Kamala Harris' revealing interview with Colbert on election loss, political future
Harris said she does not want to work in government "for now" but did not shut the door on a 2028 presidential bid
(Correction: Joe Biden was the 46th president of the United States. An earlier version of this story included the wrong number in the order of U.S. presidents.)
WASHINGTON — Former Vice President Kamala Harris denied that she was sitting out next year's California governor's race because she's holding out for a different office.
"No, no," she told "The Late Show" host Stephen Colbert during a July 31 appearance. "Honestly, it's more, perhaps, basic than that."
Harris said she thought a lot about running for governor in her home state. The 2024 Democratic nominee who lost to President Donald Trump had also previously served as California attorney general and one of the state's two U.S. senators. The 60-year-old who made history as the nation's first female, Black and Asian-American vice president was born in Oakland and now lives near Los Angeles.
"Recently I made the decision that, for now, I don't want to go back into the system, I think it's broken," Harris said.
Harris said she long believed that the country's systems would be strong enough to defend the nation's core principles but she does not currently believe that's the case.
"I want to travel the country, I want to listen to people, I want to talk with people, and I don't want it to be transactional, where I'm asking for their vote," Harris, who has run for president, told Colbert.
Earlier in the week, Harris released a statement that she would not compete in the California gubernatorial race in 2026. Yet, she left the door open to a 2028 presidential bid by saying that "for now" she would stay out of public office.
She repeated the phase on Colbert as she addressed his question about the California governor's race, while indirectly addressing speculation that she could launch a third presidential campaign. Harris said Democrats have "lots of leaders" they can look to at present and argued that it would be a "mistake" to put the future of the party on "the shoulders of any one person."
Harris ran a short-lived campaign for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination before joining Biden's ticket and serving as his vice president. She became the Democratic nominee for president in 2024 after Biden dropped out less than four months before the general election.
During her abbreviated White House campaign Harris faced questions from voters and party insiders - plus Trump attacks - about whether she was doing enough to distinguish herself from Biden, who is now 82. In the Colbert interview, Harris signaled that she would not be commenting on her former boss' health and fitness for office when he quit the race.
Harris said she has an "incredible amount of respect" for Biden, and she encouraged her audience to remember the former 46th president of the United States as someone who believed in the rule of law and the importance of public service and integrity.
"And that's where I'll leave that," she said.
As for the 2024 campaign, Harris said did not want to "pile on" Biden after he dropped out. "There was a lot of piling on at that time, and I wasn't going to participate in that."
The former vice president was on the program to promote her memoir, "107 Days," the publication of which she announced in a video that morning. The book will be published by Simon & Schuster on Sept. 23.
It was Harris' eighth appearance on the program, which was CBS cancelled last month and will end next year, and her first interview about her forthcoming memoir.
During the interview she teased a passage in the book about her last birthday. She said her husband, Doug Emhoff, "kind of dropped the ball," last October when she turned 60 just before the election.
Harris said she didn't watch the news for months after her loss to Trump. "You know, I'm just not into self-mutilation," she joked.
Instead, Harris said she turned to cooking shows. "'The Kitchen' is one of my favorites," she said.
During the Colbert interview, Harris also reflected on her drive to the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2025, for the certification of Trump's election win. Harris presided over the process in her capacity as president of the Senate and officially declared Trump, who received 312 votes at the Electoral College to her 226, the winner of the 2024 presidential contest.
That act invoked memories of the assault on the Capitol four years earlier, when lawmakers and former Vice President Mike Pence went through the same process to certify Joe Biden and Harris as the nation's next leaders, Harris said. During the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection, Harris was in her final days still representing California in the U.S. Senate and was at the Capitol.
"It was a difficult day, because it brought up - it conjured a lot, in terms of what that exact day was, what that day has meant in the history of our country, the recent history of our country," she said.
Harris said she had not spoken to Pence but complimented him for upholding the Constitution.
(This story has been updated with more information and video.)