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Almost a year after the 2024 election there are still some houses with “Harris” signs in their windows dotted around my liberal Philadelphia neighbourhood. The result left many people in a state of shock and denial, unable to process exactly what went wrong.
No one was more shocked than Kamala Harris, whose inner circle had been confident on election night that they’d eked out a win during the whirlwind campaign. Cupcakes with “Madam President” toppings were ready to go; champagne on ice. “It says a lot about how traumatized we both were by what happened that night that [my husband] Doug and I never discussed it with each other until I sat down to write this book,” Harris reveals in her new memoir, which functions as a political postmortem.
I don’t know if Harris found writing 107 Days cathartic, but reading it certainly wasn’t. Instead, the book, which unfolds in strictly chronological order, is a frustrating slog. It seems likely to alienate her critics further and provides no closure or hope for her supporters.
Harris has always been accused of sounding phoney; criticism she brushes off in the book as sexism. When Charlamagne Tha God, host of popular radio show The Breakfast Club, observed that she came off as “very scripted” on the campaign trail, she retorted that it was actually “discipline”. The memoir was Harris’s opportunity to go off-script. Instead she sticks to her talking points.
Which isn’t to say there aren’t some real insights. One of the most compelling sections describes her gloomy birthday celebrations, 16 days before the election. Harris had expected Doug to do something special – she’s a big birthday person – but he was so beaten down from the campaign that he shrugged the day off. The frustrated pair ended up fighting. This is one of the few moments Harris shows the emotional toll of an intense campaign. It humanises her; the book would have benefited from more of this kind of material.
There are occasional glimpses of how Harris really feels about Joe Biden; her bitterness at the impossible lot he handed her. You can almost feel her teeth grind as she recounts the many mishaps, attributable to him, that her campaign was forced to firefight. The moment the outgoing president was photographed putting on a “Trump 2024” cap during a 9/11 commemoration event, for example. Or when he seemed to call Trump supporters “garbage”. You sense real anger that he didn’t allow her to shine as vice-president.
But while Harris doesn’t refrain from criticising Biden, she doesn’t go full-throttle either, remaining guarded on some of the key questions that still trouble people. There was no “conspiracy at the White House to hide Joe Biden’s infirmity”, she says, insisting “there was a distinction between his ability to campaign and his ability to govern”. While she admits she had concerns about him, she maintains he was fully competent. Given that CNN’s Jake Tapper, in his book Original Sin, has convincingly detailed Biden’s decline, this feels very hard to believe. What else isn’t she being fully honest about, you wonder?
Harris was indisputably put in a very difficult situation when Biden dropped out. But if he had stuck to his promise to be a transitional president, if she’d had more time to campaign – would it have made a difference? Was Harris the right person to fight Trump? Gavin Newsom, the California governor who is a likely Democratic contender for 2028, clearly didn’t think so. After Biden bowed out, Harris started working the phones for endorsements. The notes from her call with Newsom, she writes, just say: “Hiking. Will call back. (He never did.)”
And Harris herself seemed to have some initial doubts about her chances. Frazzled, she called her pastor for wisdom at the start of her campaign, and put him on speakerphone as he reassured her inner circle: “He talked about Queen Esther, who saved her people when they were threatened. ‘You were born for a time such as this,’ he said, and I teared up … It grounded us all.” From that point on, Harris insists she was the right woman for the moment.
Her own book, however, makes it clear she still has blind spots about what went wrong. While a January YouGov poll suggests Biden’s unconditional support for Israel significantly affected Democratic voter turnout, Harris is largely dismissive of Gaza. Of demonstrators who turned up at campaign stops she asks: “Why weren’t they protesting at Trump rallies?” Can she really not understand? Because Trump was not in power at the time, and she was. Because President Biden made it clear he had no real empathy for Palestinians. Harris doesn’t seem to have much, either.
It’s not just those upset about Gaza who will bristle at this account. The former vice-president’s characterizations of peers such as Pete Buttigieg (talented but too gay for the America to accept as her running mate), and Josh Shapiro (an egoist) are not particularly juicy, but have already caused bad blood. As for any Harris supporters hoping 107 Days might bring closure or optimism, they will also be sorely disappointed. It may be time for the holdouts to finally take those Harris signs down, because the woman who kept telling voters “we’re not going back” fails to chart any kind of path forward for the United States. In the end, she seems just as helpless as the rest of us.
