Kamala Harris has not confirmed or denied she is preparing to run for president for a third time (she told Al Sharpton she is “thinking about” it earlier this month), but a host of recent polls shows her leading the pack of presumed 2028 Democrat hopefuls.
The former vice president is also making more public appearances – sitting down with Sharpton at his National Action Network conference, taking her ‘book tour’ through the Carolinas, and, most recently, headlining a leadership event for black women in Chicago. It was there that Harris returned to form, dotting her word salads with profundities and debuting a new “condescending” accent.
On Tuesday’s show, Megyn was joined by Rich Lowry and Charles C.W. Cooke of National Review to discuss Harris’ return to the public stage and what her poll positioning reveals about the Dems chances in 2028.
Kamala’s Comeback
Harris was in the Windy City on Sunday for The Root’s “Power Rising” summit. Described by the local ABC7 affiliate as a “three-day gathering for Black women and their allies, she sat down with the event’s founder, Bishop Leah Daughtry, for a “soul brunch and talk.”
“According to [the] polls right now, it’s between Harris and Newsom and Harris, she’s feeling good. She’s starting to feel a little swagger,” Megyn noted. “So, she goes to this woman women of color seminar yesterday, and she’s back to dispensing all sorts of wisdom.”
While dispensing said wisdom, Harris tried out a new accent that seemed to be her take on what black women sound like. “What gives me hope, Leah, is that we’re gonna win the midterms,” Harris said. “It’s gonna be difficult and to say I’m gonna get mine also. And so don’t count on me.”
Lowry, for one, was not impressed. “She is a black woman who does a fake black woman accent,” he noted. “If you do fake accents, almost by definition, you’re a bad politician. We were talking about Trump’s upsides downsides… but one upside is you can never get him to do a fake accent. He’s always himself.”
The eyebrow-raising inflection revealed itself again during one of her word salads:
“…Recognizing that at some point this administration will be termed out, and there’s going to be a whole lot of debris. And I would, I would caution us against talking about rebuilding with any sense of nostalgia about how things were. Cause even before, they weren’t working so well for a lot of folks. And so we’re going to have to be clear-eyed… We’re not going to go back to just trying to bring back the status quo, the thing that you worked well in and made you comfortable. We’ve got to upend some of this stuff to actually get this work done, including, again, health care, child care, what we need to do around housing. There has to be a vision that is about what we do when we’re in power. Because it’s one thing to know how to fight the power. It’s another thing to be in power and own that power. And I know everybody in this room knows what it means to be in power and empowered. Anyway, that’s how I been thinking.”
Megyn called the “fake bizarre street accent” an obvious, albeit disrespectful, pander and said Harris seems to be buying time with her awkward pauses and repetitive speech patterns. While Cooke agreed the faux accent is “condescending” and amounts to “a bad impression,” he had a different theory for why Harris speaks the way she does.
“I think she thinks that what she’s doing is eloquence. She reminds me of someone who thinks they can sing but can’t… She thinks that she is profound,” he posited. “I find her excruciating to watch as a result, but I really, truly believe that she thinks she’s an orator and so the pause is, her searching for the words are beneficial to the audience because she is saying something that is so important.”
2028 Chances
Regardless, Lowry said one thing is certain: Harris is gearing up to run for president again. “She is definitely running. What else is she going to do,” he said. “[But] this is a completely hollow figure, and… it’s a bit rich lambasting the Democratic establishment for not delivering when she was a senator herself and at the center of Democratic politics for a very, very long time.”
Lowry believes name recognition is what has Harris at the top of the polls now, but Megyn wondered if the party is going to find itself in the same place it did in 2024 after President Joe Biden dropped out of the race.
“They’re in the same position as [we] talked about that night that Joe Biden went down in that June 2024 [debate]… We were all stunned that he had fallen apart. He was not able to spit out sentences,” she recalled. “We said that night he’s done, but we talked about… the very thing that would go on to haunt the Democrats for the entire remainder of the race, which was: How are they going to replace the white guy with anyone other than the black woman who is next in line?”
Lowry believes there will be a key difference in 2028. “I think what’s different this time is it’s not just a Democratic establishment that is so into identity politics and scared of its base,” he said. “It’s going to be actual Democratic voters making the decision.”
“We saw in 2020, Biden is not a great statesman; he was in reduced state even then; but that was a rational choice compared to the other alternatives. And parties tend, not always, but tend to make rational choices,” he added. “So, she’s going to have to go out and win this this time on the merits. And that’s a much harder proposition, obviously, than just making 100 phone calls or whatever she did after Biden dropped out.”
You can check out Megyn’s full interview with Cooke and Lowry by tuning in to episode 1,300 on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you like to listen. And don’t forget that you can catch The Megyn Kelly Show live on SiriusXM’s The Megyn Kelly Channel (channel 111) weekdays from 12pm to 2pm ET.