107 Days

by Kamala Harris

“Hi, Joe,” I said. “I need to talk to you.” He was calling from his home in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, where he’d gone to isolate after testing positive for Covid four days earlier. His voice sounded hoarse, exhausted. “I’ve decided I’m dropping out.” “Are you sure?” “I’m sure. I’m going to announce in a few minutes.” “Why today?” “It’s the only thing anyone is talking about. And it’s too much. There’s going to be another letter from Democratic members of Congress on Monday. It’s too much.” Really? Give me a bit more time. The whole world is about to change. I’m here in sweatpants, and the two people staffing me right now are under four feet tall. I put the phone on mute and went back to Amara and Leela. Eyes wide, eyebrows raised, voice urgent: “Go get your parents!” My husband, Doug, was in Los Angeles, trapped by the global CrowdStrike software glitch that had grounded many flights. My sister, Maya, was in New York. I needed to start alerting the family before this story broke. The president was still talking. “I want you to do this.” He would endorse me, he said, but not for a day, maybe two, when he would make an address to the nation. That would be ruinous, and I said so. “Joe, I’m honored, but we live in a twenty-four-hour news cycle, and if you wait that long, the airwaves will be full of nothing but questions: ‘Why has he not supported his VP?’ If you want to put me in the strongest position, you have to endorse me now.” I urged him to reconsider the timing. “What ...

“What we do, right now, is so important,” I said. “People will look at how this moment occurred for decades. There’s no reason to rush this. Can we slow it down so I can prepare? And you need to endorse me at the same time. Any gap between the announcement and the endorsement will lead to the same kind of chaos we’ve had for the last three weeks.”

I reminded him about the tactics we’d previously discussed in dealing with Trump: alternate brushing him off like lint on your shoulder or striking back aggressively. His voice lightened as he recalled how his mother had once promised him a quarter if he went back and punched the bully who’d been picking on him. He did, and she gave him fifty cents. Telling the story seemed to put him in better spirits, so I wished him luck and, trying to buck him up, told him he was going to kill it. I hung up feeling sorry for him. I knew he didn’t want to do this debate, and it seemed like he just needed to talk to someone who would understand what it feels like, what it would take.

Kamala is an awful person lol. Who talks about their former boss who made them VP like this? Especially when the poor guy's dying of cancer.

I’d been campaigning on the West Coast in the days just before the debate—doing Spanish language press and outreach in Arizona, meeting major fundraisers in California, and attending gatherings with Black influencers in Los Angeles. That morning I’d met with the R&B superstar Usher to solidify his support on our common interest: unlocking credit for minority businesses. Then I’d taped a segment for the BET Awards, discussing issues from voting rights to abortion rights with the actress Taraji P. Henson, who gave an impassioned plea at the awards ceremony for awareness about the damaging contents of Project 2025.

If this idiot had somehow won, I might have had to shoot myself.

The third person in the room was my director of comms, Kirsten Allen, a veteran of tight races and high-pressure situations. I’d spotted her in 2018, working for Andrew Gillum, when he lost the Florida governor’s race to Ron DeSantis by a hair, in one of the closest gubernatorial races in history. She’d been my press secretary and special assistant to Joe Biden, and had been our national press secretary for the Covid response.

How casually they memory hole the lockdowns... Also, Florida was so close to turning blue.

I had to tell the truth. “I get that this is the after-play for the debate, this conversation that I’m in, and I understand why everyone wants to talk about it. But I think it’s also important to recognize that the choice in November between these two people that were on the debate stage involves extraordinary stakes. And there’s one person on that stage who has the endorsement of their vice president, and that’s Joe Biden.” Anderson tried to jump in, but I pushed right on. “Mike Pence is nowhere to be found in supporting Donald Trump, and that’s why he has to look for someone else to run with him, who, as we know, will embolden and rubber-stamp whatever he wants because they’re going to have to make a choice to not be Mike Pence and to put Donald Trump over their country.” And then Anderson said: “Neither person on that stage tonight made the argument as coherently as you just did.”

