Kamala Harris Is 2028’s Frontrunner by Default — And Her Sentences Still Don’t Go Anywhere.
New York Magazine calls her the Democratic Party’s “fairly obvious” 2028 front-runner. Democratic aides say the same thing to Fox News, on background. And at the National Action Network’s 2026 convention, Kamala Harris (D-CA) stopped dodging the question herself. Asked by the Rev. Al Sharpton whether she’s running again, she said: “Listen, I might. I’m thinking about it.”
What the frontrunner chatter skips past is what the years since 2024 have actually produced. The word-salad clips kept coming — the newest one is from last month. The “root causes” border assignment she was handed in March 2021 ended with the numbers moving in exactly one direction. And on policy, when Harris isn’t repeating herself, she has largely been borrowing the other side’s furniture — including a border wall she once called a “medieval vanity project.”
This is a highlight reel, not an indictment. Nothing below is invented — every clip, quote, post, and figure is cited to the outlet, agency, or account that produced it first.
- 4× — times Harris repeated “the significance of the passage of time” in under 30 seconds — Sunset, Louisiana, March 2022, footage via RNC Research
- 1,659,206 — Border Patrol Southwest-border encounters logged in fiscal year 2021 alone — the highest annual total on record at the time, per CBP
- 312–226 — the final 2024 electoral college count — the only time Harris has topped a national ticket, per the National Archives
- Dec. 3, 2019 — the day Harris suspended her first presidential campaign, two months before a single Iowa vote was cast — CNN
Start with the clip that made her a meme two full years before she ever became the nominee. Touring a library in Sunset, Louisiana, in March 2022 alongside then-Gov. John Bel Edwards (D-LA) and Rep. Troy Carter (D-LA), Harris found a phrase and would not let it go.
“We were all doing a tour of the library here and talking about the significance of the passage of time, right. The significance of the passage of time, so when you think about it there is great significance to passage of time. There is such great significance to the passage of time when you think of a day in the life of our children.”
Kamala Harris · Sunset, Louisiana · March 2022
She said some version of “the passage of time” four times in under thirty seconds. RNC Research posted the clip that same month, and it has been a stock reference in Harris commentary ever since — Fox’s Gutfeld! has returned to the genre often enough that the panel now guesses the underlying question before it even sees the clip.
KAMALA HARRIS: "The significance of the passage of time, right? The significance of the passage of time. So when you think about it, there is great..."
The pattern predates the White House run and has outlasted the 2024 loss. In May 2023, at a swearing-in ceremony for a White House Hispanic-community initiative, Harris recalled her mother telling her, “You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?” — then added a line that turned into a meme the moment Joe Biden (D) dropped his own re-election bid fourteen months later: “You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you.”
By the fall of 2024, the incoherence complaint had made its way from cable-news panels straight to the Republican nominee’s own account.
I've never seen this before, but the producers of 60 Minutes sliced and diced ("cut and pasted") Lyin' Kamala's answers to questions, which were virtually incoherent, over and over again, some by as many as four times in a single sentence or thought...
Trump's Truth Social post on Harris's 60 Minutes answers, as reported verbatim by The Hill, US News, and the Washington Times.
On March 24, 2021, President Joe Biden (D) tasked then-Vice President Harris with leading diplomatic efforts to address the “root causes” of migration from Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador — not with running border-security operations, which stayed with then-DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas (D). Critics started calling her “border czar” anyway, and the nickname stuck for the rest of her career.
Harris delivered her root-causes strategy in July 2021, naming corruption as the chief driver of migration, followed by violence, trafficking, and poverty. A June 2021 trip to Mexico produced $5,200,000,000 in announced private-sector investment pledges for the region. Whatever the assignment’s merits, the border numbers moved the opposite direction from the one it promised.
CBP recorded roughly 78,000 Southwest-border encounters in January 2021, the month Biden took office. By March 2021, when Harris got her assignment, that monthly figure had already jumped to 173,000. By November 2023 it was 233,000 — a 35% increase from her assignment month, per CBP data cited by Fox News. For the full fiscal year, Border Patrol alone logged 1,659,206 Southwest-border encounters in FY2021, the highest annual total on record at the time; by FY2023 that had grown to more than 2.4 million at the Southwest border and more than 3.2 million nationwide, a record CBP has held since at least 1960. The House Committee on Homeland Security tallies more than 8.7 million Southwest-border encounters, and more than 10.8 million nationwide, across the fiscal years since Harris’s assignment began.
