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Why did Kamala Harris lose the presidency? In 107 Days, her memoir of the election she inherited from Joe Biden, the answer is a series of mistakes, committed over years, mostly by other people.
It was a mistake for Biden to disinvite Elon Musk from a White House electric vehicle summit and make him an enemy; she “shared this view” with Biden staff. It was a mistake for Biden to run again, a view she kept quieter about.
It was her mistake to stay so loyal to Biden, and not give The View a better quote about their differences than “there’s not a thing that comes to mind,” even though he’d weakened her campaign.
“Even after the lack of support from the White House, the debate night phone call, and the MAGA hat debacle, I felt I owed him my loyalty,” writes Harris.
The Democratic argument about why they lost to Trump twice will get fresh material from 107 Days. It doesn’t absolve Harris, who has little advice for how her party can win again, or answer the questions about immigration and LGBT rights that staggered her last year.
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Biden limps through the book, “frail” and bitter, the definition of a lame duck. In its most-discussed section, he babbles to Harris that his campaign-killing debate didn’t actually hurt his poll numbers, shortly before she’ll out-debate Trump in Philadelphia.
The former vice president succeeds in the campaign’s planned moments: the debate, the convention. She struggles when she has to go off book.
“What the f— was that?” she asks the staffers who book her a long interview with the health podcaster Dr. Mike, but brief her for a short one. Harris dwells on two of her unscripted responses to protesters — telling Gaza activists that they’ll get Trump if they withhold their votes from her, and ejecting right-wing activists who claimed they were just shouting about Jesus. She wins the moment, and loses the post-event spin, blaming that largely on conservative media.
“Democracy is complicated,” Harris writes. “It’s also easily compromised by blatant bias, downright lies, and the media organizations that enable them.”
As a candidate, she is risk averse, frustrated by how Trump commands the media environment and campaign narrative. She identifies a nasty “double standard on our style of presentation,” with her answers getting mocked as “word salad.” Her interviews could have gone better, but she thinks the trouble is often that the questions are unserious, based on whatever Trump had churned up at his rallies.
Harris gets irritated when Tim Walz starts “nodding and smiling at J.D. [Vance]‘s fake bipartisanship” in the vice presidential candidate debate. She feels vindication when the press corps wows at her first big crowds as a Biden replacement: “My college tour events had been standing room only, same with my rallies for reproductive rights.”
She’s unable to generate the same energy, or confidence, on other progressive issues. Because of unhelpful spin from anonymous Biden aides, who did not want her to “shine,” she can’t win the argument on immigration, and can’t sketch out how her administration would fix it. “All I could do was show that we had taken measures that were working, and that I took the issue seriously and would continue to press for the comprehensive reforms we needed.’
Four pages of 107 Days get into Trump’s “she’s for they/them” ads, which revealed how unready Democrats were to defend transgender rights in a campaign. Harris is still not sure how to do that. She recounts that she defended covering gender surgery for prisoners because doing so was the law, that policy affected very few people, and she’d overcorrected in her 2020 campaign when she was attacked for not defending it.
In 2025, she believed that schools could “take into account biological factors such as muscle mass and unfair athletic advantage” in sports. But the idea that the ad wrecked her campaign was “the conventional wisdom of middle-aged men who don’t live in battleground states,” and she did not “regret my decision to follow my protective instincts” for trans people.
“I wish I could have gotten the message across that there isn’t a distinction between ‘they/them’ and ‘you,’” Harris writes. “The pronoun that matters is ‘we.’ We the people.”
David’s view
In What Happened, Hillary Clinton explained how her unlucky campaign lost to Donald Trump, and how a luckier one — with James Comey declawed and writing mystery novels — could beat him. He would make bold proposals without worrying how to pay for them. He’d inject his issues into the campaign without considering a backlash. Democrats needed to take some risks.
107 Days is about the advice not taken. Democrats built a cautious campaign, with policies they could pay for, on the premise that most voters didn’t want truly radical change on immigration and tariffs. They did. Biden, and then Harris, bet that the country would be repelled by at least one of Trump’s decisions or character traits. It wasn’t.
The result is a book that will convince on-the-fence Democrats that Harris isn’t part of their electoral future. (Nobody needs more convincing that Biden isn’t.) Democrats who come off poorly in it have not hesitated to disagree with her. Harris assumes that Pete Buttigieg shared her view that a ticket with zero straight white men would have been a tougher ask of voters; as soon as a reporter asked him about that, he disagreed, suggesting that Harris didn’t give those voters “credit” for their tolerance.
Harris sounds trapped between the expectations of Trump’s first term, when progressives saw him as an accidental president, and the experience of his 2024 primary campaign — that the country is more conservative than Democrats thought. When Bernie Sanders urges her to “focus on the working class, not just abortion,” she notes it. But she doesn’t come up with a memorable economic offer, griping at how Trump got out a viral “no tax on tips” policy while she tinkered with a more comprehensive one.
Harris never mentions an anti-price gouging proposal that got pummeled by some liberal economists. Imagining how the country would have changed if she won, she pictures young people “applying for their $25,000 housing down payment assistance” and “an increased child tax credit” that’s “lifting thousands more families out of poverty.”
The interpersonal sniping matters less than this paucity of ideas about the country or how to sell them. Democratic seething over insults and slights is a disadvantage for their party; they’re competing against Republicans who assume that Trump will smear them one day and endorse them the next. Nothing Harris says rivals or anonymous Biden aides is as mean as what Trump has said into microphones about Ron DeSantis.
In the meantime, MAGA conservatives have rolled back liberalism to a degree Democrats barely imagined when Clinton lost. Harris did not know how to stop it. She regrets that more people didn’t help her try.