Yet history suggests this may not be a good idea. Instead, such a race could politically fatally damage their White House prospects in 2028, when President Donald Trump will be winding down his second, nonconsecutive term.

At least three possible 2028 White House contenders are weighing their options for the Senate two years before. All would be feted for winning an important race in the 2026 cycle when Senate Republicans will be defending their 53-47 majority.

Senate Republicans are heavily recruiting Gov. Brian Kemp (R-GA) to challenge Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-GA). Due to state term limits, Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R-VA) will leave office in January 2026, about 10 months before the midterm elections. Senate Republicans hope that, by then, he’ll be challenging Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA), while Senate Democrats want former North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper to run against Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC). Other would-be 2028 presidential contenders have already turned down Senate runs, including Govs. Gretchen Whitmer (D-MI), and Tim Walz (D-MN), who was the 2024 Democratic vice presidential nominee.

There is a clear logic to running for a new, high-profile job. It keeps the contender in the news. And if they win, it shows that they still have electoral juice.

But history shows that this choice is a fraught one. The last presidential nominee to win a major electoral office and immediately turn around to successfully seek his party’s presidential nomination two years later was Thomas Dewey, who was elected New York governor in 1942. In 1944, Republicans nominated Dewey to head the national ticket in what would be a losing bid to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Still, by the time Dewey was elected governor of New York, he was a political veteran of sorts. After all, he had nearly nabbed the 1940 Republican presidential nomination as district attorney in Manhattan, making a name for himself as a mob-buster and all-around tough-on-crime prosecutor in the heart of New York City.

Three other candidates pulled off comparably quick political promotions after two years running a state house. Woodrow Wilson won the 1912 presidential election after a two-year short stint as New Jersey governor. That echoed the previous Democratic president, Grover Cleveland, elected in 1884 after two years as New York governor. A previous chief executive in Albany, Samuel Tilden, having held the governorship for approaching two years, was nominated for president by Democrats in 1876 but lost to Republican rival Rutherford B. Hayes.

More recently, successful presidential nominees have taken a different political path and run as private citizens, letting their performance in previous government positions speak for themselves. Late Presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan both won the White House as former governors, of Georgia and California, respectively. Former President Joe Biden was a former vice president when he won the White House in 2020. As was the late President Richard Nixon in his 1968 win. The late Walter Mondale, too, was a former vice president when he nabbed the 1984 Democratic presidential nomination, only to lose in crushing fashion against the incumbent Reagan.

Two relatively recent losing presidential nominees also sought the White House without holding a government job at the same time. Mitt Romney, the 2012 Republican nominee, was a former Massachusetts governor. Hillary Clinton, the 2016 Democratic standard-bearer, was years past her time on the public payroll as secretary of state and, before that, senator from New York.

Looking ahead to the 2026 midterm elections and 2028 presidential race, a prominent candidate with national ambitions would face a very tricky road running for new positions in back-to-back election cycles. The candidate would inevitably face criticism for immediately abandoning the new job, almost certainly skipping critical votes for a senator or being absent from leading their state as governor, to go on what is invariably a grueling multiyear quest for the White House.

There is another bigger problem that is somewhat more basic — what happens if they lose the race? America appears to love a winner, and the flip side is that losing a race right before running for president may be a career killer.

Historically, Nixon stands out here — in a situation that is eerily parallel to Harris’s. In 1962, after eight years as vice president and then losing the ultra-close 1960 presidential election, Nixon made an unsuccessful bid for governor of California — at the time, a Republican state. The most enduring part of that desultory statewide bid came the day after the GOP nominee’s loss, when he famously incorrectly declared, “You won’t have Dick Nixon to kick around anymore.”

Nixon sat out the 1964 presidential race and then came back to win the 1968 Republican nomination and the White House that November. Before that, to find failed statewide candidates who went on to win a presidential nomination, you have to look way back to the days before primaries and caucuses. William Jennings Bryan lost a Nebraska Senate race before he got the first of three Democratic nominations starting in 1896. In the 19th century, future Presidents Benjamin Harrison and Abraham Lincoln lost Senate races before winning their party’s nomination and the White House. So did John C. Fremont, the losing 1856 Republican nominee. However, each race happened pre-17th Amendment, when state legislatures chose senators, not the people.

Two others lost gubernatorial races before winning a presidential nomination — future President James K. Polk, and Horatio Seymour, unsuccessful in his national bid as the 1868 Democratic nominee.

Now, it’s hard to imagine these six candidates from a time before airplanes and women getting the vote would provide much comfort for a prospective 2028 presidential contender.

THE GREAT REALIGNMENT: WHAT TRUMP’S VICTORY MEANS FOR THE GOP COALITION

For Harris, a loss in the 2026 California gubernatorial race seems somewhat unlikely. Running as by far the most prominent Democrat in one of the bluest states in the country, she would be the overwhelming favorite to advance to the November ballot in the state’s all-party primary and then nab the governorship, which Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) will give up due to term limits. But the others are running in races in which they would be seen as having, at best, 50-50 odds of success in statewide bids, and in some cases, much less than that.

A presidential run is almost always a long shot. Would running and winning a statewide race two years before make a positive difference in the odds? One of the famous clichés of politics is that “fortune favors the bold.” However, in this case, being bold might not work well. Trying to win two offices in rapid succession, a different popular statement may work best — “discretion is the better part of valor.” Let’s see which one these candidates choose.

Joshua Spivak is a senior research fellow at UC Berkeley Law’s California Constitution Center and a senior fellow at the Hugh L. Carey Institution for Government Reform at Wagner College. He is the author of Recall Elections: From Alexander Hamilton to Gavin Newsom.