107 Days

by Kamala Harris

damage. 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. At this point, anyone else was bound to throw him—and all the good he had achieved—right under the bus.

Doug, at a watch party with Hollywood donors, was getting an earful. Rob Reiner had screamed at him: “We’re going to lose our fucking democracy and it’s your fault!”

I was not about to tell the American people that their eyes had lied. I would not jeopardize my own credibility. This night had turned into a disaster, and I was fully aware of the importance of what I was to say. How we handled this, right now, would have a long-term political effect, not just for him but for me. I had to acknowledge what people saw and then try to give them a way to make sense of it.

My sister, Maya, had been only seventeen, still in high school, when Meena was born. I was in the midst of my undergrad degree at Howard and had been admitted to law school at Georgetown. Instead, I came home and did my law degree at Hastings so I could help with the baby as Maya went to Berkeley and then got her law degree at Stanford. Meena did her undergrad at Stanford and law at Harvard. She is now a writer, producer, all-round firecracker. And she is a daughter to me.

The Clintons: Bill: Oh my God, I’m so relieved! Send me anywhere. Make this your own campaign. Hillary: We’re thrilled the president endorsed you. We’ll do whatever we can—we’ll jump on a plane, we’ll get on Amtrak. I want to be part of your war council.

Pete Buttigieg, my primary opponent in 2019, now a close friend: You’re going to be a fantastic president.

Bernie Sanders: I supported Joe because he was the strongest voice for the working class. Please focus on the working class, not just on abortion.

J. B. Pritzker: As governor of Illinois, I’m the convention host. I can’t commit. Gavin Newsom: Hiking. Will call back. (He never did.)

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.

“Be careful what you wish for.” Her tone was desolate. “You’re about to see how horrible the world is.” When my plane landed, Doug bounded up the steps of Air Force Two and wrapped me in a hug. There wasn’t time to talk. We were once again about to walk through the fire together. He and I both knew it. It did my heart good to receive that big, bearish hug. Sometimes, in a marriage, that’s how everything is said.

All the questioning about his capacity had wounded him badly. He didn’t want to get out of this race; he didn’t want to stop being president. I was determined that he at least have his dignity. My feelings for him were grounded in warmth and loyalty, but they had become complicated, over time, with hurt and disappointment. At that moment, the warmth predominated.

“Predators who abused women, fraudsters who ripped off consumers, cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain. So, hear me when I say… I know Donald Trump’s type.”

Pivoting, I said that our campaign was about more than the stark contrast between my record and Trump’s. The campaign, I stressed, was about two very different versions of our country going forward, one focused on the future, one mired in the past. Trump wanted to take us back to failed trickle-down economics that had never done a thing to lift the middle class and instead brought only more inequity. He romanticized a time when freedom and rights were limited and denied to so many Americans. 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!”

With my staff, in the prep room, I’d come up with a new line for the speech. Trump’s slogan, “Make America Great Again,” was very telling. “Again.” His agenda was to drag America backward. Not a goal of progress, but regression. I also wanted to remind the audience how cruel and chaotic his first term had been. “We’re not going back.”

The campaign had asked me to call members of Congress to assess support for him. That made me uneasy. I said I’d call only those I knew well: people who wouldn’t misconstrue the call as some kind of self-serving fishing expedition. Amid all the chatter, gossip, and malevolence, 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. It was just one of the many ways his staff was responding badly to the crisis. They’d started cramming his schedule with more events, knowing full well that when he was tired, he did poorly. Hunter Biden’s trial was underway, and I suppose the campaign wanted to distract from that and wanted Joe to be seen as functioning vigorously as president despite the personal burden he was carrying. Instead, they were exhausting him. Whose idea was it to have him stand in the broiling sun at a Juneteenth celebration for three hours until, worn out, he was described as “comatose”?

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 capab...

As loyal as I am to President Biden, I am more loyal to my country.

There was a distinction between his ability to campaign and his ability to govern.

As for campaigning, I did have concerns. His voice was no longer strong, his verbal stumbles more frequent. Apart from the superhuman stamina required, communicating is the main game. Before he stepped aside from the top of the ticket, I had planned to do many of the big public rallies and a lot of the crazy travel while his team fashioned a White House–based campaign for him.

Later, he unloaded. “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?”

In my life I’ve seen over and over that it is often the people with the least who give the most.

“It’s Joe and Jill’s decision.” We all said that, like a mantra, as if we’d all been hypnotized. 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.

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.

I am not a trained seal; I’m not going to memorize lines and spout them. I have to understand the logic and building blocks of every argument so I can present it clearly and defend it persuasively. We also addressed the painful matter of imagining what kinds of personal attacks Trump might mount against me. A man who had no floor, who could go infinitely low, get infinitely cruel. He’d disparaged the war hero Senator John McCain, mocked a reporter’s disability. The gutter was deep for this guy. I’d had quite a big team in the room to get the most diverse range of input I could on how answers would land. But for the part of the prep focusing on personal assaults, I narrowed the group to less than a handful. “He might ask you if you’ve ever had an abortion,” one adviser said. If he did, the response would be: That’s none of your business and that’s not what we’re here for. Someone made a dark joke that if he got that personal, I should ask if he took Viagra. Another: Had he ever paid for an abortion? In the end, he didn’t go down that track. He probably knew a question like that would be exceedingly thin ice for him—and would infuriate just about every woman in America.

