Progressive Perspectives on Kamala Harris's Book, 107 Days

I don’t know if Kamala Harris found writing 107 Days cathartic, but reading it certainly wasn’t. Instead, the book, which unfolds in strictly chronological order, is a frustrating slog. It seems likely to alienate her critics further and provides no closure or hope for her supporters.

Harris has always been accused of sounding phoney; criticism she brushes off in the book as sexism. When Charlamagne tha God, host of popular radio show The Breakfast Club, observed that she came off as “very scripted” on the campaign trail, she retorted that it was actually “discipline.” The memoir was Harris’s opportunity to go off-script. Instead she sticks to her talking points.

. . . [107 Days] makes it clear [that Harris] still has blind spots about what went wrong. While a January YouGov poll suggests Biden’s unconditional support for Israel significantly affected Democratic voter turnout, Harris is largely dismissive of Gaza. Of demonstrators who turned up at campaign stops she asks: “Why weren’t they protesting at Trump rallies?” Can she really not understand? Because Trump was not in power at the time, and she was. Because President Biden made it clear he had no real empathy for Palestinians. Harris doesn’t seem to have much, either.

– Arwa Mahdawi
Excerpted from “107 Days by Kamala Harris:
No Closure, No Hope”
The Guardian
September 22, 2025

Kamala Harris still does not understand that her administration’s support for an ongoing genocide was not only morally horrific but cost her the votes of people with two eyes and a conscience.

– Nathan J. Robinson
via social media
September 23, 2025

Kamala Harris lost not because she’s a woman. Not because of voter tampering. Not because of faulty polls. Kamala Harris lost because she’s every bit of a war-mongering hypocrite as the orange embarrassment. If we are ever going to get our democracy back, it’s going to take a large chunk of the American people demanding we go left. TRULY left. Not this “fake left actually right of center” bullshit that we seem to fall for every four years.

– Raul Smith
via social media
September 23, 2025

The situation in the U.S. is getting darker by the day. The country is creeping (a less diplomatic but more honest word would be “galloping”) towards full-blown autocracy. Given America’s outsized influence on the world, this has grave implications for all of us. . . . In this context, was it too much to expect the woman who was vice-president for four years and whose defeat allowed Trump to burst back into the Oval Office to indulge in some honest reflection on what she might have done differently? Or to attempt a substantive analysis of what has gone so wrong in America that someone like Trump can not only be elected but, in the space of less than a year, with virtually no opposition, dismantle so much of what passed for democracy? Or to offer us any hope that the Democrats might be in even the foothills of working out how to start fighting back?

Harris does none of these things in any meaningful sense. We read, for example, that “it was devastating to learn after the election that I lost some ground with voters under 30, especially young men.” But we get nothing of any substance from her on why that happened.

In a somewhat glib afterword to the book, she observes (rightly) that “the dismantling of our democracy did not start with the 2024 election”, that “the right wing and religious nationalists have played the long game” and that “their plans have been amplified by the rise of a right wing media ecosystem built to operationalise their agenda through massive propaganda, misinformation and disinformation”. All of that is true, but, to be blunt, we didn’t need a Kamala Harris book to point it out. What she could have offered are cogent thoughts on how we got to this point – on the watch of Democrats as well as Republicans – and what needs to be done to start turning the tide again. On the latter point, the best she can muster is this: “At the heart of my vision for the future is Gen Z.”

When we strip the book back to its core – and this is my biggest frustration with it – the only explanation she really gives for her defeat is lack of time. It is her repeated refrain that the campaign just wasn’t long enough for voters to get to know her or understand her policies. Indeed, this is the pay off line to the whole book: “One hundred and seven days were, in the end, not long enough to accomplish the task of winning the presidency.” At this point, it dawned on me that the book’s title isn’t just a description of what she is writing about – it is her excuse. She does genuinely seem to be saying that with just a few days, weeks or months more, she would have won. Does she really believe that? Because I’m not sure anyone else does. I know I don’t.

