PDF Summary:107 Days, by Kamala Harris

On July 21, 2024, Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race, leaving Vice President Kamala Harris just 107 days to convince Americans she should be their next head of state. In 107 Days, Harris argues that this short timeline, combined with the four years Biden’s team spent undermining her, made victory nearly impossible. Harris says she faced insurmountable challenges, while her opponent, Donald Trump, enjoyed massive advantages in money and media.

This guide reorganizes Harris’s day-by-day account into three sections: the political constraints she inherited when Biden withdrew from the race, the strategic choices she made, and why those weren’t enough to overcome her disadvantages. We’ll also connect Harris’s argument to research on whether campaigns actually change voters’ minds, the wave of anti-incumbent sentiment that swept 2024, the historical trap that has defeated nearly every vice president who’s run for president, and the question of whether Biden deliberately sabotaged Harris or was simply being himself.

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Even Biden’s Democratic National Convention speech prioritized his legacy over making the case for Harris. In her telling, he spoke for nearly an hour on his administration’s accomplishments, but he didn’t include stories about working with Harris that might have testified to her skill or explained his choice to endorse her. Harris notes he was entitled to a legacy speech, but it meant losing a chance to build her up when she desperately needed it.

Was Biden Sabotaging Harris—Or Just Being Biden?

Harris isn’t the first vice president to feel undermined by the president she served: Friction between outgoing presidents and their would-be successors is one of the oldest dynamics in US politics. But the incidents Harris cites are matters of public record, and the interpretation that Biden was working against her is contested. Some observers read the same events and see something less calculated: a president in his eighties, deeply invested in his own legacy, with a well-documented tendency to go off-script at the worst possible moments.

After the September 10 debate, Biden visited a fire station in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, on the anniversary of 9/11. In an exchange with a Trump supporter, the two traded hats: Biden offered one with the presidential seal, and the Trump supporter proposed that Biden try on his red Trump cap as a show of bipartisan spirit. Biden put it on briefly. Images of the moment immediately went viral, stripped of context: Trump’s team posted the caption: “Kamala did so bad in last night’s debate, Joe Biden just put on a Trump hat.” The episode required damage control from Harris’s team, but it was also consistent with the kind of impromptu, reach-across-the-aisle gesture that had been central to Biden’s political identity for decades.

The story of Biden’s DNC speech is similar. His address ran well past its scheduled time and focused heavily on his own record: He walked through legislative achievements, sharpened the argument against Trump, and spent less time making the affirmative case for Harris than is typically expected of a convention keynote. But he did explicitly endorse her, calling the choice of Harris as his running mate “the best decision I made my whole career.” Many commentators were forgiving in the moment. Biden had given up his own campaign under enormous pressure so Democrats could field a stronger candidate, and an evening spent taking stock of what he’d accomplished didn’t seem unreasonable.

The “garbage” remark may be the most difficult to dismiss, as it directly contradicted the message Harris was trying to deliver. The night before, Harris had pledged to govern on behalf of all Americans. The next morning, her team fielded furious messages from supporters, some of whom urged Biden to stay out of public view for the final days of the race. But the context might suggest impulse, not intent: Biden had stayed out of the spotlight since endorsing Harris, and he’d been pushing to campaign more in the final stretch because he believed he could still connect with working-class voters. His remark about “garbage” came as he tried to condemn a comedian’s racist joke about Puerto Rico at a Trump rally.

What Strategic Choices Did Harris Make?

Harris argues that given the constraints she faced, her strategic choices were not only defensible but arguably optimal. She couldn’t pursue an ideal campaign strategy. Instead, she had to make calculated decisions that balanced competing demands. In this section, we’ll explore how she handled these decisions—and how she argues the choices she made were both ethically necessary and politically unavoidable.

The Challenge of Remaining Loyal While Separating From Biden

Harris identifies her decision to stay loyal to Biden even as his unpopularity threatened to sink her candidacy as the most consequential choice of her campaign. Polling showed Biden’s approval rating around 41%, and Harris needed to convince voters that she would chart a different course. Yet she remained Biden’s vice president, and she argues that criticizing him publicly would have violated the trust necessary for that relationship. She also worried that distancing herself from Biden would alienate voters who appreciated Biden’s accomplishments in infrastructure legislation, prescription drug cost reductions, and clean energy investments. She maintains she couldn’t, in good conscience, elevate herself by tearing someone else down.

