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Kamala Harris Has Her Eye on Today’s Gubernatorial Races

The former vice president reminds The Nation that, even if government is divided in DC, “a governor, as the chief executive of a state, can actually make things happen.”

Wisconsin Democratic gubernatorial candidate David Crowley introduces former vice president Kamala Harris during a “Women for Crowley” campaign event at the Pfister Hotel on October 26, 2026, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Today’s midterms will mark the end of one election cycle and the beginning of another. As soon as the votes from 2026 are counted, the 2028 presidential race will take center stage. But that’s just a formality.

For all intents and purposes, the 2028 contest began during the course of the midterm campaign. Several dozen prospective contenders for the Democratic nomination hit the midterm trail to boost their national profiles—campaigning in states across the country and positioning themselves as allies of the candidates who could flip control of Congress and check President Trump in the last two years of his term.

Most of these 2028 hopefuls zeroed in on Senate races, which grabbed the spotlight in final weeks of the 2026 campaign. Nobody doubts the importance of these contests, whether in Michigan, which saw a chaotic close to the race between progressive Democrat Abdul El-Sayed and Trump Republican Mike Rogers, or in Texas, where Democratic James Talarico could become the first Democratic senator from the state in more than three decades.

But the front-runner in several surveys that tested the strength of 2026 Democratic presidential prospects has placed an emphasis on today’s gubernatorial races, which will define the direction of states across the country.

That prospect is former Vice President Kamala Harris, who, in a national Harvard-Harris poll released one week ago, garnered 34 percent support among likely Democratic presidential primary and voters—16 points ahead of the second-place finisher, California Governor Gavin Newsom. It was the same story in two other polls that were released in October—one for the Financial Times and one by the Echelon Insights firm—both of which gave the 2024 Democratic presidential nominee a clear lead.

Harris—whose 75,017,613 vote total in 2024 was the highest in history for any candidate except for the Republican who narrowly beat her that year, Donald Trump (77,302,580), and for the Democrat with whom she served as vice president, Joe Biden (81,283,501) in 2020—told The Nation that she has not decided whether to mount a new bid for the presidency. That’s a genuine response, as is Harris’s insistence that the top factor in making that decision will be her family. But she has little doubt that she could do the job, as someone with significant White House experience who recalls that she has “spent a lot of time with foreign leaders, thinking about America’s responsibility and role globally, as well as our responsibility as a government to our own people.”

To a greater extent than many prominent political figures, Harris thinks about the duties of executives—in Washington and in statehouses across the........

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