Coffee Break: Kamala Harris Ducks California Governor’s Race, Drops New Memoir

Kamala Harris announced she will not be running for Governor of California in 2026, but she did drop a new memoir, keeping speculation about her 2028 Presidential aspirations alive.

The NYT summarizes her activities since losing the 2024 presidential election to Donald Trump:

Ms. Harris has spent the months since November largely out of the public eye, delivering a paid speech in Australia and appearing at weddings of some of her famous friends.

She was in England last week for the wedding of the Apple heiress Eve Jobs, whose mother, Laurene Powell Jobs, is a close friend. In June, she attended the wedding of Hillary Clinton’s top aide and the son of a Democratic megadonor. In May, she was spotted at the Met Gala in New York.

During that time, Ms. Harris was also largely absent from the broader Democratic discussions about the party’s future. While the party’s ambitious governors, members of Congress and various Biden administration officials have appeared on podcasts, toured the country and held town hall meetings in Republican districts, Ms. Harris has offered no explanation for why she lost the 2024 race, and she has not presented any beginnings of a road map for how Democrats might claw back power.

Her book announcement was a minor classic in its way, for those of us who enjoy parsing badly crafted spin at least. Enjoy:

Just over a year ago I launched my campaign for president of the United States.

107 days traveling the country, fighting for our future. The shortest presidential campaign in modern history.

It was intense, high stakes, and deeply personal for me and for so many of you.

Since leaving office I’ve spent a lot of time reflecting on those days, talking with my team, my family, my friends and pulling my thoughts together

In essence, writing a journal that is this book: 107 days

With candor and reflection I’ve written a behind-the-scenes account of that journey. I believe there’s value in sharing what I saw. what I learned and what i know it will take to move forward.

In writing this book, one truth kept coming back to me: Sometimes the fight takes a while.

But I remain full of hope and I remain clear eyed. I will never stop fighting to make our country reflect the very best of its ideals. Always on behalf of the people for being in this fight with me. And I cannot wait for you to read this.

Take care.

Her publisher has a slightly different take on the book:

Jonathan Karp, the chief executive of Simon & Schuster, said Harris’s memoir “is not a typical political tome,” just as Harris — the first woman to serve as vice president and the first woman of color to run to be nominated as a major party’s presidential nominee — was not a typical candidate.

“It’s closer in spirit to ‘The West Wing’ or ‘Rocky,’” Karp said. “It reads like a suspense novel.”

To give the memoir a novelistic feel, Harris worked with the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Geraldine Brooks, an unusual choice for a collaborator on a political book.
…
The book will be focused on the campaign, not her time as vice president. Harris has written previously about her upbringing and her early political career as a U.S. senator and attorney general of California in her 2019 memoir, “The Truths We Hold: An American Journey.”

She also made an extremely cringe appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert to promote the book.

And as much as I’d enjoy parsing her misstatements on Colbert, there’s no time for that.

Instead I need to document a few things about Harris’ record as California Attorney General, as a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020, vice-president from 2021 to 2025, and her management of those 107 days as the Democratic standard bearer for President in 2024.

I’d mention her tenure as a U.S. Senator from California from 2017 to 2020, but there honestly isn’t much worth mentioning.

Yves Smith summed up Harris’ record as California Attorney General for Naked Capitalism when she announced her 2020 run for the Democratic Presidential nomination:

Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign has barely made its official start, and she’s continuing to show her unfitness for the job. Martin Luther King would be rolling in his grave if he were to learn that a former big city and then state prosecutor, with no known history of protesting but an anti-minorities rap sheet that includes criminalizing truancy, enthusiastically prosecuting drug-related activity, and pushed to keep nonviolent “second-strike” convicts in prison to assure California a continued supply of cheap labor, was misusing his name to try to burnish her sorry record.