Harris says this dilemma came to a head when she appeared on the talk show The View on October 8 and was asked what she would have done differently than Biden over the past four years. She responded, “There is not a thing that comes to mind,” a soundbite her staff immediately recognized as a gift to Trump’s campaign. Harris explains she interpreted the question as asking her to criticize Biden, which conflicted with her principles. She’d prepared better talking points—that she represented a new generation of Democrats, that she would appoint a Republican to her cabinet—but in the moment, her instinct toward remaining loyal overrode political calculation.

The Trap That’s Defeated Nearly Every VP Who’s Run for President

Harris frames her loyalty to Biden as a personal choice rooted in principle, but history suggests she was caught in a trap that’s ensnared nearly every VP who’s tried to ascend to the presidency. The vice presidency is an effective launchpad for running for president—almost every VP since 1933 has tried—but a poor launchpad for winning: Only five of those 15 campaigns ended in victory. In 2000, Al Gore tried the opposite tack from Harris’s: He distanced himself from Bill Clinton despite Clinton’s strong approval ratings, but this backfired: Gore forfeited the boost that voters typically give to the incumbent party’s nominee when the economy is strong. Gore chose distance and lost; Harris chose loyalty and lost.

Part of what makes the trap so inescapable is that the question interviewers kept asking Harris—“What would you have done differently?”—presumes a cleaner division of labor than really exists. Beginning with the Carter-Mondale partnership in the late 1970s, VPs gained West Wing offices, daily intelligence briefings, and direct roles in policy development. Beyond the president and VP, officials throughout the executive branch draft options, filter intelligence, and frame choices for their superiors, exerting enormous influence over what actually gets decided. When governance works this way, delineating where “Biden’s decisions” end and “Harris’s decisions” begin is more difficult than it sounds.

Building a Coalition Under Pressure

Harris’s coalition-building strategy was to make quick decisions to unite the Democratic Party behind her. Her most visible choice was selecting Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her running mate. She reveals that her first choice was Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, but she concluded that he posed too great a risk: Adding a gay man to the ticket alongside a Black woman felt like asking too much in a campaign with no margin for error. Walz impressed Harris with his lack of personal ambition—he had no desire to be president himself and was committed to doing whatever Harris found most useful. His background as teacher, football coach, and National Guard veteran gave him credibility with constituencies Democrats needed to reach.

How Much Does a VP Pick Matter?

Harris’s reasoning—that pairing a Black woman with a gay man like Buttigieg was too risky—reflects the logic of “ticket balancing,” the idea that a running mate should offset whatever the presidential candidate lacks in geography, ideology, or demographic appeal. But since Bill Clinton chose a fellow young Southern moderate in Al Gore in 1992, the logic of VP selection has shifted: Recent presidents have increasingly prioritized finding someone who can share the burden of governing over someone who can deliver a state or a constituency. Harris’s choice fell somewhere in between: She valued Walz for his willingness to be a supportive partner, but the deciding factor was old-school demographic math.

But does the identity of the running mate actually move votes? In Do Running Mates Matter?, Christopher Devine and Kyle Kopko tested this question across seven decades of elections and found that the answer is essentially no: A VP’s home state, gender, or background doesn’t translate into votes from that group. What they did find is that voters treat the VP pick as a window into the presidential candidate’s judgment and values. This suggests that for Harris, the risk wasn’t that her running mate would earn or cost her votes directly. It was that a choice driven by demographic caution, rather than conviction, might have told voters something about the kind of leader she would be.

Beyond the vice presidential selection, Harris made choices aimed at assembling a broad coalition of voters behind her. She held campaign rallies with Republican Liz Cheney, appeared at labor union events, spoke at Black sorority gatherings, visited Latino-owned businesses, and met with young voters. This breadth demonstrated her ability to unite diverse groups of voters, but she concedes that it also made crafting a sharp, focused message more difficult.

