October 20, 2024, was the ninety-first day of Vice-President Kamala Harris’s Presidential campaign and also, as it happened, her sixtieth birthday—a fact that members of her staff had not forgotten. When she boarded her campaign plane that afternoon, she found that it had been festooned with streamers and that a German chocolate cake, her favorite, was waiting for her. People were wearing party hats. But, as Harris writes in “107 Days,” her account of her brief stint as the 2024 Democratic Presidential nominee, there was also a helium balloon marked “with fat numerals: 60,” even though her team knew full well that she had “stopped counting birthdays a long time ago.” And so, “I looked at them with a big smile when I landed my stiletto heel in the middle of that balloon.”
The day, as she describes it, gets worse. Her staff had planned to book a nicer-than-usual hotel, but the establishment they chose, in Philadelphia, “looked like it hadn’t been redone since the 70’s.” Her husband, Doug Emhoff, hitherto a stalwart, is exhausted (he’s been campaigning in Michigan) and doesn’t get it together to plan a special meal. He had a present—a gold-and-pearl necklace—but she susses out that it is a repurposed gift, originally meant for their anniversary, two months earlier. That night, when she gets in the tub and he doesn’t hear her calling for help getting an out-of-reach towel, because he’s turned on a baseball game, it’s “a bridge too far.” They are soon in the midst of a full-blown argument, which ends only when Emhoff says, “We can’t turn on each other.” The truth of those words, Harris writes, “landed on me like a bucket of ice water.”
It is a lesson that Harris seems to have lost sight of in writing “107 Days,” a book that will do little to prevent the many dividing lines among Democrats from becoming lasting fractures. In the wake of the birthday meltdown, one of Harris’s aides hands Emhoff a stack of notecards and instructs him to write love letters that can be left on his wife’s pillow when she is on the road without him. (“Mr. Second Gentleman, you have to fix this.”) Harris is unlikely to get such notes from most of the people whom she turns on or complains about or belittles in the course of her book. The list includes Governor Tim Walz, of Minnesota, whom she chose as her running mate; Governors Gavin Newsom, of California, Gretchen Whitmer, of Michigan, Josh Shapiro, of Pennsylvania, and pretty much every other possible running mate; “nitpicking” journalists; whoever did the lighting for her first big interview, with Dana Bash, on CNN (there were shadows under Harris’s eyes); and, over and over again, members of her staff. Why did they not brief her on the fact that Doctor Mike, the host of a popular health-care podcast, would want to ask about her health-care policy? Afterward, she confronts them: “ ‘What the fuck was that?’ I said, my voice reaching a crescendo.” Even her grandnieces, breakout stars of the Democratic National Convention, whom she clearly adores, take some heat: at a key moment early in the campaign, they are too distracting. Emhoff has to get them on a plane home to California.
One of the puzzles of “107 Days” is that such details do not, on the whole, come across as humanizing, let alone endearing, but as dreary, and even sour. This shouldn’t be the case. Harris was dealt an enormously difficult hand and for the most part she played it well, galvanizing much of her party while enduring an immeasurable level of misogyny and racism. And she almost won. She has a deep reservoir of good will, as exhibited by the crowds who have turned out for her book tour. (“107 Days” is a best-seller.) Donald Trump, the man she lost to, has become a much more dangerous President than he was the first time around. Readers always claim to want to know the unvarnished truth of what the campaign was really like. So why does this book feel like another defeat?
Harris does not say whether she might run for President again, but one reason that her book has not landed well in certain quarters is a sense that it undercuts other Democrats who might be candidates. How could J. D. Vance, as the nominee in a hypothetical 2028 debate, resist mocking Shapiro for his alleged inquiry into the number of bedrooms in the Vice-President’s residence and the possibility of decorating it with Pennsylvanian art, which Harris presents as evidence of an overweening arrogance. (In Shapiro’s defense, the aide to whom he supposedly posed those questions was the residence’s manager, whose job involved such matters. A spokesperson for Shapiro, in response to the book, has said that he cared only about beating Trump.) She writes that she wanted to pick Pete Buttigieg to join her on the ticket but didn’t think that the country could handle a gay man alongside a Black woman. The rationale she gives for not choosing another contender, Senator Mark Kelly, of Arizona, seems to include an odd, amorphous discomfort with the fact that he has a distinguished military career as a combat pilot, and was also a space-shuttle commander. Could “a captain, used to deference and respect,” handle a campaign “designed to disrespect him?” Might his military record be attacked? She refers to other, unnamed candidates as “big egos.” In Walz, she sees a popular Midwesterner with working-class appeal and a sense of humor who will be loyal to her. And she thinks that voters will like that he had been a high-school coach. Walz, who took a lot of hits in the campaign, told her in his interview that he was not a good debater. One wonders if Harris really needed to describe how she erupted at the television screen when his warning was borne out, and he faltered in his confrontation with Vance. She says that a “Saturday Night Live” sketch that imagined her and Emhoff watching the Veep debate in horror was “uncanny in its portrait of our evening.”