If you missed them, these reviews of Harris’ record as a prosecutor should disabuse you of the notion that she’s a friend of the downtrodden:

• Kamala Harris Was Not a ‘Progressive Prosecutor’ Lara Bazelon, New York Times
• A Problem for Kamala Harris: Can a Prosecutor Become President in the Age of Black Lives Matter? Intercept
• Reckoning With The Neoliberal Record Of Kamala Harris ShadowProof
• The Two Faces of Kamala Harris Jacobin

Readers may recall that last week, we addressed one Harris Big Lie about her record, that she was a big defender of abused homeowners by virtue of having gotten a less terrible deal than 48 other states in the 2012 National Mortgage Settlement, which we’ve regularly described as a “get out of liability almost free card” for the big mortgage servicers. Her lack of a commitment to homeowners, and her pliancy to big money interests, was confirmed by her failure to investigate One West Bank, ignoring a 2013 memo from attorneys in her office flagging the appearance of “widespread misconduct.” Her complacency was rewarded via One West’s former CEO, Steve Mnuchin, making Harris the recipient of his lone donation to a Democratic party Senate candidate.

Her attempts to explain away her failure to prosecute Mnuchin were notably feeble, even by Harris’ low standards:

“It’s a decision my office made,” she said, in response to questions from The Hill shortly after being sworn in as California’s newest U.S. senator.

“We went and we followed the facts and the evidence, and it’s a decision my office made,” Harris said. “We pursued it just like any other case. We go and we take a case wherever the facts lead us.”

Nonetheless, Harris launched her presidential quest in 2020 and had an army of allies ready to accuse progressives who were critical of Harris’ record of racism. Briahna Joy Gray documented this at the time:

…progressive critiques of Harris were met with swift and unyielding hostility. After a Mic article documented the lack of left-wing enthusiasm for a Harris candidacy, investigative journalist Victoria A. Brownsworth suggested that a better headline for the article would be: “Kamala Harris, biracial senator and former Attorney General of the most populous state, faces misogynist white men defaming her.” (This despite the fact that every critic quoted in the piece was female, and one was a woman of color.)

Center for American Progress president Neera Tanden, a close Clinton ally and frequent defender of the Democratic Party, declared she found it “odd” that “these folks” (meaning Bernie Sanders supporters) “have [it] in for Kamala Harris and Cory Booker” in particular. “Hmmmm,” she said, implying that criticisms of Harris and Booker were racially motivated. MSNBC host Joy Ann Reid said the Mic article simply reported the opinions of “3 alt-left activists,” “alt-left” being a term used to brand leftists as racist analogues of the neo-Nazi alt-right.

In Cosmopolitan, Brittney Cooper wrote that the left in general, but in particular the “Sanders Left,” “has a black-woman problem,” a charge I’ve addressed elsewhere. Cooper said that those criticizing Harris “think that black women who care about establishment politics lack vision” and that the debate “isn’t about Harris, but about the emotional and political labor that black women are expected to do to save America’s soul.” “Angry white Sanders voters,” she said, must “get off [Harris’s] back.” In large part, responses to skepticism about Harris have simply dismissed the substance of the analysis, instead suggesting a “targeting” of Harris because of her gender and/or race.

Her disastrous 2020 run for the presidency was bad enough to end most careers, as Politico chronicled in a juicy campaign post-mortem that zeroed in on her Achilles heel as a national candidate — a complete inability to build a functional team:

What’s impossible to assess is how Harris would have fared with a functional team around her. She built a precarious structure of advisers at the top — a kind of team of rivals whose quiet snarks about each other grew louder in recent months — and she allowed senior aides to throw out ideas without designating them a defined area of responsibility.

Harris’ advisers Ace Smith and Sean Clegg launched her with a focus on the back half of the primary calendar — namely South Carolina and California — then pivoted hard back to Iowa only when it was too late.

By the summer, Harris’ team, which by then included Jim Margolis, prodded her toward unity-focused themes that centered on kitchen table economic issues. She never really bought in. And that came through as she resisted really selling it.

On one side was Harris’ sister, campaign chair Maya Harris, who recommended many hires and fed Kamala’s insecurities about the liability of being a prosecutor in today’s Democratic Party —and given her own mixed record. On the other was campaign manager Juan Rodriguez and his partners at the San Francisco-based political firm SCRB, including Smith and Clegg.

