Senate Democrats are skeptical about their former colleague, former Vice President Kamala Harris, making another presidential run in 2028 after she lost all seven battleground states to President Trump in November, but most of them aren’t ruling out the possibility that she could clinch the party’s nomination if she plays her cards right.

Harris reemerged on the national stage last week at a San Francisco gala by delivering a widely publicized speech on Trump’s first 100 days in office, sounding at times like a candidate again as she slammed him for creating “the greatest man-made economic crisis in modern presidential history.”

Harris, who is 60, is weighing her future political options and is viewed as a possible contender to run for governor of California in 2026 or for president again in 2028.

One Democratic senator who requested anonymity to talk about the next presidential election gave a one-word answer when asked about whether Harris should take another shot at the presidency: “No.”

The senator said she had her chance, the American people delivered their verdict and she should move on.

Other Democrats were more diplomatic.

Sen. John Hickenlooper (D-Colo.), who ran for president in 2020, doesn’t necessarily see Harris as a front-runner, even though polls show her leading the pack of potential candidates because of her high name ID, but he said he thinks she could add “valuable perspective to the political debate.”

“I think time will tell,” he said when asked whether Harris would be a viable presidential candidate in the next election.

“I think she will add value to” the national conversation, he said. “What’s going to happen over the next six to 18 months is going to be lots of Democrats having lots of different opinions about what our priorities should be. What are the values we have to put first?”

“I think she will have a valuable perspective on that,” he said.

Hickenlooper said Harris’s decisive loss to Trump doesn’t mean she couldn’t put together a winning formula in the 2028 general election.

“Every election is unique. We always try to draw analogies and inferences” based on past elections, he said. “I don’t think it disqualifies her that she lost.”

Some Democratic lawmakers don’t want to slam the door shut on Harris running for the White House in three years, especially when they’re not sure if a stronger candidate will emerge.

Democratic senators were more vocal about the need to move on after Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 presidential election to Trump, even though Clinton won the popular vote that year by almost 2.9 million votes. Clinton won 227 electoral votes, while Harris won 226 votes.

Senate Democratic Whip Dick Durbin (Ill.), who endorsed the former first lady in the 2016 race, famously called on his party to “move” on from Clinton after her loss to Trump.

“I think it’s time for our party to move to new leadership, a new spokesperson,” he said.

In 2019, former Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.) discouraged Clinton from running again. 

And Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) said it would be a “mistake” for Clinton to run again in 2020, when she would have been 73 years old on Election Day.

Heinrich, however, is open to Harris running again, though he says she would likely face a lot of competition.

“I’m a big fan of Kamala Harris, I enjoyed serving with her. I think given the time frame that we have, which is very different from what we were dealing with last time, that it’s going to be an open process,” he said. “Anybody who thinks they’ve got what it takes will step into that and someone will emerge” as the winner.

“I would never underestimate her talent,” he said. “Having that open process has a lot of long-term benefits.”

Democrats who think Harris could be a viable general election candidate again in 2028 believe she was handicapped by having only a few weeks to campaign as the party’s nominee, since former President Biden didn’t drop out of the race until July 21.

The New Mexico senator said the compressed general election campaign schedule hurt Harris’s chances.

“I think you need time to really get to know the candidates and feel” comfortable about them, he said. “If you’re going to run for president, you don’t get to hide a lot of cards. You really have to be comfortable in your own skin, and even the process of that in my view takes a year.”

“She didn’t get the benefit of that,” he added.

Democratic lawmakers lauded Harris as a candidate during her brief 107-day campaign in 2024 but were left deeply disappointed by the results, which exceeded the worst expectations of many Democrats after she lost all seven battleground states including the “blue wall” states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and the popular vote.

Not only that, but some Democratic lawmakers thought that her poor performance created serious headwinds for Senate Democratic incumbents, who lost their reelections despite having tens of millions of dollars poured into their races.

Senate Democrats lost four seats and their majority in last year’s election after former Sens. Bob Casey (D-Pa.), Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) and Tester went down in defeat. Former Sen. Joe Manchin (I-W.Va.) simply decided he didn’t want to run again in a state that Trump would go on to win by 42 percentage points.

Steve Jarding, a Democratic strategist, said Harris is a “legitimate candidate.”

“She obviously was vice president for four years. She got thrown into [a] 107-day election, which may not have been a fair read probably not fair” on her abilities, he said.

“She’s got a tremendous donor base to work with. She’s got experience. I would be careful if I were the Democrats to throw out, ‘Well, she lost all the battleground states,’” he said. “Who has a better résumé, for instance?”

Harris represented California in the Senate from 2017 to 2021 and before that served as California’s attorney general.

“I understand the skepticism, she lost the battleground states, she lost to Donald Trump,” Jarding said. “They would be making a mistake if they didn’t take her seriously.”

Jarding said Democrats are a little concerned about the deal her husband’s law firm, Willkie Farr & Gallagher LLP, struck with Trump in January to provide $100 million in pro bono legal services during his second term.

The former second gentleman, Doug Emhoff, who’s a partner at the firm, criticized the deal.

Harris’s failure to win a single battleground state was especially disappointing to many Democratic lawmakers and donors after her campaign and its allies dramatically outspent Trump and his allies.

Harris’s campaign raised more than $1 billion, and altogether her campaign and allied super PACs spent more than $2 billion on the race. She spent $1.5 billion over 15 weeks on everything from campaign ads and social media campaigns to voter canvassing efforts and celebrity-studded rallies.

In the end, she lost the popular vote by nearly 2.3 million votes.

Nevertheless, some Democrats thought the negative political climate for Democrats last year went far beyond Harris’s role as the party’s nominee.

Many of them blame Biden’s disastrous debate performance against Trump on June 27 and then Biden’s refusal for weeks to drop out of the race, despite heavy pressure from many Democratic lawmakers and donors.

“I think she’s a potential candidate. There were a good many reasons that she lost, some beyond her control. But she’s a strikingly attractive and effective candidate and public official,” said Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.).

He said that Harris “would certainly have support.”

“The question would be whether she’s the best candidate, and there will be a lot of debate about that question,” he said.