A challenging campaign

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 01/11/2025 (296 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

“The fight for our freedom will take hard work. But like I always say, we like hard work. Hard work is good work.”

During the last four months of the 2024 American presidential election campaign, Kamala Harris’ mantra dominated political rallies, stump speeches and nightly TV news sound bites. The “hard work is good work’”catch phrase became as much her trademark as the pant suits and pearls during an edgy election contest in which Harris, who served as vice-president from 2021-2025, and Republican candidate Donald Trump, the 45th U.S. president, duked it out for the keys to the White House.

The ending is now history. Harris, the first Black and South Asian-American woman to run on a major political party’s presidential ticket, lost that election battle almost a year ago. The 61-year-old took a few months to lick her war wounds, and then put pen to paper in 107 Days, which follows 2009’s Smart on Crime and 2019’s The Truths We Hold: An American Journey. Selling 350,000 copies in its first week following a late September launch, Harris’ book has already become one of 2025’s bestselling memoirs.

107 Days is her recap of the shortest presidential campaign in modern election history, a fact she partly blames for her loss at the polls. It was also the closest election in the 21st century, she recently told Good Morning America. “As history writes about (it), I wanted to make sure my voice was present in how that election is discussed and covered,” she explains of her rationale for the memoir.

Harris’ book could have been a ponderous political thesis or a down-and-dirty exposé. It’s neither. Sure, readers know the events and rally cries that drove the story, and there’s no surprise ending. But Harris writes as she speaks — with candour, intensity and optimistic joyfulness. The result is a bonafide page-turner, helped by the “election day countdown” chapterization format (for which she’s received some criticism) and supported by personal photographs.

Like her or not, Harris’ behind-the-scenes look into the most recent U.S. election event is worth any reader’s time. Some of her reveals aren’t pretty; others are just sad. She explores her disappointing relationship with then-president Joe Biden‘s team, the television debate shenanigans with Trump and the logistics behind selecting her running mate Tim Walz (a two-week window to shortlist, vet, select and present her VP pick).

Some of her gutsiest, most heart-wrenching prose comes from life’s toughest moments: an uncharacteristic argument, mid-campaign, with her husband Doug Emhoff; the disillusionment about the election-night results of Nov. 5, 2024; and her January 2025 Senate certification of Trump’s electoral college victory and her defeat. The latter, she writes, was the hardest thing she’s ever had to do.

Harris also owns her campaign mistakes and miscues (“The buck stops with me and I’m clear about that,” she writes). The largest of those, for which Harris has soundly been thumped, was not acknowledging Joe Biden’s obvious inability to stage a successful election campaign. Her thoughts on that oversight are among 107 Days’ biggest a-ha moments.

“Running for president of the United States is like being in a marathon,” she writes. “You’re running at a sprinter’s pace with people throwing tomatoes at you every step you take. It’s not for the light-hearted.”

When it comes to her political future, Harris is as politically coy in print as she often is on air. While she raised a record US$671 million in donations in the two months after she became the 2024 Democrat nominee, that feat didn’t move the post-election needle: one-third of Americans voted for her, one-third voted for her opponent, and one-third never bothered to vote. Harris pulls no punches: two-thirds of the country didn’t elect Trump, she writes.

Still, she hedges about whether she’ll stage a presidential run in 2028, preferring, she says, “to listen to and elevate the voices of Americans.” Time will tell.

“We’re living in very dark times, very troubling times. And I hope that when people read this book, they will remember the light that they had (during the 107 days)… We need to see that light within all of us and let it propel us.”

107 Days is a good start.

GC Cabana-Coldwell is a Winnipeg-based writer.