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She is, friends and allies say, content to just wait. For now. To campaign where asked, see how the midterms play out, and let those White House aspirants champing at the political bit launch their candidacies first.

But make no mistake: Kamala Harris is very much looking like a presidential contender–in–waiting.

“She’s been listening to the American people and really trying to figure out what’s impacting them and how she can be of service to them,” said Minyon Moore, a longtime Democratic strategist who ran the Democratic National Convention that nominated Harris in 2024. “I mean, you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to understand that right now we need leaders that can take us in a different direction and bring us back together as a party.”

It is a prospect that has filled many senior Democratic officials and big-money donors with dread, even though Harris would come into the race with some sizable advantages. She has led in every national poll of prospective candidates, usually by double digits. Early front-runners tend to do well. Joe Biden led in almost all polling two years before he won in 2020 (when he did come in second, it was usually behind Michelle Obama or Hillary Clinton, neither of whom showed much interest in running), and Clinton led easily by this point in the 2016 race.

“She walks in as the front-runner. It is fairly obvious she is followed wherever she goes,” said one former aide. “And I don’t want to upset any narratives that any of the other candidates are pushing, but she comes in with 99 percent name ID and everyone else is going to have to raise money and buy it.”

It remains an article of faith among Harris’s tight-knit group of advisers that the 2024 race wasn’t winnable. Her polling lead was a mirage and did not square with what the campaign’s internal polls were showing. The compressed timeline after Biden dropped out of the race left her without enough time to appear as her own person, a particularly big problem when much of the public had tired of the president. And multiple former campaign staffers brought up the two........

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