Two years on from her devastating presidential election defeat, Kamala Harris was greeted like a rockstar as she took the stage before a rapt audience at Georgia’s Clark Atlanta University.

When a politician is greeted by a friendly crowd, they often hear chants of their name. But at Clark, an historically-Black college (HBCU), students instead delivered a school spirit chant for the Atlanta University Center, celebrating an HBCU alumna – and the country’s first female and first Black vice-president – as one of their own.

Harris is “big sister general”, said Sanaiya Archer, a sophomore at Spelman College in Atlanta. “I’m able to see myself in her. Not that I personally relate to her, but she went to an HBCU, she’s an HBCU alum, I’m at an HBCU. And it’s just amazing to see a Black woman that I can see anywhere else in my life on a presidential scale.”

That scale has yet to reach the Oval Office. In 2024, following the reluctant withdrawal of Joe Biden, Harris launched a 107-day campaign for the White House which again brought to the US tantalizingly close to electing its first female president. She lost.

Donald Trump’s return left Democrats reeling – again. Even as it contests this week’s midterm elections, the party has yet to settle on who could lead it back into power, and how.

Harris, forced by Biden’s late exit to conduct the shortest presidential campaign in modern US history, has not yet ruled out another run for the Democratic nomination. But is a figure so closely associated with the party’s past really the person to manifest a more successful future?

At Clark on Thursday, she was treated like a returning hero. “I’ve come here to remind you, don’t ever let anybody take your power from you,” Harris said. “Don’t ever let anybody tell you who you are. You tell them who you are!”

She was aware, she stressed, of how her loss affected some of the young Black women before her. “You know, we’ve been spending the last year and a half, so many of us, going through a range of emotions,” Harris said. “You cried. I heard you. Anger, depression, sadness, frustration, a sense of – of helplessness and powerlessness, folks feeling like, ‘I’m watching all this happen, but I can’t do anything about it’.”

“Well,” she said, “that moment has passed”.

Harris has spent the last month recultivating relationships, appearing in front of the friendliest of audiences on behalf of Democratic candidates around the country.

In Mississippi earlier this month, Harris appeared at a high school rally in Columbus and took part in a rural healthcare roundtable in Clarksdale, campaigning for Scott Colom, the Democratic challenger of US Republican senator Cindy Hyde-Smith. Polls point to a surprisingly close contest in a historically-Republican state.

Similarly, Nevada’s Democratic attorney general Aaron Ford is now in a toss-up race for the state’s governorship against Republican incumbent Joe Lombardo. Harris met with unionized culinary workers in Las Vegas in October.

Harris has also campaigned for Democratic gubernatorial nominee David Crowley in Wisconsin, and the party’s New Hampshire Senate nominee Chris Pappas. She returned to Michigan – a state which Trump flipped in 2024 – in September to campaign for Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic senate candidate.

After dozens of trips to Georgia as vice-president, and having all but rented an apartment in Atlanta while campaigning for president, Harris returned to the state last week to campaign alongside Democratic senator Jon Ossoff – who has also been mooted as a potential 2028 contender.

Ossoff is popular in his state, confident on stage, and widely expected to retain his Senate seat by a convincing margin. But even he looked a little awkward when walking out after Harris had instead been erroneously announced too early, leaving a roomful of Democrats momentarily disappointed.

“Let me be really blunt,” Ossoff said, dissecting Trump’s obsession with voting results from the 2020 election in the county that covers the core of Atlanta. “Why Fulton county? It’s the same reason he’s obsessed with Philly. It’s the same reason he’s obsessed with Detroit. It’s because for this committed, lifelong racist, the fact that Black voters were instrumental to his defeat is even more offensive than the defeat itself.”

Voter turnout has been surging in Georgia – particularly in Black communities, and Atlanta’s politically potent purple suburbs. Early voting set a record on the last day of open polls before Election Day, with about 2.8m votes cast: turnout of 37% so far.

Harris, who has been channelling Black anger and anxiety on the campaign trail for others, has been pushed back on questions about her own political ambitions, even while shoring up relationships in swing states on the road. Speaking to actress Keke Palmer on a podcast earlier this month, she swatted away a question about another run for president.

“Oh, girl, come on!,” Harris replied. “I haven’t decided. I haven’t decided yet. I will. I promise you. But the midterms, the midterms, the midterms. ’28 doesn’t matter if we don’t do ’26 right: what’s right in front of us.”

While Harris had to navigate a short runway in 2024, the last two years have offered the former vice-president an opportunity to redefine herself and offer a new vision for a Democratic party that faltered. She has tried to do that, at times – while opting to lay low, at others.

At a fundraising dinner in Atlanta for Fulton county Democrats on Friday evening, Harris reinforced themes she has returned to over the last year; that the country cannot simply be repaired after Trump’s departure, but must be fundamentally changed for the better.

Trump, whom she dubbed the “decorator in chief”, is leading “an administration that is stone cold corrupt”, Harris said, recounting highlights from his second presidency – from the offer of checks from tariff revenue to a teleprompter handler who profited on prediction markets with wagers on the president’s next words. “This is the most callous, corrupt presidential administration in America’s history.”

Democrats must not squander power if they recapture it, she said.

“It is the job of the Democratic party to be ready to match the resolve of the people with the resolve to govern. And to be candid, that’s going to require a certain kind of ruthlessness,” Harris said. “Not ruthlessness in the sense of cruelty, because that’s not who we are. But in our willingness to use our power to deliver on our commitments.

“And we must be uncompromising to deliver actual relief. We must be impatient with injustice. We must be intolerant of cronyism and corruption. And we must be intolerant of the status quo, because it’s ain’t working for a whole lot of people.

“Our party cannot no longer let process stand in the way of progress, because … the American people cannot afford to wait for that time.”

At Clark, at least, the bright-eyed students of the AUC who waited for a glimpse of Harris outside the hall like theater fans seeking autographs seem to want her to run.

Carington Hill and Naomi Blakey are two first-year students at Clark who attended Harris’s address. “We just turned 18,” Blakey said. “We were just talking about how when voting came and the election ended, how we were upset about how he won.”

Blakey wants Harris to run again, she said. “Because me and my friends weren’t ready … I didn’t get to vote. And I feel like my vote could have made a difference, and it could have not, but still, I wanted to.”

Hill also wants Harris to run again, but expressed apprehension about the public’s appetite for a Black woman in charge. “We’re not progressive enough,” she said. “I feel like all their biases would come back and we would vote for the bad person in a way again.”

“Well, not we” she added, pointing at her friend and herself. “But other people would vote for that bad person again. You know what I mean?”