What happened in the 2024 election? Kamala Harris shares some thoughts

107 DAYS

by Kamala Harris 

Published by 

Simon & Schuster

304 pages ₹899

 

When Joe Biden phoned Kamala Harris to tell her that he was dropping out of the 2024 presidential race, he said he was just minutes away from announcing his decision to the world. It was a Sunday afternoon in late July — not yet a full month since a wan, feeble Biden had delivered a listless debate performance against a red-faced, fulminating Donald Trump. For more than three weeks, Biden had been bucking demands to drop out, and Harris assumed he was going to persevere.

 

Harris was initially bewildered by Biden’s sudden switch, including his determination to rush out an announcement. “Give me a bit more time,” she thought to herself. She was wearing sweats and had just served her grandnieces pancakes. But in another sense she felt ready: “I knew I was the candidate in the strongest position to win.”

 

Was she? It’s a question that looms over 107 Days, Harris’s memoir about her second presidential campaign. The early pages have her making the rounds right after Biden went public, asking Democratic insiders whether she could count on their support. As someone who prides herself on doing “the work,” she reprints the notes she made from those calls, including the few demurrals. Nancy Pelosi thought there should be “some kind of primary, not an anointment.”

 

107 Days takes us through the next 106 days until the night of November 5, when Trump won both the popular vote and the Electoral College — an evening that Harris says was so awful for her and her husband, Douglas Emhoff, that they “never discussed it with each other until I sat down to write this book.” She had just come out of “the shortest campaign in modern presidential history.”

 

Political figures aren’t known for baring their hearts and souls in their books, especially if they are keen to keep their options open. When news broke that Harris had worked with the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Geraldine Brooks, there was speculation that this might be a different kind of memoir. But even Brooks’s estimable talents can’t make up for an obvious reluctance on Harris’s part to let down her guard, even now.

 

The book’s structure accommodates this aversion to reflection. The diaristic organisation permits her to give a play-by-play of those gruelling 107 days, moving through events as they happened, issuing her rebuttals. Regarding the famous Trump campaign ad — “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you” — she defends the decision to “quickly pivot” in her response ads to economic issues like price gouging and small-business tax relief.

 

For the most part, she favours the blunt-force declaration, the rat-a-tat recitation of facts. “I do not regret my decision to follow my protective instincts,” she writes about her ad strategy, as if delivering a statement. “I do regret not giving even more attention to how we might mitigate Trump’s attacks.” 

Still, glimmers of a more private self come through. Recalling a run-in with JD Vance, whom she calls “a shape-shifter” and “a shifty guy,” she allows herself a moment of profane comedy. In Wisconsin, Vance violated security rules by walking toward Air Force Two, later telling reporters, “I just wanted to check out my future plane.” Had she known what Vance was up to, she says, “I would’ve been inclined to step from my car and use a word I believe best pronounced correctly. It begins with an m and ends with ah.”

But it’s her fraught relationship with Biden that forms the undercurrent of the book: “My feelings for him were grounded in warmth and loyalty, but they had become complicated, over time, with hurt and disappointment.” She enumerates how she felt sidelined and taken for granted, given thankless jobs like trying to fix undocumented immigration while Biden and his team failed to stand up for her when she was attacked.

 

Yet during those 107 days she found it difficult to specify what she would do differently from him. In the book, she recalls — not once, but twice — that her campaign adviser David Plouffe pulled her aside and told her, “People hate  Joe Biden.”

 

It’s inadvertently revealing that some of the sharpest lines about Biden come not from her, but from other people.107 Days  insinuates that her loss in November had much to do with him. But whenever she was given the chance to separate and distinguish herself from him on the campaign trail, Harris says, her sense of loyalty and honour prevented her from doing so: “I’ve never believed you need to elevate yourself by pushing someone else down.”

 

A different kind of politician might have been able to thread the needle. Harris describes the moment on the night of the election when her team understood that the returns were not going to go her way: “All I could do was repeat, over and over, ‘My God, my God, what will happen to our country?’”

 

The reviewer is the nonfiction book critic for The Times.

 

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