Michael LaRosa, who served as Jill Biden's press secretary, told Fox News he believes Kamala Harris has no realistic path to the 2028 Democratic nomination, a blunt assessment from inside the party's own ranks.
LaRosa, now working as a Democratic strategist, delivered the verdict during a televised interview with Fox News host Gillian Turner on Tuesday. Harris, he said, has fundamental political weaknesses that two presidential cycles have failed to fix. He told Turner flatly that he does not believe Harris will secure the party's nomination, let alone the presidency.
His reasoning was specific. LaRosa pointed to a pattern of evasion and caution that he said defines Harris as a political figure, one who calculates rather than leads, and who refuses to give voters straight answers.
"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."
That "third at-bat" line carries weight. Harris ran for president in 2020, dropped out before a single primary vote was cast, and then lost the 2024 general election after replacing Joe Biden at the top of the ticket. LaRosa's argument is that Democratic voters have seen enough.
Rather than simply dismissing Harris, LaRosa offered a glimpse of the kind of candidate he believes Democrats need. He named California Governor Gavin Newsom, Rahm Emanuel, and former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg as the type of stronger leaders the party should consider. But he stopped short of endorsing any of them, saying he was not yet committed to a specific candidate.
Newsom has been frequently considered a frontrunner for the Democratic nomination in 2028. On the Republican side, Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio are among those drawing early attention, according to Federal News Network reporting on prediction-market odds.
LaRosa's willingness to go on Fox News and publicly undercut Harris is notable on its own. But it fits a broader pattern: the former Biden press secretary has become one of the more candid Democratic insiders willing to acknowledge his own party's failures.
This is not the first time LaRosa has broken ranks. He previously confirmed key claims from Jake Tapper's book about the Biden White House, admitting that Biden's team engaged in deliberate deception about the former president's mental decline. LaRosa told the Washington Examiner that "there are many things there that are true" in Tapper's account, and added bluntly: "They did do a lot of gaslighting."
The numbers bore that out. Polling as far back as August 2023 showed 77 percent of voters believed Biden was too old for another term. By July 2024, only 24 percent described him as mentally sharp, down from 46 percent during his 2020 campaign. Biden's inner circle denied and undermined that data for months.
LaRosa has also weighed in on Jill Biden's memoir, "View from the West Wing." He accused the former first lady of trying to rewrite her own role in the 2024 disaster. As Newsmax reported, LaRosa said of the memoir: "They're trying to change the tape in people's minds about who she is."
That memoir itself became a flashpoint. Jill Biden revealed she privately feared her husband may have been having a stroke during the disastrous June 2024 debate, the same debate after which she publicly told him, "Joe, you did such a great job. You answered every question, you knew all the facts." The contradiction between her private alarm and public praise drew fierce criticism from former Biden aides, who accused her of shifting blame and avoiding accountability.
Harris has not stayed silent about 2024, either. In her own memoir, "107 Days," she described Biden's decision to seek a second term as "recklessness," saying the stakes were too high for the choice to rest on "an individual's ego, an individual's ambition." She also revealed that the White House mantra was always "It's Joe and Jill's decision", a phrase she said staff repeated "as if we'd all been hypnotized."
That account, reported by the New York Post, also included Harris's claim that Biden's staff actively worked against her within the administration, adding "fuel to negative narratives" about her. If true, it means Harris entered the 2024 general election already undermined from within her own White House.
Yet LaRosa's critique cuts a different direction. He is not blaming Biden's team for Harris's failures. He is saying Harris herself is the problem, that her instinct to equivocate, to avoid risk, to calculate rather than connect, is baked in. And he does not believe she can fix it.
A New York Magazine article, referenced in the Just the News report, has positioned Harris as the 2028 Democratic frontrunner and highlighted her efforts to listen to voters more effectively. LaRosa's on-air dismissal was a direct rebuttal of that framing.
The broader picture is one of a Democratic establishment still litigating the wreckage of 2024. Jill Biden has not reconciled with Nancy Pelosi over the push to end Joe Biden's campaign. Her memoir has drawn accusations of historical revisionism from the very aides who served her family. Harris has publicly called the decision to run again reckless. And now LaRosa, a man who worked for Jill Biden and knows the operation from the inside, is going on national television to say the party's supposed frontrunner cannot win.
One former Biden campaign aide, reacting to Jill Biden's memoir, captured the mood among disillusioned staffers: "The Bidens preached selflessness and service above all, and every decision they've made since he decided to run for reelection has been about themselves."
Jill Biden, for her part, has continued to make public statements about her husband's treatment by the media and by the White House medical team. She has claimed the press held Biden to a harsher standard than his opponents, a complaint that sits uneasily alongside the mounting evidence that his own team suppressed the truth about his condition for years.
LaRosa worked for Jill Biden beginning in 2019, according to the body of the Just the News report, though a separate passage in the same article gives a start date of 2021. Either way, he left in July 2022. He is not a Republican operative or a hostile outsider. He is a Democrat who watched the Biden operation from the inside and came away willing to say publicly what many in the party will only whisper.
His verdict on Harris is not personal. It is strategic. He believes the country needs a stronger leader, and he does not believe Harris is capable of becoming one. Whether Democrats listen is another question. The party's track record of learning from its own internal dysfunction is not encouraging.
When the people who ran the last Democratic White House are the ones saying the party's frontrunner cannot win, the party's problem is not messaging. It is leadership.
