107 Days

“A man can work out, shower, shave, pat down his hair, and grab one of half a dozen identical blue suits. As any woman in a public-facing job knows, it takes us longer. Women need to add time for hairstyling, makeup, and more complicated apparel choices, including not repeating the same outfit too often. […] As trivial as it may seem, women are still judged on all this. Get it wrong in one direction, you’re a frump. Go too far in the other, you’re vain and frivolous. Like our tone of voice or our uninhibited laugh, it has the potential to be noted ahead of the consequential matters we’re engaged in, be it national security or a billion-dollar infrastructure deal.”

Here, Harris describes the double standard that exists for men and women in public-facing roles. She suggests that women are still judged on things like appearance and demeanor to a much greater extent than men and risk not being taken seriously if they don’t look or behave a certain way. Harris is aware of this dynamic and does her part to meet these expectations. However, throughout her campaign, she also does all she can to keep the conversation focused on the substance of her qualifications and plans for the American people.

“Throughout my career I’ve maintained that people in positions of power must be required to ask of themselves: Who am I not hearing from? Then make it their business to seek those folks out.”

This belief that leaders must seek out and listen to everyone, especially those who might be outside of their usual sphere of supporters or otherwise silenced or marginalized by society, is a key tenet of Harris’s leadership philosophy. This emphasizes the theme of Leadership and Responsibility. It is also an important point of deviation from her opponent, Donald Trump, who spends much of the campaign in an echo chamber, surrounded by and speaking to only his supporters.

“Was it grace, or was it recklessness? In retrospect, I think it was recklessness. The stakes were simply too high. This wasn’t a choice that should have been left to an individual’s ego, an individual’s ambition. It should have been more than a personal decision.”

As President Biden became increasingly unpopular and calls from within the party for him to step down grew louder, Harris and those closest to Biden repeated that it was his choice to stay in the race. Behind this sentiment was a great deal of respect for the president and his five decades of public service. Now, however, Harris wonders about the line between respect and responsibility, suggesting that perhaps her and Biden’s advisors’ responsibility to the country and the Democratic Party was greater than the respect they owed the president.

“Their thinking was zero-sum: If she’s shining, he’s dimmed. None of them grasped that if I did well, he did well. That given the concerns about his age, my visible success as his vice president was vital. It would serve as a testament to his judgment in choosing me and reassurance that if something happened, the country was in good hands. My success was important for him.”

During Harris’s time as vice president, Biden’s administration made efforts to keep Harris “under wraps,” worried, perhaps, that an increase in her popularity might make her eager to pursue her own agenda and therefore disloyal to the president. Harris, however, argues the opposite, insisting that her visible success would have strengthened the administration as a whole. It also would have helped the Democratic Party in the 2024 election, as the American people already would have been better acquainted with Harris when she stepped into the candidacy. This is another example of how the attempt to preserve Biden’s presidency had far-reaching, damaging effects for the American people.

“People were focused on the cost of things today. I needed to emphasize that I had plans that would swiftly lower the cost of housing, that would stop price gouging. Climate policy was a much longer, more complicated conversation. […] In this short campaign, I just didn’t have time. I had to triage issues so that key information could sink in.”

Here, Harris touches on the difficulties of running such an abbreviated campaign, highlighting the theme of Integrity and Compromise in Political Campaigns. With just three months to the election, she simply didn’t have time to focus on complex issues, even if they were important to her and the American people. She had to prioritize those issues that were most pressing for everyday people and explain how she would directly improve voters’ lives.

“I was pressing on with the business at hand when Sheila grabbed me by the arms and said, ‘Please just take thirty seconds! You need to appreciate the historic thing you’ve just accomplished!’”

This passage details the moment that Harris officially secured the delegate support needed to become the Democratic presidential nominee. She was the first woman of color to achieve such a thing, but the historic nature of Harris’s campaign was often lost in the urgency of the shortened race and the looming threat of a second Trump administration.

“He would make the case for the people who were not in the room. Even more valuable, Tim would notice who was not in the room and would know how to reach them. Of the three candidates, this quality was authentic and unique to him.”

Here, Harris describes the reason she chose Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her running mate. Walz complimented Harris’s leadership philosophy of speaking to Americans from all walks of life, and with his Midwestern background, she knew that he would help her connect with new demographics.

“The campaign was fresh, alive, vibrating with energy. It seemed like anything was possible.”