Even mundane tasks like agreeing on the candidate’s schedule proved maddening for aides at her Baltimore headquarters. Rodriguez and others failed to anticipate the dramatic drop-off in fundraising, bringing on new staff just a few weeks before laying off dozens in early states and headquarters. Staffers said they had been warning for months of the dire financial situation and worried that Harris herself was unaware.

After the layoffs, many of the aides at the middle to lower levels of the campaign said they weren’t so much siding with one camp or the other as they were throwing up their hands in exasperation at everyone. They weren’t being communicated a plan. They didn’t know if one existed.

Instead of being exiled for her abysmal performance, Harris failed upward, thanks to Biden’s identity-based Vice-Presidential selection criteria.

Once in office as Vice-President, Harris repeated the pattern and by June 2021, the squabbling inside her office reached the press, again from Politico:

Harris’ team is experiencing low morale, porous lines of communication and diminished trust among aides and senior officials. Much of the frustration internally is directed at Tina Flournoy, Harris’ chief of staff, a veteran of Democratic politics who began working for her earlier this year.

In interviews, 22 current and former vice presidential aides, administration officials and associates of Harris and Biden described a tense and at times dour office atmosphere. Aides and allies said Flournoy, in an apparent effort to protect Harris, has instead created an insular environment where ideas are ignored or met with harsh dismissals and decisions are dragged out. Often, they said, she refuses to take responsibility for delicate issues and blames staffers for the negative results that ensue.

While much of the ire is aimed at Harris’ chief, two administration officials said the VP herself also bears responsibility for the way her office is run. “It all starts at the top,” said one of the administration officials…“People are thrown under the bus from the very top, there are short fuses and it’s an abusive environment,” said another person with direct knowledge of how Harris’ office is run. “It’s not a healthy environment and people often feel mistreated. It’s not a place where people feel supported but a place where people feel treated like s—.”

The dysfunction in the VP’s ranks threatens to complicate the White House’s carefully crafted image as a place staffed by a close-knit group of professionals working in concert to advance the president’s agenda. It’s pronounced enough that members of the president’s own team have taken notice and are concerned about the way Harris’ staffers are treated.

All of this was merely prelude to what will likely go down as Kamala Harris’ most singular accomplishment: raising and spending $1.5 billion in a disastrous presidential run, losing every swing state and ending the campaign an alleged $20 million in debt:

Her cash-rich campaign spared no expense as it hunted for voters — paying for an avalanche of advertising, social-media influencers, a for-hire door-knocking operation, thousands of staff, pricey rallies, a splashy Oprah town hall, celebrity concerts and even drone shows.

It was a spree that averaged roughly $100 million per week.

The frenzied spending has led to second-guessing among some Democrats, including whether investing in celebrity-fueled events with stars such as Lady Gaga and Beyoncé was more ostentatious than effective.

Since her loss, the Harris operation has pressed supporters for more cash with desperate-sounding solicitations, stirring fears about post-election debts. “Is there anything we can say?” came one email asking for cash last Monday.

The biggest expense during the race was advertising. Between July 21 and Oct. 16, financial records show that the Harris campaign spent $494 million on producing and buying media, a category that includes both television and digital ads. The total sum through the election is said to be closer to $600 million.

Yet starting in October, her campaign was actually narrowly outspent on broadcast television by Mr. Trump, according to data from the ad-tracking service AdImpact.

The ads were just one piece of a campaign that had enough cash to spend on seemingly everything. There was $2.5 million directed toward three digital agencies that work with online influencers, records show. The campaign spent around $900,000 to book advertising on the exterior of the Sphere venue in Las Vegas in the last week of the race, two officials said. There were drone shows in the sky before the debate in Philadelphia in September and at a Pittsburgh Steelers game in October.

In a note on Friday to Ms. Harris’s top fund-raisers, Chris Korge, the Democratic National Committee’s finance chair, said that losing all seven battleground states had “shocked us all.”
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One particular Harris payment has drawn attention in the aftermath of the election: the $1 million paid to Oprah Winfrey’s production firm, Harpo Productions. In an Instagram post, Ms. Winfrey said the company was paid to stage a live-streamed town hall in Detroit, providing the set, lights, cameras, microphones, crew, producers and even the chairs.

