Former Vice President Kamala Harris phoned New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani last week and met behind the scenes with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez at a Chicago summit, Fox News Digital reported, in a burst of outreach to the Democratic Party's progressive and socialist wing that signals a likely 2028 presidential campaign.
Mamdani, the Ugandan-born Muslim sworn in as mayor in January, confirmed the call on SiriusXM's "The Clay Cane Show" on Wednesday. He described a relationship that has been building for months, not a one-off courtesy dial.
"The vice president reached out to have a conversation, and we've had a brief conversation. We've been in touch over the last few months, and I really do appreciate her outreach."
Harris also reached out to pro-Palestinian groups, including at least one organization connected to the "Uncommitted Movement" that grew out of opposition to President Joe Biden's handling of the Israel and Gaza conflict. That movement openly challenged Biden and Harris during the 2024 cycle. Now Harris appears to want those same activists inside her coalition.
The pattern is unmistakable. Harris has visited South Carolina, a crucial early primary state, earlier this year. In April, at the National Action Network's 35th Anniversary Convention, Rev. Al Sharpton asked her directly whether she would seek the presidency again. Her answer was coy but telling: "I might. I might. I'm thinking about it... I'll keep you posted."
The choice of allies tells you where Harris believes the Democratic Party's center of gravity has moved. Mamdani is not a garden-variety big-city Democrat. He won the Democratic primary for New York City mayor in June, and since taking office he has endorsed socialist-aligned candidates who swept New York's Democratic primaries last month.
That socialist wave in New York is not an isolated event. It is part of a broader pattern of Mamdani-backed democratic socialists winning primaries and pushing the party further left at the local and state level.
Ocasio-Cortez, meanwhile, needs no introduction as a progressive standard-bearer. Harris met with her behind the scenes at a Black women empowerment summit in Chicago. The venue name was not disclosed. But the meeting itself, quiet, deliberate, off-camera, suggests strategic coordination, not a chance encounter at a buffet table.
RNC Chair Joe Gruters did not mince words. Speaking exclusively to Fox News Digital on Wednesday, Gruters framed Harris's outreach as evidence that the Democratic Party is being pulled into ideological territory most Americans reject.
"The fact that she's courting people like Mamdani, these socialists and communists, it goes back to the radical leftists, because the Democrats are in big trouble as a party."
Gruters went further, describing what he sees as a structural problem the Democratic Party cannot escape:
"They're in the death spiral, because now they have these people inside their tent. This is who the Democratic Party is today: these radical leftists that want to fundamentally transform our country. And that's why we have to fight. That's why we have to come together, unite, and we have to win. We have to win to save the country."
Gruters's critique is sharp, but it is not coming only from Republicans. Even within the Democratic coalition, voices have warned that the party's drift toward its socialist flank risks alienating the working-class voters it once counted on. Union leaders have openly warned about blue-collar workers walking away from a party they no longer recognize.
And the warnings are not limited to labor. The late Barney Frank, a towering figure in Democratic politics, used some of his final public statements to caution his own party. Frank warned from hospice that Democrats had swung too far left, a message that landed with particular force given his decades of service and his own progressive credentials.
Yet Harris appears to be moving in the opposite direction. Her 2024 campaign collapsed in part because she could not hold together the coalition she inherited from Biden. She lost to Donald Trump after replacing Biden as the Democratic nominee. The factions that peeled away, pro-Palestinian activists, young progressives, parts of the Black electorate, are precisely the groups she is now courting.
The question is whether stitching those factions back together requires concessions that make her unelectable in a general election. Reaching out to the Uncommitted Movement means engaging activists who view American foreign policy through a lens most swing voters do not share. Courting Mamdani means embracing a mayor whose political network just delivered a clean sweep for socialist candidates in New York.
Republican operatives are watching Harris's moves with something close to anticipation. GOP strategist Nathan Brand posted bluntly on X: "Kamala Harris 2020 was desperate, Kamala Harris 2024 was pathetic, Kamala Harris 2028 will be unhinged."
The language is rough, but the underlying political argument is straightforward. Harris ran in 2020 and dropped out before a single vote was cast. She entered 2024 as a replacement nominee and lost. A third attempt, built on a foundation of socialist mayors and pro-Palestinian organizers, would give Republicans a clean contrast to draw.
Gruters made the strategic calculus explicit. Harris, he argued, "has to kowtow to these radicals to try to win." That framing, that the Democratic primary process now forces candidates to adopt positions too extreme for the general electorate, has been a Republican talking point for years. Harris's current outreach gives it fresh evidence.
The socialist surge reshaping Democratic primaries is not confined to New York. A democratic socialist recently toppled a 15-term Colorado Democrat and promptly refused to back Hakeem Jeffries for party leader, a sign that the new left wing feels no obligation to the old guard.
For all the outreach, Harris has not formally announced a 2028 campaign. Her "I might" at the National Action Network event in April is the closest thing to a public declaration. The South Carolina visits, the Chicago meeting with AOC, the phone calls with Mamdani, the overtures to pro-Palestinian groups, none of these come with an official campaign filing or a launch date.
But campaigns are built in exactly this way: quietly, through phone calls and private meetings, before the cameras roll. Harris is assembling relationships, testing loyalty, and mapping the progressive infrastructure she would need to win a Democratic primary.
The open questions are significant. What did Harris and Mamdani actually discuss? What commitments, if any, did Harris make to the Uncommitted Movement? What policy positions will she adopt to win over activists who felt betrayed by the Biden-Harris administration's approach to Gaza?
None of those answers are public yet. But the direction is clear enough.
Harris's courtship of the party's socialist and activist wings is a bet, a bet that the Democratic primary electorate has moved far enough left that a candidate needs Mamdani's network, AOC's endorsement, and the Uncommitted Movement's energy to compete.
That bet may be correct for a primary. It may also be precisely the kind of positioning that hands Republicans another general-election victory. The 2024 result already showed what happens when a Democratic nominee cannot hold the middle while satisfying the left.
Harris lost that race. Now she is courting the same factions whose demands helped sink her, and asking them for another chance.
When a two-time losing candidate decides the answer is to move further from the voters who rejected her, the word for that is not strategy. It is habit.
