Kamala Harris was most definitely saying I told you so about Donald Trump. Last week the former vice president made a surprise appearance at a women’s leadership conference in California’s Orange County, giving her first extended remarks since her November 6 concession speech. Harris’s tone was somber, with one major exception. “There were many things that we knew would happen,” she said before departing from her written text. “I’m not here to say I told you so! I swore I wasn’t gonna say that!”
With that, Harris briefly backed away from the mic, laughing and grinning. “I thought she performed incredibly well—one of her best speeches,” says Ashley Etienne, who worked as Harris’s communications director during her first year as vice president and was in the room last week. “The way I read it was, she felt a little lighter in her presentation but heavier in the depth of what she was saying.”
Those eight minutes may have also been a preview of what’s to come: Harris, according to an associate, is now writing a longer and broader speech that will address the chaotic moment the country is enduring, with a tentative aim of delivering it in the next several months. She is also at work on a book. Both moves will stoke even more speculation about Harris’s plans, which are already the subject of considerable debate in her own camp: Should she run for governor of California in 2026 or mount a third presidential bid in 2028? Or none of the above? “She’s taking a second to figure out how she can best serve in this moment,” a senior adviser says. “People are expecting her to only be guided by this blind ambition of, ‘I want to be in charge,’ when in fact a lot of the roles she’s played are because one, she wants to do the job, but two, she knows how she can make the biggest difference.”
Harris has mostly been offstage during President Trump’s first 100 days, drawing some criticism from a Democratic Party in search of leadership. She certainly earned a break, having run a frantic 107-day presidential campaign, which saw her pile up 75 million votes but lose the Electoral College decisively. Harris took a short vacation in Hawaii, put on a stoic face at Trump’s inauguration, and helped distribute food in Altadena amid the January wildfires in Southern California. Harris has also, a friend says, been catching up on her passion for cooking, spending time with her nieces and nephews, and soliciting suggestions for TV shows to binge-watch.
But even though Harris is out of elected office for the first time in 21 years, she is not entirely out of the game. She has been working the phones; focusing on how to improve the party’s state-level infrastructure and social media presence; chatting up donors; and congratulating activists for helping defeat four Republican ballot measures in Louisiana.
Harris has also been assessing the reasons for her defeat, if not dwelling on the what-ifs. “In my experience, she is not the kind of person who ruminates on the past,” says Jamal Simmons, who served as vice presidential communications director in the middle of Harris’s term. “Working for her, sometimes you want to spend time licking your wounds or celebrating your success. She’s thinking about, Here’s where we are—what do we need to do to get to the next place? You’re like, Can we have a cocktail first?”
Her team’s early reading, perhaps unsurprisingly, is that Harris wasn’t the problem in 2024. “What she ran on—health care and housing and small businesses—that wasn’t the wrong message,” says Sheila Nix, Harris’s chief of staff during the campaign and now in private life. “The people who heard that message, they liked it. So it shouldn’t be, ‘Oh my God, throw your hands up in the air. We don’t even know what to say to people.’ No, that’s not true. The values she talked about and the things she cared about were important to the people who heard them.”
One obvious place for Harris to go next is the 2026 California governor’s race—an option too obvious, in the view of some of her advisers, who see quickly jumping into the contest as the political equivalent of dating a rebound boyfriend. Others believe she’ll be unable to stay out of the action for long. “She hasn’t been out of public service during her entire career,” a Harris insider says. “I think it will be difficult for her to pass up a bird in the hand.”
