Former Vice President Kamala Harris is no longer holding back, sharing her thoughts about former President Joe Biden and his team, political allies and what it was like to lose last November’s election in a new book, titled “107 Days,” detailing her short-lived presidential campaign.
The book, which will be published Tuesday, Sept. 23, by Simon & Schuster, details Harris’ true thoughts about those who doubted her, whether she should have spoken up sooner and her frustration with other Democrats.
According to excerpts released from the book, obtained by several news organizations, Harris is tired of biting her tongue and ready to put it all out there, less than a year after her campaign ended with a loss on election night. Here’s what we know so far about her tell-all.
Deteriorating relationship with Biden
In the first released excerpt, published in full by The Atlantic last week, Harris pinpoints the exact moments when Biden’s bid for reelection felt like “recklessness” and reflects on whether she should have said something sooner.
According to the excerpt, she writes, “‘It’s Joe and Jill’s decision.’ We all said that, like a mantra, as if we’d all been hypnotized. Was it grace, or was it recklessness? In retrospect, I think it was recklessness.”
Harris didn’t blame the former president’s reported cognitive decline and instead defended Biden’s mental acuity.
“On his worst day, (Biden) was more deeply knowledgeable, more capable of exercising judgment, and far more compassionate than Donald Trump on his best‚" she said.
But the decline, evident through his physicality and verbal mishaps, couldn’t be ignored, leading to his disastrous performance in a presidential debate with President Donald Trump. That debate was the point of no return for Biden, who dropped out of the race soon after.
Harris, in her book, stands her ground. “I don’t believe it was incapacity,” she wrote. “If I believed that, I would have said so. As loyal as I am to President Biden, I am more loyal to my country.” Still, she says that at 81, Biden “got tired” and his age showed in his “physical and verbal stumbles.”
She also insinuated she was snubbed by the West Wing. Harris provides several examples of living in the shadows. In one anecdote, she is in a hotel room in Houston, watching the president’s address to the nation from the Oval Office. Biden mentioned Harris at the very end of the 11-minute speech and kept his comments about Harris brief.
In a newer excerpt, Harris said Biden called her shortly before she took the debate stage with Trump, to say he’d heard from his brother that she was badmouthing him and rambled about his own debate performances. She wrote that she couldn’t understand why the president would call moments before a big moment and “make it all about himself,” USA Today reported.
Conversations with Trump
Harris also detailed two separate conversations she had with Trump throughout the campaign. She said she had prepared herself for a difficult conversation but was pleasantly surprised.
After a man was arrested last September at Trump’s West Palm Beach golf course, who was allegedly looking to shoot the then-presidential candidate while he was golfing, Harris called Trump to express concern. Trump said Harris had “done a great job,” USA Today said.
“My only problem is it makes it very hard for me to be angry at you,” he said, according to her book.
In November, when Harris called Trump to concede the election, Trump said he wanted to be “nice and respectful” because Harris was a “tough, smart customer.” Still, Harris wasn’t won over. She wrote that Trump is a really good “con man.”
Views on other Democrats
Just over a year ago, all the buzz was about who the then-vice president would choose to be her vice president. After Biden dropped out of the race and Harris was at the top of the ticket, the question remained, who would she choose to be a running mate?
The list of contenders seemed to grow and then shrink while conversations happened behind closed doors. Harris eventually chose Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, but her book shows that she ideally wanted someone else.
Harris said her first choice in a running mate would have been former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, but she was concerned about the difficulty their ticket would face with voters.
Harris wrote that she thought it was “already asking a lot of America” to vote for a Black woman who is married to a Jewish man. Adding Buttigieg, who is gay, to that would have complicated it.
“Part of me wanted to say, ‘Screw it, let’s just do it.’ But knowing what was at stake, it was too big a risk,” she wrote.
Buttigieg told Politico on Thursday that he believes Americans should get more credit than what Harris thought about their electability. He said he was surprised to hear he was Harris’ first pick but that he only would have been the ideal candidate if he were straight. Buttigieg said he’s earned trust with voters based on “what they think you’re going to do for their lives, not on categories.”
“You just have to go to voters with what you think you can do for them,” he told the outlet. “Politics is about the results we can get for people and not about these other things.”
One of Harris’ other front-runners was mentioned in the excerpt. Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro was described as “poised, polished and personable,” but she argued that he didn’t seem like he wanted to take a back seat to her leading role and it would “wear on our partnership,” ABC News reported.
She noted that she was frustrated with Walz after his debate performance against now-Vice President JD Vance, saying he wasn’t there to become friends with the competitor who was attacking her.
Harris briefly mentioned her fellow California Democrat, Gov. Gavin Newsom. She said she called him after Biden dropped out of the race, only to receive a text that said, “Hiking. Will call back,” but he never did.
Election night loss
When it became clear that Trump had won the 2024 presidential election, a Harris staff member scraped off the “Madame President” cupcake toppers that had been ordered in the event of a historic win.
Harris wrote that she was devastated and asked aloud, “My God, my God, what will happen to our country?” She said she realized she was a “very long way from acceptance” and went through the stages of grief.