107 Days

107 Days is a story about the dangers of political loyalty. Upon becoming the presidential nominee, Harris struggled to run a successful campaign that distanced her from the increasingly unpopular President Biden while maintaining the trust and loyalty that is crucial to the working relationship between a president and vice president.

In the text, Harris depicts being vice president as performing a balancing act. The president must trust their vice president completely; they must be sure they are loyal and won’t act in favor of their own ambition. Harris is proud of her loyalty, opening the text with an epigraph quoting Kendrick Lamar: “I got loyalty, got royalty inside my DNA” (vii). However, she also recognizes how her loyalty to Biden was sometimes misplaced. The administration kept Harris “under wraps” during her time as vice president, assigning her thankless tasks, allowing mischaracterizations of her work and character to flourish unchallenged, and keeping her successes out of the spotlight. Biden’s team worried that Harris’s success would reflect poorly on Biden, that she might start to seek her own agenda, and become disloyal to the president. Harris argues the opposite, that a strong vice president reassures the public and provides “a testament to his judgment” (51).