Business. News – Nov 10, 2024

1 - What’s Next for Kamala Harris? Here Are Six Options.

New York Times. Nov 7, 2024

In 74 days, Vice President Kamala Harris will leave office, with no concrete plans about what to do next or how to proceed as a private citizen for the first time since she was elected San Francisco’s district attorney in 2003.

Her friends, aides and political allies have said in the hours since her loss to former President Donald J. Trump that it is too soon to even contemplate, let alone plan, the next phase of her life, except to say that the 60-year-old Ms. Harris will have plenty of options.

Like the defeated presidential nominees who came before her, Ms. Harris is experiencing incredible political whiplash. On Tuesday morning, she was the leader of the Democratic Party and widely seen as its future. By Thursday, officials were privately saying they expected her to remain engaged but assumed the party would want to move on from the Biden era as soon as possible.

“I believe that she is more respected than ever within our party,” said Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis of California, a longtime Harris ally. “I think the question really is, what does she want to do? Right now I’m sure she is simply trying to process. But I have no doubt that she will have an answer to this in the coming months.”

Here are six options for Ms. Harris as she contemplates her post-vice presidency.

Bide her time and run again in 2028

Democrats have not exactly hungered for their defeated presidential nominees to try again. After her 2016 loss, Hillary Clinton came to be seen as a deeply flawed candidate. She has maintained a rapport with donors, but when it came time for the Harris campaign to deploy her as a surrogate, Mrs. Clinton held an event in Tampa, far from a battleground state.

John Kerry returned to the Senate and eventually became secretary of state. Al Gore briefly entertained running for president again in 2004 but later endorsed Howard Dean in the Democratic primary race.

There is no reason to believe Democrats are eager to anoint Ms. Harris as their 2028 nominee, especially given how comfortably Mr. Trump won the Electoral College. She received the 2024 nomination in part because President Biden dropped out of the race with too little time for the party to hold a proper primary election.

Yet four years is an eternity in politics. Ms. Harris has access to the party’s largest donor network and could bank on nationwide buyer’s remorse if the second Trump term is as chaotic and damaging to the country as she predicted.

Run for a lower office

Returning to the Senate is theoretically an option, but it’s unlikely: Next year, California will have two senators in their first full terms who are unlikely to step down anytime soon.

California will also have an open-seat race for governor in 2026. Still, Ms. Harris might be reluctant to campaign against other Democrats like Ms. Kounalakis, who is already running.

If she did, Ms. Harris would not be the first vice president to run for governor of California after losing a presidential election. Richard M. Nixon was denied the presidency in 1960, then the governor’s mansion two years later. When he lost that race, Mr. Nixon proclaimed to reporters, “You don’t have Nixon to kick around any more, because, gentlemen, this is my last news conference.”

Six years later Mr. Nixon finally won the White House, though things did not go entirely swimmingly for him after that.

Join the private sector

As she said repeatedly on the campaign trail, Ms. Harris has had one client her entire career: the people.

Plenty of people with lots of money and business in Washington and California would be happy for her to take them on as clients if she chose to join a law firm or lobbying outfit.

Cashing in after a career in Washington is such a well-traveled path that recruitment of retiring and defeated members of Congress begins well before they leave office. But while it would be quite lucrative, Ms. Harris would