Even if we were to buy into her theory about the brevity of the campaign, Harris takes no responsibility for its ineffectiveness. Given that she had been vice-president for four years under Joe Biden, it seems valid to ask why voters didn’t know her better. All we learn is that it wasn’t her fault. It was because Biden and his team had sidelined her. She admits that Biden was allowed to stay in the race for far too long and concludes that this was “reckless,” but also absolves herself of any blame: “I was in the worst position to make the case that he should drop out.”

There is much in this book that I found exasperating, but aspects of it depressed me too. Without appearing to recognise it, Harris seems to embody one of the failings of modern politics: the constant quest for positions calculated to offend the fewest voters. Obviously, compromise is a virtue in politics – and an art that seems lost in today’s world – but triangulation often ends up sounding too much like moral equivocation. On Gaza, while I am sure it doesn’t reflect how she really feels, she gives the impression of having cared more about finding the formulation that would lose the fewest votes than she did about the clarity, or justice, of her stance. She also expresses irritation that the young people turning up to her rallies to protest against genocide couldn’t see what, in her mind, was the bigger picture: “The threat to withhold their vote got to me. It felt reckless.”

. . . [T]he hard reality is I felt more despondent after reading this book than I did beforehand. I also can’t shake the feeling that the purpose of writing it may be more about testing the ground for another tilt at the White House than making sense of the last attempt. If I was to make up my mind about the prospect of that on the strength of this book alone, I’d have to conclude that it is not a good idea.

– Nicola Sturgeon
Excerpted from “Kamala Harris Has No Lessons
for the Democrats – or Herself”
The Observer
September 22, 2025

In the following 35-minute Left Reckoning video, Matt Lech and David Griscom break down Kamala Harris’s failed 2024 presidential campaign and “why it seems she might be done.”





Related Off-site Links:
Kamala Harris’s Book Proves She Was Never Prepared to Be President – The Majority Report (September 28, 2025).
Briahna Joy Gray Eviscerates Rachel Maddow Over Pathetic Kamala Harris Interview – The Katie Halper Show (September 25, 2025).
Kamala Harris Failed Gaza and Voters – HasanAbi Archive (September 24, 2025).
What a Book of Excuses Reveals About the Democrats’ Future – The Opinions Podcast (September 27, 2025).
Kamala Harris Deserves the Backlash – Black Green Red (September 29, 2025).
Why Kamala Shouldn’t Run in 2028 – Raging Moderates (September 23, 2025).
The Real Reason Democrats Are Failing – Sabrina Salvati (Sabby Sabs, September 28, 2025).


See also the following chronologically-ordered Wild Reed posts:
• On This Momentous Day in U.S. Politics, a Visit to the Prayer Tree (2024)
• Memes of the Times – July 27, 2024
• “‘Vote Blue No Matter Who’ Is Not Enough to Win in November”
• Progressive Perspectives on an American Coronation
• Marianne Williamson: “I Hope I Will Hear Things from Kamala That I Can Full-on Support”
• Progressive Perspectives on the Presidential Nomination of Kamala Harris
• Breaking Down Kamala Harris’s DNC Speech on Gaza
• Yousef Munayyer: Quote of the Day – August 30, 2024
• Chris Hedges on the End of the American Empire
• Peter Bloom on the Unmasking of the “Democratic Charade”
• “It’s a Systematic Slaughter That We’re Funding”
• Progressive Perspectives on the Harris–Trump Presidential Debate
• Miles Kampf-Lassin on the “Flashing Red Warning Signs” for the Harris Campaign
• Progressive Perspectives on Kamala Harris’s Faltering Presidential Campaign
• Progressive Perspectives on Where Democrats Went Wrong in the 2024 Presidential Election
• The Lamentable Legacy of the Biden/Harris Administration (2025)
• Yes, Just Imagine

Image: Kamala Harris, November, 2024. (Photo: Jacquelyn Martin/AP)