major swaths of the state in January, the extent of Harris’s public involvement has been posts on social platform X.
“Los Angeles is my home,” Harris wrote in a statement earlier this month on the protests. “And like so many Americans, I am appalled at what we are witnessing on the streets of our city. Deploying the National Guard is a dangerous escalation meant to provoke chaos.”
“In addition to the recent ICE raids in Southern California and across our nation, it is part of the Trump administration’s cruel, calculated agenda to spread panic and division,” she added.
Those close to the former vice president say she has been appalled by the Trump administration's bold moves, like deploying the National Guard. Harris has told confidants that she feels the president is governing by loyalty and retribution and that such actions will propel her to reenter public service.
“This moment almost requires her to do it,” one source close to Harris said.
At the same time, if she chooses to enter the race, her confidants know she will have to contend with looming narratives about whether she helped conceal former President Biden’s decline, something Republicans continue to press her on.
Even one of her would-be opponents, Villaraigosa, has made it a talking point.
“Voters deserve to know the truth, what did Kamala Harris and Xavier Becerra know, when did they know it, and most importantly, why didn’t either of them speak out? This cover up directly led to a second Donald Trump term,” Villaraigosa wrote in a post on X last month that took aim at two potential rivals.
Against the backdrop of these questions, there’s a thought among some Democrats that a run for governor would be “a consolation prize” with Harris having been close to winning the presidency less than a year ago. Her confidants cringe at that sentiment, and they say Harris brushes off such commentary.
A decision by Harris to run for governor would be significant, political observers say, because it could take a 2028 presidential run off the table.
“I don't think she could, with a straight face, run for governor in 2026 without making an absolute pledge that she would not run for president in 2028,” said Garry South, a California-based Democratic strategist.
An Emerson College poll in April revealed that 50 percent of Democratic voters in California would support Harris in a gubernatorial run. A separate survey from Politico/UC Berkeley Citrin Center also released in April revealed that 33 percent of Democratic voters in California would be “joyful” about a Harris bid and 41 percent would be “mostly excited.”
Though those polls show she would be the clear front-runner in the race, some Democrats say they don’t think that’s enough for her to maintain a clear field.
“She would start out, at least initially, as the front-runner. There's no doubt about it because she has 100 percent name ID in California,” South said. “I think there are real mixed feelings about her among California Democrats, and I think those mixed feelings would grow if she actually got into the race.”
“She doesn't come into this as an 800-pound gorilla,” he added.
Even as some close to her say she’s leaning toward running, some former aides and longtime observers in the state say they doubt Harris will run for governor because she has been, as one former aide put it, “absent” from the events that have dominated the state.
In the face of this month’s protests in Los Angeles, for example, Harris was in the Hamptons attending the wedding of Huma Abedin and Alex Soros — two big names within Democratic circles. In April, Harris spoke at a gala before hundreds of donors in San Francisco and made no mention of state issues or political affairs.
“She’s the kind of person that if she’s going to do something, she’s very serious about it, focused on it,” said Elizabeth Ashford, a California-based communications adviser who served as Harris’s chief of staff when she was the state’s attorney general. “It just seems to me that this would be a summer of reintroducing herself as a Californian to Californians if that were really front of mind.”
In the months since she left office, Harris has made most of her public appearances outside of California.
Last month, the former vice president spoke at a closed-room real estate conference in Australia following a surprise Met Gala appearance in New York. She was in Las Vegas for a conference on AI in March and engaged with students at a Maryland community college in December.
Her loss of the presidency in November raises questions for some California Democrats about how she will address the issue they say Democratic voters in the state care most about.
“I think California Democrats right now want somebody who’s going to get in Trump's face,” said South, the California-based Democratic strategist. “But I'm not sure that someone who just lost pretty badly to Donald Trump can posit themselves as the best counter against Donald Trump if they were to be governor of California.”