Typically, US presidential candidates will spend years building up momentum to run for the highest job in the nation. However, President Joe Biden passed the torch to his vice president to lead the party in the 2024 US election just over three months before Americans were due to vote after his disastrous debate with Donald Trump in June.

Kamala Harris had a little more than 100 days to build a rapport with the American public and lay out her own vision for the nation. Unfortunately for her, while the vice president isn’t the one calling the shots in the White House they usually get stuck with any baggage that the administration is carrying.

Despite creating a tremendous amount of energy, reinvigorating the Democratic base and building a broad coalition that crossed party lines, it wasn’t enough to come out victorious once the vote tabulations began on November 5. Come January 20, she will have to decide what the next chapter of her story will be after failing to ascend to the highest position in the United States.

What will Kamala Harris do now, after losing the election against Donald Trump?

Harris’ political career spans 35 years, cutting her teeth first in California, moving up the ladder from a trial lawyer to getting herself elected District Attorney of San Francisco. Seven years later she was elected Attorney General of the state of California.

In 2016, she won a seat in the US Senate where she served for four years before being tapped to be Biden’s running mate in the 2020 US presidential race. She herself had run in the Democratic primaries catching attention for her debate performances.

Now though, having held the number two position in the US government and failing to attain the presidency, the road forward in her political career appears to be a dead end says Gil Duran, her colleague who worked with her in the attorney-general’s office in Sacramento. “Has she come all this way just to lose at the most consequential moment in American history? Sadly the answer turned out to be yes,” he said.

“That seems to me like the end of a political career, not the beginning of one. This looks like game over. It’s tragic, for her and the country,” he told The Times. “People were so convinced Kamala would win and it didn’t work out across the country, she couldn’t sell it — or people weren’t buying it.”

“It is a great shame. To be on such a long path, fighting aggressively to position herself to get to where she arrived in 2024, only to lose? I don’t see that there’s a viable path in politics as an elected official,” he added.

What have previous vice presidents done after leaving office?

Previous vice presidents that haven’t gone on to become president have generally gone back into private life. They’ve given speeches, written books and have gotten day jobs.

Mike Pence for example continued with politics, working with conservative organizations and delivering speeches in preparation for his own failed run for the Republican nomination in 2024. He is now at conservative Grove City College in Mercer County, Pennsylvania teaching political science classes reports the Erie Times-News.

Dan Quayle, vice president to George HW Bush, made a run for the GOP party nomination in 2000 but lost out to his former boss’s son, George W Bush. He went on to write three books and established and sold an insurance business in Indiana. He is currently Chairman of Cerberus Global Investments.

The closest example to Harris may be Al Gore, Bill Clinton’s vice president. He lost the 2000 election to Bush Jr in an extremely tight race, winning the popular vote but losing the Electoral College. He went on to pursue his life’s mission to protect the environment which earned him, along with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007.

He’s also authored books to bring attention to climate change and global warming, two of which were turned into documentaries starring him, ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ and ‘An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power’. The former won two Oscars in 2006.