Kamala Harris wants the Democratic National Committee to stop sitting on its postmortem of her failed 2024 presidential campaign, and she's telling donors she has no objection to making the findings public. The move comes as the former vice president openly considers a third bid for the presidency in 2028, a prospect that has divided Democratic donors, strategists, and party officials who are still sorting through the wreckage of a $1.5 billion loss.
NBC News reported that Harris has been privately discussing political next steps with allies, donors, and other Democrats. She publicly acknowledged at a National Action Network event in New York last month that she is "thinking about" running again. Behind the scenes, she has been building what looks like the early scaffolding of a campaign, hiring staff, courting Black voters across the South, and developing policy positions on issues she plans to champion.
But the DNC autopsy remains a sore point. Chairman Ken Martin had promised to conduct a comprehensive review of the 2024 defeat and share the results with the public. He has since gone back on that vow, keeping the report under wraps. Harris, for her part, has told donors she believes the party committee should release it. Whether that amounts to genuine transparency or a calculated effort to shift blame away from her candidacy and toward the party apparatus is a question Democrats have not yet answered.
The scale of the defeat is hard to overstate. Harris lost the electoral vote to Donald Trump 312, 226 and trailed in the popular vote by 1.5 percentage points. She and the DNC burned through $1.5 billion in campaign cash in just 107 days, a staggering sum for a campaign that ended in a clear loss across every meaningful metric.
The DNC's own internal documents paint a damning picture of how that money was spent. Despite making more than 300 million phone calls in 2024, described as more than any campaign in history, only 3 percent of those calls actually resulted in contact with a voter. That is a 97 percent miss rate on the single most basic act of campaigning: talking to the people whose votes you need.
Harris collected 75 million votes, a number her allies cite as proof of a viable national constituency. But votes that don't add up to an Electoral College majority are just a consolation prize. And the gap between the money spent and the results achieved raises serious questions about organizational competence, questions the unreleased autopsy was supposed to address.
Harris had earlier signaled interest in a 2028 bid at the Sharpton convention, and the pace of her political activity has only accelerated since.
The personnel moves tell their own story. Gabriel Uy, the DNC's national coalitions director, recently told colleagues he was leaving to take a job with Harris. In an email obtained by NBC News, Uy wrote: "I will also be working for VP Harris again, so let's keep in touch." Uy previously worked in Nevada for Harris' 2020 presidential primary bid and served in the Vice President's Office of Public Engagement and Intergovernmental Affairs. He did not respond to a request for comment.
Harris herself has been traveling heavily. Over the last several months, she has hit cities with large Black populations, Philadelphia, Detroit, Houston, Atlanta, New Orleans, and made stops across the South in Birmingham, Durham, Greensboro, Jackson, Nashville, Memphis, Savannah, Macon, and Richmond. She gave a recent speech to the Arkansas Democratic Party and was expected to address Nevada Democrats on Thursday.
The geographic pattern is deliberate. South Carolina and Nevada are both making bids to become early states in Democratic primaries. South Carolina's majority-Black Democratic primary electorate revived Joe Biden's 2020 campaign and forced several other contenders to consolidate behind him. A party official told NBC News the math could work for Harris: "You don't have to win all of the early states. You need to win South Carolina. Maybe take one of the other early states and then you sweep through the Southern states. That's when delegate counts are so key and important."
That strategy banks on the same coalition that powered Biden's comeback, Black voters in Southern states where the Democratic primary electorate is heavily African American. Whether Harris can replicate that dynamic after losing a general election is an open question.
Rev. Al Sharpton, who spoke with Harris recently about her next steps, described the pressure she's receiving in a telephone interview with NBC News:
"She is being encouraged to run by a lot of people around her and by a lot of people around the country. She is definitely getting a lot of push, and I think it will ultimately impact her decision."
Sharpton told Harris her legacy was secure but also admonished her to consider the possibility that it could be diminished if she ran and lost again. That is a real concern. Harris dropped out of the 2020 primary before the first votes were cast. A 2028 bid would be her third attempt at the presidency.
South Carolina-based strategist Antjuan Seawright, who advised the 2024 campaign, framed skepticism of a Harris run in racial terms:
"I find it offensive for people to say to a qualified Black woman: 'Shut up and go away.' We don't hear that same approach with others who may not look like Kamala."