Harris’s message attempted to balance multiple elements that she felt were essential to her campaign. She emphasized her identity as a prosecutor who had taken on “predators of all kinds.” She promoted an optimistic vision that positioned Trump as representing regression to a divided past. She developed detailed economic policy proposals, including a $50,000 tax credit for new small businesses, protections against price gouging, down payment assistance for first-time homebuyers, and student debt relief. She also made reproductive rights central to her campaign. Harris argues that each element mattered to key constituencies, but acknowledges that trying to emphasize all of them simultaneously may have diluted her message’s impact.

When Voters Stop Asking “Who’s Competent?” and Start Asking “Who’s on My Side?”

Harris’s difficulty crafting a sharp message while holding together a broad coalition reflects political scientists’ observation that voters weigh two kinds of political issues when choosing how to vote. A “valence issue” is one where virtually everyone agrees on the goal: Nobody campaigns against prosperity or safety, so when these are the issues that matter most, the contest becomes less about what a party believes and more about whether voters trust it to get results. A “position issue,” by contrast, is one where people disagree, and voters sort themselves based on which side they’re on. Harris ran a valence campaign: She was asking voters to trust that she was the more competent and decent candidate.

But in 2024, the electorate wasn’t asking “Who’s more competent?” It was asking “Who’s on my side?”—a position question. People across the globe felt betrayed by economic and political forces, and European parties of the center-right and center-left experienced steep declines in the wake of a wave of anti-establishment sentiment. Against an opponent channeling that anger, Harris’s centrist pitch had limited leverage: A party on the left or right can recover by shifting toward the middle, but a party that’s already in the center has nowhere to move. Its only path back is to rebuild its reputation—which takes time Harris didn’t have.

Navigating Difficult Issues

Harris writes that a few issues in particular presented her with no good options—taking any stand on them would alienate groups of voters she needed to win. The most painful was the war in Gaza. Harris faced intense pressure to break with Biden’s support for Israel’s war, which had killed tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians. She describes trying to influence Biden privately to press Netanyahu about the humanitarian crisis. But she never took a public position that broke with Biden’s: She was still serving as vice president and feared that breaking with Israel would alienate Jewish and moderate voters in crucial swing states. Harris acknowledges the result satisfied no one—progressives felt betrayed while pro-Israel voters didn’t trust her.

(Shortform note: Harris’s approach to Gaza illustrates a problem that arises when an issue splits a party’s base into opposing camps. The median voter theorem holds that candidates maximize support by staking out the center of any issue. But on deeply moral issues like the war in Gaza, there are clusters on both sides and few people in the middle. A policy shift might have helped: Among Biden 2020 voters who didn’t vote for Harris, 36% said they’d have been more likely to vote for her had she pledged to withhold weapons to Israel, versus just 10% who said that pledge would have driven them away, suggesting she lost more voters by not breaking with him than she would have by breaking with him.)

Another difficult issue was transgender rights. Trump’s campaign spent more than $40 million on ads attacking Harris for her support of LGBTQ+ rights, including a 2019 statement supporting medically necessary healthcare for trans prisoners. Harris faced a choice: disavow her record or stand by her values despite the political cost. She chose the latter. Harris explains that her core identity is a protector, and she couldn’t vilify a vulnerable population for political advantage. She writes that she doesn’t regret refusing to abandon trans people, but wishes she’d devoted more attention to countering Trump’s attacks.

Harris contends that communicating effectively about these complex issues required nuance, trust-building, and time to explain positions that couldn’t be reduced to soundbites. She argues that with more time, she could have built enough credibility that voters would trust her judgment even on issues where they disagreed with her specific positions. Without that time, she disappointed multiple groups of voters while satisfying none completely.

The $215 Million Campaign That Didn’t Move Votes

GOP spending on anti-trans network television advertising in 2024 reached nearly $215 million—not counting cable or streaming platforms—yet this massive investment appears to have had almost no effect on how people voted. Post-election polling by the Human Rights Campaign found that only 4% of voters named opposition to trans rights as a factor in their presidential vote, last among all issues tested. When Data for Progress polled voters, four out of five—including 85% of Republicans—said candidates of both parties were spending too much time talking about trans people instead of addressing economic concerns.

