Here’s an idea that won’t happen but should: if Kamala Harris really wants to reset her political future — and strike back hard against the naysayers in Washington who have undermined her for the past two years — she should consider replacing Dianne Feinstein in the Senate.

Hear me out, and feel free to play the theme from The West Wing or House of Cards in the background. Democrats are transparently paranoid about Kamala Harris’s failure to launch. She’s viewed as a major liability, and should she be the nominee in 2024 through happenstance or an unexpected Joe Biden retirement, most Democrats in Washington feel she would lose to any Republican, even Donald Trump. In Jonathan Martin’s latest Politico essay on Biden, much if not all of the concerns about his age and frailty are set aside because Democrats just don’t think Kamala can win. It’s a long fall from being lauded as the heir apparent to the legacy of Barack Obama — and yes, that’s a thing the Washington Post was claiming not too long ago.

Obviously, Harris’s electoral failure — precipitated by a rough-hewn shiv placed between the third and fourth rib by Tulsi Gabbard on the debate stage back in 2020 — took a lot of shine off of her initial narrative. It became clear that Harris only became more grating and inauthentic the more you came to know her. Her selection as veep seemed like a consolation prize, driven by the Obamas and at the expense of Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, who is in every way a more capable politician.

This was supposed to be an opportunity for Harris to rebound. But as veep, Kamala’s fortunes have only worsened. Her odd laughter, her verbal tics, her constant staff turnover and her general uselessness in a particularly useless job have put her ever closer to Dan Quayle territory. Her invocations on foreign policy are particularly ludicrous, as exemplified by her latest Politico interview on the China balloon. She just does not seem ready for the big job, and Democrats know it.

Yet fortune is smiling on Kamala, if only she has the creative will to seize it. California’s Dianne Feinstein, who at eighty-nine is the oldest senator, is retiring — something she didn’t even know her own staff had announced.

At least two deeply unpopular members of the California delegation, the ludicrously ambitious Adam Schiff and the performative progressive Katie Porter, are vying for her seat — and more are reportedly incoming. It could be an incredibly expensive contest, with tens of millions of dollars from donors spent in a fight that could weigh down Democratic efforts to retain the Senate across the board in 2024.

Yet a solution presents itself: what if Kamala Harris was to engineer a return to the US Senate, replacing Dianne Feinstein?

This would be in the interests of Governor Gavin Newsom, a longtime Harris foe, in that it would remove her from the vice president’s position of natural ascendance. It would be in the interests of Democratic donors, who would breathe a sigh of relief that Harris had been removed as the unassailable alternative to Joe Biden. It would be in the interests of the Democratic Party in warding off an extremely expensive Senate contest in a critical campaign cycle. And it would allow Harris, who isn’t even sixty yet — a spring chicken in Democrat years — to find her footing again as a progressive-leaning darling. If she mounted another attempt at the White House in 2028, she could do it as her own person, not as someone who had to carry water for the last old white man to be nominated by the party of the woke.

The move would be compelling, audacious, and unprecedented in the modern era. But it would also give Kamala Harris the reset she needs to be taken seriously again. She should take a lesson from the hapless Charlie Crist: does anyone want their résumé in politics to end with a loss to Ron DeSantis?

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