WASHINGTON — When Willie Brown talks about Kamala Harris and Gavin Newsom, he speaks like a man who trained both horses and watched one break from the gate too early. The former San Francisco mayor, who mentored both of California’s most prominent Democratic figures, told ABC News this week that the more “viable” candidate between his two mentees heading into 2028 is Newsom — because, as Brown put it, “he would not be the most recent loser.”
It is the kind of blunt assessment that rarely gets said on the record in Democratic Party circles, and the fact that it came from Brown — one of the most influential political brokers California has produced — signals something more than routine donor skepticism. Former Vice President Harris has said publicly she is “thinking about” another presidential bid, but a network that has been retreating from her since spring is now openly saying what it had previously only whispered.
ABC News spoke with more than fifteen former donors, fundraisers, campaign aides, and Biden White House staffers about another Harris run. A source familiar with Harris’s thinking told the outlet she is considering all options but has not begun deliberating a 2028 campaign explicitly with her team. That distinction — between keeping options open and actively planning — is precisely what her former supporters are reading as a tell.
“I really have not heard anybody say that they want her to run. In fact, it’s the opposite,” a longtime Democratic donor who raised money for Harris’s 2020 presidential campaign told ABC News. A fundraiser who raised money for her 2024 bid was sharper still, saying he did not believe Harris was “the right person for this moment by any stretch” and that the Democratic electorate would be hungry for a voice with “a different perspective” and “a different future.”
What makes this moment different from ordinary post-loss donor fatigue is the structural argument Brown laid out. Harris had a clear path back to national viability, he said: win the California governorship in 2026, take office on January 8, 2027, and enter the presidential race from a position of executive authority — not as a former vice president marketing a campaign memoir. She declined to run for governor.
“I would have advised her to be elected governor, so that she would be in the same identical position, if not better than for electability nationally than Newsom,” Brown told ABC News. “If she was in the category of being on January 8, 2027, the governor of California, the dialogue would be about her candidacy, not about anybody else’s.”
The problem for Harris, as her critics inside the party see it, is that she now occupies the worst possible position in the 2028 field: familiar enough to be relitigated, but without the executive record that would reset the conversation. An influential California donor and early Harris supporter told ABC News, “We are looking for someone who is fresh and not imposed on the voters. We understood we were stuck with the situation last time, but this is not the case going forward.”
Newsom, for his part, has confirmed he is considering a run. “Yeah, I’d be lying otherwise,” the term-limited California governor told CBS News earlier this year. He has spent recent months touring early-primary states, recording a podcast in which he debates conservative guests, and building donor relationships that would have otherwise gone to Harris. ABC News reported that one fundraiser who backed Harris for more than fifteen years said that if a choice came down to Harris and Newsom, the money would flow to Newsom.
The broader 2028 field remains unsettled. Among the names Democrats are weighing: Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, Harris’s 2024 running mate. A Politico-Citrin Center poll of California Democratic voters — Harris and Newsom’s home state — found Newsom leading at 25 percent to Harris’s 19 percent, a gap that illustrates the competitive ceiling she faces even on favorable terrain.
Harris’s supporters argue that the skepticism is premature and that she retains a national profile and infrastructure that no other potential candidate can quickly replicate. She has led in some early national Democratic primary polls by double digits, according to a Morning Consult survey conducted earlier this year, and commands strong support among Black voters — a core Democratic constituency that no campaign can win the nomination without. Senator Elizabeth Warren told NOTUS she was “not there” on 2028 yet, reflecting the broader posture of many elected Democrats who are publicly deferring the question rather than committing to or against Harris.
The dissonance between Harris’s polling strength and the private unease of her donor network points to what may be the defining tension of the early 2028 cycle. Voters, particularly Black voters, may be more forgiving of 2024 than the money. Democrats’ strong showing in the 2025 elections suggested the party’s base was energized and focused forward — but forward toward whom remains the question the next eighteen months will answer.
What the ABC News survey makes clear is that Harris has not done the political maintenance her post-2024 position required. One fundraiser who was involved with both her 2020 and 2024 campaigns told ABC News that Harris had done nothing to maintain relationships with major donors in the two years since her loss — and that, to his knowledge, donors had not even received a thank-you note. Whether that assessment is fair or an overstatement, it is the operating reality of the donor class she would need to finance a third campaign.
Harris’s aides have previously said she will make a decision on her political future by the end of summer. What remains unanswered is whether the party’s voters and its money will still be in alignment when that moment arrives — or whether, as Brown’s assessment suggests, the window that was always the most natural for her has already closed.
