In Reply to: Bad news for Demos posted by UCLART on January 20, 2026 at 01:02:39
Clinton spent decades building a massive baggage going back to her baking cookies comment, her healthcare proposal, her years as the hawkish senator, followed by a relatively pretty hawkish term as the head of State Dept.
Compared to her, Harris has a pretty small baggage.
She also has the advantage of having the footage of her old campaign speeches to run and point out everything she said that Trump would do that the media made fun of but Trump eventually did. That would make great optics.
That said, if she runs, her main challenge will be to differentiate herself from the mainstream Democratic position personified by Biden, and Obama before him (not to mention Schumer and Jeffries), i.e. that whole "everything is actually just fine, we just need a better manager on top". Whoever the Democratic candidate eventually is, that would be their kiss of death at the ballot box. 2028 will again be a change election, as all elections since 2008 have been, and Harris will have a hard time positioning herself as the change candidate.
I'm also not buying that she will be the only black and/or female candidate on the field (also she's not a great campaigner). I'm inherently skeptical of Democrats' ability to read the room, obviously, since they've fallen short so many times before, but with the old guard's grip on the party weakening (fingers crossed), I can imagine better candidates may begin to surface
Plus, if it turnes out that the constitution somehow prevails and Trump can't run, Republicans have no one on deck that can duplicate Trump's personal charisma. Running against Vance or Rubio will be an altogether different proposition than running against Trump.
My take? I'm far less worried about who should run in 28 than I am of whether and how we make it to 28 as a nation and what the political and economic landscape will look like at that point. Will we make it as a single nation? As an affluent nation? A nation that can still claim greatness? Who's in a better position to grasp what's happening? Those are the questions that concern me deeply at this point, not necessarily what happens if Harris runs again.