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Nonfiction
The new memoir by the former vice president defends her campaign and allows others to criticize Joe Biden and his team for her failure to win.
Sept. 18, 2025Updated 3:59 p.m. ET
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107 DAYS, by Kamala Harris
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. But then he came down with Covid and she got the call.
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 some 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 new memoir about her second presidential campaign, though she tries to dispel any doubts by cutting them off at the pass. 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.” Gavin Newsom, the governor of California and Harris’s longtime frenemy, ducked the question. Her notes read: “Hiking. Will call back. (He never did.)”
“107 Days” takes us through the next 106 days until the night of Nov. 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.” One refrain in this memoir is how little time Harris had to make her case to the American people. “I was in fight mode,” she writes at one point. “I couldn’t let down my guard.”
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 entirely make up for an obvious reluctance on Harris’s part to let down her guard, even now. Harris, the former prosecutor, seems most comfortable when she is recounting facts and making a case; in the acknowledgments, she admits that she tends “to be task-oriented” and isn’t prone to allowing herself “enough space or time to reflect.”
The book’s structure accommodates this aversion to reflection. The diaristic organization permits her to give a play-by-play of those grueling 107 days, moving through events as they happened, issuing her rebuttals. She says she “really wanted” to go on Joe Rogan’s podcast, but that he made scheduling exceedingly difficult in the whirlwind last weeks before the election and later told his audience that her campaign pushed for tight restrictions on what she was willing to talk about — even though some of the topics he claimed were off limits were ones that, she says, “we had suggested.” 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, Harris’s narrative voice is no-nonsense and all business. She favors 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. Harris writes about her (mostly idyllic) relationship with her husband, “my Dougie,” including how hurt she was when, in the maelstrom of campaigning, he didn’t plan anything for her birthday.
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, she might have handled things differently: “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 when she was running for her boss’s job, 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 honor prevented her from doing so: “I’ve never believed you need to elevate yourself by pushing someone else down.”
This seems to me a strangely binary way of working through ambivalence. A different kind of politician might have been able to thread the needle. But Harris has never been known to answer skillfully when pressed on a campaign trail. In the book, she recounts instances of Biden seeming weak, or confused, or infirm, and it’s clear that whatever frustrations she felt were mingled with sympathy for him.
One word she repeatedly uses for herself is “protector.” Even though she doesn’t spell it out, the book shows her reflexively protecting Biden only to realize, belatedly, that doing so meant she had left other vulnerable people exposed. 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?’”
107 DAYS | By Kamala Harris | Simon & Schuster | 304 pp. | $30
Jennifer Szalai is the nonfiction book critic for The Times.