Another target, of course, is Joe Biden, about whom she expresses “hurt and disappointment.” And yet, on the subject about which many Democrats have a gripe—the way that the President, his family, and his team apparently hid his growing weakness, and perhaps incapacity, leaving the Party and the country in an untenable position—she is surprisingly gentle. She denies that there was a real governance problem, and she sticks to the story that he just got tired—too tired, she concedes, for it to have been a good idea for him to undertake a strenuous campaign. The real problem with Biden, in Harris’s telling, is that he keeps spoiling things for her. He and his team, she writes, had never wanted her to be the one “shining.” He calls her right before what would be her only debate with Trump and, after some pro-forma good wishes, delivers a rambling, confusing warning that if she goes after him it will hurt her with big donors in Pennsylvania, a crucial swing state. Does he care that he might throw her off her game? She wins the debate, but the next day Biden steps on her victory by accepting a red MAGA cap at a 9/11 memorial. “Don’t put it on,” she remembers thinking. “He put it on.” Then when a comedian at a Trump rally brands Puerto Rico “a floating island of garbage,” Biden manages to turn it into “a mess for us” by seeming to refer to Trump supporters as garbage. And so on. She wonders why she didn’t distance herself more—but also why a host on “The View” just had to ask a follow-up question about what she would have done differently than Biden. (Harris’s fumbled response became fodder for Trump.)
Jill Biden, meanwhile, is portrayed as a grim figure. At one point in the protracted interlude between Biden’s disastrous debate performance and his exit from the race, Doug Emhoff is summoned, alone, to a room in the White House, where Jill admonishes him about loyalty. He doesn’t take it well. After Joe drops out, Jill and Doug speak again. “Be careful what you wish for,” the First Lady says, in a “desolate” voice. “You’re about to see how horrible the world is.”
Biden’s insistence on running until Harris had very little time to do so—and until the Party had no time at all for a true primary—is high on the list of reasons that the country now has a horrible President. (It’s not the only factor, of course; counterfactuals are complicated.) The scale of that tragedy may be what makes Harris’s complaints seem so petty, however well founded many of them may be, and her deflection of responsibility so grating. The lighting for her first interview—to which, she concedes, she didn’t bring her “A game”—may well have been bad, but the candidate shouldn’t have allowed thirty-nine of the hundred and seven days she had to elapse before she sat down for it. Harris’s tendency, throughout the book, is to claim that critics don’t understand how campaigns work, or how political ads are targeted, or why it just didn’t make sense to go to the Al Smith dinner or on Joe Rogan’s podcast, when doing so would have taken her away from campaigning in swing states. (She also claims that Rogan did more to accommodate Trump’s schedule than hers.) The reflections are often inches deep. In a CNN town hall two weeks before the election, Anderson Cooper asks Harris if she agrees with retired general Mark Milley’s view that Trump is a fascist. “Yes, I do,” she says—an answer that got a mixed response at the time, even from her allies. In retrospect, she writes, she should have more or less dodged the question, and told the audience, “Never mind what I think”—just listen to what Milley and other generals had to say. Never mind? It is hard to tell what the word “fascism” means to her personally, or how relevant she believes it is to this historical juncture. She does complain about Cooper’s moderating style, though.
One of the last, consoling illusions many Democrats hold onto, when looking back at 2024, is that with just a little more time, even a few more days, Harris could have pulled it off—and, again, she almost did, and there were times when her campaign felt genuinely joyous and thrilling. Once one makes it to the end of “107 Days,” though, Harris’s lack of generosity toward others makes it harder to be generous toward her and the campaign that she ran, as much as one may want to be. The book certainly makes it more difficult to see her as the kind of leader that the Democrats need now. We’re left with burst balloons and buckets of ice water. And Donald Trump. ♦