Former U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris has set off a political firestorm with her forthcoming memoir, 107 Days, which dissects the tumultuous final chapter of the Biden administration and her own fraught journey as the Democratic nominee in the 2024 presidential election. With the book set to hit shelves on September 23, 2025, excerpts published by The Atlantic have already sent shockwaves through Democratic circles, exposing deep rifts and raising uncomfortable questions about party leadership, loyalty, and the cost of political ambition.
Harris, who inherited the Democratic nomination after President Joe Biden’s dramatic withdrawal from the 2024 race, spares little in her critique of the decisions that led to the party’s defeat. She characterizes Biden’s insistence on running for reelection—despite his advanced age and mounting health concerns—as “recklessness.” In the memoir, Harris writes, “Was that dignity, or was it recklessness? In retrospect, I think it was recklessness.” According to The Atlantic, her assessment of the Democratic Party’s mood in those critical months was scathing: “It was as if everyone were hypnotized, chanting only that ‘it’s Joe and Jill’s decision.’”
Biden, born in 1942, faced mounting skepticism from within his own party as he launched his bid for a second term. Despite warnings from advisers and visible signs of fatigue, he pressed forward, only to suffer a devastating blow during the June 27, 2024, televised debate against then-Republican candidate Donald Trump. Harris describes the debate as “a disaster,” recalling how Biden spoke with a hoarse voice, struggled to complete sentences, and made high-profile verbal missteps—such as confusing “billion” and “million” and stating, “we finally beat Medicare” when discussing the national debt. She attributes the poor performance, at least in part, to “the forced march that followed immediately after a tour of Europe.”
The fallout from that night was immediate and severe. Public opinion turned sharply against Biden’s candidacy, and, amid growing calls for change, he dropped out of the race. Harris stepped into the breach, launching a feverish 107-day campaign, only to be defeated by the Republican Party in key swing states. The title of her memoir, 107 Days, is a nod to the brief, intense period she spent as the Democratic standard-bearer.
But the memoir is more than a campaign diary. Harris offers a candid, sometimes blistering, account of her time in the White House—detailing a sense of isolation and a lack of support from Biden’s senior aides. She claims that she was viewed as a threat by the president’s inner circle: “Their thinking was zero-sum. If I shone, he (Biden) would be dimmed. No one understood that my success was the president’s success.” She further alleges that when Republicans attacked her as the “border czar” or a “DEI hire,” the White House communications team “offered little defense,” and, worse, that Biden’s aides “were adding fuel to the negative stories that sprang up around me.”
Harris’s frustrations were not limited to internal politics. She recounts being tasked with managing the diplomatic effort to address the “root causes” of immigration from Mexico and Central America—an assignment fraught with political peril. Media outlets, particularly conservative ones, quickly labeled her the “Border Czar,” a moniker that stuck and proved politically damaging. Harris writes, “When Republicans mischaracterized my role as ‘border czar,’ no one in the White House comms team helped me to effectively push back and explain what I had really been tasked to do, nor to highlight any of the progress I had achieved … I wanted to get that good news out. But White House staff stalled. ‘Not yet. We need more data.’ The story remained untold. Instead, I shouldered the blame for the porous border, an issue that had proved intractable for Democratic and Republican administrations alike.”
Her sense of being set up to fail extended beyond immigration. Harris details how, after the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade, she was thrust into the role of defending reproductive rights while Biden “struggled to talk about reproductive rights in a way that met the gravity of the moment.” She also describes being “castigated” by West Wing aides for delivering a strong speech on the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, despite the speech having been vetted in advance. “The West Wing thinking was zero-sum: If she’s shining, he’s dimmed. None of them grasped that if I did well, he did well.”
Despite the bitterness, Harris draws a line when it comes to Biden’s health. She insists, “Biden was a smart person capable of performing the duties of the presidency. But at age 81, when he was tired, physical and verbal slips appeared.” She also reflects on the impossible position she found herself in, torn between loyalty and political reality. “Me advising Biden not to run would have appeared to be extremely selfish,” she notes, adding that it would have looked like “naked ambition, perhaps as poisonous disloyalty.”
The publication of 107 Days has plunged the Democratic Party into turmoil. According to Axios, Biden’s allies have pushed back forcefully against Harris’s claims, accusing her of scapegoating the president to cover for her own shortcomings. “Vice President Harris was simply not good at the job,” one former White House official told the outlet. “She played little substantial role in any core function of the administration.” Another aide criticized her timing: “Staying silent when it mattered and criticizing only now is an act without courage.”
Democratic strategists are deeply uneasy about the memoir’s impact. Many fear that public airing of such grievances will only deepen party divisions and play into the hands of President Donald Trump and the Republican Party. Ron Klain, Biden’s former Chief of Staff, told The Washington Post that “Harris, by asserting her own voice, is further damaging Biden’s already tattered political legacy.” Senator Chris Coons, one of Biden’s closest allies, cautioned on CNN, “Rehashing past debates does nothing to help the party. Now is the time to focus on the Trump administration.”
Political observers have long debated whether Biden’s team truly intended to prepare Harris as a successor. As one commentator in The Atlantic put it, “The memoir suggests Biden’s inner circle never intended to fully empower Harris as a successor in 2024.” Biden’s own ambitions, and his belief that he alone could defeat Trump, shaped the administration’s approach. In a post-debate interview with ABC News, Biden argued, “I don’t think anybody’s more qualified to be president or win this race than me.”
For Harris, the publication of 107 Days is both a reckoning and a gamble. It offers her a platform to explain her side of the story, but it also risks deepening the wounds within her party. Whether the Democratic electorate will embrace her candor or penalize her for disunity remains to be seen. What’s clear is that the Biden-Harris partnership, once hailed for its historic significance, has left behind a legacy of unresolved tensions and hard lessons about the perils of political succession.
