Kamala Harris Is Out of Time

 

Opinion

Carlos Lozada

Kamala Harris Is Out of Time

 

Sept. 20, 2025

Carlos Lozada

By Carlos Lozada

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/20/opinion/kamala-harris-memoir-107-days.html

Opinion Columnist

 

The title of Kamala Harris’s new memoir, “107 Days,” is more revealing than it means to be. In its simplest sense, it marks the length of her 2024 presidential campaign, the number of days from July 21, when Joe Biden left the race, through Nov. 5, when Harris lost it. The book breaks down, countdown-style, each chapter covering one day of the campaign. Some chapters span several pages, others a few paragraphs; the shortest is a handful of words. Harris also skips several days altogether. Even when you’re running for president of the United States, I imagine, some days are just more interesting than others.

 

But the title is not merely the duration of Harris’s campaign; it is also her excuse for losing the election. Throughout the book, the former vice president repeatedly laments that she did not have sufficient time to run the race she would have liked. With more time, Harris contends, she could have better sold her economic vision. With more time, she could have forged a stronger connection with voters. With more time, she could have made clear that she offered Americans a superior alternative to Donald Trump.

 

“In 107 days, I didn’t have enough time to show how much more I would do to help them than he ever would,” Harris writes. “And that makes me immensely sad.”

 

It’s a comforting explanation, in part because it eases the burden of responsibility on Harris for her defeat. After all, the calendar is a structural impediment, not a strategic or ideological one. And the person most easily blamed for truncating the 2024 campaign schedule is not Harris, but her former boss, the man who sat atop the ticket for so long that, when push came to shove him out, Harris had only 107 days left.

 

Biden’s choice to stay in the race so long was based on “ego” and “ambition,” Harris writes. And her own deference to Biden’s intransigence was, in hindsight, an exercise in “recklessness.” The stakes of the race, Harris concludes, were too high to leave it all to a personal decision made by the first family. If she did not say so in real time, it was in part because of how “incredibly self-serving” it would have seemed for her to suggest the president make way for someone else. Such is the price of politesse.

 

Harris’s book is not as relentlessly damning of Biden as, say, Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s “Original Sin.” Still, Harris acknowledges that an aging Biden got “tired” and that he “needed rest,” and that even though she believed that he could still govern — “I don’t believe it was incapacity,” she writes, in a tellingly awkward formulation — his deteriorating campaign skills worried her.

 

“His voice was no longer strong, his verbal stumbles more frequent,” Harris writes. In one of the few chapters that breaks free from the 107-day time frame, Harris flashes back to the Biden-Trump debate and recalls speaking to Biden by phone during his preparation. He didn’t sound upbeat, she writes, and “I hung up feeling sorry for him.” The evening of the contest, Harris had a “gnawing feeling” that things might not go right.

 

Even before the “disaster” of a debate had ended, she writes, the campaign staff had sent her wildly unrealistic talking points to guide her television appearances, including “JOE BIDEN WON — He fought through his cold as he is fighting for the American people.”

 

Harris’s reaction is italicized, not quoted, so it’s unclear if she said it to someone or if she’s describing what she thought, or what she wishes she’d said. Stuff like “Are you kidding me?” and “No. Don’t feed me bullshit.” When Harris went on TV, she tried gamely to split the difference, arguing that Biden’s 90 minutes onstage didn’t matter as much as three and a half years on the job.

 

Sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter  Get expert analysis of the news and a guide to the big ideas shaping the world every weekday morning. Get it sent to your inbox.

Except that Biden’s job performance wasn’t playing well with voters, either. As David Plouffe, a campaign adviser, would tell Harris bluntly, “People hate Joe Biden.”

 

This is a standard Harris feint throughout “107 Days” — her own critiques of Biden are diplomatic, but she quotes others ripping him and his staff apart. “My feelings for him were grounded in warmth and loyalty,” Harris writes, “but they had become complicated, over time, with hurt and disappointment.” Yet she quotes the second gentleman of the United States, much angrier and at length, ranting about Harris’s mistreatment. “They hide you away for four years, give you impossible, shit jobs, don’t correct the record when those tasks are mischaracterized, never fight back when you’re attacked, never praise your accomplishments, and now, finally, they want you out there on that balcony, standing right beside them,” Doug Emhoff told her. “Now, finally, they know you are an asset, and they need you to reassure the American people.”

 

This sense of disrespect permeates “107 Days.” Disrespect from Trump, certainly, who, aside from one phone conversation in which he told Harris she was doing “a great job,” constantly insulted her intelligence, questioned her background and belittled her qualifications. But disrespect from Biden and his team, too, whom Harris says constantly undercut her and even whispered that she wasn’t up to the top job, using her to try to persuade Democrats to stick with Biden.

 

When they could stick with him no longer, the vice president moved with astonishing speed to seize the nomination. Indeed, Harris’s complaints about the brevity of the campaign feel less than persuasive when her case for taking Biden’s place rested on how quickly and seamlessly she could do it all. “I knew I was the candidate in the strongest position to win,” she writes. “The most qualified and ready. The highest name recognition. A powerful donor base.” When Democratic insiders asked her what sort of “process” the party should use to pick a new nominee, she would retort, “This is the process” — meaning, this phone call, this conversation, this moment, this person.

 

Harris dismissed the idea of mini-primary formalities. I mean, who has the time?

 

The writing in “107 Days” is serviceable, though with some of the clunkers inevitable in political memoirs. (“My thoughts darted from these promising horizons to gnarly thickets of logistics” is a sentence I will long remember.) Much of the book recaps the campaign, quoting Harris’s own speeches at length, citing Trump’s nastier comments, and simply cycling through events day to day while pausing to quote television personalities — Tapper, Van Jones, Whoopi Goldberg, John King — saying nice things about her. The chronological approach does not serve this book or its readers well. If you followed the campaign closely, many of those 107 days will feel familiar.

