Politics

Harris is telling her advisers and allies to keep her political options open

Published

2 years ago

November 25, 2024

Kamala Harris has been lying low since her defeat in the presidential race, unwinding with family and senior aides in Hawaii before heading back to the nation’s capital.

But privately, the vice president has been instructing advisers and allies to keep her options open — whether for a possible 2028 presidential run, or even to run for governor in her home state of California in two years. As Harris has repeated in phone calls, “I am staying in the fight.”

She is expected to explore those and other possible paths forward with family members over the winter holiday season, according to five people in the Harris inner circle, who were granted anonymity to discuss internal dynamics. Her deliberations follow an extraordinary four months in which Harris went from President Joe Biden’s running mate to the top of the ticket, re-energizing Democrats before ultimately crashing on election night.

“She doesn’t have to decide if she wants to run for something again in the next six months,” said one former Harris campaign aide. “The natural thing to do would be to set up some type of entity that would give her the opportunity to travel and give speeches and preserve her political relationships.”

Most immediately, Harris and her advisers are working to define how and when she will speak out against Donald Trump and reassert her own role in the Democratic Party. Closing out her term as vice president, she’s set to preside over certifying the November election she lost to Trump, and then appear at the once-and-future president’s inauguration on Jan. 20.

“There will be a desire to hear her voice, and there won’t be a vacuum for long,” a person close to Harris said.

At the same time, Harris and her husband, Doug Emhoff, will have a long checklist to plow through before they leave the Naval Observatory for good.

They have to decide whether they’ll take up permanent residence at their home in Los Angeles, or establish a base elsewhere. No matter where Harris and her family live, some around her have expressed concerns about safety, as her Secret Service protection expires six months after stepping away.

Following her meteoric rise in Washington and California, there are internal questions about standing up a federal committee to raise money. It will be the first time in two decades that the former senator and career prosecutor will be out of public office. That means she’ll be standing up a personal office and nurturing her massive online presence without the organizing principle of day-to-day governing.

“You just got to let them marinate in their own success, their own failures or their own mistakes or their achievements. This is personal,” said Donna Brazile, a close ally of Harris’ and campaign manager for Al Gore, the last vice president who ran for president, lost, and never ran again. He instead made climate change the cause of his life.

Brazile recalled how Gore was given months before people demanded an answer about his next moves and that over the last few months Harris, despite her defeat, has earned “a lot of political capital. You don’t squander that by making snap decisions.”

While other Democrats have lost presidential races and been forced to regroup, none in the modern era inherited the nomination roughly 100 days before the election. Indeed, most of the prior losses occurred after a carefully planned, and often arduous climb to the top. Harris, 60, is comparatively young.

“There is no one — no one — who actually can relate to what she’s been through these last four months. No one,” said Paul Maslin, the Democratic pollster. “And I wouldn’t begrudge her at all to take some time and figure this out.”

But others close to Harris believe that the current news cycle and speed at which the Democratic Party might start making decisions will force Harris, who tends to deliberate for long periods, to make some early decisions.

In interviews with Harris aides and confidants, as well as Democratic luminaries, there’s broad acknowledgement that Harris represents an “X factor” in the next Democratic primary. While some Democrats are dismissive of a 2028 run — and few, if any, prospective opponents would defer to her — Harris notched more than 74 million votes and was able to build good will among a large group of Americans.

The good news for Harris, according to her allies, is that her standing in the party increased the longer that she ran her short campaign, which is rare in electoral politics. Her allies believe that the toxicity that surrounded John Kerry or Hillary Clinton after their losses is unlikely to taint Harris’ political future in the same way.

Harris and her advisers are working to define how and when she will speak out against Donald Trump and reassert her own role in the Democratic Party.

They point to her running a race as a more moderate candidate (a break from her 2019 primary run) as a boon to whatever choice she ends up making as the party seems poised to do its own writ large move to the center.

“She proved a lot of skeptics wrong as a political athlete. And her standing with the public is as good as any Democrats with the name I.D. that she has,” a Harris ally told Blue Light News.

A snap poll of the 2028 field found Harris at 41 percent, a significant lead over the others: Gavin Newsom, Josh Shapiro, Tim Walz, Pete Buttigieg, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Gretchen Whitmer, JB Pritzker, Andy Beshear and several others who all were in single digits.

But Harris’ advantages are not unique. Similar surveys taken in the two months after the 2016 campaign, for example, found Clinton with a large lead for 2020, with majorities of Democrats saying they wanted her to run in the next cycle.

“I can’t conceivably imagine the party turning to her a second time,” said one Democratic strategist granted anonymity to speak candidly.

If she opts not to run in 2028, the earliest clues about her political future could come around whether she runs to succeed Newsom in California, a prospect Blue Light News first reported in May. Her office pushed back strongly at the time. Yet the mere idea of her running again in California has frozen the field and kept some fundraisers on the sidelines.

While there’s disagreement among people who know Harris well about what office she should run for, there’s emerging consensus that she probably can’t do both — compete for governor and then turn around and start a presidential campaign a few weeks later.