WTF is this self-fellating nonsense? (I remember seeing this live after the debate lol.)

Meanwhile, on Cooper’s follow-up panel, CNN’s national correspondent John King kicked off his remarks: “I just want to make an observation about your interview with the vice president… I think one of the greatest acts of political malpractice I have seen in my lifetime doing this is that they kept her under wraps for three years. Now she’s on the road, she has great appeals… She also has potential star power. And on issues like reproductive rights and in the Black community, she is a great asset to this team, and they have kept her under wraps.”

Trump should get CNN off the air somehow.

We waited for the promised call back from Joe, anxious as the minutes passed. News was starting to leak. Then, the call. There was no postponing the announcement of his dropping out, Joe said. “But the statement endorsing you will go out a few minutes later.” “Joe, thank you for this,” I said, relieved. “I will do you proud. I am so looking forward to carrying on the work we’ve done together.” “You’re gonna do great, kid.” His announcement that he would not be seeking reelection hit social media just twenty-two minutes after we hung up. Twenty-seven minutes after that, he endorsed me as the Democratic candidate for president of the United States.

I suspect this conversation never happened.

Barack Obama: Saddle up! Joe did what I hoped he would do. But you have to earn it. Michelle and I are supportive but not going to put a finger on the scale right now. Let Joe have his moment. Think through timing.

Snake lol.

Nancy Pelosi: I’m so sad about Joe. It’s so tragic. My heart is broken. But now it’s you! It’s important there’s a process, we have a great bench. We should have some kind of primary, not an anointment.

At least this is honest.

Gavin Newsom: Hiking. Will call back. (He never did.)

Hate this guy but saving this for my own use lol.

If they thought I was down with a mini primary or some other half-baked procedure, I was quick to disabuse them. How much more time would it have taken to pull that off? I could imagine the chaos of even trying to decide how to do it, much less actually doing it, as precious days slipped away.

Kamala relies on the 107 days thing too much. "I lost because there wasn't enough time! We couldn't have a primary because there wasn't enough time!"

A few hours into this day of frenzied, nonstop calls, I realized I needed centering. I stopped everything to call my pastor. Reverend Dr. Amos C. Brown is a Baptist preacher who marched with Dr. King. Of course he had already heard the news. I put him on speaker so the whole table could listen to his wise and sonorous voice, and we prayed. He talked about Queen Esther, who saved her people when they were threatened. “You were born for a time such as this,” he said, and I teared up. He asked God to protect me, my family, my team, and to give us an understanding of our purpose in this moment. It grounded us all.

Opposite. Gassed you up and made you complacent.

Storm Horncastle, my indispensable social secretary, got us sandwiches, ordered pizza.

I want a secretary named Storm Horncastle.

At 5:29 p.m., staff alerted me that the British singer-songwriter Charli XCX had posted: Kamala is brat. Brat was the title of her latest album and identified me with her brand: edgy, imperfect, confident, embracing. From then on, our rebranded Kamala HQ social media site was awash in her signature color, lime green, and posts supporting us used that color.

In hindsight, this doomed Kamala's campaign by motivating her to blow a billion-plus dollars on celebrity endorsements lol. Harrison Ford's endorsement of her made me lose all respect for him permanently.

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. For me, pantsuits have been a practical choice: if you’re going to be photographed getting in and out of numerous SUVs and climbing stairs on windy tarmacs, they offer less chance of a wardrobe malfunction. 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.

"If you find me annoying you're a misogynist."

For me, it’s always been about that work. From the time my mother told me to look after my little sister, I have been a protector. As a prosecutor, my work was protecting vulnerable people, especially women and children, from sexual predators. As California’s attorney general I protected our state from cartels, homeowners from predatory banks, and I made the criminal justice data from the second-biggest justice department in the country open, accessible to reporters and researchers, so we could transparently test our system and see what was most effective. In the Senate, it was getting money to community banks, the most effective funders of small business. In the White House, I was able to work on so many issues that mattered to me: small business, maternal health, child poverty, climate action, infrastructure, repairing our global alliances.