But the research revealed that while the ads failed as an electoral strategy, they succeeded in reducing public acceptance of trans people. Support for trans healthcare access dropped by 3.7 points, and willingness to accept a trans friend or family member fell by 3.1 points, even among people who said they already knew someone who is trans. The Human Rights Campaign argued the ads caused immense harm to trans people, who already face disproportionate rates of violence and psychological distress. Researchers found that trans adults who worried about losing legal protections had significantly higher odds of depression (66% higher) and anxiety (167% higher) compared to those who didn’t share that concern.

Why Did Harris’s Strategy Fail?

Harris argues that her campaign suffered not only because of the rushed timeframe and her party’s irreconcilable expectations, but also because Trump enjoyed a number of advantages that left her at a significant deficit. In this section, we’ll explore the upper hand Trump had in reaching voters, the key demographics that shifted away from Democrats, and why Harris believes the timeline made all these problems insurmountable.

Trump’s Advantages in Money and Media

Harris argues that Trump had the upper hand in reaching voters and shaping what they heard about the campaign. Tech billionaire Elon Musk spent at least $288 million supporting Trump. One example of how he used his influence was when he created a controversial million-dollar “sweepstakes” to drive traffic to his social media platform X, formerly Twitter, where he’d fired content moderators and fact-checkers, relentlessly promoted Trump, attacked Harris, and spread misinformation about the election. Harris suggests tactics like this may have decided the race in swing states, where Trump’s margins were razor-thin: less than 1% in Wisconsin, 1.44% in Michigan, and 1.73% in Pennsylvania.

How Big an Effect Did Elon Musk Have?

According to year-end FEC filings, Musk poured more than $290 million into the 2024 race, a sum that made him one of the most prolific individual political spenders in American history. (To put that in perspective, it would take roughly 3 million small donors to match that figure collectively, a stark illustration of how concentrated political spending has become.) That one person can spend this kind of money on an election is a relatively new feature of American politics. Before the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United v. FEC (2010), federal law barred corporations and outside groups from spending unlimited sums to influence elections—restrictions that had been in place, in various forms, since the early 1900s.

Did Musk’s spending decide the race, as Harris suggests? The question of whether money determines election outcomes remains genuinely unsettled. Advertising—the main thing campaigns spend money on—has a surprisingly weak track record of changing results, and its effects become harder to isolate as media fragments. Research suggests that campaign dollars are better at getting sympathetic voters to the polls than at changing minds: When candidates spend money communicating directly with voters, the main effect is on who shows up, not which candidate they prefer. Much of Musk’s money went toward this kind of work: door-knocking, texting, phone calls, and mailers designed to turn out Trump-friendly voters.

However, Harris wasn’t outspent overall. Pro-Harris groups, led by the hybrid PAC Future Forward USA (which alone spent over $517 million), outpaced pro-Trump groups by a slim margin: roughly $1.05 billion to $1 billion. The real asymmetry wasn’t in dollars—it was in the kind of influence Musk could exert. As a megadonor who owns one of the world’s largest social media platforms, Musk occupied a position no Democratic counterpart could match. He’d gutted X’s trust-and-safety team, used the platform to amplify pro-Trump content and spread misinformation about Harris, and served as a megaphone for the campaign—a concentration of power unprecedented in American elections.

According to Harris, Trump also benefited from a right-wing media ecosystem that constantly promoted his messages while attacking her, spreading misinformation faster than her campaign could respond. Trump dominated formats that reached persuadable voters, particularly young men. He spent hours on Joe Rogan’s podcast, an appearance that eventually garnered 60 million views. Harris wanted to reach Rogan’s audience, but Rogan wouldn’t accommodate her campaign schedule. Harris maintains Rogan later misrepresented the situation by claiming that her campaign had demanded certain topics remain off-limits, when those were actually topics her team had suggested discussing.

The Information Landscape Harris Couldn’t Crack

The right-wing media ecosystem Harris cites as a key obstacle has been shaped by the financial decisions news organizations have made in pursuit of funding. Many of the most respected center-right publications like The Economist and The Wall Street Journal fund their journalism through subscriptions, putting their reporting behind paywalls. The conservative news outlets that are free (relying on advertising for funds) tend to be the most sensationalized ones, and for voters unwilling or unable to pay for a subscription, they’ve become the default source of political information. The result is that the quality of political news a person reads depends on whether they’re willing to pay for it, a divide that falls along class lines. Podcasts have emerged as one of the beneficiaries of this shift and are especially popular news sources among Republicans.

