Two years after her whirlwind ascension to Democratic presidential nominee, former Vice President Kamala Harris is thinking about…running for president again. Not doing it — yet — but laying the groundwork in case she does. She’s done the book tour through the early states. She’s taken the meeting with New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and dialed up pro-Palestinian organizers to feel out the room.

And she’s leading many 2028 polls — ahead of California Gov. Gavin Newsom, ahead of former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg or Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, ahead of the field. But she remains noncommittal to the prospect about running in 2028 and is yet to weigh in on the Democratic party’s most pressing ideological fights. It’s an odd situation: The candidate is unclear if she wants to run — and the party seems unclear if they want her to. So last week, I talked with Democratic Party officials, donors, and South Carolina voters for our last episode of America, Actually to figure out whether Harris has a lane for another presidential bid — and whether it’s one she actually wants. Here’s what I learned: The Harris camp treats 2024 as an anomaly The case from her inner circle is that the 2024 presidential election against President Donald Trump simply doesn’t count.

To start, President Joe Biden dropped out in July — under pressure from virtually the entire Democratic Party — and left her just 107 days to mount a campaign. And, then, there were the multiple assassination attempts against Trump, including one that resulted in an indelible image of the bloodied candidate pumping his fist in a knot of Secret Service agents. As one Harris surrogate put it to me: “I think Jesus Christ would’ve lost in 2024 after the assassination attempt.” It’s a real argument, but it’s also exactly the argument a team makes once it has decided the loss wasn’t about the candidate. I’m not sure the rest of the party agree. (Also, she did run for the nomination in 2020 and dropped out in late 2019, before the first primary contest.)