On the plane that day when I first heard about Trump’s remark, we patched in Brian Fallon from DC on a call to strategize a response. Brian wanted me to punch back with a big speech about my racial identity, like the one Obama had given. I was so pissed that I didn’t hold back. “Are you fucking kidding me?” I was not about to take Trump’s bait. He lies all the time, I told Brian. He throws out outrageous statements to distract from the real issues. “Today he wants me to prove my race. What next? He’ll say I’m not a woman and I’ll need to show my vagina?” Brian, on the other end of the phone, fell silent. I imagined the deep crimson of his blush.

Bill: “You have to level with them and watch how they answer.” Bill said that Al Gore was good for him “because he knew things I didn’t know. We were as different as daylight and dark and it worked.” They both emphasized that I’d be offering this person the chance of a lifetime, so they’d better know it. If they were someone dying for immediate public recognition, it might not be the job for them. They might have to swallow a lot of crap.

Over the years I’d learned it’s one thing how people treat me, it’s another to see how they behave toward someone they perceive as less powerful. I’m especially sensitive to this because, as a child, I saw how my mother, a small brown woman with a foreign accent, would be treated in a fancy department store and other public places: as if she didn’t belong or couldn’t afford to be there. She was a distinguished scientist doing groundbreaking research, but often I saw her encounter derision and disrespect.

He said he had no ambition to be president, that his aim as vice president would be doing meaningful work to improve people’s lives. It’s no bad thing for a vice president to want to be president, unless that ambition plays a corrosive role in the relationship and causes disloyalty. That wouldn’t be an issue with Tim. He had no fixed ideas about what the role of vice president should be, saying he would do whatever I found was most useful for him to do.

Musk is a talented entrepreneur. But there are genius engineers behind the cars and rockets, such as Tesla’s former longtime chief technical officer, J. B. Straubel, who deserve just as much credit. Despite what I think of Musk, I believe Joe Biden made a mistake in not inviting him to the White House in 2021 for an event promoting our electric vehicle policy. I shared this view with his team. Behind the president on the lawn that day were electric Fords, Chevys, Jeeps. American-made Teslas, then the world’s most innovative and successful electric cars, were nowhere to be seen. Biden, loyal to the UAW, was sending a message about Musk’s anti-union stance. But as president of the United States, if you are convening the nation’s manufacturers of electric vehicles and the biggest player in the field is not there, it simply doesn’t make sense. Musk never forgave it.

Bill Clinton, speaking for the twelfth time at a Democratic convention, delivered firm words. Like the cop who arrives at the door of a rowdy party, he wanted the music turned down a little. We were getting euphoric too soon, he warned. “We’ve seen more than one election slip away from us when we thought it couldn’t happen,” he said, clearly referring to Hillary’s 2016 loss to Trump. Don’t get “distracted by phony issues,” he admonished. “Never underestimate your adversary.”

The movie director Greta Gerwig had helped me rehearse. Her combination of gentleness and strength, modesty and smarts, made it clear how she’d managed to elicit so many great performances. “When you speak about your family,” she advised, “see their faces.”

I hadn’t belabored the historic nature of my candidacy as a Black woman. I’d always felt that it was more important to stress that I was the most qualified person, regardless of race or gender. But that photo somehow spoke volumes about the past and the future. It reminded us how far we’ve come—that a woman and a person of color could be at that podium, accepting that nomination. It also spoke volumes about how far we can go, when children grow up knowing anything is possible for someone who looks just like them.

He has a skill for going for the very personal and pulling people into a false reality, forcing them to debate nonsense. Running after his crazy lies was a trap I was determined to avoid.

But J. D. Vance is a shape-shifter. And a shifty guy. He understood that his default meanness wouldn’t play against Tim Walz’s sunny disposition and patent decency. Throughout the debate, he toned the anger and the insults way down. As Van Jones later remarked, he sane-washed the crazy. There were no cat ladies, no pet-eating Haitians, no personal insults. Just a mild-mannered, aw-shucks Appalachian pretending he had a lot of common ground with that nice Midwestern coach.

Democracy is complicated. It’s also easily compromised by blatant bias, downright lies, and the media organizations that enable them.

The last days of the campaign became increasingly kinetic. The team constantly watched the swing states’ local data: Where are we gaining, losing? What assets can we move from here to there? Where would an ad spend move the needle most?

It is not too late for us, but we need to think both strategically and tactically. When we go to the streets, as we will, we must not give them the spectacle they are craving. We will go out of love of our country and belief in its promise. We cannot let them lie about that.