A former press secretary to first lady Jill Biden went on national television to dismiss Kamala Harris's 2028 presidential prospects, and the criticism landed harder because it came from inside the Democratic house.
Michael LaRosa, now a communications strategist, told Fox News host Gillian Turner on Tuesday that voters "are not going to give Kamala Harris a third at-bat." The blunt assessment came during a segment on "America Reports" prompted by a New York Magazine article that identified Harris as the Democratic front-runner for the next presidential cycle.
LaRosa didn't stop at predicting Harris would lose. He laid out what he sees as the structural flaws that make her candidacy unworkable, a pattern of risk-aversion, evasion, and political calculation that he argued voters have already rejected twice.
"She follows. She doesn't take risks. She calculates. She doesn't answer questions, she equivocates. She's got to get over that if she wants to make a connection with people, but I don't think she's going to get a third at-bat."
Harris's office did not respond immediately to a request for comment from The Hill.
When Turner asked LaRosa who he'd prefer to see carry the Democratic banner in 2028, he rattled off three names without hesitation.
"I want somebody who can run the country. I want somebody who is competent. I love Rahm Emanuel, Gavin Newsom. I like Pete Buttigieg."
LaRosa indicated his list was "not limited to" those three, though he did not name additional candidates during the interview. The preferences are notable in part because they bypass the identity-driven calculus that has shaped recent Democratic primary politics. All three of LaRosa's picks are white men, a fact he didn't address but one that echoes recent calls from veteran strategists urging the party to prioritize electability over demographic box-checking.
Whether any of those alternatives would actually run remains an open question. Gavin Newsom appeared on CBS News's "Face the Nation" earlier this year and said he needs to make the decision with his family. He has not committed to a campaign.
Rahm Emanuel, for his part, has been publicly vocal about the Democratic Party's direction, or lack of one. His sharp criticism of party leadership and the DNC's postmortem process has positioned him as a figure willing to say what many elected Democrats won't.
Not everyone in Democratic circles shares LaRosa's assessment. The New York Magazine article that sparked the Fox News segment featured Democratic strategist Minyon Moore offering a far more favorable portrait of Harris's positioning.
"She's been listening to the American people and really trying to figure out what's impacting them and how she can be of service to them."
LaRosa pushed back on that characterization during the interview, arguing that Harris needs to "start leading" rather than listening, a distinction that cuts to the core of the intraparty debate over whether Harris's cautious political style is prudent or paralytic.
The gap between Moore's framing and LaRosa's is not just a difference of opinion. It reflects a genuine split within the Democratic coalition over whether the party's 2024 loss was a personnel problem or a Harris problem specifically. Moore's language, "listening," "service", describes a candidate in waiting. LaRosa's language, "follows," "calculates," "equivocates", describes a candidate who has already been weighed and found wanting.
LaRosa's criticism arrives at a moment when Harris's standing within her own party is already under strain. Her forthcoming memoir, "107 Days," includes candid shots at Joe Biden's decision to seek a second term. Harris called that decision "recklessness" driven by ego and personal ambition rather than the national interest, as the New York Post reported.
Harris also claimed in the book that Biden's White House staff actively "added fuel" to negative narratives about her and failed to defend her publicly. But that finger-pointing has not gone unanswered. An anonymous Democratic aide told the Post that "no one wants a leader that can't speak truth to power," adding, "I do not think she is going to run."
The memoir's blame-shifting fits a pattern that former Democratic fundraisers have publicly criticized, a tendency among Biden-era principals to point fingers at everyone except themselves for the 2024 loss.
Former Biden aides have been even more direct. One former Biden official told reporters that the "throughline" between Jill Biden's memoir and Harris's book is that "they blame everyone but themselves for the loss." Another former campaign aide said bluntly: "The only people undermining President Biden's legacy are the people closest to him." Those comments came amid backlash to Jill Biden's own memoir, "View from the West Wing," which revealed she feared her husband was having a stroke during the June 2024 presidential debate, describing him as "an AI hologram that was glitching." That admission directly contradicted her public praise of Biden's performance immediately after the event, when she told him, "Joe, you did such a great job."
LaRosa's willingness to publicly dismiss Harris carries additional weight because of his own prior admissions about the Biden operation. He has previously acknowledged that Biden's inner circle engaged in "gaslighting" and denial about the former president's mental decline and poor polling numbers.
In comments corroborating claims made in journalist Jake Tapper's book "Original Sin," LaRosa confirmed that "many things" in the book about efforts to hide Biden's deterioration "are true." He said plainly: "They did do a lot of gaslighting."
The numbers bear that out. Polling as early as August 2023 showed 77 percent of voters believed Biden was too old to serve another term, yet his team denied the data. By July 2024, only 24 percent of voters described Biden as mentally sharp, down from 46 percent during his 2020 campaign.
That LaRosa, someone who saw the dysfunction from the inside and has since spoken openly about it, now says Harris cannot win is more than routine punditry. It's a firsthand witness to the party's 2024 collapse saying the same leadership failures that doomed Biden still define Harris.
The broader question hanging over the Democratic Party is whether it can move past both Biden and Harris without tearing itself apart in the process. Early 2028 polling has shown Harris leading the Democratic field by default, a reflection of name recognition more than enthusiasm.
But default front-runner status is not the same as a mandate. Harris ran for president in the 2020 cycle and dropped out before a single primary vote was cast. She became the 2024 nominee only after Biden withdrew from the race. LaRosa's "third at-bat" framing captures a real vulnerability: Harris has never won a competitive national primary, and the two campaigns she has run ended in withdrawal and defeat.
Meanwhile, the alternatives LaRosa named each carry their own liabilities. Newsom has not committed to running. Emanuel is a polarizing figure within the progressive wing. Buttigieg lost the 2020 primary after struggling to build a coalition beyond college-educated white voters. And other potential contenders have been stepping back from 2028 talk rather than stepping forward.
New York Magazine may have crowned Harris the front-runner. But when a former Biden insider goes on Fox News to say it's "not going to happen" and names three men he'd rather see run, the coronation looks less like consensus and more like a party that hasn't figured out how to say no to a candidate it doesn't believe can win.
Democrats spent 2024 propping up a candidate they knew was failing. If they do it again in 2028, they'll have no one to blame but themselves, and this time, they won't even be able to say nobody warned them.
