Page 6 of 107 Days

Beau and I talked often, comparing notes on our work and becoming close friends.

When he died from brain cancer, everyone who knew him, knew his character and gifts, was devastated at the loss for his family, his friends, and for the United States.

I flew across the country to be at his funeral.

Beau always spoke so admiringly of his father, of his integrity and commitment.

I shared that with the crowd, adding my gratitude for Joe’s service to America.

Then I went on with my prepared remarks, focused on the young athletes’ achievements.

As I stepped down from the podium, the band struck up Queen’s anthem: We are the champions, my friends.

And we’ll keep on fighting till the end…

No time for losers. With Trump on the ballot and the threats to freedom outlined in Project 2025, this was the time for fighting.

No time to lose. Only 106 days till the election.

A hundred and six days to remake a campaign deployed over a year earlier for the reelection of a familiar eighty-one-year-old guy who had been part of the political scene for the last half century, to repurpose it as the historic campaign of a woman, whom many voters still didn’t know very well, born almost a quarter century later with a completely different set of experiences and accomplishments.

Less than a month to redesign a convention made for Joe into a celebration of an entirely different kind of candidate.

Two weeks to vet and choose a vice president—a choice that would not just reverberate through the campaign but would be integral to the success of my administration.

It would be the shortest campaign in modern presidential history.

This, in a country used to having a year or two to learn the plans, policies, values, and character of their presidential candidates.

Against a man who had been campaigning for almost ten years, ever since he came down the escalator at Trump Tower in 2015.

As we headed through a sudden downpour to Joint Base Andrews and made the quick hop to Delaware, I worked on the speech I would soon be giving, one of the most important of my life.

My usual process for major speeches was to work with Adam Frankel, who had been my senior speech writer since 2021.

A deep thinker who had authored a book on the intergenerational trauma of Holocaust survivors, his Democratic Party DNA could be traced in several directions, including to the JFK administration.

I would share broad concepts for what I wanted a speech to get across, and after we talked it out, he’d put it down on paper, trying to capture my voice.

I’d go over it many more times before it went on the teleprompter, making sure it was words for the ear, not the eye.

But this speech was different. I knew what I needed to say about Trump’s character, his record, and his horrible agenda.

For the first two weeks of this campaign, I would have nothing but the benefit of my own instincts.

Polling hadn’t been done, messages hadn’t been tested, but I didn’t need polling that day to know what I wanted to say and exactly how I wanted to say it.

Doug’s flight had landed ten minutes earlier. He was waiting in the forward operating base when Jill Biden returned the call he’d made to her the day before, when he first heard the news.

“Be careful what you wish for.” Her tone was desolate. “You’re about to see how horrible the world is.”

When my plane landed, Doug bounded up the steps of Air Force Two and wrapped me in a hug.

There wasn’t time to talk. We were once again about to walk through the fire together.

He and I both knew it. It did my heart good to receive that big, bearish hug.

Sometimes, in a marriage, that’s how everything is said.

The Biden–Harris Campaign HQ had been built in Wilmington, Delaware, because it was Joe’s town.

The key staffers were his people, his loyal longtime operatives.

We were both on the ticket and the campaign had been tasked to work hard for both of us.

There had been an early understanding that Joe would mostly campaign from the White House while I did the heavy lifting on the trail, so I was already aware of how extensive the travel demands would be.

But it was a Joe-shaped organism that would need to adapt very fast. There was no way to know if it could.

As I stepped into the room, the place erupted.

Young faces everywhere, cheering and crying.

In the twenty-four hours since I’d declared my candidacy, the campaign had taken in $81 million.

Everyone in the room knew that funds had all but dried up after the debate, and this sudden gush of money was proof of life.

I was surprised to see how quickly they’d switched out the Biden–Harris signs and covered the walls with newly printed HARRIS FOR PRESIDENT posters.

My first order of business was to put out a small brush fire.

