Former Vice President Kamala Harris has an explanation for what went wrong with her 2024 presidential campaign: It wasn’t her fault.
At various points, Harris has blamed former President Joe Biden, White House officials who didn’t do a good enough job advertising her accomplishments as vice president, her running mate, other Democrats she considered to be her running mate, the truncated campaign calendar (that’s the reason her book is titled 107 Days), and the voters themselves for her failure to close the deal against President Donald Trump.
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Like her ill-fated campaign for the presidency, 107 Days reveals her to be funny, engaging, and less one-dimensional than her reputation. But also like her campaign, it fails to make a strong case that she would be a decisive leader.
Over the course of the book, Harris admits that she probably should have tried to talk Biden out of running for reelection, but didn’t (it would have seemed “ incredibly self-serving”); that she wanted to select former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg as her running mate, but didn’t (putting a gay man on the ticket when she was not “a straight white man” herself but rather “a Black woman married to a Jewish man” was too risky); that she had a ready response to attacks on her stance on transgender issues, but didn’t think the issue hurt her all that much (the view that it did was just “the conventional wisdom of middle-aged men who don’t live in battleground states”).
The 60-year-old Californian (this would fit the definition of a middle-aged person who lives in a blue state) lost all seven battleground states, including Nevada, where Trump had come close but never won before, calling into question her own expertise on swing-state sensibilities.
Harris also didn’t behave then or now as if she really believes this. She stayed quiet about her more controversial transgender positions during those 107 days, despite writing that there was “no way I was going to go against my very nature and turn on transgender people,” and presently acknowledges her messaging on the subject needed some work.
“I do regret not giving even more attention to how we might mitigate Trump’s attacks,” Harris writes. “I wish I could have gotten the message across that there isn’t a distinction between ‘they/them’ and ‘you.’ The pronoun that matters is ‘we.’ We the people.”
Alright, there are more than 107 days to go back to the drawing board on this one.
If Harris had time to go back to the drawing board on her explanation for why she picked Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN) over Buttigieg between when the 107 Days excerpts started dropping and the beginning of her book tour, she didn’t take it.
Pressed by MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow on passing over Buttigieg because of his sexual orientation, the former vice president replied, “No, no, no, that’s not what I said. … It wasn’t about any prejudice on my part, but we had such a short period of time.” Translation: there was prejudice on the part of the voters, not me, and as a black, South Asian woman, I didn’t want to push my luck.
There was, she said, a “real risk,” “with the stakes being so high,” “running against someone like Donald Trump, who knows no floor” (but had also just deleted any overt opposition to gay marriage from the GOP platform and has since put together what the New York Times described last month as “Donald Trump’s big gay government”), in a close race for president.
Every race for president in the last 25 years has been close, with the arguable exception of the one won by Barack Obama in 2008. (Though he did win it as a nominal opponent of gay marriage.)
“Maybe I was being too cautious,” Harris said toward the end of the exchange. “I’ll let our friends — we should all talk about that. Maybe I was.”
This acknowledgement that she has not always been well served by her caution is a bit of introspection. Taking a little more blame for the aborted Biden reelection bid was another. Yet here Harris is on New York City Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani, a socialist, when Maddow asked if she supported him on Monday night: “As far as I’m concerned, he’s the Democratic nominee and he should be supported.”
“I support the Democrat in the race,” Harris continued. “Sure. But let me just say this. He’s not the only star.” She went on to mention Democratic women running for mayor in New Orleans and Mobile, Alabama. Perhaps she, as a Democratic woman, was simply trying to highlight such candidacies. But she rather implausibly chided New Yorkers for thinking they are the center of the universe, as she sat in a studio in New York City and avoided saying Mamdani’s name.
Harris’s book title itself and her many other references to the brevity of the campaign are examples of blame-shifting. Not only did Harris know going in when Election Day would be and that she was largely inheriting a campaign structure from a candidate who was already trailing Trump, but most of her strategic choices, from her reliance on big scripted events to the timing and nature of the media interviews she did eventually give, were an attempt to take advantage of the abbreviated campaign cycle.
This was for good reason: Her previous campaign for president started promisingly enough but collapsed down the stretch. At least in 2024, when Harris was nominated at an uncontested convention after the primaries were over, she made it all the way to Election Day.
Harris won’t have the luxury of no competition this time around. Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA), a politician from her own state, has already started to overtake her in the early polling. Other Democrats will surely get into the race.
Even if Harris learns to take responsibility for her loss, Democrats may not want the next campaign to be about re-litigating the last one — or worse, the Biden-Harris years.