Former Vice President Kamala Harris' new memoir, 107 days, is out Tuesday with a mix of insights and unanswered questions about her historically short run for president after former President Joe Biden dropped out.
Harris has largely been out of the public spotlight since losing the election to Donald Trump last November, but the book release kicks off a cross-country tour.
Here are five takeaways:
1. Harris believes she was loyal to the Bidens, but says the feeling wasn't mutual
Loyalty is one of the underlying themes in Harris' book. It's even laid out in one of the introduction quotes before the memoir begins from Kendrick Lamar's "DNA": "I got loyalty, got royalty inside my DNA."
Harris writes of times that Biden, his family and his senior staff in the West Wing questioned whether Harris truly was loyal, while her own frustrations mounted from the president's staff not speaking up to defend her from outside criticism.
In the tumultuous weeks after Biden's disastrous debate performance last summer — when high-profile Democrats began to question his ability to beat Trump — first lady Jill Biden pulled aside Harris' husband, Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff, to ask if they were standing by the Bidens. Harris says that irked Emhoff.
In another instance, two months into Harris' bid, right as she was about to get on the debate stage, Harris writes that Biden called her. He wished her luck — but then spent time on the call asking if she was bashing him to "powerbrokers."
"I just couldn't understand why he would call me, right now, and make it all about himself," she writes.
A spokesperson for Biden declined to comment.
2. She doesn't directly say that Biden shouldn't have run for a second term
Harris doesn't make any comment in the book on whether Biden should have run for a second term at all. She defends his mental capacity to serve as president but writes that Biden's staff mismanaged his fatigue and worsened the issue.
By the time last summer's debate debacle came around, and questions mounted on whether Biden should stay in the race, she says, she was in the "worst position" to tell Biden to drop out.
"He would see it as naked ambition, perhaps as poisonous disloyalty, even if my only message was: Don't let the other guy win," Harris writes.
She writes that she perhaps should have told Biden in the aftermath of the debate to drop out, but that "maybe he was right" to think voters would support him in a second match-up against Trump. In the end, Harris says, it was "Joe and Jill's decision."
But Harris acknowledges in the book that it was "recklessness" to leave the decision of whether Biden should drop out to the Bidens themselves. "It should have been more than a personal decision."
In an interview on MSNBC Monday night, Harris admitted, "I have and had a certain responsibility that I should have followed through on. … When I talk about the recklessness, as much as anything, I'm talking about myself."
Harris notes that throughout her run, she struggled to distance herself from Biden and his legacy — like when she told ABC's The View that she wouldn't have done anything different than Biden in their years in office.
She says at one point, her adviser David Plouffe didn't mince words: "People hate Joe Biden," he said.
3. Her first choice as running mate was Pete Buttigieg
Harris reveals that Pete Buttigieg, her former 2020 political rival who served as transportation secretary in the Biden administration, is a close friend and was her first choice for running mate. She compliments Buttigieg as a savvy communicator and says he would have been an "ideal partner," but she had reservations about whether Americans would accept a ticket with a Black woman married to a Jewish man alongside a gay man.
Buttigieg responded in a statement to Politico, "My experience in politics has been that the way that you earn trust with voters is based mostly on what they think you're going to do for their lives, not on categories."
Harris instead chose Tim Walz, the Minnesota governor, who Harris says made clear from the start that he had no presidential ambitions. It was a contrast to Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, whom Harris is critical of in her book and paints as too ambitious for being a No. 2. She says Shapiro asked one of her staffers about how many rooms the VP's residence had, and on the way in for his final interview, wondered how he could get work from Pennsylvania artists sent to the house.
She muses that Shapiro tried to call her to withdraw himself as a contender right before she named Walz because he knew he wouldn't be her choice.
Shapiro's spokesperson Manuel Bonder said in a statement, "it's simply ridiculous to suggest that Governor Shapiro was focused on anything other than defeating Donald Trump. … The conclusion of this process was a deeply personal decision for both him and the Vice President."
4. She is still trying to tell her own backstory
Harris has typically been a buttoned-up politician, especially when it comes to sharing personal anecdotes. In the memoir, though, she's more candid and reveals some of the personal struggles and stresses of her run for president — like the toll it took on her relationship with Emhoff.
But in most other parts of the book, it seems Harris is still trying to tell her own story to the public — something the campaign was pressed to do in a short window of time last year after Biden dropped out. After three and a half years of being a vice president that largely left her in the shadows, Harris spent several weeks on the campaign trail trying to reintroduce herself to the country in her own words.
The book is peppered with familiar stump speech lines from Harris, along with explanations about her decision to become a prosecutor and lessons from her mother.
She also recounts her time as vice president meeting with foreign leaders like Ukraine's Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, as well as leading on issues like gun violence prevention from the White House.
5. What's next for Harris is still unanswered
In the last few pages of her book, Harris gives some vague ideas for what she sees as the path forward for Democrats, and for the country.
"We need to come up with our own blueprint that sets out our alternative vision for our country," Harris writes, adding that "the heart" of her vision is investing in educating Gen Z.
While she touches on the topics of transgender athletes and Israel's war in Gaza in the book, Harris doesn't offer any suggestions for how the party should handle specific issues going forward. Besides noting that she wants to "be with the people" and hear their ideas, Harris also doesn't indicate what her own future in politics will look like. She does say that the answer for what's next, though, won't come from Washington.
Her book tour, which kicks off Wednesday in New York, will include nearly 20 stops around the country, as well as London and Toronto.
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