Harris is up by 10.3 points, according to the RealClearPolitics average of polls. She’s led in most polls since May, often by double digits. Much of that may be due to name recognition, as she was the 2024 nominee and served a term as vice president, and the cooling in support for Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA), who not long ago seemed poised to overtake her.

Still, Harris has so far been immune to the anti-establishment mood in her party and is taking steps to stay that way. She has made contact with the top socialist kingmaker, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani. Mamdani confirmed the call. 

Harris embraced the great awokening in her first failed presidential campaign, before being tapped for vice president. She ran away from it in 2024, once the tide had turned and she found herself unexpectedly atop the Democratic ticket. She could always shape-shift again, and her “no bad ideas” slogan from earlier this year is a strong indication she will attempt to do so, though Newsom is similarly malleable.

Mamdani is constitutionally ineligible to run for president because he is foreign-born. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), who turns 85 in September, has acknowledged he is probably too old for a third Democratic presidential bid.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), 36, faces neither constraint. She is running fourth in the RealClearPolitics national polling average at 11%, just behind former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg. An early May AtlasIntel poll had her in first place.

Ocasio-Cortez could also mount a primary challenge against Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), who is up for reelection in 2028. Given the socialists’ recent track record in New York, she’d have to be favored. Ocasio-Cortez was first elected in 2018 after upsetting a 10-term incumbent and sitting member of the House Democratic leadership team in a primary.

The 2028 Democratic presidential contest won’t really come into focus until after this year’s midterm elections.

Harris would nevertheless have one major vulnerability: The socialist wave is powered at least in part by anger at establishment Democrats who have lost to President Donald Trump.

Unlike Hillary Clinton in 2016, Harris did not even win the popular vote. She won about 6.8 million fewer votes than former President Joe Biden did in 2020, when she was his understudy.

Off-message things such as the reemergence of Hunter Biden or the Jill Biden book tour that down-ballot Democrats will probably be able to overcome in the midterm elections could be a bigger problem for Harris. Democrats may not wish to relitigate the Biden-Harris years, and progressives don’t have especially fond memories of them.

As the loser of the 2024 election, Harris would also be ill-suited to make the electability argument against a socialist opponent (with the caveat that Democrats will know the fate of battleground state socialist candidates like Maine’s Graham Platner by then).

Harris is very much the type of Democrat her party’s left-wing insurgents are most angry at, and all the energy is on the progressive side.

The main thing Harris has going for her is Democratic racial coalition politics. Black voters are helping to keep her atop the primary polls. This same voting bloc prevented Sanders from getting closer to the nomination in either 2016 or 2020, proving especially important to Biden in South Carolina after his slow start.

Unlike Sanders, many of the rising socialists are candidates of color. Perhaps Ocasio-Cortez could do better with black voters than her mentor did.

‘NOT A SURPRISE’ HARRIS REACHED OUT TO SOCIALISTS: BYRON YORK

It’s also the case that in every past presidential campaign Harris has run, she has started strong and then fizzled. A left-wing challenger will surely want to test whether her early polling lead is a mirage.

Harris may be making overtures to the ascendant socialist wing of her party in an attempt to become its leader. But this is a revolution that devours its elders rather than its children.