Major-league baseball’s regular season begins three weeks from now (in Tokyo, Japan, of all places), and the prohibitive favorite to win it all is Southern California’s blue colossus: the defending champion Los Angeles Dodgers.
Before you place a wager on the Dodgers for a repeat victory, a word of caution: No team has won two or more consecutive World Series since the New Yankees “three-repeated” at the end of the 20th century—a reason why, in the midst of spring training, hope springs eternal for California’s four other baseball franchises.
“Colossus” and “Los Angeles” are words that also come to mind when looking at California’s 2026 gubernatorial race—specifically, what might ensue should former Vice President Kamala Harris, now a private citizen in Los Angeles and figuring her next political move, decide that she’d like to succeed the term-limited Gavin Newsom as the 41st governor of the Golden State.
How formidable would Harris be, should she set her sights on Sacramento?
Look no further than this Emerson College Polling/Inside California Politics/The Hill survey. Harris checks in with 57% support, six times better than former congresswoman Katie Porter (9%). The rest of the pack: at 4% apiece, Lieutenant Governor Eleni Kounalakis and former Los Angeles mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. Meanwhile, 17% of the electorate is undecided.
Further evidence of the long shadow Harris casts: Remove her from the ballot, and “undecided” becomes the frontrunner at 45%, followed by Porter (21%), Villaraigosa (9%), and Kounalakis (5%). That’s much like this September 2024 survey by USC, Cal Poly Pomona, and Long Beach State showing Porter as the frontrunner (14%) with nearly 50% of the electorate undecided.
On the one hand, a Harris gubernatorial candidacy wouldn’t be uncharted political waters for California. In 1962, former Vice President Richard Nixon ran for governor. Like Harris, he was fresh off a presidential defeat. But unlike Harris, Nixon took on a sitting Democratic governor—and lost. While it wasn’t the end of Nixon’s career, it did make for an inglorious press conference the morning after the election (“You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore, because gentlemen, this is my last press conference”).
But what would be a departure from California elections past: a gubernatorial primary without a whiff of competition for first place.
Go back eight years to the last time the Golden State was bracing for an “open” (nonincumbent) gubernatorial contest, and here’s a poll showing Newsom with a two-to-one lead over Villaraigosa. However, more likely voters were undecided (35%) than they were pro-Newsom (23%) at the time.
Eight years prior to that, in the lead-up to the contest to succeed Arnold Schwarzenegger, Newsom once again was a gubernatorial hopeful (he eventually withdrew from the race seven months before the primary), running a distant second to Jerry Brown. Not that Brown was exactly a “colossus” in his own right—a week after Newsom exited the race, 65% of California Democrats told pollsters they were open to alternate choices.
Perhaps Harris, should she run for governor, proves to be the rare example of a gubernatorial front-runner who didn’t have to break a sweat during the primary. But that’s assuming she wants to relocate to Sacramento. All we know of her future at this point: She’s signed with CAA for representation, with an emphasis on speeches and publishing (the same Los Angeles agency repped her prior to her becoming vice president in 2021). A reminder: In January 2019, the release of her autobiography came two weeks prior to her presidential campaign kickoff. Indeed, a Harris book reflecting on her ill-fated, 107-day presidential campaign may be in the works.
As for another presidential run in 2028 . . . well, it’s complicated. Even more so were Harris to attempt a run for national office after potentially becoming California’s governor two Januarys from now.
Here, there once again is a precedent: Jerry Brown’s choices in his first term as California’s 34th governor.
In March 1976, 14 months after taking office, Brown announced his candidacy for president, with an eye on claiming California and perhaps stealing his party’s nomination at that year’s national convention. What Brown saw: a field that began without a clear front-runner, followed by a Democratic hierarchy none too thrilled by Jimmy Carter’s outsider candidacy. Moreover, the Democrats’ primary process was much more backloaded in 1976—plenty of states voting in April, May, and June—than are more recent elections in which primaries and caucuses in January, February, and March decide matters.
But Harris cannot wait until mid-March 2028 to enter the presidential sweepstakes. If California holds its presidential primary that year on the first Tuesday in March, as it did in 2020, the Brown model goes out the window.
That leaves the 2019 model, when Harris entered the presidential contest 21 days into the new year, one year ahead of the election year. The problem with that approach: Harris would be running for an entirely different office just two weeks into her new day job in Sacramento.
Thus, the more likely scenario would be for Harris to wait deeper into 2027 before making her intentions known. In 2019, the last Democrat to enter the presidential race, former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg, did so on the Sunday before Thanksgiving.
Or, Harris could wait until 2028, either in hopes of the field taking a chaotic turn (déjà vu, for her) or if, absent a solid front-runner, she and other prominent Democratic governors from delegate-rich states opt for “favorite son” (and daughter) candidacies along the lines of Brown in 1976.
The problem with that latter scenario: Political junkies have been waiting in vain, for a half-century now, for a “brokered” national convention with even a hint of political intrigue.
Before we take a quantum leap from a survey conducted 15 months prior to a primary to the notion of Kamala Harris measuring the drapes in the governor’s office, there is one concern for California voters: Is the former vice president the right person for this job?
Here are two (nonpartisan) reasons for concern.
First, Harris’s four-year record as vice president (and her two years prior to that as California’s junior US senator) suggests that she doesn’t have wonkish inclinations—an important trait for a California governor, as the job requires relentless, deep dives into the Golden State’s myriad policy challenges.
During the Biden administration’s run, staffers familiar with Harris’s professional habits went public with complaints about her work ethic—the vice president at times not reading her briefings, then berating staff when she came across as unprepared. “It’s clear that you’re not working with somebody who is willing to do the prep and the work,” one former aide complained to reporters. That doesn’t bode well for a Harris governorship, given that much of her time would be in closed-door meetings, trying to reach policy solutions.
The other concern: staff loyalty.
Many years ago, I had the luxury of working for a California governor who assumed the position of the state’s chief executive after a quarter-century in other elected offices (state legislator, big-city mayor, US senator). What made Pete Wilson’s office run at peak efficiency: staff loyalty, beginning with a chief of staff whose service dated back three decades.
In this regard, the Harris record on staff longevity is troubling. Per the website Open the Books, only four of Harris’s initial 47 vice presidential aides lasted until March of her final year in office—a 91.5% staff turnover rate. “People are thrown under the bus from the very top, there are short fuses and it’s an abusive environment,” an insider told reporters. “It’s not a healthy environment and people often feel mistreated. It’s not a place where people feel supported but a place where people feel treated like s---.”
Of course, there’s always a chance that by 2027 California could be witness to a “new and improved” version of Kamala Harris—a new governor who learned from her past mistakes in Washington and arrives in Sacramento with a workable plan for tackling California’s challenges.
That’s assuming she gets the job.
Let’s see how the Dodgers do, before that.