The calendar alone would make that difficult, with the 2028 primary gearing up immediately after the midterm elections. Harris confidants also point to the demands on a governor’s time, and the expectation of the electorate that she would stay home and dig into the state’s mounting challenges around the high cost of living, homelessness and crime.

“It’s a real job,” is how one of the people close to her put it, contending they were at first dismissive of the idea she might do it, but now feel like it’s possible.

And if she doesn’t run for governor, Harris will have to consider the cost of staying out of an open race in a state where other high-profile offices are not likely to come up soon. Both Senate seats will be filled for the foreseeable future by relatively youthful incumbent Sens. Alex Padilla, 51, and Adam Schiff, 64.

Advisers and aides to several other candidates conceded that a gubernatorial run would almost certainly clear the field of serious challengers, leaving a mix of Democratic also-rans and unproven self-financed candidates to take her on.

The state hasn’t elected a Republican to the office since Arnold Schwarzenegger nearly 20 years ago, and Harris, who would be about 70 after two terms, could view the governorship as a capstone of her political career, or potentially pass on 2028 and still run for president in 2032, if there’s an opening.

“She is not someone who makes rash decisions. She takes, sometimes, a painfully long time to make decisions. So I would pretty much guarantee you she has no idea what her next move is,” said Brian Brokaw, a former Harris aide who has remained close to her circle.

“Could she run for governor? Yes. Do I think she wants to run for governor? Probably not. Could she win? Definitely. Would she like the job? I don’t know. Could she run for president again? Yes,” Brokaw said. “Would she have a whole bunch of skepticism from the outset, because she has run in a full-length Democratic primary where [in 2019] she didn’t even make it long enough to be in the Iowa caucus, and then she was the nominee this year?”

He added: “On the other hand, people can learn a lot from their previous adversity, too.”

Politics

A forced-labor crackdown or an end-run around Congress? Dissecting Trump’s new tariffs

Published

3 hours ago

July 27, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

NEW YORK (AP) — The Trump administration has imposed double-digit tariffs on more than 60 countriesusing a legal justification that permits the president to levy import taxes and other sanctions against countries found to engage in “unjustifiable,” “unreasonable” or “discriminatory” trade practices.

The new tariffs announced in recent days take effect just as temporary 10% worldwide tariffs expiredand critics say they are less about cracking down on forced labor than they are a way to replace those tariffs. The expired tariffs were themselves a temporary replacement for worldwide tariffs the Supreme Court struck down in February.

The tariffs were levied on countries that the U.S. says either don’t have or don’t effectively enforce a forced-labor import ban. The affected countrieswhich account for 99% of U.S. imports, were quick to protest, calling the Trump administration’s claims unfounded and arbitrary, as nations with vastly different records on forced labor received the same tariff level. The U.S. spent four months investigating but gave few details on how it arrived at the tariff rates, which are either 10% or 12.5%.

Sidestepping Congress

The tariffs were levied under Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974 on countries that the U.S. determined had failed “to impose and effectively enforce a prohibition on the importation of goods produced with forced labor.”

During President Donald Trump ‘s first term, he cited Section 301 to impose sweeping tariffs on Chinese imports amid a dispute over the sharp-elbowed tactics Beijing was using to challenge America’s technological dominance. The U.S. is also using 301 powers to counter what it calls unfair Chinese practices in the shipbuilding industry.

“The 301s allow a permanent tariff without going to Congress to settle the dispute,” said Barry Appleton, a law professor and co-director of New York Law School’s Center for International Law. “That’s what all of this is about. The president doesn’t want to knock on the front door of Congress, so he’s trying every side door and every unlatched window to get in.”

Little evidence that countries failed to enforce import bans

The office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) said it consulted with all 60 economies under investigation and held two rounds of public hearings, elicited more than 2,100 public comments, and had “engagement” with its trading partners about what they were doing to combat forced labor bans.

It didn’t detail its talks with the countries, saying those were confidential. Experts say it is fairly straightforward to investigate whether a country has a ban or not, but it is difficult to determine the government’s exact rationale for each country’s failure to enforce import bans.

“There’s not a lot of hard evidence there,” said Scott Lincicome, vice president for general economics and trade policy at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank. “It’s pretty laughable on its face to think that a country like the ones in Europe or in Norway or Switzerland aren’t doing enough to police forced labor.”

And even if countries do enact and enforce the forced-labor import bans the U.S. wants, they would still need to prove that they’re enforcing them to Washington’s satisfaction before the tariffs would be removed, said lawyer Patrick Childress, a partner at Holland & Knight and a former U.S. trade official.

“This suggests that no short-term path for countrywide relief from the new Section 301 tariffs will be available,” he said.

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Countries and industries reject the forced labor argument

Many countries have pushed back against the Trump administration’s findings.

Brazil, which faces a 12.5% forced-labor tariff, called the U.S. move “arbitrary and unjustified.” The U.S. “chose to manipulate an issue of great importance to human rights and the struggles of workers worldwide in order to accuse 59 countries and the European Union of unfair practices,” it said in a statement.

