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What’s a girl who has lost a race for the presidency to do?

Coming out of her disastrous run for president in 2024, Kamala Harris faces a choice that is virtually identical to the one Richard Nixon faced after he lost the presidential election of 1960. Should she run for governor of California in 2026 or try again for the presidency in 2028? Or both? Nixon opted to run for governor of California in 1962 and ended up losing, which drastically reduced his chances of getting the Republican presidential nomination in 1964.

Aware of this, on the night he lost the California gubernatorial race, the Trickster ostentatiously retired from politics, uttering the famous statement: “You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore, because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference.” Kamala’s prospects likewise look so dim at this point that the nation’s pundits might not have her to kick around too much longer, either.

Whatever she chooses, Harris does not apparently see a run for California governor as a stepping stone to seeking the Democrat Party’s presidential nomination again. The New York Times reported Thursday that some of Harris’ “closest allies say she is leaning against another White House run in 2028 and, instead, toward a campaign for governor of California in 2026. Her political choice is binary, she has told people: She can run for governor or president, but not both.”

Either way, however, Harris might be better off just staying home. The Daily Caller reported Thursday that all three of the hosts of “The Morning Meeting,” Mark Halperin, Sean Spicer, and Dan Turrentine, predicted that Harris “would likely face defeat if she pursued the governorship,” with Halperin “saying a loss would be humiliating for her.”

Spicer based his assessment on how poorly Harris campaigned for president in 2024, saying: “I had an advance copy of that book, ‘Fight,’ by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes … If she ran for dogcatcher, she’d lose. It is so bad. When you start to read how horrible of a candidate she was, how the staff infighting, the inability to — I mean, I really don’t care what she runs for. I mean, her decision-making, her staffing, are atrocious … She couldn’t run for anything and win.”

Turrentine, a former Democratic strategist, agreed, and gave the impression that Harris was aware enough of her own deficiencies to opt for the easier campaign: “I do not think she’ll run for president.” But, he said, it might not turn out to be as easy as she assumes: “I think if she runs for governor, it will not be nearly as easy as she thinks it will. And if I had to bet, I’d bet she loses running for governor for the reasons Sean said.”

Halperin suggested an intervention: “If her friends are being honest with her, they’re going to say what Dan said, which is, ‘You can run for governor of California, but you might lose. And that would be not just embarrassing but like existential destabilizing.”

Running for California governor and losing might not be as devastating to Harris’ career as Halperin, Spicer, and Turrentine seem to think. After all, it didn’t end Nixon’s career in national politics, despite his own declaration that he was finished. He sat out the 1964 election, watched Barry Goldwater lose in a landslide to Lyndon Johnson, and positioned himself for 1968 as the middle-of-the-road candidate who avoided Goldwater’s extremes and could unite both the party and the country. It worked, and he was elected president six years after he vented his bitter disappointment at losing the California gubernatorial race.

There is no doubt, however, that Kamala Harris’ political career is going through some dark times. Before the 2020 election, she had an aura of competence and formidability; back then, however, the number of Americans who had actually seen her in action was comparatively few. When she and Old Joe claimed victory in 2020 and took office, Harris worked assiduously to dispel her image of strength and fitness for office by repeatedly demonstrating that she was abjectly unequipped even for the light and largely ceremonial duties of the vice presidency.

Now her political fortunes rest upon people not remembering, or never having known, just how disastrous she was as vice president, and not being exposed to her vapid and often semi-coherent public ramblings. The more Americans see Kamala Harris, however, the less they like her. That’s not exactly a strong foundation on which to build a run for any office.