https://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/non-fiction/review-kamala-harris-107-days-memoir-campaign/
Full of gossip, preening and attacks on the Biden family, 107 Days is the most interesting account of total failure you will ever read
22 September 2025 5:00pm BST
Full disclosure: I was a Hillary Clinton fan. She was a ball-buster. She was sharp. She knew her Equatorial Guinea from her Guinea-Bissau. Her loss to Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election was, to me, a disappointment.
But it was hardly surprising. For decades now, the Democrats have suffered from a political disease. The symptoms: virtue signalling, tribalism, rigidity, arrogance and denial of reality. All of this doomed Clinton’s campaign, kept Joe Biden in office long after he was unfit for it, and prevented Biden’s successor in the 2024 campaign from being chosen properly, through open primaries, rather than the coronation that installed Kamala Harris. Then, last autumn, it led to Harris’s loss.
With 107 Days, we have the inside story of that loss – and the Democratic hubris that helped to cause it – from Harris herself. “We’d planned for everything,” she writes at the very end, “except the actual result.” Hours before Trump’s victory is announced, she describes “fighting off the first tendrils of alarm and apprehension”. The first!
Harris’s total confidence in victory is barely believable. Seeing this on the page makes for a bizarre reading experience: 107 Days reads like a memoir of a president, a victor. Harris writes that her choice of running mate “would be integral to the success of my administration”. There’s a lot of “when I’m president” here, a line that always makes me cringe, whether it’s a student election or an American presidential primary. Throughout the book, until a few pages before the end, I wondered: does she realise, even now, that she lost?
Before 2024, I can’t recall responding to Kamala Harris’s name with elation, respect or even much interest. Like most people, I’d barely heard of her until she became Biden’s vice-president. Her 2019 run for the Democratic presidential candidacy, in which she was his opponent, was dramatic – she attacked his record on race – but unsuccessful: she dropped out before she could make much of a splash. Once they were reconciled and jointly elected in 2020, Harris’s image soon became that of a weak, tokenistic figure, another bizarre Democratic pick.
But – aside from the hubris – this memoir changed my opinion of her. I still don’t accept the implication of the title that a squeezed time frame was the reason Harris didn’t win against Trump; she’d had plenty of time in public office, including four years as the nation’s second-most-powerful person, to carve out a clear image. Yet she at least makes it clear here that she had expertise and plenty of passions, issues she knew her way around and could have capitalised on: reproductive rights, transparency in the justice system, infrastructure and economic assistance for the needy.
The trouble was, they never coalesced into a legible force. And the reason for this, invisible to her advisers but glaringly obvious to everyone else, was her weakness for word salads and her reliance on off-putting buzzwordssuch as “equity”. (It also remains a sad fact that in 21st-century America, abortion rights still need to be discussed in the right way, especially by a woman, or a lot of people will run a mile. She got that wrong too.)
Harris takes pains to emphasise her respect for and loyalty to Biden. But, at the same time, describing the run-up to his exit from the race, she makes abundantly clear how pathetic were the attempts of his team to put his delicate ego and exhausted body and mind above the needs of the US. She describes how the Democratic campaign team had for months been having political briefings that “made no sense to me”. Mike Donilon, Biden’s closest adviser, “would filter the data from the polls and present the numbers in soothing terms”. Lorraine Voles, Harris’s chief of staff, “turned to me as we left one of these meetings and said, ‘If I ever organised that sort of dog-and-pony bull---- for you, you’d have my head on a platter’”.
Harris is clearly a hard-nosed operative. She takes the trouble to name countless members of her operation: deputy chiefs of staff, speech writers, press gurus, lawyers and whole armies of advisers. There are people whose job it is to hand her a sheet of choreography at events; everything is planned, down to who rides in the lift with her. Harris gives a special mention to the inner members of her team, some of whose names – Storm Horncastle, Opal Vadhan, Juan Dromgoole – are worth the read alone. (Laughs aside, such names are a reminder of Washington’s astonishing diversity compared with Westminster.)
107 Days is written surprisingly well. On top of that, it’s jolly gossipy. We meet Kamala the mean girl, the egotist. She makes sure to include the moment a top strategist urged her to stop paying tribute to Biden in her speeches: “People hate Joe Biden.” Plenty of memories seem to be peacocking: “I took the stage to a standing ovation”, for instance, or an aside about a “senior campaign finance official” saying to a staffer: “Thank God you guys are top of the ticket. We weren’t going to make payroll [if Biden had stayed on].”
But I enjoyed it all, especially Harris’s attitude to the Biden family. She speculates that Jill Biden, the former president’s wife, still harboured rancour towards her for her attack on Biden in the 2019 primaries. In fact, the family appears wildly self-absorbed and cold towards Harris and her husband, Doug Emhoff. Towards the end, Jill Biden seems openly hostile. “What’s going on?” she demands of Emhoff at a Fourth of July celebration in Delaware. “Are you supporting us?” This was a fortnight before Biden quit; for years, Harris might have been asking the same question. She pulls no punches on the Biden White House’s relish at throwing her under the bus and keeping her there. She suspects, at one point, that “the president’s inner circle… decided I should be knocked down a little”, hence her elevation to the impossible role of “border tsar”. In the opinion of her advisers, Biden’s people treated her like a “potted plant”.
The reaction in the US to this memoir has been amusing. The gloves are off. Everyone from the New York Times – a Kamala organ if ever there was one – to Politico to the Wall Street Journal have been scathing. Senior Democrats are fuming, too. Pete Buttigieg has expressed “surprise” at Harris’s account of her choice not to pick him as running mate because he was gay and she thought it would be too much for the American people; he noted that she’s a black woman married to a Jewish man.
Most of all, there is disagreement about whether 107 Days is a bridge-burning exercise as Harris flounces out of public office for good, or the setting-out of a stall for a future run. I suspect it’s the latter. Either way, this is the most interesting thing Kamala Harris has ever done.