Kamala Harris's Mentor Pours Cold Water on Her Gubernatorial Plans

Kamala Harris says she will decide by summer’s end if she will run for governor of her native California. She would find it easy to raise money, and polls show that she would likely be the front-runner against a slew of local candidates who want to replace the term-limited Gavin Newsom. But not every Democrat thinks that Harris would have an easy run.

Among them is Willie Brown, the 91-year-old legendary former California State Assembly speaker and San Francisco mayor. He also happens to have been Harris’s political mentor and love interest in the 1990s, when she was just entering the public arena.

“I do think people running for public office really ought to fit eventually where they are trying to land at. And I really do hope, frankly, that Harris comes to that reality,” Brown told the State of Gold political podcast last week. “She may not want to run [for] governor of the State of California. That may not be where she should be going.” He predicts that she would have a “difficult” road to the governor’s mansion.

Brown is under no illusions that Kamala will heed his warnings. In 2020, he had advised her to not join Joe Biden’s presidential ticket and instead to seek to be U.S. attorney general. He told her that, from that perch, “you may land where you, I suspect, are most talented, and that’s the Supreme Court,” and “you could easily end up being chief justice.” Brown added that “I think she stopped speaking to me as a result of that.”

Harris’s penchant for abruptly cutting off those who offer her unwelcome advice may explain why many Democrats aren’t willing to go on the record about her potential gubernatorial candidacy. Those who will speak, anonymously, don’t think that she’s what the party needs. They fear that she could easily top next June’s primary, because of her universal name ID, but then repeat the mistakes of her 2024 presidential campaign. They worry that she could run a shambolic general election campaign that would once again showcase her inability to communicate an appealing vision or message.

“There’s no groundswell for her candidacy,” one California house Democrat told CNN. “In fact, I think it would only fire up Republicans and hurt our ability to win the four to five seats that we need to win the House. . . . She comes in with baggage.”

One Democrat who is willing to be quoted is Representative Jimmy Gomez of Los Angeles. He recalls that Richard Nixon ran for governor of California in 1962, two years after he had lost the presidency to John F. Kennedy. But voters weren’t sure that Nixon really wanted to be the No. 1 guy in Sacramento, and many came to believe that he only wanted the job as a springboard for another run at the White House. “Once you’re the vice president of the United States, there’s only one place to go. It’s president,” Gomez told CNN. “For me, if I was vice president and all of a sudden I lose,” the governorship “would be a fallback to me. I hate to put it so bluntly.”

One of the reasons that Willie Brown is so blunt about his assessment of Harris’s prospects is that he sees many other, more engaged contenders. “There’s just so many really talented people thinking about that job,” Brown said. He lavished praise on Rick Caruso, a wealthy real estate developer who as a conservative Democrat won 45 percent of the vote against Karen Bass in the 2022 Los Angeles mayoral race. (Since the city’s disastrous response to the L.A. fires this past January, many voters, including Los Angeles Times publisher Patrick Soon-Shiong, have expressed buyer’s remorse regarding Bass’s election.) Brown calls Caruso “a really talented guy” and thinks “he’s got great executive potential.” Moreover, “in this day and age when the public is looking for somebody that represents not yesterday, but somebody who is fresh and relatively new for the 39 million people, he is exactly that.”

Harris, who has held only public sector jobs since she graduated from law school in 1990, is clearly a government lifer. But Brown argues that she “needs to understand” that successfully leading California means running it like a hands-on “private-sector person” with an innovative approach to solving problems.

Unlike many commentators, I have never considered Harris to be incompetent, stupid, or out of her depth. Having met her several times, I would say that her problems are born out of insecurity and a terminal timidity that have prevented her from challenging the political environment in which she was marinated. As I wrote in National Review just before the 2024 election:

Harris may be suffering from ‘ideological dissonance’: She wants to promote the progressive values of her native Bay Area but knows that doing so could chop the political ladder off just before she reaches the top. Her ideology is incompatible, she fears, with that of a majority of voters.

Even bright-blue California, which gave her 58 percent of the vote in that election, is now shifting slightly to the right as problems with immigrant assimilation, rising crime, and a middle-class income squeeze pile up. Harris may have enough “baggage” to be the only Democrat who could lose the gubernatorial race. The state’s “top-two” open primary is structured so that the November general election could feature two Democrats — say, Harris and Caruso. (That scenario played out in 2018, when the late Senator Dianne Feinstein won her last reelection.) It’s no wonder that Harris is being so cautious about mounting a full-fledged political comeback so soon.