Despite the stress of mounting such a short presidential campaign and the looming, dire consequences of a second Trump administration, Harris’s campaign was always one of joy. Taking over for Biden, Harris imbued the race with a fresh, joyful energy that filled supporters with hope.

“He was playing up the disrespect, but the secondary intent was to reinforce the notion that I was alien, other, too different to lead America.”

Throughout the campaign, Harris had to endure racist rhetoric from her opponent, Donald Trump. In this example, he intentionally mispronounced Harris’s first name, a move that was disrespectful but also emphasized that she was different from white Americans and perhaps too foreign to be their president.

“He spoke for nearly an hour, detailing the accomplishments of our administration. It was a legacy speech for him, not an argument for me, and he was entitled to it. But if we waited for some personal stories about working with me and what qualities he had seen that led him to endorse me, they weren’t there.

And then, at last, a fulsome, generous endorsement: ‘Selecting Kamala as my vice president was the very first decision I made when I became our nominee. And it was the best decision I made in my whole career.’ Given that his career spanned half a century, that was saying something.”

This passage describes President Joe Biden’s address at the Democratic National Convention. While Biden did close with a “generous” endorsement of Harris, the speech was largely about himself and his administration’s accomplishments. Again, Harris shows respect for the president, not begrudging him this “legacy speech,” but she again implies the difficulty of balancing her respect for Biden with the urgency and consequence of Harris’s campaign and the need for unwavering party unity and support.

“I think the true strength of a leader is based not on who you beat down but who you lift up. His is a stunted, narrow definition of strength: the strength of the bully.”

Here, Harris contrasts her leadership philosophy with that of Donald Trump. She describes Trump as focused on strength as domination, putting others down, and taking more power for himself. Harris, on the other hand, believes that leaders should lift up and empower others. This highlights her focus on leadership and responsibility.

“My head had to be right. I had to be completely in the game. I just couldn’t understand why he would call me, right now, and make it all about himself. Distracting me with worry about hostile powerbrokers in the biggest city of the most important swing state.”

In this passage, Harris describes her disappointment after receiving a pre-debate phone call from President Biden. Instead of simply wishing Harris good luck, Biden went on about his own debate performances and warned her that powerbrokers in Philadelphia believed Harris was saying bad things about him. This call is another example of the difficulty that Biden had in letting go of the presidency and how Harris’s candidacy revealed the one-sided nature of her relationship with the president. For four years, she had been unwaveringly loyal, but Biden does not return the favor.

“He was being amiable. This man who had called me dumb, lazy, crazy, and mentally impaired. Implied that I drank and took drugs. Said I was a Marxist, a fascist. People had told me that he had the capacity, one on one, to show a warmer side. That he could even be charming. I hadn’t believed it. But now I was experiencing it. And then, a reality check: He’s a con man. He’s really good at it.”

After the second attempt on Donald Trump’s life, Harris arranged a call with her opponent. On the one hand, this call illustrates Harris’s commitment to decorum and maintaining a basic level of etiquette even within the cruelty and mean-spiritedness of the campaign. On the other hand, it also reveals another side of Trump, whom Harris is shocked to find friendly and effusively grateful for her call.

“In 107 days, I didn’t have enough time to show how much more I would do to help them than he ever would. And that makes me immensely sad. Every night of those 107 days, my last prayer before sleep was to ask God, Have I done everything I could do today? I don’t know if there was more that I could have done to help those young people know me better, to give me their vote. I do know that I tried.”

During her campaign, Harris was attempting to counter Donald Trump’s sensationalized lies and fearmongering with facts and real plans to make life better for the American people. Trump was also already well-known to the American people while Harris was introducing herself and her policies largely from scratch. As the campaign progressed, she began to worry that her ideas weren’t sinking in quickly enough with prospective voters. In such a short campaign, she simply didn’t have the time to explain in detail her position on every important issue. She could only do her best to reach as many people as possible every day and hope it was enough.

“Sadly, in the aftermath, polls in the affected communities would show that whether people felt that the federal government had done a good job split exactly on party lines.”

The response to the devastation of Hurricane Helene highlighted the real-life dangers and implications of misinformation and divisive rhetoric. As misinformation and conspiracy theories claimed that the storm had been engineered to specifically target Trump supporters and that the Biden administration was intentionally withholding aid from Red counties, the natural disaster served to drive Americans further apart rather than bring them together.

