President Joe Biden announced his historic decision to suspend his presidential campaign on July 21, 2024. Shortly after, he endorsed his vice president, Kamala Harris, as the Democratic party’s nominee.
This began Harris’s 107-day campaign to defeat Donald Trump — a short and devastating battle for the Democrats. Harris lost in each of the seven battleground states and became the first Democrat to lose the popular vote since 2004. Less than one year after conceding the election, Harris announced a memoir and subsequent book tour describing the journey as the “shortest presidential campaign in modern history.”
Throughout “107 Days,” Harris reveals internal conversations from the election, detailing topics from her vice presidential nominee to her relationship with the sitting president. If one thing is evident throughout every interview linked with her memoir, it is that Harris still does not know why she lost the election.
Harris’s election arguably was doomed from the start. Democratic voters and donors were excited about a potential generational shift in the party, with Harris raising over $81 million in the first 24 hours of her candidacy. However, this was a demonstration of support from those able to contribute. It was not a unified endorsement by the voters.
“I knew I was the candidate in the strongest position to win. The most qualified and ready,” wrote Harris in her memoir.
But is this even remotely true? She dropped out of her 2020 presidential run before it even became 2020. It seems Harris believes that her name recognition and vice presidency made her skyrocket ahead of other 2020 primary contenders who were deemed by the voting bloc to be their second choice president — or any other notable Democrat who emerged in the past four years.
According to Harris, former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi suggested that the party have “some kind of primary, not an anointment.”
Harris did not listen. The party was plagued with primary rigging allegations in 2016 and criticism from Senator Bernie Sanders for the use of closed primaries that ignore independents. With distrust in the Democratic party, it was reckless of Harris to ignore this advice and forbid the voters from deciding their own candidate.
Harris, without Biden on the ticket, had never received a single delegate vote in a presidential primary prior to being crowned the party’s nominee. For a campaign largely about fighting fascism and promoting democracy, this was deeply ironic. It also set her up for frequent attacks by Republicans claiming that she was an unwanted nominee chosen by the political elite — and were they even wrong?
Her campaign only got worse as it progressed. Just like her press tour.
Prior to the book’s release, an excerpt was released discussing her considered candidates for vice president. Controversially, Harris admitted that Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg was her first pick but she was hesitant to select a gay man as she was already a Black woman married to a Jewish man.
With this, she endorses the same tired identity politics that Democrats love to fall back on. Hillary Clinton lost because she was a woman. Joe Biden won because he was a straight white man. Kamala Harris lost because she was a Black woman. It’s a strategy that avoids accountability and allows Democrats to continue pushing a centrist agenda.
Her target demographic is not people who would be turned away because Buttigieg is gay, but she was more interested in appeasing the potential homophobes than in engaging her core crowd with a more popular stance on healthcare or Israel.
In fact, her campaign revolved around appeasing Republicans — the same Republicans who actually had the opportunity to vote for other candidates in their primary but still wanted Trump. From campaigning with Liz Cheney to suggesting to put a Republican on her Cabinet, the Harris campaign sought the votes of moderate Republicans instead of progressives that exist within her own party. She passed on the opportunity to redefine the Democratic party in her image and instead stayed in the shadow of an already unpopular president. In the memoir, she recognizes that this was a mistake but continues the neutral messaging that voters are tired of.
She tiptoed around the subject of Gaza and when met with protestors on the campaign trail, she responded, “If you want Donald Trump to win, then say that. Otherwise, I’m speaking.”
Is that the best way to speak to your constituents and potential voters? Politicians are supposed to respond to the people, but Harris acted as if she was entitled to endless support simply for not being Trump. Even still, as her book tour is protested, she deflects accountability.
“You know what, I am not President of the United States,” responded Harris at one stop, rising out of her chair to yell back at a protester.
We are told not to protest her when she is the sitting vice president, nor when she is the Democratic presidential nominee, or now that she is a private citizen making money off of her failure that sent us to fascism. Her response to criticism makes it evident that she is not a public servant.
“Are you the same person that was telling people not to vote?” asked Harris after another protestor called out her role in the genocide in Gaza. “You want to talk about legacy? Let’s talk about the legacy … of not voting.”
How is it the voters fault for not voting for you when you didn’t earn their vote? It was your responsibility to adopt policies that your constituents wanted, not theirs to abandon their morals for a candidate they never wanted. The Democratic message for the past decade has been “Vote for me because I’m not the other guy.”
But what is perhaps the most bizarre stump speech from her press tour is her insistence that she believed “titans of industry” would protect democracy.
That’s right. Harris has said on multiple occasions that she thought the leader of corporations — whose motivations are solely profit — would protect democracy from a president who consistently offered tax breaks to the companies and billionaire CEOs.
Why would anyone believe that? Capitalism is not the guardrail to democracy, especially not in one where billionaires can practically buy elections and candidates. To believe this would be purposeful naivety, but we can expect nothing less from someone who has said on multiple occasions that we’re living in a communist dictatorship. U.S. politics has just become both political parties calling the other communist until it sticks.
Not only does Harris not understand — or at least not publicly state — that her loss was largely due to her never being a popular candidate with voters, but she had outdated beliefs guiding her campaign: The promise of capitalism, identity politics, bipartisan unity in the face of fascism, neutrality towards genocide — and that’s only scratching the surface.
The more Harris discusses her campaign, the more clear it is that she never should have run in the first place. Perhaps if the Democrats decided to hold a primary, a likeable, more promising candidate could have emerged, but we will never know.
Contrary to what she suggests, it was not her loyalty to Biden that potentially cost her the election. It was her ego that she was the best candidate, despite proving time and time again that there was a fundamental discrepancy between what voters cared about and what she believed.
And 340 million people are left to suffer because of it.
