At first glance, the chair of Maine’s Cumberland County Democratic Party, Joe Zamboni, and former presidential candidate Kamala Harris would appear to operate in very different spheres of the political plane. But both have a similar question on their mind this week: who is the best fit to represent the Democrats during the crucial two years when Donald Trump reaches the end of his political lifespan?
For Zamboni, the task is obvious: to find a replacement nominee for Graham Platner, who announced he was ending his Maine Senate candidacy this week after a series of sexual assault allegations. Harris is trying to wrestle with the more consequential question of whether she should put herself forward as a presidential candidate for 2028.
Platner’s departure from the race was considered an inevitability for the past few days following several broadcast interviews by previous partners alleging harrowing sexual assault. The manner of Platner’s announcement that he was withdrawing from the race, in which he denied the allegations and hinted that he was being forced out by the party establishment, drew criticism from within the party. David Axelrod, the former Obama adviser and prominent commentator described Platner as issuing “a closing act right out of Donald Trump’s tawdry playbook. Deny. Deflect. Refuse responsibility.”
For more than a year, Platner presented himself – and convinced a growing following – that he was a new kind of Democrat, far removed from the gilded insider path and a complete repudiation of the smooth blandishments of the finessed political careerist. He connected with Maine Democrats in town halls that felt collective and energetic and real.
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But the emergency task facing Zamboni and his colleagues has drawn obvious comparisons with the melodramatic and botched three weeks in the summer of 2024, when president Joe Biden announced he would not advance as party candidate and Harris, his vice-president, succeeded him without a primary election – or even a party conversation.
“Our goal is to make the process as transparent, accessible and orderly as possible while ensuring we remain consistent with statewide procedures,” Zamboni was quoted as stating in the Maine Beacon this week.
“Transparent” was a much-used word in the bitter aftermath of the Harris campaign, during the long winter when the party could reflect on its debacle at length while Trump set about reshaping Washington. Harris, meanwhile, vanished from view only to return with a memoir on her experience and has since given occasional interviews and appeared at public forums.
Just three weeks ago, at a Forbes event in Vienna, she was asked a straightforward question about what she has been hearing from Americans as she moves around on what she has described as a “listening tour”. It sounded like a penalty-kick of a question, set up to allow Harris to express a new urgency and keen ear and, more importantly, to communicate the one thing that she singularly failed to in her defeat by Trump: explain why she would want to be president.
Her reply is too long to quote in full, but in tone and style it must have plunged any Democrats listening back into the nausea of autumn 2024, when her message somehow went off track in the weeks after she out-sparred Trump in the only debate stage they shared during the campaign.
“What people are telling me includes that they want to believe in systems,” she said.
Her interview companion at the event was former Hollywood star and governor of California Arnold Schwarzenegger, whose celluloid and political careers were defined by verbal brevity.
“And they’ve lost trust in those systems,” she continued.
“What I hear a lot is at the end of this administration there will be a lot of debris. I tell them often I can’t guarantee that it won’t get worse before it gets better. There will be a lot of debris. And it would be irresponsible to then address that in a way that we only talk about what should we do, what we need to do to rebuild; if we do that with any sense of nostalgia, that would be irresponsible.
“The status quo is not working for a lot of people and what the people are telling us is that they want things to be better. And in some places what that sounds like is we want that to be broken. But they don’t actually necessarily mean break it through destruction. But they do mean it has to be better.”
The reply inadvertently summarised the problem of Harris’s first campaign in a nutshell. It was difficult to know what she was trying to say. Does anyone – let alone “people”– really say that they “want to believe in systems”. If so, what systems?
A little while later, Harris spoke of her “love for Generation Z”, the demographic aged 13 to 28 that, she said, has only known “climate change and the pandemic”.
“What I love about them is that they are so beautifully impatient.”
This observation gave a much clearer hint that yup, she is running.
And why not? The most recent 2028 presidential survey by Quantas Insights shows Harris with a clear national lead as Democratic candidate at 35 per cent. Gavin Newsom, the California governor who nailed his colours to the mast early, is her closest challenger but sits on a distant 17 per cent. In the New York Times table aggregating 14 other polls, Harris also has a commanding 35 per cent support base, with none of her would-be competitors reaching 20 per cent.
The same aggregate leans overwhelmingly to Harris facing the man who succeeded her as vice-president, JD Vance. There is little surprise there: even Trump, in idle moments in the White House, reportedly likes to canvas staff on their preference for Vance or secretary of state Marco Rubio.
But the lingering presence of Harris and the sudden, disgraced end to Platner’s insurgent campaign presents the width of both choice and dilemma for the Democratic Party as its members continue to try to identify the right people to lead it at state and national level over a crucial 24 months. It would be something, if, after all the soul-searching and promise of exorcising, they ended up right back where they, well, ended in November 2024.
It may be too early to say that Kamala Harris is back. But she hasn’t gone away.
