107 Days

by Kamala Harris

The amount of energy necessary to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it. —ALBERTO BRANDOLINI

I knew I was the candidate in the strongest position to win. The most qualified and ready. The highest name recognition. A powerful donor base. And I also knew, as he did, that I was the only person who would preserve his legacy.

“Things are going to get wild,” I said. “There will be hard days ahead. We have a lot of ground to cover. But you are the best team in the world, and I know we can do this. Let’s take a photo.” And there we all are: seventeen rumpled, messy, smiling people. Joyful warriors, about to go into the battle of our lives.

Whatever is start time on that sheet, I will be up two hours earlier. 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.

My mother told me I could be anything, and I believed her, but president wasn’t on my list.

Although Joe had felt differently, I made the immediate decision to go on TikTok. The @KamalaHQ TikTok would be a five-person Gen Z team in their twenties. We would give them a few rules of the road and then let them trick it out.

I was born into a fight for freedom and stood in that tradition. Freedom to vote, to control one’s own body, to breathe clean air and drink clean water, to be free from the fear of weapons of war on our city streets and in our children’s classrooms. Freedom from anxiety about health care costs, childcare costs, a retirement spent in poverty. Freedom to afford a home, build wealth, provide our kids a good education. The freedom not just to get by but to get ahead. And the freedom to simply be.

“They hide you away for four years, give you impossible, shit jobs, don’t correct the record when those tasks are mischaracterized, never fight back when you’re attacked, never praise your accomplishments, and now, finally, they want you out there on that balcony, standing right beside them. Now, finally, they know you are an asset, and they need you to reassure the American people. “And still, they have to ask if we’re loyal?”

I was in a room full of people with whom, because of our shared experience, certain words did not need to be said. There is an emotion that comes from being in a place where people see you, support you, know you. The kindness and the love in that room penetrated the armor I usually wore, armor I’d need to put back on as soon as I left that room.

Everyone who said we couldn’t afford to make the necessary changes to achieve net-zero carbon emissions didn’t seem to grasp that we couldn’t afford not to. What sort of American economy would we have in a future where even Wall Street itself could be drowned by rising water?

As the campaign went on, the venues would get bigger and the crowds more diverse: posses of young girls taking selfies, dads with their kids on their shoulders, tattooed teenagers ushering a grandma to a better vantage point. People of all ages, colors, wallet sizes. All standing shoulder to shoulder, being immensely kind to one another. I could feel the intensity of emotion, and my only thought, when glancing down at a tear-streaked face or grasping a hand on the rope line: There is so much at stake. I cannot fail these people.

He’s an expert at suggesting that someone is a fraud—that you cannot believe this person. Which I believe some psychologists would call “projection.”

Had I known he was pulling that juvenile stunt, I would’ve been inclined to step from my car and use a word I believe best pronounced correctly. It begins with an m and ends with ah.

So many people who formed me had died. I believe you can tell a lot about who a person is when you know who their people are. But many of my people aren’t here.

I wanted people to know that I, like them, cherish both my family by blood and my family by love.

“She looked and sounded more presidential in this convention speech than almost any other candidate I’ve ever seen accept the nomination… Her presentation, her delivery, her confidence—it was a sight to behold.”

Sadly, racist, sexist attacks are not exclusive to Donald Trump. And someone had gone to a lot of trouble to make those bus signs. As the first woman, or Black woman, in every office I have run for, except the Senate, where I was the second, racism and sexism have always been present. They were not new to me: I would not let them throw me off my game.

We are the only country in the world where the leading cause of death for children is guns. Every day in America there are parents who drop their kids off at the bus stop or at the school gate and say a silent prayer that their children will return home that day.

As a prosecutor, I’d studied autopsy photographs in the aftermath of shootings. I know exactly what semiautomatic rifle fire does to the human body, especially to the tiny body of a child. This may sound harsh, but somebody needs to get lawmakers in a locked room and make them look at those images. Then they can go out on the floor of the chamber and vote their conscience.

Every country in the world has sick and deranged individuals. Only the United States had eighty-three school shootings in 2024.

It’s impossible to get a moment when I don’t have to be self-aware. If I leave the privacy of my room, someone is always observing me.

I confess that sometimes I have a salty mouth. I keep it in check on most occasions. But the adrenaline was taking over. In a long pause, I just managed to stifle the name I so badly wanted to call him. “And this… former president, as president, invited them to Camp David.”

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.

Few of us know who we will be in a time of crisis until we are tested.