Australia also questioned the justification for its 12.5% tariff.

“We believe that amongst all of the countries in the world, Australia does take the issue of slavery, modern slavery, seriously, and will continue to do that,” Trade Minister Don Farrell told reporters in Adelaide.

Carve-outs have riled some industries. The National Council of Textile Organizations (NCTO), which describes itself as the voice of the American textile industry, protested a mechanism that exempts the Section 301 tariffs for textile and apparel imports from Bangladesh, Cambodia, Indonesia, and Malaysia based on those countries’ imports of U.S. cotton and textiles.

“No other industry has been more disadvantaged by forced labor than the U.S. textile industry, which employs 453,000 workers and has lost 41 plants over the past two plus years,” NCTO chief executive Kim Glas said in a statement. “We remain strongly concerned that USTR’s textile mechanism will harm the very domestic manufacturers the administration seeks to help.”

US forced-labor bans don’t always work

The U.S. has two major pieces of legislation related to forced-labor import bans. The Tariff Act of 1930 gave Customs and Border Protection the authority to seize shipments where forced labor was suspected and to block further imports. But it had a big carve-out: If there was “consumptive demand,” meaning there wasn’t sufficient supply to meet domestic demand, imports were allowed regardless of how they were produced. The Trade Facilitation and Trade Enforcement Act that took effect in 2016 eliminated that loophole.

In 2021, the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act was passed. It blocks imports from China’s Xinjiang region unless businesses can prove the items were made without forced labor.

But goods made with forced labor can still make it into the U.S. In 2015, an Associated Press investigation found that slave labor was used in the fishing industry in Southeast Asia. The seafood they caught made its way to supermarkets and pet food providers across the U.S.

An investigation by The Associated Press in 2020 into the $65 billion palm oil industry found labor abuses among an invisible workforce consisting of millions of men, women and children in Asia. The fruit they harvested made its way into the supply chains of major companies, including Unilever, L’Oreal, Nestle and Procter & Gamble.

Calls for a more comprehensive approach to combat forced labor

During hearings on the tariffs this month, National Retail Federation vice president Jonathan Gold, who was representing the business coalition the Joint Association Forced Labor Working Group at the hearing, said that in order for the import bans to work, they would have to be much more extensive.

He said there need to be “clear, measurable benchmarks” tied to tariffs for countries to hit, and that the U.S. should help countries build enforcement programs.

Kenya Davis, a partner at the Boies Schiller Flexner law firm, said an effective ban needs a “comprehensive approach” that provides transparency about what the investigations consisted of, along with programs that provide countries aid in enforcing bans.

Politics

El-Sayed comes under fire for ‘ogre on a pike’ leaked comment

Published

5 hours ago

July 27, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed is facing backlash from within his own party after using controversial rhetoric to describe the stakes of his victory in a recent donor meeting.

“You put one ogre on a pike, and then everyone else gets the message, and all of a sudden starts to sound a lot different,” El-Sayed said, describing how his win could propel the progressive movement, according to audio of a Zoom meeting obtained by POLITICO.

On Monday, several Democrats were quick to slam his comments, which they took as direct reference to his Senate primary opponent, Rep. Haley Stevens. El-Sayed had not explicitly mentioned Stevens in the portion of the call Blue Light News reviewed.

“Calling your female opponent an ogre you want to put on a pike is not beating the rap that this race has some serious sexism,” Neera Tanden, a centrist Democrat and president of the Center for American Progress, posted on X. Melissa Byrne, a former staffer for Sen. Bernie Sanders, called the remark an “unforced error” that is “really bad and beneath the progressive project.”

El-Sayed’s leaked comments and the reaction to them amount to another flashpoint in a tense primary that is dividing the progressive and moderate wings of the party, and at times has been defined by accusations of racism and sexism.

“Abdul continues with personal insults and making this race about his personal political ambitions and the other 49 states,” said Arik Wolk, spokesperson for the Stevens campaign. “Haley is focused on getting things done for Michigan, and only Michigan.”

Republicans also immediately jumped on the comment, and some leaned into stereotypes of El-Sayed’s religion as a Muslim. “Michigan Islamist discusses beheading his opponents,” said Steve Guest, a former staffer for Sen. Ted Cruz, on X.

An El-Sayed campaign spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the backlash. A spokesperson had previously told Blue Light News that the candidate was “speaking metaphorically” about his intention to support a primary against Sen. John Fetterman in Pennsylvania.

This is not the first time El-Sayed has used — and defended — aggressive political rhetoric. “When they go low, we don’t go high,” the progressive said while speaking at a campaign rally earlier this year, riffing on a famous line from former first lady Michelle Obama. “We take them to the mud and choke them out.”

He and Stevens will face off in their final Democratic Senate debate Monday night, and the results of the Aug. 4 primary could have major consequences for the party as it grapples with its ideological tack ahead of the 2028 presidential election.