She grew up a middle-class kid.

As president, there was so much more I could do. I wanted to see Gen Z given the tools they needed to become a new Greatest Generation, and I had so many ideas on how to help them. I wanted to create a secretary of culture to uplift the immense creative talent of this country. I wanted to change the way we think about our workforce, to assign value based on an individual’s skill, to open up government jobs to talented people who didn’t necessarily have a college degree. I wanted to increase home ownership. All these things, and so much more, all grounded in the fundamental values of dignity, fairness, and opportunity.

Equity, not equality!

Trump’s public reaction was to claim I’d be easier to defeat than Biden because I was even further to the left—a “dangerous San Francisco radical.” But reports from inside his campaign revealed dismay. Later that day, Trump whined on Truth Social: “They also mislead [sic] the Republican Party, causing it to waste a great deal of time and money” on political advertising targeting a candidate who was no longer his opponent. After the debate, after the assassination attempt, the Republicans had believed they were on a glide path. Now a boulder had rolled onto the runway, and they had to recalculate their approach.

Switching out the fighter is cheating lol.

A hundred and six days to remake a campaign deployed over a year earlier for the reelection of a familiar eighty-one-year-old guy who had been part of the political scene for the last half century, to repurpose it as the historic campaign of a woman, whom many voters still didn’t know very well, born almost a quarter century later with a completely different set of experiences and accomplishments.

Lmao. Kamala, you're 60. 60 is old.

It would be the shortest campaign in modern presidential history. This, in a country used to having a year or two to learn the plans, policies, values, and character of their presidential candidates. Against a man who had been campaigning for almost ten years, ever since he came down the escalator at Trump Tower in 2015.

Honey you were VP for four years at this point. Trump was a civilian.

My first order of business was to put out a small brush fire. Jen O’Malley Dillon—JOD, as everyone called her—was chair of the campaign, a seasoned pro who had led us to a win in 2020, the first woman campaign manager for a successful Democratic ticket. I had called her on Sunday to ask her to stay on in the role. But there were questions about how the campaign would need to be reshaped, and when David Plouffe called her to discuss strategy, there was confusion. In a quick meeting, I reassured her that I wanted her and the campaign manager, Julie Chávez Rodríguez, to remain in their roles. I didn’t have time to build a new plane; I had to fly the aircraft available. It would have been a self-inflicted disaster to blow it up, 106 days from the election.

"Dillon lost me the election, but I had no choice! 106 days!" (I remember Dillon was indulging the weird celebrity stuff, including shelling out millions to have Kamala on the Vegas Sphere lol.)

An entirely new digital campaign would be spun up—digital for me looked entirely different from digital for Joe. Kirsten Allen immediately started briefing comms and digital staff in more detail on my background and values so that anything they created would give an accurate reflection. 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. Insta would have a Millennial flavor, X would be directed at political junkies, and Facebook would target the Boomers.

So fake and corporate.

The rapport between Joe and me was genuine. For two people who seemingly couldn’t have been more different, our values were incredibly aligned. We cared about working people, we’d given our lives to public service. We would outdo each other quoting sayings from our parents, and we both liked to secretly and affectionately make fun of the British, drawing on our respective colonial ancestry—his Irish, mine Jamaican and Indian.

WTF. Slavery and famines were not a joke. Kamala is insane.

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. Finally, I wrapped up with the kind of call-and-response familiar to me from the church of my childhood: “Do we believe in the promise of America?” The crowd affirmed it. “And are we willing to fight for it?” “Yes!” they cried. “And when we fight…” “We win!”

This is so uninspiring. I think I scroll past stuff like this on Reddit.

