A USA Today opinion writer who voted for Kamala Harris in 2024 is now urging her own party to look elsewhere for its next presidential nominee, arguing the former vice president lacks the support to win and would risk "humiliating" Democrats a second time.
Sara Pequeño, writing in a column flagged by Fox News Digital, laid out a blunt case against a Harris encore. The criticism landed just weeks after Harris renewed 2028 speculation during a sit-down with Al Sharpton, telling him she "might" make another run for the White House.
That two-word answer, "I might. I might.", set off a fresh round of Democratic positioning. But Pequeño's response amounts to a warning flare from inside the party's own tent: don't do it.
Pequeño did not mince words about what she sees as Harris's fundamental problem. She acknowledged Harris is popular among Democrats but drew a sharp line between intraparty enthusiasm and general-election viability.
"I have no doubt in my mind that she knows what the job entails. What I doubt is that she has the backing to actually secure the presidency for the Democrats. In all of this fanfare over her potential run, my question is, 'Why?'"
The columnist then twisted the knife further, posing a string of questions that read less like a policy critique and more like a plea for self-awareness.
"Why is she willing to humiliate herself and the Democratic Party for a second time? Why does she think she has a better shot this time? What has she done to better the lives of people who voted for her in the months since she lost the presidential election?"
Those are not questions from a Republican opposition researcher. They come from a Democratic voter who pulled the lever for Harris and now regrets the prospect of doing it again.
Pequeño's argument rests on concrete electoral results, not just vibes. Harris lost every major swing state in 2024. She became the first Democrat to lose the popular vote in a presidential election since 2004, a distinction that separates her from even Hillary Clinton, who, as Pequeño noted, "at least" won the popular vote in 2016.
Harris also took responsibility for parts of her defeat but, Fox News Digital reported, blamed a variety of other factors as well, including the baggage of an unpopular Joe Biden. That pattern of partial accountability is exactly the kind of thing that dogged the Biden-Harris relationship from the start, when reports surfaced that Biden had wanted a different running mate entirely.
Pequeño went after Harris's 2024 campaign strategy directly, arguing she failed to carve out a message voters could hold onto.
"On the presidential campaign trail, Harris failed to establish a clear message on affordability, continuously touted the lethality of the U.S. military and gave non-answers on the situation in Gaza and transgender issues."
The columnist's verdict on the strategic failure was equally pointed: Harris "aimed for the middle by following the playbook that former President Joe Biden had laid out for her, and ended up pleasing no one in the process."
That line captures a problem Democrats have struggled to name publicly. Harris ran as a continuity candidate in a change election. She inherited Biden's record without owning it and tried to pivot without actually breaking from it. The result was a campaign that satisfied neither the progressive base nor the persuadable middle.
Harris currently leads many Democratic primary polls, a fact that might seem to contradict Pequeño's thesis. But the columnist drew a distinction between name recognition inside the party and genuine electability.
"Sure, she's popular with Democrats. That does not mean she's popular with the overall population."
Betting markets tell a harsher story. Pequeño cited odds placing Harris's chances of becoming the Democratic nominee at just over 9%. That is a long way from frontrunner status, no matter what primary polls say. And broader surveys show both Harris and other top Democrats deeply underwater as the 2028 jockeying begins in earnest.
The gap between those two data points, high name ID among partisans, low confidence among bettors and the wider public, is exactly the trap Democrats fell into in 2024. Pequeño is warning them not to walk into it again.
Perhaps the most damaging thread in Pequeño's column is what Harris has not done since losing. The columnist described Harris as "absent from the conversation" in the months following her defeat and accused her of failing to "ignite enthusiasm" or establish herself as the new leader of the Democratic Party.
"For most people, Harris' name carries baggage from the 2024 presidential campaign, as well as her failure to do anything of note following her attempt to reach the Oval Office. She hasn't done much to cement herself as the new leader of the Democratic Party in the aftermath."
Pequeño also noted that Harris had "burned bridges" with the establishment wing of her party after publishing a memoir last year, a move that apparently left a "long shadow over her legacy" rather than rehabilitating it. The tensions between Harris and other prominent Democrats, including Gavin Newsom, whose dismissal of a rivalry with Harris was contradicted by her own book, suggest the internal friction runs deeper than anyone in the party wants to admit publicly.
Pequeño called it "naive" to think Harris could simply pick up where she left off. The columnist wrote that the nation "has far too much to lose to bet on her."
When a liberal columnist who voted for the candidate is writing this kind of column barely months after the election, the party has a problem that goes beyond one person's ambitions. Harris's sit-down with Sharpton, where she floated the possibility of running again, was clearly designed to keep her name in the conversation. But the reaction to that trial balloon has been far from the rallying cry her team might have hoped for.
Pequeño's column is one data point. But it reflects a broader unease. Democrats face a familiar dilemma: the candidate with the highest name recognition and the most institutional loyalty may also be the candidate least likely to win a general election. That was the Clinton problem in 2016. It was arguably the Biden problem in 2024. And now voices on the left are saying it is the Harris problem for 2028.
The party's early polling lead for Harris may say more about a thin bench than about genuine voter enthusiasm. And as recent reporting suggests, even Democrats who see Harris atop those surveys appear ready to move on.
Pequeño summed up her own position with a line that could serve as the epitaph for the entire Harris 2028 project: "It's up to her to decide whether to run again, but as a Democratic voter, I'm wary of seeing her at the top of the 2028 ticket after her devastating loss."
When your own voters are publishing op-eds begging you not to run, the "I might, I might" answer starts to sound less like confidence and more like a party that still hasn't learned what losing looks like.