Over the course of the campaign, Trump sat for 14 major podcast or streaming interviews that collectively drew 68.7 million YouTube views. Researchers estimate these appearances boosted his support by 1% to 2.6%, with more than half of that effect linked to Joe Rogan’s platform. Unlike traditional news interviews, which are structured around specific policy questions, podcasts tend to let conversations wander, a format that plays to Trump’s strengths and may have put Harris, whose speaking style is more structured, at a disadvantage.

Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes’s Fight offers a more detailed account of Harris’s interaction with Rogan than either side tells publicly. Allen and Parnes report that the two sides couldn’t agree on what the conversation would cover. Harris’s team floated topics they thought would resonate with Rogan’s audience—social media censorship and marijuana—but Rogan’s side said he wanted to discuss the economy, the border, and abortion. Harris’s team saw their proposal as an opening suggestion; Rogan’s camp read it as a restriction. Rogan also disputes Harris’s assertion that his team lied about a scheduling conflict when hers proposed an interview on October 25, which turned out to be the day he interviewed Trump.

Finally, Harris argues that Trump operated under a different set of rules than those she was expected to follow—a double standard where her stumbles were magnified while Trump’s were normalized. While she faced intense scrutiny for every policy position and media appearance, Trump could make outrageous or confusing statements without facing similar consequences. He could offer mere “concepts of a plan” for healthcare affecting millions of Americans, spread debunked conspiracy theories, and make rambling speeches, while media coverage often treated these as routine rather than disqualifying behavior.

(Shortform note: During the 2024 campaign, critics used the term “sanewashing” to describe how news outlets translated Trump’s rambling remarks into coherent-sounding summaries, particularly in headline form, which some attributed to the media’s instinct to treat both candidates as comparably normal. Yet sentiment analysis of TV news transcripts showed that coverage of Harris was consistently more positive in tone than coverage of Trump. Harris’s own media strategy also complicates her double-standard argument: Her campaign minimized her unscripted interactions, which may have reduced the risk of damaging moments but also left her less defined in the minds of voters who felt they didn’t know enough about what she stood for.)

Why Key Voters Shifted Away

Compared to the 2020 election, key demographic groups shifted toward Trump in ways Harris argues she couldn’t reverse in the time she had. Young voters, particularly young men, and Latino voters moved away from Democrats, driven by economic concerns rather than the issues Harris expected would motivate them. Post-election analysis revealed that 40% of young voters prioritized the economy and jobs, while the issues Harris emphasized polled much lower: abortion at 13%, climate change at 8%, and foreign policy including Gaza at just 4%.

(Shortform note: Harris’s surprise at which issues motivated young voters may reflect a broader Democratic miscalculation. In 2022, 44% of young voters who were asked to name the single issue that drove their vote said abortion, versus just 21% for inflation. Two years later, nearly two-thirds of young people (64%) cited the cost of living among their top three concerns, while abortion had fallen to 27%. One explanation is that the rise in voters calling abortion their top issue had been driven almost entirely by those identifying as Democrats. In other words, Harris’s focus on abortion may have appealed to voters who were going to vote for her anyway, but didn’t persuade the economically anxious swing voters she needed to win the race.)

Harris had proposed policies aimed at helping young men struggling economically: raising the minimum wage, offering student debt relief, improving support for workers without college degrees, and instituting protections for renters. But these proposals never reached the young men who needed to hear them because they were following people like Andrew Tate and Myron Gaines—hypermasculine social media influencers who promoted messages blaming feminism for men’s problems. Harris writes that her campaign couldn’t counter those messages or demonstrate that her policies would materially improve these voters’ lives.

The Manosphere Sells Power, Not Just Prosperity

A common explanation for the rise of influencers like Tate and Gaines is that they speak to young men’s economic anxieties, but research published both before and after the 2024 election suggests the picture is more complicated. While economic frustration can be an entry point to this content, boys at elite private schools and Ivy League universities are just as drawn to figures like Tate and Gaines as those from economically disadvantaged backgrounds—a pattern that undercuts the idea that financial anxiety is the primary driver.

