Former Vice President Kamala Harris endorsed abolishing the Electoral College and expanding the Supreme Court to 13 justices, positions she never ran on in 2024, as she builds ties with the Democratic Party's progressive wing ahead of a possible 2028 presidential bid.
Harris made the remarks Friday at the National Urban League Conference in Nashville, Tennessee, framing the proposals as overdue conversations the country needs to have. She stopped short of announcing a White House run but did nothing to discourage the speculation that has trailed her for months.
"We must allow for a real conversation about revisiting certain things," Harris told the conference audience. "I know this is gonna be controversial coming from me, in particular. We need to revisit the Electoral College."
She went further moments later, calling for a larger Supreme Court pegged to the number of federal circuit courts. "We need to revisit the point of expanding the court to 13 justices like we have 13 district courts," she said. She also urged the country to revisit statehood for Puerto Rico, and had previously backed the same for Washington, D.C.
None of these positions appeared on Harris's 2024 campaign platform. During that race she supported term limits for Supreme Court justices but did not call for adding seats to the bench, and she did not campaign on scrapping the Electoral College. The New York Post noted that the Nashville speech marked a clear leftward shift from the positions she carried into her loss against President Donald Trump, who beat her in both the Electoral College and the popular vote.
The timing matters. Harris ran in 2024 as a candidate who could hold the center. She lost. Now, barely two years later, she is publicly embracing structural changes to American government that would delight the progressive base, and alarm anyone who thinks the Constitution's framework has served the country well for more than two centuries.
Abolishing the Electoral College would require a constitutional amendment, a process so demanding it has succeeded only 27 times in the nation's history. Court-packing, adding justices to reshape the ideological balance of the bench, has been a third rail since Franklin Roosevelt tried it in 1937 and was rebuked by his own party. Harris offered no mechanism or timeline for either proposal. She simply said the country should "revisit" them, a word soft enough to avoid commitment but loud enough to send a signal.
And the signal is aimed squarely at the Democratic left.
Harris has spent the spring and summer building relationships with prominent progressives. In May she called New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a progressive Democrat who won the mayoralty on a platform well to the left of his predecessors. Fox News Digital previously reported that Harris also met privately with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., at a Black women's empowerment summit in Chicago. The substance of those conversations has not been disclosed.
The pattern is deliberate. Multiple Democratic aides and strategists have described Harris as the leading contender for the party's 2028 presidential nomination. The New York Post reported she leads 2028 Democratic primary polls by double digits over California Gov. Gavin Newsom, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, and Ocasio-Cortez, though she has not officially declared.
Asked in April at the National Action Network's 35th Anniversary Convention whether she planned to run again, Harris gave Rev. Al Sharpton a coy answer:
"I might. I might. I'm thinking about it... I'll keep you posted."
On Friday in Nashville she offered the same careful non-denial. "I have not made a decision," she said. "I am fully, sincerely, focused on these midterms."
Focused on the midterms, but floating the kind of red-meat proposals that energize progressive donors and activist networks months before a primary calendar takes shape. If Harris is not running, she is doing an excellent impression of someone who is.
What voters are watching is a defeated candidate who has drawn a specific conclusion from her loss: she was not progressive enough. That reading contradicts the simpler explanation, that voters rejected her record and her party's governance, but it is the reading that produces headlines, conference invitations, and private meetings with rising progressive stars.
Court-packing and Electoral College abolition are not modest reforms. They would fundamentally alter the balance of power between branches of government and between states. Harris framed them as topics for conversation, but conversations at this level of politics are trial balloons. If the applause is loud enough, the "conversation" becomes a platform plank.
Harris also appeared at the 38th Annual Michigan Democratic Women's Caucus Legacy Luncheon in Detroit on April 18, another stop on a schedule that looks far more like a campaign preview than a midterm support tour.
The former vice president's strategy is now visible enough that even sympathetic observers can map it. Court the progressive base. Adopt structural-reform positions that energize the left. Meet privately with figures like Ocasio-Cortez and Mamdani who carry credibility with younger, more ideological voters. And keep saying you haven't decided, until you have.
Voters who care about constitutional order should pay close attention. A candidate who lost on a moderate message and responded by proposing to pack the Supreme Court and scrap the Electoral College is not moving toward the center, she is telling you what she would do with power if she ever gets a second chance.
