What Will Kamala Harris Do Now?

The 2024 election is over, the last few races are being decided, and for the most part, only the recriminations remain. The Harris/Walz campaign tried everything from "brat" and "joy" to calling Donald Trump a fascist and a Nazi, and they failed. They didn't just fail, they failed catastrophically, losing not only the presidential election by a wide margin in the electoral vote and the total vote count, but they also lost more Senate seats to the Republicans and, it looks like, control of the House of Representatives as well. President-elect Donald Trump will enter office with a clear and undeniable mandate, and with a friendly Congress.

The next couple of years are going to be - and I never use this word - epic. We're going to see some big changes unless I miss my guess. Streamlining and decentralizing the federal government, on-shoring our industrial sector, and rebuilding our military services, all of that will be keeping President-elect Trump and Vice President-elect Vance pretty busy.

But, one might wonder, what's to become of the primary figures in the Harris/Biden administration and the Biden/Walz campaign? It's tempting, of course, to say "who cares?" But watching what people like this do after a catastrophe like last Tuesday can be instructive. So what might they do?

Joe Biden, of course, is done. Come January, he will fade away into retirement, and given his current mental decline, he will probably be withdrawn from the public eye. Sadly, he seems to be physically in decent shape, and may well become what our daughter who works in emergency medicine calls a GOMER, an acronym that stands for "Get Out Of My Emergency Room," which is what one says when the nursing home sends a demented patient in at 3:00 a.m. That's sad, and I hope that's not the case; it's not a fate I'd wish on anyone. But after all his decades on the government teat, the final achievement of his life's goal of being president of the United States, and the perception that he's in part responsible for the electoral beating the Democrats just took, Joe Biden is done, and I'm betting that after January we won't see or hear much from him.

Tim "Great Walz of China" is, of course, still governor of Minnesota. He is up for re-election in 2026 - the Land of Ten Thousand Lakes doesn't term limit governors, so he can run again. It's hard to guess what might happen. He'll likely face a primary challenger after this electoral drubbing, and he may even face a resurgent GOP in Minnesota. Trump only lost blue Minnesota by 138,316 votes as of this writing; that's about 3.3 percent of the vote. In 2020, Donald Trump lost to Joe Biden in Minnesota by about twice that margin - so the gap was closed. I'll be a tad surprised if the Minnesota Republicans land a candidate in the governor's residence, but a primary challenger, a more moderate challenger with some more crossover appeal into Minnesota's more rural and small-town regions, might just take old Tim Walz out - and that loss, after the mess of a presidential campaign he was part of, may find Tim Walz jetting back to China to see if he can get back his old job teaching English.

And, finally, what's to become of Kamala Harris? Some are touring a harebrained scheme for Joe Biden to land her on the Supreme Court, but that's not going to happen, and only the most far-left, wackadoodle "progressives" think that's even in the same time zone as realistic. So I don't think there's any reason to worry about that.

Here's a dose of "real," though: Kamala Harris' political career is over. At least, at the national level.

Republicans will bring a candidate back and have even had some luck doing so. Richard Nixon lost to John F. Kennedy in 1960 but came back and won in 1968. Ronald Reagan mounted a primary challenge to Gerald Ford in 1976 and lost - but we know what happened in 1980, prompting the political truism that "it took a Carter to give us a Reagan." (Now we may very well say "It took a Harris to give us a Trump.") But the Democrats tend to eat their wounded. Kamala Harris, after the drubbing she just took, after that terrible campaign, after the word salads, the refusal to engage in unscripted interviews, the shrieks of "Trump is a Nazi," will not now be able to run for Third Assistant Dogcatcher in any but the most committed leftist jurisdictions. That brings her political options down to a few - Mayor of San Francisco (or Oakland) or maybe, just maybe, Governor of California, although I wouldn't bet a brass farthing on that last option.

More likely she'll release a book, a ghost-written treatise on "Why I Lost" that will blame everything but herself, and she may be able to make a few million on the progressive speaking circuit before she fades completely from memory. She may also be able to land an academic position, perhaps Professor of Women's Studies at some liberal arts degree mill.

But as far as national politics, she's done. The Democrats, as I noted, tend to eat their wounded, and Kamala Harris just took the electoral equivalent of a sucking chest wound.

So Much for 'Pissed Off' Women: Trump's 2024 Gains With Women Greater Than 2020

America spoke very clearly last Tuesday and sent Kamala Harris and Tim Walz to the showers. For a while, at least, we will return to some semblance of normalcy. But there are more "progressive" Democrats in the wings - anyone who doesn't think that the impeccably coiffed Gavin Newsom doesn't have his eye set on the White House is kidding themselves.

Kamala Harris, though, is done past. On a personal level, I hope she has a long, healthy, happy life, well away from political office, speaking loudly about why she thinks she lost, so she can continue to serve as an object lesson for how to lose a presidential election.

And if you want an example of how to win - just look at Donald Trump and JD Vance.