Kamala Harris, whom I admire, is right. President Joe Biden shouldn’t have run for re-election in 2024. Biden’s popularity cratered eight months into his term, going underwater and never recovering following the administration’s bungled pullout from Afghanistan. By summer 2023, more than 75% of U.S. adults, including 69% of Democrats, said Biden was too old to be effective for four more years, according to polling from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. So Harris isn’t wrong when she writes in her refreshingly candid new book “107 Days” that Biden should have bowed out gracefully.
The truth is 2024 was a change election, and, as Biden’s vice president, Harris represented more of the same.
What Harris leaves out, though, is that despite her vast qualifications and her preparedness for the nation’s highest office, she shouldn’t have run either.
It pains me to write that, but the truth is 2024 was a change election, and, as Biden’s vice president, Harris represented more of the same. Her association with him was always going to drag her down, but her refusal to break with him on any major issue sealed her fate.
Harris, of course, disagrees. In “107 Days,” her 304-page reflection on the shortest presidential campaign in modern history, Harris writes simply, “I didn’t have enough time.” She goes on to argue that if she’d had more time, she could have created a more compelling narrative to appeal to key voting blocs and better warn the public of the grave dangers Donald Trump posed to democratic systems and norms.
I believe that she believes that.
But those tactics were in service of a strategy that ignored the elephant in the room: Biden and her close ties to him. She said political strategist David Plouffe told her that “people hate Joe Biden.”
Plouffe may have been slightly overstating the case, but there was truth there. Harris says: “Plouffe was a realist. He knew that the president’s approval rating of 41 percent was a ball and chain dragging on my campaign. It would take time, too much time, before I acknowledged this truth.”
Her head-in-the-sand denial was on full display Oct. 8, when “The View” co-host Sunny Hostin, a former prosecutor like Harris, pressed the vice president by asking if there was something that she would have done differently than Biden had done while in office.
Her head-in-the-sand denial was on full display when “The View” co-host Sunny Hostin pressed the vice president by asking if there was something that she would have done differently than Biden had done.
She should have been ready, even eager to answer that question. Instead, she answered, “There’s not a thing that comes to mind.” In her book, she says her staff was “beside themselves” with her answer. As they should have been. You don’t run for president during a change election without making distinctions between yourself and the person who’s already the president.
“I had no idea I’d just pulled the pin on a hand grenade,” she writes. “I wasn’t braced for the explosion that was coming.”
It was only 28 days before Election Day (early voting had already begun in several states), and Trump’s campaign jumped on the rare mistake, featuring Harris’ disastrous answer in ads and further shackling her to the unpopular president: “A flood of illegals, skyrocketing prices, global chaos and Kamala wouldn’t change a thing” is how that ad began.
“Why. Didn’t. I. Separate. Myself. From. Joe. Biden?” she asks rhetorically. “Over the course of the 107 days, I became increasingly aware that people wanted to know there was a separation and that it was a big issue for them. I just didn’t realize how big.”
That lack of awareness — her not understanding the moment or the mood of the country — was the original sin of Harris’ candidacy. She couldn’t win without putting real daylight between herself and her former running mate, and even then voters would have questioned her sincerity. They’d have wondered: Is this really a clean break from the past or is she just telling us what we want to hear? Can we really trust Biden’s sidekick who now claims that she really didn’t agree with what he did or said on X issue?
In her first news interview since leaving office, Harris told MSNBC host Rachel Maddow Monday night that she regretted not speaking directly with Biden about his insistence on running again, noting that it would have been self-serving for her to question whether it was a good idea. The unstated assumption in her answer is that if she’d told him to step aside, she would run in his stead. But, again, that wouldn’t have been the right move given that the country was clamoring for change.
That lack of awareness was the original sin of Harris’ candidacy.
It would have been more selfless for the vice president to have told Biden that they were in it together and that for the good of the party and the country both should step aside and allow for a competitive primary process centered on outside-the-Beltway solutions from our nation’s governors.
That may not have worked. Biden still may have insisted on running. But we don’t know that it wouldn’t have been persuasive. Instead, Harris held her tongue, rolled the dice, and bear-hugged a respected but slowing elder statesman whom the country was ready to move away from. The American public’s clear desire for change — and we’ve got to mention the influence of sexism and racism among certain voters — is why she didn’t win.
Having more than 107 days wouldn’t have changed that.