 

The best moments in “107 Days” happen when Harris is open about what she saw and clear about what she really thinks, when this memoir is truly a book about a campaign and not just one more politician’s campaign book.

 

One such episode occurs early in the book, when Harris calls numerous Democratic luminaries immediately after Biden left the race, hoping to enlist their support — and her recollections of the exchanges nicely capture their personalities. “I want to be part of your war council,” Hillary Clinton said, suiting up for battle. Barack Obama demurred: “Michelle and I are supportive but not going to put a finger on the scale right now.” Bernie Sanders was on brand: “Please focus on the working class, not just on abortion.” And count Nancy Pelosi among those preferring a process: “We should have some kind of primary, not an anointment.”

 

Then there’s Gavin Newsom, governor of Harris’s home state, who simply responded, “Hiking. Will call back.” He never did.

 

Another call was to Pete Buttigieg (“You’re going to be a fantastic president,” he said), and Harris admits in “107 Days” that the transportation secretary and expert dismantler of Fox News interviewers was her top choice for running mate. “I love Pete,” she writes. But she felt that America was not ready for a gay vice president, in addition to a Black female president. “He would have been an ideal partner,” Harris fantasizes, “if I were a straight white man.” Anyone wondering about the limits of Harris’s identity politics, here you go.

 

Instead, she went for the rumpled Everyman vibe of Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, who later disappointed her during his debate with JD Vance. “You’re not there to make friends with the guy who is attacking your running mate,” she groused to the TV screen. (I, for one, would have loved to watch a Buttigieg-Vance showdown. Maybe someday.)

 

And when Trump said in an interview that Harris had only recently embraced her Black identity, and a campaign adviser encouraged her to respond with a major Obama-style speech on race, Harris shut him down instantly. “Today he wants me to prove my race. What next? He’ll say I’m not a woman and I’ll need to show him my vagina?”

 

Such straight talk is too infrequent in “107 Days,” particularly regarding some of the campaign’s more controversial moments. The final weeks of the race featured a barrage of Trump ads assailing Harris for her position on transgender rights (“Kamala is for they/them, President Trump is for you,” the voice-over intoned), and Harris now asks herself, “Why didn’t I punch back harder?” She answers that her “protective instincts” kicked in, and she did not want to turn against transgender people at a vulnerable moment. But would explaining her positions have necessarily meant abandoning transgender Americans? Harris now says she wishes she’d made clear that the “we” — as in “We the people” — is the pronoun that matters most. Would saying so back then have been so hard or so damaging?

 

Similarly, she revisits her interview on “The View,” where she said she couldn’t think of even one thing she would have done differently from Biden. “Why. Didn’t. I. Separate. Myself. From. Joe Biden?” Harris wonders in the book. Her answer is that she did not want to “embrace the cruelty of my opponent,” and that she felt she owed Biden her loyalty, two explanations that seem implausible. Finding some point of contention with Biden would hardly have meant going full “Sleepy Joe,” and loyally going down to defeat helped neither Biden’s legacy nor Harris’s ambitions.

 

It’s not clear to me, after finishing “107 Days,” that more time would have necessarily improved Harris’s chances. If anything, she might have benefited from an even shorter time frame. “After drawing even with Trump in the polls in August and pulling ahead of him after the debate in September, by mid-October, we’d stalled out,” Harris writes. After the burst of excitement and energy that came with a new, younger and more compelling candidate, what specifically did Kamala Harris have to offer? She incessantly mentions all the money she was raising, but absent a concrete message, money only buys so much.

 

Her ideas could be vague (“I want to keep people safe and help them thrive,” she says in the book) and her preferred campaign lines (“We’re not going back” and “I know Donald Trump’s type”) kept the focus squarely on her opponent rather than on what the Democrats could offer.

 

Harris’s team had prepared for a contested outcome, a prolonged vote count and a premature claim of victory by her opponent. “We’d planned for everything, it seemed, except the actual result,” Harris writes. When Jennifer O’Malley Dillon, the campaign chair, called to tell her they would not win, Harris is reduced to asking, “My God, my God, what will happen to our country?” It’s one of the more poignant moments in the book, hinting at the depth of her feeling. But Harris’s shock also reflects the blindness of her team and the credulity of the candidate. “Why were we feeling so confident,” Harris wonders, “in a race that had never shifted out of tossup territory?”

 

Now Harris can see what is happening to our country. In the afterword of “107 Days,” Harris looks upon Trump’s second term and denounces “right-wing and religious nationalists” pushing an authoritarian agenda. “We need to come up with our own blueprint that sets out our alternative vision for our country,” she urges. “A blueprint on how we will lead a government that truly works for the American people.”

 

I’ve now read all three of Harris’s books — she published “Smart on Crime” in 2009 and “The Truths We Hold” in 2019 — and the sense they give collectively is that of a prosecutor, a senator and a presidential candidate genuinely wanting to do good, but letting that good be defined by the party orthodoxies of the moment. She’s right that the Democrats must offer a new vision, but she had 107 days on the campaign trail, not to mention four years in the White House, to develop and propose one. Was that not enough time?

 

Maybe Biden could have left earlier. Maybe the Democrats would have emerged stronger from a “process” to select a nominee. Maybe with something more than 107 days, Kamala Harris could have found that elusive blueprint.

 

But if you’re not sure what you stand for, more time doesn’t help you. It only exposes you.