The quiet campaign to stop Kamala 2028 is growing louder

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Welcome to The Midterms, Actually. Every week I’ll be writing about two things: one big idea or trend I see forming across the 2026 primaries, and one thing I’m hearing from a voice on the ground. You can sign up here to get it in your inbox every week. Let’s get into it.

On Wednesday, LinkedIn co-founder and Democratic Party megadonor Reid Hoffman threw cold water on the prospect of a 2028 presidential campaign from former Vice President Kamala Harris. “I think it would be a very challenging path for her and it’s going to be a very noisy field,” Hoffman said when asked at a Politico event in Washington, DC, whether Harris should run again.

His statement comes the same week CNN aired an interview with California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who told Jake Tapper (while fly-fishing?) that he would not run for president if Harris did so — a curious move from someone who swung through South Carolina barely two weeks ago, and who has long been treated as a presumed frontrunner for 2028.

Taken together — and thinking back to our America, Actually episode on the question of whether Harris will run — I think you’re seeing the early stages of what I’d call a light public pressure campaign.

Astead W. Herndon’s weekly guide to the big ideas and key people behind the political shifts shaping the 2026 elections.

Let me explain: Harris has been curiously mum on most things politics since 2024, but it’s clear she wants to be taken seriously as an option for 2028 and has weighed in from time to time on issues (this week it was AI safety). When we recorded our episode in June, her allies emphasized two political points over and over: She’s leading the early 2028 polls, and nobody has supplanted her with the two groups that anchor the Democratic base, Black voters, and women. But they stressed something else, too. Her former communications director Jamal Simmons told me Harris “should do what makes her hap

To me, it seemed the group was less interested in making the case that Harris should run in 2028, and more interested in pushing back against an emerging elite consensus that she shouldn’t. They were fighting for the right for her to choose for herself, without Washington input or pressure from the media. And it came with an implicit acknowledgment: They understood that the party’s biggest donors, whose money and access shape much of the early stages of a presidential race, had moved on from Team Harris.

Hoffman’s statement is particularly notable because of the ideological lane he occupies. He’s not just any rich Democrat — he’s bankrolled several of the party’s newest post-2024 ventures, from the abundance-adjacent WelcomeFest crowd to the $10 million he put behind a super PAC boosting James Talarico’s Senate bid in Texas this summer. If Hoffman’s asking Harris to move on, that’s likely representative of the larger left-of-center apparatus, which is looking for a unifying contender who can fend off a challenge from the activist left in 2028.

Here’s what John Morgan, another big Democratic donor, told me about Harris over the summer:

I do not [want her to run]. I think that everything associated with the Biden administration needs to be put to the side and moved on. … I just think that everything that happened has left a bad taste, and we need a fresh start on that side of the aisle.