One asked for his reaction to a remark about me that Trump had posted on Truth Social. “Lyin’ Kamala Harris destroys everything she touches!” “That’s all he’s got?” my Jersey boy shot back. My Dougie. I had kissed a lot of frogs before fate—and my best friend, Chrisette—delivered me the amazing Douglas Craig Emhoff, first Second Gentleman of the United States. Doug was born into a loving Jewish family in Brooklyn. His dad was a shoe designer, and they moved to New Jersey when Doug was about five. He had most of his schooling there, and the guys from his kindergarten remain some of his best friends. They’re still on a group chat that’s active every day. When he was sixteen, the family relocated to California, and that’s where he went to college and law school. Money was tight, so he worked full-time parking cars, waiting tables, and slinging burgers at McDonald’s so that he could afford to go to college part-time. (Later in the campaign, when Trump put on a McDonald’s apron, serving fries as a stunt, it was particularly galling. Doug, my sister, Maya, and I had all sweated over those McDonald’s deep fryers in our teens—I vividly remember my annoyance when I learned that my cousin, who was bagging groceries that summer, made more than me. Meanwhile, Trump got handed $413 million from his daddy—and then his companies went bankrupt four times.)

Kamala keeps lying about working at McDonalds lmao.

But what was his new role? No one even knew what to call him. I came up with the title Second Gentleman, off the cuff, during a live interview on CNN. (When I got back to the house he said, “Okay, I guess we figured that one out.”) Now, in White House–speak, SGOTUS is an established awkward acronym, just like POTUS and VPOTUS. Since, as VP, I was also president of the Senate, Doug became the president of the Senate spouses, upholding the traditions of luncheons and events originally designed for an all-female association.

Kamala's only contribution to politics.

I never let even those closest to me engage me in the conversation about whether Joe should drop out. I know how this town works. Information is its most prized capital. What you know and what you’re prepared to trade are the keys to power. Everyone is in this swap meet: politicians, lobbyists, the press. Intentionally or not, word would spread that I was passively gauging their support for me. And I didn’t want to hear anyone saying to me, You should run. There was no good way for me to respond to that. The last thing our ailing campaign needed was rumors of a rift between the president and me. What I didn’t know then was that some of his senior staff didn’t share that concern. In their own calls trying to quell the rebellion, they’d been talking me down, saying, If Joe goes, you’ll get her, strongly implying that I wasn’t up to it.

Kamala's a random girl who dated the right people lol.

Many people want to spin up a narrative of some big conspiracy at the White House to hide Joe Biden’s infirmity. Here is the truth as I lived it. Joe Biden was a smart guy with long experience and deep conviction, able to discharge the duties of president. On his worst day, he was more deeply knowledgeable, more capable of exercising judgment, and far more compassionate than Donald Trump on his best. But at eighty-one, Joe got tired. That’s when his age showed in physical and verbal stumbles. I don’t think it’s any surprise that the debate debacle happened right after two back-to-back trips to Europe and a flight to the West Coast for a Hollywood fundraiser. I don’t believe it was incapacity.

This sounds like incapacity.

Philippe Reines was my sparring partner. He was a longtime political operative who had served Hillary in her Senate and presidential campaigns and worked for her in the State Department. He’d had various roles but was perhaps most well-known as her take-no-prisoners, highly combative press spokesman. He’d called a reporter’s question “asinine” and told another to “fuck off.” He was able to harness this natural aggression when channeling Donald Trump. Reines had played Trump during Hillary’s debate prep in 2016, and he approached the role with the dedication of a method actor. He had studied Trump’s debates frame by frame, learning his every gesture. He’d memorized everything he’d said and exactly how he said it. Every night, he watched the video of Trump’s latest rant to see if he’d updated any lines of attack. He wore makeup to give his skin an orange tinge, tortured his elegantly graying hair into a facsimile of Trump’s cotton candy comb-over, and sported a long red tie dangling over his belt. He was also a total jerk—but solely in pursuit of honing my performance. He lied, was confrontational, tried to rattle me one moment, distract me the next. It was a high-level hazing. Not even during our breaks did he step out of character.

Trump is just a man guys. He's not the devil lol.

By the second day I was working without my note cards, and we were going the full ninety minutes. Then doing it again. And again. It matters that you get your reps in. You must get used to the cadence; you must get used to the clock. As for an athlete, a great shooter can’t score if the shot comes after the buzzer. Say the subject is the color green. You might have a bunch of incredible things to say on the subject of green, but the buzzer goes before you’ve landed your best point, and by the time you get to speak again, the subject’s changed to orange. If you try to make your final great point about green, you won’t have time left to spell out your position on orange. Complex answers are often punished by the unforgiving clock.

