Kamala’s 107 Days: The 2024 US Presidential Election
I enjoyed reading 107 Days by Kamala Harris.[1] Her nearly day by day recounting of the 2024 presidential election is a solid and useful aid-memoir for anyone who might wish to reflect on the dynamics of the election and its outcome. I could imagine it being an anchor to a course on election campaigns or political communication as it would provide a basis for discussing a varied set of her campaign’s responses to situations that arose.
The book does not provide an overall synthesis of the campaign’s loss to Donald Trump. Kamala does not present herself as a political scientist. She is not using or developing theories of political behavior or campaigns. She is recounting the events of her days leading into the election.
Also, the book does not offer a big picture or interpretation of the campaign so much as the author’s reflections on each day from a perspective of the entire campaign. That said, the book’s day-by-day account of developments, mistakes, and homeruns conveys a sense that these details of the choices made and not made over the course of the campaign do matter. What appointments are made? What meetings are organized? How is her family holding up? The timing of Joe Biden’s decision not to run was critical. They all matter. That is the lesson learned by so many politicians. At the same time, how can Donald Trump seem to skate over what to others might have been major issues, from the Epstein files to criminal charges to orange makeup to obvious signs of ageing to wanting to be a dictator on day one?
Also, the interaction of these choices seems to be a related but less explicit theme of the book. For example, the attempted assassination of Donald Trump on 13 July 2024, by a 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks, when Trump was presumed to be the nominee of the Republican Party, was hugely consequential. After being wounded in his upper right ear and taking cover behind the lectern, Trump was lifted with blood on his face, then standing and pumping his fist saying Fight! Fight! Fight! This fortunate moment for the candidate was also a major boost to his campaign in general but also specifically for the American billionaire owner of X (formerly Twitter), Elon Musk. Musk was so inspired that he publicly endorsed Trump after the assassination attempt and donated an amazing $281 million to the Trump campaign.
One critic of 107 Days felt that Kamala Harris tended to blame others for her loss. That was not at all my sense of the book. Quite the opposite, I thought she did a remarkably fair and accurate account of mistakes made by herself and others. If she had buried campaign blunders, that would completely undermine the credibility of her book. For example, she was candid about her own mistakes, such as her own slip when asked during her appearance on The View if she “would have done something differently than Joe Biden during the last four years?” Her almost famous answer was: “There is not a thing that comes to mind.” This was a monumental slip, as she had prepared to describe some of the space between them, but she did not put that distance between them and might not have fully realized how unpopular President Biden was to many across the electorate. A member of her campaign team told her: “People hate Joe Biden.”
That was a soft ball pitched to her that she failed to use effectively. She also points out problems linked to others, such as President Biden’s late decision to pull out of the race, leaving her less time to organize her campaign. She also wrote about both Biden and Waltz’s weaknesses in their respective debates with Trump, all widely discussed in the media. And she recounted serious interventions that undermined her campaign, such as the very controversial decisions by the owners of The Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post to undermine their editors and refrain from endorsing Kamala Harris, when their editorial boards planned to do so. This was 22 days before the election. On one hand, speaking of these problems probably led some to accuse her of blaming others. On the other hand, not recounting these problems would have inevitably led to accusations of whitewashing the campaign. She did not do that.
As Kamala recounts, a third of the electorate voted for her, a third voted for Trump, beating Kamala by 1.5 percent of the votes, but fully a third stayed home. There was no mandate for Trump. The vote totals were so close that the details probably did matter in one of America’s most consequential elections, such as the Musk donation driven by a young shooter and the greatest security failure by the Secret Service since the attempted assassination of Ronald Regan.[2] While many plausible explanations could account for this election outcome, the details surely mattered, and not only for the Harris-Waltz campaign, but for the entire world.
Notes
[1] Kamala Harris (2025), 107 Days. London: Simon & Schuster.
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attempted_assassination_of_Donald_Trump_in_Pennsylvania