“I did not take any personal fee,” Ms. Winfrey wrote. “However the people who worked on that production needed to be paid. And were. End of story.”

The $1 million actually undercounts the full cost of the event, which ran closer to $2.5 million, according to two people briefed on the matter.

Another pricey choice was holding swing-state rallies featuring star performers on the eve of the election, including Lady Gaga in Philadelphia, Jon Bon Jovi in Detroit, Christina Aguilera in Nevada, James Taylor in North Carolina and Katy Perry in Pittsburgh.

The singers themselves were not compensated, officials said, but the support staff was. The overall bill for the election-eve rallies exceeded the planned budget and is said to have topped $10 million.

The cost overruns were partly because the Harris team built an entire rally venue at a park in Pittsburgh only to be told by the Secret Service that the site could not be properly secured. They had to rush to take it down and rebuild at a second venue.

If anyone wants to argue about what exactly cost Kamala Harris the 2024 election, I recommend this exhaustive post-mortem by Musa al-Gharbi.

After using quantitative data to demolish most of the conventional wisdom around Harris’ 2024 loss, al-Gharbi boils the loss down to two primary factors:

1. Ongoing alienation among “normie” Americans from symbolic capitalists, our institutions, our communities, and our preferred political party (the Democrats) – which has been going on for decades, and has analogs in most peer countries as well.
2. Backlash against the post-2010 “Great Awokening” — including (perhaps especially) among the populations that were supposed to be empowered or represented by these social justice campaigns. As detailed in We Have Never Been Woke, as Awokenings wind down, they are usually followed by right-wing gains at the ballot box. The post-2010 Awokening, now on the downswing, seems to be no exception to the general pattern.

He also gets into specific missteps by Harris and her campaign:

…it was really unfortunate that Harris was the Democrats’ standard bearer for 2024.

Again, she added nothing to the ticket in 2020 in terms of shoring up support from groups where Democrats were seeing losses. Her approval numbers were underwater almost the entire time she was in office as VP and she created a lot of avoidable drama throughout her tenure as well. Some urged Biden to drop Kamala and choose an alternative running mate in 2024. It likely would have benefitted the party if he had.

However, to be clear, it would definitely not have helped anything for Biden to have stayed in the race. Although Harris lost decisively, Democrats were headed for a clear landslide defeat with Biden at the top of the ticket – even according to the Biden team’s own internal data. The polling, fundraising, and enthusiasm for the party all shot up durably and dramatically after Biden’s exit – even if the shifts were insufficient to ultimately pull off a win. If anything, Biden should have exited much sooner, allowing Democrats to hold an open primary, and possibly settle around a better alternative candidate.

In any event, Harris was clearly not prepared to succeed Joe Biden when it was her time to shine. Despite the President’s long period of cognitive decline (which she played a key role in covering up), she seemed to have done zero prep work for possibly stepping into the presidency or becoming the nominee. She apparently had no plans or vision to articulate to voters after moving to the top of the ticket. Worse, Kamala largely avoided media for much of her short campaign, rendering it impossible to convey any ideas she did have to voters.

Despite her “turn the page,” rhetoric, Harris was unwilling or unable to distance herself from the unpopular incumbent regime at a time when incumbent parties worldwide were seeing major losses. As in 2016, this was a moment when major change was needed, and Democrats once again ran on preserving the status quo.

This is all just the tip of the iceberg of Kamala’s political malpractice. Ticking through a few major missteps in the final stretch:

