107 Days

The principal argument running through 107 Days is that Kamala Harris was set up to lose an election she had little real chance of winning, and that the loss should be read less as a personal indictment than as the predictable result of a series of decisions made by others. Joe Biden chose to seek another term. His inner circle chose to keep Harris in the political shadows. Democratic Party leaders chose to defer to Biden long past the point when his decline had become evident. By the time Harris was handed the nomination, the foundation of her candidacy had already been compromised. She makes the case that her decisions within those constraints were defensible: she did not betray the man she had served; she did not abandon vulnerable populations for political convenience; she did not pretend to be someone she was not. The cost of those choices was political, and it was steep, but she frames them as ethically and tactically reasonable under impossible circumstances.

The second, related takeaway is that American campaigns now demand a level of preparation, infrastructure, and time that simply could not be assembled in three and a half months, especially for a candidate stepping out from beneath an unpopular incumbent. Harris's account is less an apology than a warning. The political environment, the media landscape, the role of billionaire spending, and the appetite of voters for someone who feels rather than thinks all conspired to favor the candidate who had been preparing for years. Her book reads as both a defense of her choices and an argument that the system itself made the kind of campaign she might have run in normal circumstances effectively unreachable. Whether readers find the explanation persuasive depends in part on how much weight they give to the constraints she emphasizes versus the decisions she made within them, but the basic frame she offers is hard to dismiss.

Kamala Harris is an American politician, attorney, and former vice president of the United States. Born in Oakland, California, in 1964 to a Jamaican-born father and an Indian-born mother, both immigrants and academics, she was raised in California and briefly in Montreal before returning to the United States for college. She earned her undergraduate degree at Howard University, one of the country's historically Black universities, and her law degree at the University of California, Hastings. She began her career as a prosecutor in Alameda County, eventually rising to become the District Attorney of San Francisco and later the Attorney General of California, the first woman and first Black person to hold that office.

Harris served in the United States Senate from California from 2017 until 2021, when she was sworn in as vice president of the United States under President Joe Biden. In that role she was the first woman, the first Black American, and the first person of South Asian descent to hold the second-highest office in the country. After Biden's withdrawal in July 2024, she became the Democratic Party's presidential nominee and ran the abbreviated campaign described in 107 Days. She lost the general election to Donald Trump in November 2024 by narrow margins in several decisive swing states. She remains a significant figure in American Democratic politics and has not ruled out another presidential run in 2028. 107 Days is her account of that campaign and her broader reflections on the obstacles facing American political life. She has also previously authored The Truths We Hold: An American Journey, a memoir, and Smart on Crime, a book on criminal justice policy.