Jen O’Malley Dillon—JOD, as everyone called her—was chair of the campaign, a seasoned pro who had led us to a win in 2020, the first woman campaign manager for a successful Democratic ticket.

I had called her on Sunday to ask her to stay on in the role.

But there were questions about how the campaign would need to be reshaped, and when David Plouffe called her to discuss strategy, there was confusion.

In a quick meeting, I reassured her that I wanted her and the campaign manager, Julie Chávez Rodríguez, to remain in their roles.

I didn’t have time to build a new plane; I had to fly the aircraft available.

It would have been a self-inflicted disaster to blow it up, 106 days from the election.

Everyone in that HQ was dedicated. They often worked around the clock.

Many had given up jobs, hauled themselves across the country, to live in Delaware and do this work.

But I had my concerns. Some, like Mike Donilon, one of Joe’s closest advisers, had moved from the West Wing to the campaign because he was expert in channeling Joe; he knew Joe’s every whim and inflection.

It was unclear how that expertise could work for me.

In fact, he left the campaign and returned to the West Wing less than two weeks later.

For several months, the Biden–Harris campaign team had been holding meetings in what’s called the “tennis hut,” a pavilion on the grounds of the White House.

These political briefings often made no sense to me.

Mike Donilon would filter the data from the polls and present the numbers in soothing terms: that the razor-thin, within-the-margin-of-error results were no cause for hair on fire; that really there was nothing to see here.

Doug had wanted to stop sitting next to me because he got tired of me kicking him under the table when I asked a question and got a nonanswer.

My chief of staff, Lorraine Voles, turned to me as we left one of these meetings and said, “If I ever organized that sort of dog-and-pony bullshit for you, you’d have my head on a platter. ”

I’d had to learn from the news, a month earlier, that there was a planned $50 million ad buy, even as big donors were sitting on their hands.

I didn’t see how we were going to fix the problem by throwing money at it, even if we had the money to throw.

There were no specifics about which swing states to prioritize, which demographics to target, just happy talk about how we were “going to right the ship.”

On July 5, I was on Air Force Two, headed to New Orleans for Essence magazine’s Festival of Culture, one of the most significant gatherings of Black talent in the country, when Joe’s chief of staff, Jeff Zients, reached me.

“I’m willing to fight to the death for this president,” I told him.

“But the campaign can’t have us out there like the emperor with no clothes.

My name is on this ticket, so I don’t want to hear XYZ is happening or not happening when the facts just don’t support it.

” I’d become concerned that the data was being filtered to manage Joe’s mood and lift his spirits.

“I need straight talk. We have many pollsters—are they all in agreement on what’s being presented at these meetings? ”

My team members, like Kirsten Allen, Sheila Nix, Brian Fallon, Ike Irby, Josh Hsu—the people clear about what I wanted—would now have to elbow their way into the campaign structure.

I told JOD that my own pollster, David Binder, who had been with me since I ran for district attorney, would be taking a more significant role.

One of the first calls I’d made was to Kristin Bertolina Faust, a key political strategist who had been with me since my race for attorney general.

When we hung up, she packed and left her husband and two teenagers in Sacramento, arrived in Wilmington, and did not leave till November 6.

David Plouffe, I said, would join us as a senior adviser as soon as he extricated himself from existing commitments.

Room also needed to be made for the raft of young people newly drawn to my candidacy.

We’d keep the Delaware HQ but would open two new offices right away in Northern and Southern California, where we could tap the talents of people who had supported me for years, and deploy them to Nevada and Arizona.

An entirely new digital campaign would be spun up—digital for me looked entirely different from digital for Joe. Kirsten Allen immediately started briefing comms and digital staff in more detail on my background and values so that anything they created would give an accurate reflection.

Although Joe had felt differently, I made the immediate decision to go on TikTok. The @KamalaHQ TikTok would be a five-person Gen Z team in their twenties. We would give them a few rules of the road and then let them trick it out.