• Against the advice of her own team, Harris aggressively courted prominent Republican endorsements, and praised people like Alberto Gonzalez and Dick Cheney, who oversaw some of the worst abuses of the post-9/11 era, and campaigned with Liz Cheney. In the process she alienated her own base – and for nothing. Trump saw fewer defections among Republicans and conservatives in 2024 than in previous cycles.
• Because Harris was too busy kissing up to Republicans and trying to flip “reach” states rather than securing the “blue wall” in the Rust Belt, she sent NAFTA champion Bill Clinton to Michigan in her stead – a state whose industrial sector was ravaged by Clinton’s own policies. Upon arrival, he spent most of his final pitch to voters lecturing Arabs about why they should be fine with ethnic cleansing in Gaza, while emphasizing that Israel can do as it pleases and U.S. policy wasn’t going to change under Harris, and everyone just needed to make peace with these realities. This was somehow supposed to help win votes in the state! (it didn’t).
• Meanwhile, the campaign tried to shore up its weakness with black voters by deploying Barack Obama to patronize and scold folks for being insufficiently warm to Harris. The implicit message was that African Americans somehow owed Harris their vote in virtue of her purported race. In adopting this posture, the “trust the science” party was apparently indifferent to the abundant research showing that attempts to guilt or shame people into political behaviors typically causes backlash instead (i.e. it leads them to behave opposite how you want). No notes.
• Finally, in the home stretch, even as the polling tightened, Harris chose to skip one of the most popular podcasts in the world – a program that reaches 11 million people per episode — and at times over 50 million — many of them undecided voters. She skipped this opportunity because she was worried that some members of her staff wouldn’t like it. Not only did she miss a chance to reach a large undecided audience, she gave her opponent uncontested access to that audience (because he did go on the show, as did his VP, each appearance having tens of millions of views) — and ultimately she and her team left such a bad taste in the mouth of her prospective interlocutor that he ended up urging his listeners to vote for her opponent instead. And then, audaciously, after declining to go on the program, progressives responded to Kamala losing by saying they need a Joe Rogan of the left… when they could’ve just gone on the existing Joe Rogan show like they were invited to do! Bernie Sanders did — leading to a Rogan endorsement. But he also got a lot of criticism for it from the scolds Kamala was so afraid of — folks who would apparently rather lose an election that have a conversation with someone “impure.” Rather than being laser-focused on reaching persuadable voters she was worried about impressing these people. In itself, not going on Rogan didn’t cost her the race, but what this episode reveals about her decision making process and top priorities definitely clarifies how she lost so decisively to a deeply unpopular opponent like Trump.

One could go on and on about how Harris took an already-tough situation and made decisions that exacerbated her problems at nearly every turn. But then again, what’d be the point of that? Many Harris sympathizers seem set on believing Kamala’s campaign was “flawless,” and the problem lies with the voters. Because of these same tendencies very little was learned from the previous Trump cycles. I fear the same may hold true this time as well. Distressingly high numbers of influential people seem more interested in telling self-flattering stories than actually winning elections — and it’s hard to persuade folks with that priority set of anything.

I’ll let Howie Klein have the last word on Kamala Harris’ 2028 hopes:

107 Days is supposed to be her What Happened, but the real story is this: she never figured out what she stood for… and the voters noticed. Even now, as Democrats hunger for a compelling alternative to Trumpism, Harris still talks like someone who’s running for student body president at Howard, not for the most powerful office in the world. Safe. Rehearsed. Vague. May I be blunt? She’s already lost the easiest election Democrats will have in a generation. We cannot afford to roll those dice again. It’s time for new blood, new ideas and a new generation of leaders who aren’t afraid to fight like hell for working people— leaders who don’t check a box, but who build a movement rooted in justice and solidarity. That means confronting the issues Kamala Harris has consistently avoided or watered down. We need candidates willing to champion Medicare for All, not timid tweaks to a for-profit system that continues to bankrupt families. We need a real Green New Deal, one that treats the climate crisis as the emergency it is, while creating millions of union jobs through public investment.

We need to declare housing a human right, push back against Wall Street landlords and against AIPAC and Netanyahu and finally address the unaffordability crisis crushing working people across the country. It’s time to stop cozying up to tech executives and instead fight for labor rights, union power, and workplace democracy. And when it comes to foreign policy, Democrats must show moral clarity, especially in standing against the U.S. government’s complicity in genocide and occupation, including our blind support for Netanyahu’s regime. The party must also abandon its addiction to militarized border policy and begin building an immigration system rooted in humanity, dignity, and fairness. And none of this can happen without taxing the rich, breaking up monopolies, and ending the culture of deference to corporate power that defines the current Democratic establishment. These are the fights Harris refused to take on but they are the fights that matter and the ones that could actually defeat fascism, energize the base, and change the country.