Assigned it — President Joe Biden (D), March 24, 2021.
Held it — Vice President Kamala Harris (D), diplomatic engagement with Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador only.
Ran border security the whole time — DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas (D), by statute.
The one fair data point for Harris: encounters with migrants from her three assigned countries fell from roughly 700,000 in 2021 to roughly 500,000 in 2023. Encounters from every other country combined rose enough to make FY2023 the highest-encounter year CBP has ever recorded. Voters, evidently, graded the whole administration’s border record — not just her slice of it — in November 2024.
This was a typical day on the Border under the Sleepy Joe Biden Administration with "Border Czar" Kamala Harris!
Verbatim, archived at Trump's Truth (status 116847638833780246) — Trump still runs this line two years after the election that made it moot.
The word-salad genre hasn’t taken 2026 off. On June 21, podcast host Don Lemon asked Harris about hope. Her answer:
“And, in particular, at this moment, it is so important that we not only have hope, but that we understand that that should be a verb. We each have light inside of us. And we need to know that that is what inspires our hope as much as anything external to ourselves.”
Kamala Harris · The Don Lemon Show · June 21, 2026
I never thought I'd say this, but it appears as though Kamala Harris might have a real challenger in the word salad competition.
Kruta’s post was actually about Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) defending a different Democrat — but notice who the benchmark still is, two years after Harris last appeared on a ballot. When Harris does put out policy, critics on both sides describe it the same way: her 2024 campaign website, published a full month into the race, still “lacks specifics beyond a general vision,” and where there is specificity, it increasingly resembles the positions she spent a decade opposing.
At her 2019 campaign launch in Oakland, Senator Harris dismissed Donald Trump’s border wall as “the president’s medieval vanity project.” She repeated the line on her own X account that July.
Congress did not appropriate these funds for Trump's medieval vanity project. Let's be clear: Trump's wall has never been about keeping the American people safe.
By August 2024, Axios reported that a Harris presidency would spend $650,000,000 in already-appropriated funds to keep building that same wall. She reversed course on a 2019 fracking-ban pledge the same year, telling CNN “I will not ban fracking” and defending the shift by saying “my values have not changed” — and she dropped her 2019 call to decriminalize illegal border crossings, telling voters instead that there “should be consequence” for crossing without authorization, per PBS NewsHour. Three reversals, each one landing closer to the positions she used to run against.
The 2028 frontrunner conversation also glides past Harris’s actual electoral track record outside deep-blue California. Her first presidential run ended before a single vote was cast: she entered the 2020 primary in January 2019 and suspended her campaign on December 3, 2019, two months before the Iowa caucuses, citing a lack of campaign funds. Her only run at the top of a national ticket ended on November 5, 2024, when Donald Trump (R) carried all seven contested swing states and the electoral college 312–226, per the National Archives’ certified count.
San Francisco District Attorney (2004–2011); California Attorney General (2011–2017); U.S. Senator, California (2017–2021) — each won in a state Democrats have carried in every presidential election since 1992.
Vice President (2021–2025) — a national office, but not a first-chair executive one.
Zero wins, ever, as the top of a ticket in a competitive swing state.
The candidates, Sleepy Joe and then, Kamala, weren't so "HOT" either!
Trump's reaction to the DNC's own 2024 election 'autopsy' report, via meaww.com.
Even Democrats are split on whether any of this adds up to a second campaign worth running. A former Biden campaign aide told Mediaite flatly that a Harris 2028 bid is “not gonna happen.” A USA TODAY opinion column went further.
Opinion: There's an idea taking hold on the left that former Vice President Kamala Harris is a viable choice for the Democratic nomination in 2028. She isn't.
And yet New York Magazine’s reporting — the same reporting Fox News rounded up — keeps landing on the same word: frontrunner.
New York Magazine says Kamala Harris is the Democratic frontrunner for 2028 whether Democrats want to admit it or not.
A word-salad reputation built in 2022 is still fresh in 2026. A border assignment that was never actually “border czar” still gets called that, because the numbers under the administration she served went up regardless of her lane. A decade of progressive positions has quietly become a set of Trump-era ones. And the only national election she has ever topped, she lost by 86 electoral votes.
None of that has stopped anyone — least of all Harris — from talking about 2028. This page will keep the reel running as long as she does.
