Kamala Harris’s Memoir Tour Sparks Democratic Concerns Over Party’s Direction
Some party members are expressing concerns about relitigating the 2024 election.

Vice President Kamala Harris, who lost every swing state in the 2024 election and saw hemorrhaging support from nearly all demographic groups, is back in the limelight, but some Democrats wish she’d just go away.
Ms. Harris will soon embark on a 15-city book tour to hawk her new memoir, “107 Days,” which seeks to elaborate on what happened in her presidential campaign following President Biden’s withdrawal from the race. The book’s release on Tuesday has prompted mixed reactions within the Democratic Party, with some members expressing concerns about relitigating the 2024 election while others see potential therapeutic value.
“Well, there’s nothing to elaborate about,” a sports analyst turned political commentator, Stephen Smith, said on ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday. “Who cares what she has to say at this particular moment in time? I don’t think that she’s going to have any support from the Democratic Party, I can tell you that much.”
The timing of her book tour has generated unease among some Democratic operatives, who worry it may hinder the party’s efforts to move forward. There are, of course, parallels to Secretary Hillary Clinton’s post-2016 election activities, and Ms. Harris’s reemergence could create similar divisions within the party.
Others think the book’s release will not help Ms. Harris should she choose to seek the White House again. “It doesn’t mean anything when it comes to 2028, because that’s going to be a huge wide open field,” one former aide told the Daily Mail.
In some ways, it seems as if Ms. Harris is burning bridges rather than mending fences. In her new book, she blasts a slew of Democrats, including:
- Governor Gavin Newsom, who she says didn’t take her first call, saying he was on a hike.
- Governor Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, who told Mr. Harris she’d have to “let the dust settle” before getting on the Harris bandwagon.
- Governor J.B. Pritzker of Illinois, who the vice president says also declined to immediately endorse her with a blunt, “I can’t commit.”
- Secretary Pete Buttigieg, who she said was her top pick to join the ticket but later decided it was “too big a risk” to pick a gay man.
- Governor Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, another veep contender she didn’t pick, who Ms. Harris claimed said “he would want to be in the room for every decision.”
In her book, Ms. Harris also rips Mr. Biden, whose decision to seek re-election she says was fundamentally misguided. “‘It’s Joe and Jill’s decision.’ We all said that, like a mantra, as if we’d all been hypnotized. Was it grace, or was it recklessness?” Ms. Harris writes.
“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 writes, noting that she never said Mr. Biden shouldn’t run because “it would come off to him as incredibly self-serving.”
In the end, Ms. Harris picked Tim Walz, the far-left governor of Minnesota, as her running mate. That turned out to be an underwhelming pick for Democrats. “The truth is that, like Joe Biden before her, she prioritized making sure that her running mate would not overshadow her, and she got what she wanted,” journalist Josh Barro wrote on X.
The Democratic Party has huge problems heading toward 2028. Millions of voters are abandoning the party, approval ratings have hit a 30-year low, and fundraising is in an ebb.
Between the 2020 and 2024 elections, Democrats lost ground to Republicans in all 30 states that track voter registration by political party, losing more than 2 million registered voters during the period, while Republicans gained 2.4 million, according to the New York Times.
A recent CNBC survey showed the Democratic Party’s net favorability has plummeted to a near three-decade low of -32 among registered voters. The party now holds just a 24 percent positive rating, compared with a 56 percent negative rating. The Democratic National Committee also trails the Republican National Committee by nearly every fundraising metric. By June’s end, the RNC held $80 million; the Democrats, just $15 million.
The party does not appear to have learned the lessons from 2024’s loss.
During the DNC’s summer meeting last month in Minneapolis, leaders doubled down on “woke.” The meeting featured an American Indian saying “we still live in a system built to suppress Indigenous peoples,” moved on to a presenter telling the crowd that “migrant crime and carjackings are things that don’t matter to many Americans,” and ended up with a top Democrat boasting about filing a lawsuit against the Trump administration for prohibiting minors from getting sex change operations.

