The Kamala Harris we see in ‘107 Days’

This column first appeared in The Amendment, a biweekly newsletter by Errin Haines, The 19th’s editor-at-large. Subscribe today to get early access to her analysis.

Kamala Harris’ “107 Days,” in which she recounts her experience of the 2024 presidential election, is a revealing look at how she saw many of the moments that shaped her campaign, and into the candidate herself, a rarity for a politician’s book.

As someone who has covered Harris for the better part of a decade, to read the book was to see a version of Harris I’d gotten to know as a reporter, but that the American people rarely saw, and that the media often missed or dismissed. She was charming, prepared, a mentor and also a demanding boss and a devoted wife and sister. But the book is hardly a tell-all. This is also the Harris I recognize: guarded, cautious, thoughtful, strategic, someone who does not dwell on her mistakes or missteps. 

In her historic but ultimately unsuccessful run for president, Harris had a chance to finally define herself as she made her case to millions of Americans. As the title points out, she had only a few months to do it, facing a former president who was well known through almost 10 years in politics, and decades in the public eye. In the book, she offers readers more of a window into who she is while also challenging them to think about who they will be after her loss. 

Before November 5, 2024, Harris — a first in every elected office she has ever held — had never lost an election. And on Election Night, she was in denial about the reality that she would not be the next president.

Harris had come up short — and she was terrified about what this would mean for the country and for democracy. In “107 Days,” she writes: “My mind simply would not allow me to believe that we had lost.”

Her description of the night was among the more human moments in the book. “I was ashamed to realize I was in the denial and bargaining stages of grief, a very long way from acceptance,” Harris wrote, describing her feelings the morning after the election.

Her level of shock surprised me; I’d known Harris to be more of a pragmatist. She describes feeling optimistic in the final days of the campaign. But there were also realities: America has never elected a woman president. Only one sitting vice president has been elected president in nearly 200 years. Incumbent parties were losing elections across the globe. 

But by the next afternoon, in typical Harris fashion, she had somehow found her way to an acceptance that allowed her to address her supporters — but not to concede the fight for America’s future. What that fight or future will be — or her role in it — remains unclear. 

Harris writes that certifying the 2024 election results, one of her last acts as vice president, was “one of the most difficult things I have ever done.” I found the admission striking, not because I had also wondered to myself what she must’ve been experiencing as I watched her in that moment, but because I had seen her as a candidate and as vice president as someone who took her role to defend democracy seriously.

Both of these moments were a reminder of not just how quickly Harris had to move on from her stinging loss, but how her supporters did, too. In the days after the election, the narrative quickly shifted, from how Donald Trump won, to questions about former President Joe Biden’s age and health, and whether his decision to stay in the race cost Democrats the White House. 

Less dwelled on in the aftermath of the election were many of the things Harris reflects on in “107 Days”: the voters she met; how joy became a campaign strategy; the challenges she confronted simultaneously as vice president, from a mass shooting, to a deadly hurricane, to wars on two continents and tense hostage negotiations. Along the way, she made history again as the first Black woman to be the presidential nominee for a major party ticket, buoyed by a diverse coalition led by Black women who have been building political power within the Democratic Party since the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. 

It’s a moment worth revisiting, and Harris now gets to do so at length for the first time, on her terms, in her own words. And in telling her story, she has created a space for her supporters to collectively reflect on their own journey during the campaign.

Repeatedly in the book, Harris says that 107 days was not enough time to make her case to the voters. Last August, I wrote that the abbreviated timeline was the only way her candidacy could’ve happened when it did, the way it did. 

In 2020, Harris exited her first presidential bid before one ballot was cast in the Democratic primary, after campaigning for nearly a year. Her making the point that she didn’t have enough time last year raises the question: How much more time does she think would’ve made a difference?

Harris is candid about her feeling that Biden’s decision to run for reelection and later to exit the race should not have been a personal decision and that he should not have run. And she reveals in the book that it was she who pushed for him to immediately endorse her when he eventually did come to the decision to drop out.

In Hillary Clinton’s post-2016 election loss book, “What Happened?” it was clear that her presidential aspirations were behind her. In “107 Days,” Harris does not seem to close the door on a 2028 run, but instead makes the case for why she could win under different circumstances and a longer runway.

It’s unclear whether Harris will run again. In some ways, the book feels like an ending of sorts, a cathartic closure for Harris and for her supporters. But is it also a beginning? 

More than 50 years ago, Shirley Chisholm was the first Black woman to run for president as a major political party candidate. She didn’t get as far as Harris, but her legacy reverberates across American politics today and has inspired the political careers of hundreds of Black women.

At the end of the book, Harris’ call to action is for people to stay in the fight. Whether and how they — or she — will is unwritten.