“Nice to meet you, Madam President,” Kamala Harris said, shaking hands with the Coahoma Community College student body representative on her surprise stop by the campus on Thursday afternoon.

Harris likes that disarming joke. She was the biggest political figure to come across this underfunded school in the Mississippi Delta, the grass so dry it crunched as she walked with a gathering of stunned students for a group picture.

“You don’t know how many people this uplifts,” said Don Green, who followed Harris that afternoon from the college to a rural health clinic in Clarksdale, most famous for being the site of the legendary Crossroads of the Blues.

Mike Cavanaugh, a sophomore at the University of Mississippi and president of the campus’ College Democrats, spoke ahead of Harris at a rally that day and answered her questions about voter registration during his brief chat with her on the photo line. “Young people are very excited,” he said.

“It didn’t have to be this way,” is one of the lines Harris used several times on the stump in Mississippi as she campaigned for Democrat Scott Colom, whose challenge to Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith is drawing a new burst of national attention and outside money.

“There are so many people who were devastated with the outcome of that election — for good reason, for really good reason,” Harris told CNN backstage before her speech at the rally and two days after her 62nd birthday. “That pain, it lingers, because every day we are witnessing events that we know didn’t have to happen. Could have been different.”After the interview ended, Harris asked to go back on the record.

“The American people want leaders who aren’t just occupied with looking in the mirror. They want leaders who are looking at the people, you know?” she said. “And they can tell the difference.”Much of the political insider world has been clear in not wanting Harris to run for president in 2028, or really not wanting to hear from her again, ever. Even before Democrats’ horror year of Joe Biden’s collapse, the contortions over Gaza that she’s still struggling with and Donald Trump’s return, Harris was never good about cultivating donors or keeping aides from fleeing her overly cautious style and the constant infighting that followed.

Yet with her stops in Mississippi and across the country, she’s hearing from many Democratic campaigns who believe having her around helps — and lots of voters who are turning out to show they agree. All told, she’ll end the midterms with more campaign appearances than Barack Obama, and after a late flurry that includes Wisconsin and Georgia this week, more than almost any potential top-tier 2028 candidate.

Several close to the former vice president and 2024 presidential nominee told CNN they believe when she keeps saying she’s thinking about running again, what that means is that after months of soaking up the superfans who bought tickets to her book tour, she hasn’t ruled it out.

But not killing the option is different from pursuing it, whether lining up staff or crafting a new agenda, and Harris acknowledged that her time-treading answers about not having made up her mind can only go on so long. But asked if that means six months or even a year, she said, “I don’t know.”

“I go back and forth. I honestly go back and forth,” Harris said of which way she’s leaning. “There’s so many factors.”What Harris does know, two years after losing, is that she’s less interested in the game of inches that presidential primaries tend to be.

“I’ll be very specific,” she said. “If I run, my motivation is not to beat other Democrats. It’s to actually do the job.”Privately, she’s been known to do her wry stare at comments from other Democrats who say she shouldn’t run – convenient, she says, since that would mean they didn’t have to run against her.

“I’m sure there are many who think that I should just sit at home and eat bonbons and cook Doug’s favorite foods,” she said, brushing off the Wall Street Journal article reporting that her husband, Doug Emhoff, had privately told some people that he preferred she didn’t run. “I could cook Doug’s favorite foods do this.”Harris said Emhoff was upset at his feelings being portrayed inaccurately. According to one person who has spoken directly with him, his more precise feeling is that the moves the two of them have been making were not done with a plan to run again.

“I feel so strongly and therefore am compelled, and maybe propelled, into doing this, because I know that I can help,” she added. “And how can I sit at home in the comfort of my home when I know there are things I can do to help? I don’t know any other life but that – that’s my point. I don’t know any life that is not about, ‘There’s a problem, what can I do to fix it?’”When Harris talks about “turning pain into purpose,” that means one thing to frustrated voters in the final days of these midterm campaigns, like the retired plumber who shouted “You told us so!” as she ripped Trump’s record in the gym at Columbus High School.

It can mean another to the woman who was herself the candidate Trump beat, even as she kept up the smiles pouring drinks behind the bar at another stop in New Hampshire on Saturday. Around this time two years ago, Harris was calling around to make sure old friends would be with her to celebrate back on the quad at Howard University. She stopped her remarks on Thursday to call back to the man, “Yes, brother, I did.”Harris did not, like Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker and Georgia Sen. Jon Ossoff, hit the Hamptons fundraising circuit this summer. She has not, as had been proposed in an internal memo circulated among her advisers, launched an extensive engagement tour championing Black voting rights in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision.

Yet she kept working the phones, whether calling a range of advocates and asking what she could have done differently in her abbreviated presidential run, or checking in with candidates like Texas Senate Democratic nominee James Talarico, to whom she offered some advice over how to manage the ongoing criticism from his former primary opponent, Rep. Jasmine Crockett, whom she endorsed before he won.

Her prospective opponents aren’t waiting on her.

Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear has discussed a plan to launch his campaign shortly after the December meeting of the Democratic Governors Association, when he’ll officially wrap up his stint as its chair. After months of public denials while maintaining a national travel schedule, Maryland Gov. Wes Moore has started telling people that after November he’s going to take another look at running for president.

Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly and former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg have been all over the country stumping for candidates, including in early states, as aides make sure to remind reporters each time they add more stops. New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker has quietly banked $20 million and started thinking through a South Carolina and Super Tuesday-focused strategy.

Operatives associated with multiple likely contenders are assembling opposition research files on expected opponents and asking around for suggestions of staff to hire. Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, her former running mate, is already saying his advice for the future of the Democratic Party is “pick Pete Buttigieg” (which Harris said she hadn’t seen).

Harris’ motorcade is now just two cars, no sirens. She flies commercial. She pays for staff and security out of the limited fundraising she’s still doing off her old campaign email list, which left her and advisers having to pick between stops she was asked to make and forcing her to stack several virtual appearances into a day she’ll spend this week holed up in a hotel room with a computer instead.

“Ihave more access, you know? It’s like, the bubble is smaller, and that’s nice. Or there’s not a bubble,” she said.

As for candidates like Rob Sand, running for governor in Iowa, or Adam Hamilton, running for Senate in Kansas, who’ve said they don’t want her to come, Harris says she doesn’t take that personally.

Oh, I want them to do whatever they need to do to win. I mean that sincerely,” Harris told CNN. “I have run for local, state, and national office. I am not naïve. And I want to win, and I respect whatever decisions they need to make in order to do that.”Nor was she interested in drawing a line against candidates like Angie Nixon, the Democratic nominee for Senate in Florida who said she joined the Democratic Socialists of America specifically as part of launching her campaign, and who will be part of one of Harris’s virtual events this week.

Asked how big of a role the DSA should have in Democrats’ future, Harris said, “We are, as we say, a big tent, and I don’t think anybody should be kicked out.”Mississippi won’t be an early stop on the 2028 presidential calendar. But its electorate could offer a preview of what might await Harris in South Carolina, which is set to host the first Democratic primary again and where Black voters are critical.

“The conventional wisdom,” she said in Mississippi, is, “‘Those are red states, we can’t win there, therefore we won’t go there,’ as opposed to reconditioning ourselves to think about the fact that there are a lot of people who live here who actually care about the things we care about and deserve to be heard and deserve to have us spend our time and resources sitting with them and listening to them.”Harris first connected with Colom in January, after Rep. Bennie Thompson, the lone Democrat sent to Washington from Mississippi, got them on the phone when she brought her book tour to Jackson.

Colom’s campaign to unseat Hyde-Smith, in a state Harris lost to Trump by 23 points, has drawn increasing buzz and now outside spending from both Democratic- and GOP-aligned groups.

Still several Colom consultants initially opposed having Harris join campaign events, worried about nationalizing the race and bringing in a candidate known for losing. With some encouragement, Colom overruled them and called her directly to ask.

Georgia Sen. Raphael Warnock, who told CNN that he’s considering a presidential run and for months was a main engine of getting Democrats to focus on Colom’s race, drew 100 people when he came to the state two weeks ago. Harris had over 1,000 on their feet in the gym, with an RSVP list that had to be closed because of the fire marshal – even after a sudden decision to bar holding the event at a local college forced a last-minute venue change.

“In this community, it transcends the fact that she lost the last election,” Thompson told CNN while waiting for her to arrive at the community college.

Black maternal mortality was a top issue for Harris when she was vice president. But when he’s campaigning with a focus on 400,000 people in the state without health insurance, rural hospitals closing and mothers dying waiting for a limited number of ambulances to be able to get them, Colom said he saw enormous value having Harris help draw a dozen reporters from across the state to a maternal health care clinic that’s struggling to cover costs.

“The question is: why does Vice President Harris care more about healthcare in our hospitals than our junior senator? If she cares more than our junior senator, I want to bring attention to that issue because that matters,” Colom told CNN after the rally. “You see how many people showed up, you see the excitement. People care about folks that are going to fight for the people.”In Mississippi, as in Harris’ other stops, the memory of her loss cuts two ways.

“There’s people that think that she got the raw end of the deal,” said Chris Miller, the former chair of the Clark County Democrats in Nevada, who was an early supporter of her 2020 presidential campaign and attended the rally she did with the powerful Culinary Workers Union on behalf of her longtime supporter, state Attorney General Aaron Ford, running for governor. “There’s a feeling that if she wants to run, she should run.”Patrick Gaspard, who was Obama’s first political director at the White House and has recently been informally advising a number of rising new voices in the Democratic Party including New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, was part of the Colom kitchen cabinet encouraging him to bring Harris in.

Videoing the crowd’s reaction to her on stage on his iPhone in Columbus on Thursday night, Gaspard said that has to be factored into any 2028 math, especially at a moment when voters around the country are making clear that they feel abandoned by the people who read tipsheets in green rooms.

“When Muhammad Ali was trying to regain the heavyweight crown, there were a lot of people who were saying they didn’t want him fighting again, they didn’t want him in the ring,” Gaspard told CNN. “They were saying that not because they were worried that Muhammad Ali would fall flat on his face — they were worried he would win.”