Monash University sociologists Steven Roberts and Stephanie Wescott argue that what these spaces really sell is the restoration of a traditional gender hierarchy, which appeals to men regardless of their economic standing. A 2024 analysis of Tate’s videos and focus groups with teenage boys found that Tate cultivates anxiety about the future, manufacturing a sense of economic and social precariousness that he positions himself as the solution to, through dating advice and entrepreneurial coaching. This suggests the manosphere doesn’t just reflect a rightward shift among young men, but that its influencers actively use algorithms and social media to turn ambient frustration into conservative political identity.

Latino voters presented a similar challenge. Harris had announced policies aimed at them, including a task force to advance economic development in Puerto Rico and repair damage from Hurricane Maria, the devastating 2017 storm that killed thousands and destroyed much of the island’s infrastructure and electrical grid. She held campaign events at Latino-owned businesses and met with community leaders. Yet Latino voters also shifted toward Trump, driven primarily by economic concerns.

(Shortform note: The rightward shift of Latino voters defied expectations of Democratic leaders, who’d assumed they’d vote based on immigration and cultural issues rather than economic worries. This proved to be a misreading of Latino concerns: Most Latinos in the US are legal citizens, either through birth or naturalization, and many support the deportation of immigrants living in the country illegally. Culturally, too, Latinos often align more closely with conservative views than Democrats accounted for, due to the strong Christian beliefs held by many. Leading up to the election, 64% of Latinos cited economic concerns as their top priority—a stark contrast to the 8% who named immigration issues and the 1% that cited racial injustice.)

This points to what Harris sees as the challenge of public sentiment regarding the economy being misaligned with economic reality. The economy showed strength—unemployment was low, wages were rising, and inflation had declined. Harris had plans to address costs that remained high—a $50,000 tax credit for new small businesses, protections for renters, down payment assistance for first-time homebuyers, and student debt relief. But Harris argues that voters didn’t evaluate the economy based on statistics or policy proposals; they evaluated it based on how they felt when buying groceries or paying rent, and they felt worse than four years earlier. They blamed the administration Harris still served in, creating a strong association her proposals couldn’t break.

Why Policy Proposals May Not Matter as Much as Candidates Think

Harris argues that with more time, her economic proposals would have broken through. But the gap she needed to close may not have been an information gap at all. Research suggests that a campaign doesn’t change voters’ minds, but instead gives them enough information to vote the way their underlying values and circumstances were always going to lead them. That finding has a specific implication for economic issues. When voters evaluate the economy, they look backward rather than forward and judge the country’s economic health, not just their own. This meant Harris’s proposals were competing against voters’ feelings about how the economy had performed under Biden—feelings that are often disconnected from the data.

As PBS reported in the wake of the election, voters expressed deep dissatisfaction with the economy even as unemployment stayed low and growth remained strong. In Democracy for Realists, Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels offer a framework for understanding why: They argue that most voters don’t follow politics closely enough to form accurate assessments of economic conditions, so their judgments are shaped more by partisan identity and gut-level perception than by the kind of data a policy proposal is designed to address. If that’s right, Harris’s problem wasn’t that voters hadn’t heard her economic plan—it’s that the plan was answering a question most voters weren’t asking.

The Timeline as the Decisive Factor

Harris argues the 107-day timeline was decisive not because any single obstacle was insurmountable, but because with so little time to address them, multiple challenges compounded into an impossible situation. The timeline prevented Harris from resolving what she identifies as the core contradiction of her candidacy: running as a change candidate while serving in the administration voters wanted a change from.

(Shortform note: Harris sees time as the decisive constraint, but as she notes, she was up against something deeper too. In 2024, ruling parties in developed countries lost ground in every single election, a pattern without precedent in a century of records. Both left-wing and right-wing governments were swept out, suggesting the force at work wasn’t ideological but a rejection of whoever held power. Harris couldn’t escape this: Three-quarters of persuadable voters saw her as “more of the same.” If the dominant impulse was to punish ruling parties, then the question isn’t whether 107 days was enough time. It’s whether any amount of time could have made voters see the sitting VP as a break from the administration she’d served in.)