Former Vice President Kamala Harris writes in her new memoir that she regretted not pressing President Joe Biden to withdraw from the 2024 reelection contest sooner but feared doing so would appear "incredibly self-serving." The revelation appears in 107 Days, an excerpt of which was published in The Atlantic on Wednesday.
Harris says she wrestled with whether she should have told Biden to "consider not running" during a period she describes as "months of growing panic," but concluded she was the wrong person to make that case. "Of all the people in the White House, I was in the worst position to make the case that he should drop out," she wrote. "I knew it would come off to him as incredibly self-serving if I advised him not to run. He would see it as naked ambition, perhaps as poisonous disloyalty."
Harris questions whether the deference shown to Biden's personal decision was "grace, or...recklessness," writing that the choice to run should not have been left solely to an individual's judgment. "In retrospect, I think it was recklessness. The stakes were simply too high. This wasn’t a choice that should have been left to an individual’s ego, an individual’s ambition. It should have been more than a personal decision," she wrote.
Beyond that central regret, Harris lays out a series of criticisms of Biden and members of his inner circle, saying she felt sidelined and insufficiently defended by the president's communications team. She wrote that during Biden's speech announcing his decision to abandon his reelection campaign, he did not mention her name until "almost nine minutes into the 11-minute address." Harris added that the administration's "huge comms team" made it "almost impossible" to get positive attention for her work or defenses against what she described as untrue attacks.
Harris singled out conservative media criticism, including coverage that accused her of faking a French accent during a trip to Paris. She also pushed back against reporting that characterized her vice presidential office as chaotic and noted high staff turnover during her first year. Harris said some of that turnover stemmed from gendered expectations and stereotypes faced by the team supporting "the first woman vice president." "Working for the first woman vice president, my staff had the additional challenge of confronting gendered stereotypes, a constant battle that could prove exhausting," she wrote.
On policy roles, Harris said she was frustrated by how she was deployed on the administration's response to the crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border. Assigned as a special envoy to the issue, she complained that "no one around the president advocated, 'Give her something she can win with.'" She also described criticism from Biden aides after delivering a speech in Selma, Alabama, about the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, saying the speech had been cleared in advance by the White House. "I was castigated for, apparently, delivering it too well," she wrote.
Harris says some in Biden's circle reacted poorly when polls showed her rising in popularity, treating political success as a zero-sum proposition. "Their thinking was zero-sum: If she’s shining, he’s dimmed. None of them grasped that if I did well, he did well," she wrote, arguing that her success would have validated Biden's judgment in selecting her amid concerns about his age.
The memoir passages offer an uncommon public airing of intra-administration tensions and underscore the personal and political calculations faced by senior officials during a turbulent campaign season. The Atlantic excerpt does not include comment from the White House or Biden aides responding to the account.
Harris, who served as vice president before launching her own campaign, frames the episodes in 107 Days as lessons about decision-making and the limits of institutional deference. She reflects that the handling of the 2024 campaign decision and the internal dynamics that followed had broader implications for governance and electoral strategy, concluding that some choices "should have been more than a personal decision."
The memoir contributes to a growing body of post-administration accounts that reassess the 2024 cycle and the choices made by Democratic leaders. It adds a candid voice to debates over succession, communications strategy and the role of gender in political staffing, and it is likely to shape conversations about party unity and leadership decisions heading into future election cycles.