Two years after her whirlwind ascension to Democratic presidential nominee, former Vice President Kamala Harris is thinking about…running for president again. Not doing it — yet — but laying the groundwork in case she does.

She’s done the book tour through the early states. She’s taken the meeting with New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and dialed up pro-Palestinian organizers to feel out the room. And she’s leading many 2028 polls — ahead of California Gov. Gavin Newsom, ahead of former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg or Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, ahead of the field. But she remains noncommittal to the prospect about running in 2028 and is yet to weigh in on the Democratic party’s most pressing ideological fights.

It’s an odd situation: The candidate is unclear if she wants to run — and the party seems unclear if they want her to.

So last week, I talked with Democratic Party officials, donors, and South Carolina voters for our last episode of America, Actually to figure out whether Harris has a lane for another presidential bid — and whether it’s one she actually wants.

Here’s what I learned:

The Harris camp treats 2024 as an anomaly

The case from her inner circle is that the 2024 presidential election against President Donald Trump simply doesn’t count. To start, President Joe Biden dropped out in July — under pressure from virtually the entire Democratic Party — and left her just 107 days to mount a campaign.

And, then, there were the multiple assassination attempts against Trump, including one that resulted in an indelible image of the bloodied candidate pumping his fist in a knot of Secret Service agents. As one Harris surrogate put it to me: “I think Jesus Christ would’ve lost in 2024 after the assassination attempt.”

It’s a real argument, but it’s also exactly the argument a team makes once it has decided the loss wasn’t about the candidate. I’m not sure the rest of the party agree. (Also, she did run for the nomination in 2020 and dropped out in late 2019, before the first primary contest.)

The donor class may be ready to turn the page

I called John Morgan, a Florida mega-donor who’s raised tens of millions for Democrats going back to the Clinton years. He doesn’t want Harris to run, but, even more, he said that he thinks the money won’t materialize and that she and Newsom would be cannibalizing the same California checkbooks. He also raised her ties to the Biden administration. According to Morgan, the entire Biden era needs what he called — and I’m quoting the man — a “Bye Bye Biden” sendoff.

Morgan also added plenty of donors feel this way, and almost none will say it out loud, because “people think to say no to her, they could be labeled racist, and they don’t want that, ’cause they’re Democrats,” he said. 

Oof.

Nobody has actually replaced her — and that’s the real story

Here’s one where the Harris team has a point. No one has yet supplanted her with the two groups that anchor the Democratic base: Black voters and women. To this moment, that bond holds. I felt it at a Juneteenth picnic in North Charleston, where “Yes, she should run” won our little yes-bucket, no-bucket poll. A few other responses we got: “Third time’s a charm.” “We need women.” “It was stolen from her the first time.”

But the fuller conversations were more nuanced than any topline number. There’s a generational split — younger voters are raising her prosecutor record and her posture on Gaza, with one telling me she “was locking us up until she needed our vote.” There’s a gender split — men at the picnic were ready to run back “a competent white man” before another woman, and women insisted that the door just needs one more good push.

Beneath nearly all of it, one word kept surfacing, from the yeses and the nos alike: fresh. People want a fresh face. Some want a fresher Harris. Some just want somebody new.

The Black vote — particularly in the South — has been the great consolidating force in modern Democratic primaries: the firewall that lined up behind Hillary Clinton in 2016, that rescued Joe Biden in South Carolina in 2020, that ultimately made Obama.

Democrats run orderly primaries when that group decides early and moves together. A Black electorate that’s split by age, split by gender, and openly shopping for a new face isn’t just a headache for Harris; it’s a break from decades of how this party has chosen a nominee. That’s not really a story about Kamala Harris. It’s a story about a party that doesn’t know what it wants — and a 2028 presidential cycle that’s going to be a good deal messier than the polling makes it look.

As always, there’s much more in the full show, so listen to America, Actually wherever you get your podcasts or watch it on Vox’s YouTube channel.

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