That line of argument may resonate with parts of the Democratic base. But it sidesteps the more uncomfortable question: whether Harris' record as a candidate, two failed presidential bids and a vice presidency widely seen as underperforming, justifies the skepticism on its own merits.
Not everyone in Harris' orbit is enthusiastic. A prominent Harris donor offered a blunter assessment: "I don't know how she runs from Israel, and I don't know how she runs from Biden, and she's not good at threading the needle. If she's the lead horse, it will be easy to cut her legs. She comes with baggage."
That donor's concern about the Middle East reflects a broader dynamic. Harris is reportedly signaling privately that she has more to say about the issue now that she is freed from Biden White House policy. Whether a shift on that front would help or hurt her in a Democratic primary, where pro-Palestinian sentiment has surged on the left, remains to be seen.
Meanwhile, Harris has also expressed frustration with fellow Democrats clinging to their titles, a posture that could either signal fresh energy or deepen intra-party tensions.
Harris would not run unopposed. The list of often-mentioned potential 2028 contenders includes Governors Gavin Newsom of California, JB Pritzker of Illinois, Andy Beshear of Kentucky, Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, and Wes Moore of Maryland. A crop of senators, Mark Kelly of Arizona, Chris Murphy of Connecticut, Cory Booker of New Jersey, and Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, are also seen as potential candidates. Rep. Ro Khanna of California rounds out the field.
On the party's left flank, excitement is building for Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, described as a democratic socialist, has risen to national prominence amid dissatisfaction with the party's direction. Democratic strategist Chuck Rocha, a former top adviser on Sen. Bernie Sanders' 2020 campaign, summed up the assumption: "Everyone assumes she's running."
A party elder cautioned that Harris "would almost have to clear the deck to get the kind of momentum she would want." Clearing the deck against a field this deep and this restless would be a tall order for any candidate, let alone one who just lost.
Harris has also been active on other fronts, recently rallying donors to preemptively block Trump Supreme Court nominees, a move that kept her name in the national conversation and her fundraising network engaged.
The DNC autopsy sits at the center of a broader accountability problem. The party spent $1.5 billion in 107 days, lost the Electoral College decisively, lost the popular vote, and failed to make meaningful contact with voters despite a historically massive phone-banking operation. Someone should have to explain how that happened.
Harris' call to release the autopsy puts her on the side of transparency, at least in public. But it also serves her interests. If the report shows the DNC's organizational failures contributed to the loss, it shifts blame away from the candidate and toward the party infrastructure. If Ken Martin continues to suppress it, Harris can position herself as the reformer demanding accountability from a broken institution.
Either way, the DNC chairman's broken promise to release the findings is a problem in its own right. Martin vowed a comprehensive public review. He has not delivered. Democrats who donated to the party and worked on the campaign deserve to know what went wrong. So do the voters who showed up for Harris and watched the most expensive 107-day campaign in American history fall short.
Her recent decision to endorse California Democrats across the board while staying silent on the governor's race has only added to the sense that every move she makes is calibrated for a national run rather than state-level party building.
In prepared remarks from a recent speech, Harris laid out her view of the political landscape: "We have arrived at a place where the American people are experiencing: An economic system that's failing working people. A rigged political system. And a weakened civic life." She added that "a certain collection of leaders" had "sensed this epidemic of disconnect and distrust and sought to exploit it for their personal gain."
That language could describe any number of politicians in either party. Whether it describes Harris' own record, a candidate who raised $1.5 billion, failed to connect with voters on 97 percent of her phone calls, and is now angling for another chance, is a question she has not yet been forced to answer.
Harris has bought an $8 million home in Malibu. She completed a monthslong book tour for "107 Days" that hit 33 sites. She has helped pay off the DNC's debt from her 2024 campaign. And she has identified issue areas she wants to advance, though the specific policy positions remain unclear.
Her allies insist she has earned the right to run again. Her critics, including some of her own donors, say she carries too much baggage from a campaign that spent more, reached fewer voters, and lost more decisively than Democrats expected.
Democrats who wanted Harris to run for California governor instead of eyeing 2028 have already been disappointed by her trajectory. The party now faces a familiar pattern: a defeated candidate who believes the next time will be different, surrounded by loyalists who agree and skeptics too polite, or too afraid, to say otherwise.
Before Democrats hand anyone the keys again, they might start by reading the report their own chairman promised them and then buried. A party that can't face its own autopsy has no business asking voters for another chance.