“The earlier clip was a gift to the Trump campaign, and they used it in ad after ad to shackle me to an unpopular president. Why. Didn’t. I. Separate. Myself. From. Joe. Biden?”

When Harris announced on the talk show The View that there wasn’t anything she would have done differently from Biden during his time in office, she finally began to see the damage that her proximity to the increasingly unpopular president was inflicting on her campaign. Apart from a genuine affection for Biden and pride in what his administration had accomplished, Harris’s position was complicated by the fact that she was still Biden’s vice president and, therefore, still needed to preserve the trust in their relationship.

“In these settings, which are high stress and high stakes, it is important to stay focused and on message. But it is also important to respond as a human. I have said countless times that there is more that unites us than divides us, and sometimes you must feel it as well as say it. It requires an enormous amount of emotional dexterity. It isn’t easy.”

Here, Harris addresses the emotional intelligence required of leaders. While answering a difficult question from a woman whose undocumented mother died after not being able to access affordable healthcare, Harris had to maintain her ability to articulate her position on the issue at hand while responding in a way that honored the woman’s pain. Highlighting the complex emotional situations that leaders are required to navigate and the dexterity required is an astute way of combating the frequent criticisms that women are too emotional to be effective leaders.

“And then we got into it. The stress had finally gotten to both of us. It was one of those fights that every married couple has had. But we weren’t every married couple. Doug stopped the argument cold. As soon as his words were out, the truth of them landed on me like a bucket of ice water. ‘We can’t turn on each other.’”

In this passage, Harris describes a fight with her husband in the final weeks of the campaign. Both of them were under an incredible amount of pressure, and the campaign was taking its toll on their physical, mental, and emotional well-being. However, they were also a united front, there to support one another, and they could not let any conflict between them take unnecessary attention or energy away from the campaign.

“The last piece I was determined to get right was the wording of what I wanted to say about being a leader who listens to experts, to people who would be impacted by decisions I made, and to people who disagree with me.”

In her final speech of the election cycle, Harris wanted to emphasize that she intended to be the president of all Americans, not just her supporters. She was determined to unite the country and improve the lives of everyone. She knew that this meant surrounding herself with people who had diverse and even disparate viewpoints. This highlights her sense of leadership and responsibility, which determined all of her strategies on the campaign trail.

“‘What are you most proud of?’ one reporter asked me. ‘My team,’ I said without hesitation. They had put their lives on hold. For 106 days, they’d barely seen their families or slept in their own beds. They’d worked inhuman hours, living on this plane and in anonymous hotel rooms. They’d been positive and loyal and ready to laugh. No job had been too big, no job had been too small.”

Throughout the chronicle of her campaign, Harris expresses her immense gratitude for her team and illustrates the incredible amount of teamwork that goes into running a political campaign. Because of the short nature of her campaign, the sacrifice required from everyone involved was even more extreme, with untold numbers of individuals giving up their own lives to support Harris’s effort.

“At the Conrad hotel, a party was underway for our friends, big donors, and campaign luminaries such as Cedric Richmond. Later, they’d be bused over to Howard University for the speech I fully expected to give there. We expected one of two things: a victory speech in the early hours, or, if it was too close to call, an optimistic holding statement.”

This passage describes Harris and her campaign’s misplaced optimism on election day. Although they had never really pulled ahead in polls that remained neck-and-neck, Harris never considered the possibility that she might lose the election. It’s possible that she found the consequences of a second Trump presidency so grave that she couldn’t bring herself to contemplate the possibility of its reality.

“But this wasn’t just any election. I had argued throughout the campaign that the stakes in this race were exceptionally high. I needed to find a way to motivate people—especially young people—to stay in this fight. I wanted to communicate that the stakes were still high. We did something, we had accomplished something, that we could not, just in one night, lose.”

In Harris’s concession speech, she tried to impress upon her supporters that their fight was not over. Just because they lost a battle didn’t mean they had lost the war, and her campaign had accomplished the significant feat of motivating a huge number of Americans. The loss of the election did not mean that their work was over or lost.

“It was one of the most difficult things I have ever done. I stood there and did my duty for democracy. And that day, democracy stood. As I finished speaking, both sides of the aisle rose and applauded, as one.”

As vice president, Harris was tasked with certifying the election results in favor of her opponent. While this was an incredibly difficult task, Harris showed true leadership by putting her own feelings aside to do her duty for the American people and the democratic process, facilitating the peaceful transfer of power that she so believed in.