Same IQ as a bag of rocks.

Storm would make me a cup of tea. The team, if they were being kind, would bring me a small bag of Doritos, which felt like being handed a doggy treat.

Imagine her as president.

And then I glanced across to the far side of the room, where Joe was sharing a joke with some guys in MAGA hats. One of them took his hat off and offered it to Joe. Don’t take it. He took it. Don’t put it on. He put it on. Cameras clicked. Within hours, the picture was all over: Joe Biden in a MAGA hat, with the caption “Biden endorses Trump over Harris.”

Based Biden.

I got some disapproval for saying that if somebody breaks into my house, they’ll get shot. But it’s the truth. I’ve never made a big deal of being a gun owner, but I have a reason to have a handgun. I store it securely. And I know how to use it.

Liar.

Sean O’Brien, the union president, had spoken at the Republican National Convention. He’d asked for a speaking slot at ours as well, but why would I put someone on my stage who hadn’t supported me? I’m not about to be punked. If you’re flirting with my opponent, have at it.

Stupid. I've actually met people like Kamala in real life lol. They keep pretending they don't need anyone or anything until they're ruined. Unemployed white guys who go into ridiculous credit card debt instead of cutting their losses and living with roommates/parents come to mind.

When he finally got on the line with me, I said I was calling to check how he was. “Well, I’m okay. And I hope it never happens to you. It’s not a good feeling.” “I can only imagine for you, for your family. I’m so relieved you’re safe, but I’m sorry you had to go through this. It’s actually quite unbelievable that in our country this would happen. I pray for your safety.” He stressed how much he appreciated the call and stood up for “your Secret Service—they did a fantastic job”—despite the criticism he was hearing on television. He mused, “We’re all in this very precarious position being president or vice president. It’s dangerous, worse than race car drivers and bull riders.” Then he started to get surprisingly effusive. “It’s very nice that you called, and I appreciate it. You’ve done a great job, you really have. You’ve done a very, very good job… my only problem is it makes it very hard for me to be angry at you. It’s like, what am I going to do? How do I say bad things about you now?” “Well, then don’t!” I said, laughing. “I’m going to tone it down. I will. You’re going to see. I said, ‘I hate to speak to her because I can’t be vicious.’ ” I noted that it was important for us to be civil, especially at a moment like this. As I was wrapping up the call, he suddenly declared, “My daughter, you know, is your big fan. Okay?” And then after a few fulsome sentences about Ivanka’s regard for me, he started gushing about Doug. “And say hello to your husband. He looks like a...

really good guy. He did a good job at the convention, by the way. I watched his speech. He really was good.” 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.

In the front row was the driving force behind it: Jotaka Eaddy. She had been sitting on her parents’ porch in South Carolina when she got a text saying that Joe Biden had dropped out and endorsed me. Not three hours later, she’d rallied forty-four thousand Black women to support me on a call that “broke” Zoom, which couldn’t handle any more participants. The night raised $1.5 million. She organized her group, Win with Black Women, in 2020 because of anger over how the Black women candidates in the running to be Biden’s VP were being portrayed in the media. All the familiar tropes—the Jezebel who’d slept her way to the top, the Sapphire who emasculated and disparaged Black men—had been dusted off to smear us, and Jotaka, an activist and founder of a successful Silicon Valley consultancy, decided to mobilize Black women to fight back and rally behind Black women candidates. After that first Zoom call, others contacted Jotaka to ask how to do the same thing. From her mentoring came: Win with Black Men, White Dudes for Harris, White Women: Answer the Call, Comics for Kamala, Deadheads for Kamala, Cat Ladies for Kamala, Cooking for Kamala, Swifties for Kamala, Jewish Women for Kamala Harris, Caregivers for Harris, Republicans for Harris, and dozens more.

Thank you Jotaka lmao.