For the most part, 2028 presidential polls aren’t that meaningful. But for one once-and-possibly-future presidential candidate, signs of home state weakness could be significant, and I wrote about it<\/a> at New York<\/em>:<\/p>\n There\u2019s an old tradition in American politics whereby the last presidential nominee is referred to as the\u00a0\u201cTitular Leader\u201d<\/a>\u00a0of the party, to be displaced, if at all, at the next party nominating convention. According to that tradition,\u00a0Kamala Harris<\/a>\u00a0is owed considerable deference if she chooses to attempt a comeback in 2028. It\u2019s hardly unprecedented for a losing major-party presidential candidate to win subsequent renomination: it\u2019s happened eight times in U.S. history, most recently in the very election Harris lost. And anyone would have to admit that Harris\u2019s defeat came with rather a large\u00a0Joe Biden<\/a>-sized asterisk.<\/p>\n Still, there\u2019s a lot of merited skepticism about a Harris return to the biggest arena in politics in 2028, aside from doubts as to whether she will even try it. It\u2019s not like she\u2019s actually won a contested presidential nomination before: in 2019 she dropped out of the race<\/a>\u00a0before voters voted, and in 2024 she inherited the nomination when it was too late for anyone to challenge her. Yes, she\u2019s doing relatively well in\u00a0early 2028 polls<\/a>\u00a0(though suspiciously, her best showings invariably seem to be polls conducted by overtly pro-Republican outfits like\u00a0Rasmussen Reports<\/a>,\u00a0I&I\/TIPP<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Harvard-Harris<\/a>), but a lot of that is probably due to name ID rather than a sober assessment of alternatives. But there\u2019s one constituency that knows her very well: her home state of California, where she served in public elected office from 2002 until her elevation to the vice presidency in 2020. And initial polling there doesn\u2019t look particularly golden for Kamala Harris.<\/p>\n A\u00a0Politico survey<\/a>\u00a0of a Democratic presidential test ballot in California released on March 12 showed Harris trailing her friendly career-long rival Gavin Newsom by a 28 percent to 14 percent margin. Harris barely led\u00a0Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez<\/a>\u00a0(12 percent) and\u00a0Pete Buttigieg<\/a> (11 percent) in the poll. And there was worse home-state news for the former vice president:<\/p>\n “She struggles even more in a concurrent survey of POLITICO\u2019s audience of key political and policy influencers in the state, including political staffers, lobbyists, policy advisers and others \u2014 the kind of people most familiar with the former state attorney general and U.S. senator.<\/p>\n “Harris, whose rise in politics had mirrored Newsom\u2019s for decades back to their early days in San Francisco, until she was chosen as vice president, draws support from just 2 percent of political and policy influencers likely to vote in the Democratic primary, compared to 17 percent who back Newsom, according to the survey.”<\/p>\n Actually, in the California \u201cinfluencer\u201d survey, Harris ran not only behind Newsom, AOC and Buttigieg, but behind\u00a0Mark Kelly<\/a>,\u00a0Josh Shapiro<\/a>,\u00a0Andy Beshear<\/a>,\u00a0J.B. Pritzker<\/a>,\u00a0Gretchen Whitmer<\/a>,\u00a0Wes Moore<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Rahm Emanuel<\/a>. That is some bad home cooking.<\/p>\n One poll could be an outlier, but now there\u2019s another: a\u00a0new survey<\/a> from the respected Berkeley-IGS polling operation shows Harris running a mediocre fourth:<\/p>\n “28% of the state\u2019s Democratic voters now select Newsom as their first choice to be their party\u2019s nominee should he launch a bid for president in 2028. New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez places a distant second at 14%, followed by former Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg at 11%.<\/p>\n “Former Vice President and California Senator Kamala Harris trails, receiving just 9% support among Democratic voters in her home state, while Arizona Senator Mark Kelly places fifth at 7%.”<\/p>\n This kind of standing in a place where she has appeared on statewide ballots five times is concerning. Yes, you can argue that she has a national base beyond California, especially among Black and Asian-American voters. But her lack of strong support in the largest state in the union, which happens to be her own, will be of considerable concern to donors, activists and other power brokers with a role to play in 2028. If Harris wants to run again, she should mend some fences in California.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\r\n\n
Source link thedemocraticstrategist.org<\/a>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"For the most part, 2028 presidential polls aren’t that meaningful. But for one once-and-possibly-future presidential candidate, signs of home state weakness could be significant, and I wrote about it at New York: There\u2019s an old tradition in American politics whereby the last presidential nominee is referred to as the\u00a0\u201cTitular Leader\u201d\u00a0of the party, to be displaced, if at all, at the…","protected":false},"author":127,"featured_media":82,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_analytify_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1075","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wokeantifa.org\/topics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1075","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wokeantifa.org\/topics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wokeantifa.org\/topics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wokeantifa.org\/topics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/127"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wokeantifa.org\/topics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1075"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wokeantifa.org\/topics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1075\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wokeantifa.org\/topics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/82"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wokeantifa.org\/topics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1075"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wokeantifa.org\/topics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1075"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wokeantifa.org\/topics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1075"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}