PHILADELPHIA — A little over a year ago, Kamala Harris, then the presumptive Democratic nominee, faced the daunting challenge of salvaging the presidential election for her party as she made her first appearance in Pennsylvania.
That August evening, before a raucous and packed Temple University auditorium, Harris both was imbued and stoked optimism as she made a case to the nation — and the most crucial swing state — that she would beat Donald Trump.
Some 13 months later, Harris on Thursday night returned to Philadelphia, this time striking a far more relaxed tone as she unpacked the insights of her warp-speed campaign, which anchors “107 Days,” her newly released memoir and the basis for the cross-country book tour.
The evening’s event at The Met, billed as a conversation with Harris, was all that and more — mostly because this was Philadelphia, and the audience, in most instances women who seemingly could not hold back, shouted how much they still admire her and continue to bank on her hope for the future.
Harris took the stage to a rousing standing ovation. She recognized that she, too, was in the presence of someone with hefty credentials: Moderator Dawn Staley, a Philly native and women’s basketball icon, herself earned a healthy reception when she took the stage, but she was happy to play the three-way conversation and let the audience have friendly banter with Harris, who referred to her host as “coach.”
It was a change from the former vice president’s first stop on her book tour in New York this week, when protesters calling attention to the war in Gaza interrupted the evening before being removed.
Surely the Harris team was prepared for that to happen again, but it was not needed: This audience was, if not adoring, generous with raucous applause and shout-outs.
“Kamala. Kamala,” the house shouted in unison.
It felt like the days on the campaign trail.
Some demanded that she run again.
“It’s hard to move Philadelphia,” Staley said to the former vice president. “But you’ve done that.”
Staley, South Carolina Gamecocks women’s basketball head coach and multi-title holder, seemed to have the right knack for pulling back and letting Harris commune with her audience.
Harris opened up the hour-long event waxing on the future being worth the fight and the unprecedented nature of the 2024 election (as she put it, a sitting president running for re-election against a former president … and the sitting vice president suddenly stepping up to take the former’s place).
The first time Harris referenced the sitting president, the house broke out in a resounding boo. But she didn’t refer to him by name — not for some time. She kept on referencing “this guy who’s in the White House,” or some version of that, but it wasn’t until a few minutes before the end of the event that she uttered Donald Trump’s name.
“He lied. He lied,” Harris said, as she picked apart her former opponent’s promises to followers, including lowering prices on Day 1. She countered that everything from prices, unemployment and inflation is up — but urged her supporters to pay attention “to what these people say.”
“The part of what is just warped about this guy who’s in the White House,” Harris said. “There is a lot that is wrong about him and unwell, but it includes this suggestion that the sign of strength of the leader is based on who you beat down instead of what we know … the real measure of the strength of the leader is based on who you lift up.”
Her memoir, released on Tuesday, provides personal insights on a myriad of thorny issues — from her thoughts at the time on then-President Joe Biden’s decision to launch a re-election bid, then drop out, to blunt perspectives on why she didn’t choose Pennsylvania native son Gov. Josh Shapiro as her running mate.
In her book, Harris defends Biden’s mental capacity, which fueled considerable discord on the left and disparagement from the right. Harris admits that Biden was often tired and stumbled verbally miserably — but she lays much of that at the feet of his staff.
She does, however, acknowledge in the book that it was “recklessness” to leave the decision of whether Biden should drop out to the Bidens.
“It should have been more than a personal decision,” Harris writes.
But she broached none of that before her Philadelphia audience — other than to drop a reference to Shapiro being a “great leader” (having, as a novice governor in 2023, led a swift 12-day repair to a collapsed I-95 overpass).
She spoke of empathy, lessons learned from other leaders, and even vulnerability, but what Harris perfected in the moment for her audience was recognizing the collective anguish that so many of them are enduring.
“…(R)emember the guy who’s currently in the White House and what he has done is much bigger than just him,” she said. “We, over these last several months, many have been so overwhelmed and distraught about what we are witnessing and experiencing, and it feels overwhelming. It feels chaotic. But do understand what we are witnessing and experiencing is a high-velocity event that is about a swift implementation of a plan that has been decades in the making. This didn’t just come up and happen overnight.”
The agenda set by the likes of the Federalist Society, the Heritage Foundation, and Project 2025, Harris said, was planned long before this year.
“And so as we think about and reflect on the 107 days [of last year’s campaign], I hope that when you read the book, it will be with an eye toward remembering where we’ve been,” Harris said. “To know where we need to go. That has to be a big part of how we are thinking right now … where we need to go today and tomorrow, and where we need to go over the coming months and years.”
Harris excoriated the business and academia sector — the titans of industry — who she said were supposed to be guardrails for democracy but instead have capitulated to Trump with a “feckless response.”
That was her setup to rally Democrats and reject the notion that they need to find “the one” who is going to step up and lead.
“We’re not gonna have a messiah,” Harris said. “We can’t, as Democrats, sit around waiting for the savior because we have so many stars who are doing great work and covering different ground … We’ve got lots of people who are doing great work, so let’s not get distracted by that.”
And that Democratic penchant for following rules and decorum?
“Right now, we need to fight fire with fire,” Harris said.