Kamala Harris reflects on 2024 presidential run, VP picks at Philadelphia book event

From Philly and the Pa. suburbs to South Jersey and Delaware, what would you like WHYY News to cover? Let us know!

Former Vice President Kamala Harris took the stage at The Met in North Philadelphia, entering an electric room and a new chapter in her public life.

The event felt like one of her many 2024 campaign visits to the city, with more than 3,000 supporters chanting her name as she stepped onto the stage.

Harris told moderator Dawn Staley, a Philadelphia native and head coach for the South Carolina Gamecocks women’s basketball team, that she wanted her voice to be among those who continue to dissect how the 2024 presidential race unfolded.

“I would like history to recall that it was the closest election in the 21st century,” Harris said to cheers. “So I decided to write a book.”

Harris won the third-largest total number of votes in U.S. presidential history, but lost the national popular vote by a 1.5% margin. She also lost every swing state, including the largest, Pennsylvania, which Trump won by less than two percentage points.

In the 107 days that she was a presidential candidate, Harris regularly visited the commonwealth and even made her final argument on the eve of Election Day at a star-studded extravaganza on the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

‘We thought we were going to win’

Much of the conversation focused on Harris’ personal journey from being vice president in the Biden administration up until Election Day 2024. She acknowledged the abruptness of her sudden candidacy, the compressed pace of decision-making and the weight of expectations she carried as a Black woman stepping into the presidential arena after President Joe Biden’s withdrawal.

“I feel very blessed that in my career I’ve had many people, men and women, who have offered me advice along the way that has taken into account the realities of being the first and give them that kind of feedback in a way that is very supportive,” she said.

One of those people was then-Chancellor Angela Merkel, Germany’s first female leader, who once told her, “Don’t ever let them make you cry.”

Harris also recounted how her husband, Doug Emhoff, returned to Pennsylvania to campaign on Election Day when he received a call from a friend — a Democrat who worked at Fox News — who expressed concern over the unfolding results. Harris said she could tell something was wrong when Emhoff returned to Washington, D.C.

“He was so in shock about it,” Harris said. “We really believed we were going to win … We thought we were going to be giving a victory speech at Howard University, my alma mater, but of course, that was not what happened.”

The Shapiro factor

A central subplot of Harris’ book, “107 Days,” is her recounting of her vetting process for a vice-presidential pick. Among those she considered was Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, of whom her portrayal appears critical, framing her decision not to pick Shapiro not as a rejection of his capacity, but of his ambitions.

Harris describes Shapiro as “poised, polished, and personable” and said that she “admired” his work and that he was “great on the stump, a wonderful campaigner, very compelling and very bright.”

However, she said that during the interview with him, he inquired about how many rooms the vice president’s residence had and asked whether his home state might contribute art loans to the official house and “mused that he would want to be in the room for every decision.”

“I told him bluntly that was an unrealistic expectation,” she wrote.  “A vice president is not a co-president,” she wrote. “I had a nagging concern that he would be unable to settle for a role as No. 2 and that it would wear on our partnership … I had to be able to completely trust the person in that role.”

That appears to have led to a war of words in the media between. A spokesperson said it was “simply ridiculous to suggest that Governor Shapiro was focused on anything other than defeating Donald Trump.”

In an interview on “Meet the Press,” Shapiro personally shot back, saying “The only thing I was focused on was working my tail off to deny Donald Trump a second term.”

Shapiro later told a Fox News host that Harris “is going to have to answer” for not publicly raising concerns about former President Biden’s fitness to do the job before the 2024 presidential election.

Harris has gotten criticism from other Democrats, but did not address the impasse with Shapiro at The Met, but said that she hadn’t intended to offend others by writing the book.

“It really is about so much as anything, just lifting the hood on how this stuff works,” she said. “And there is so much about the process that is really opaque and I wanted to bring some transparency to it.”

She also addressed her vice president alternatives, including Pete Buttigieg. Harris recounted that she considered Buttigieg her “first choice” — “an ideal partner,” in her words — but rejected him over fear that a ticket combining a Black woman and a gay man would be too electrically charged for voters to accept.

“Part of me wanted to say, ‘Screw it, let’s just do it.’ But knowing what was at stake, it felt too much of a gamble,” she said.

Harris ultimately settled on Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz in part because he reportedly told her he had no presidential ambitions — a contrast to how she saw Shapiro.

Going forward

When Staley suggested that Harris would be president one day in the future, the audience roared.

“I equate you running for [the] presidency as one of those moments where the American people have to be prepared for that moment,” Staley said. “Now that you’ve been through it, I hope you give it another shot.”

Harris said that she learned what it meant to “break barriers” during her first run in 2020.

“When you break things, you get cut and you may bleed and it is worth it every time,” she said. “It’s worth it every time, but it’s not without pain … it’s important that they are prepared for the fact that it will not just be about you being the first without a lot of pain and perhaps unfairness as people get adjusted to something they’ve never seen.”

Harris took a moment to criticize Trump, but also what she said is the coordinated effort behind his policies designed to benefit “billionaires.”

“It feels chaotic, but do understand what we are witnessing and experiencing is a high velocity event that is about a swift implementation of a plan that has been decades in the making,” she said. “This didn’t just come up and happen overnight. The Federalist Society, the Heritage Foundation. We talked about Project 2025. They didn’t write that thing overnight. That has been decades in the making.”

While Harris didn’t divulge her thinking over future plans, she said she would continue in the fight against “darkness.”

“Sometimes the fight takes a while,” she said. “So we don’t give up. We just understand what we’ve got in front of us and what we have to do.”

‘Disappointment’ and ‘empowerment’

Mary Caitlin Gagliardi made the trip from Baltimore, Maryland, because she couldn’t get tickets to Harris’s stop in Washington, D.C., but said she was “really inspired” hearing from Harris.

Gagliardi is listening to the audio version of the book, which Harris herself narrates.

“It feels a little bit more raw and passionate,” she said. “Hearing her, I feel like I’m in the book with her.”

Gagliardi said she was “astounded and disappointed” to hear about the “lack of support from some of the Democrats, some of her colleagues.”

“I think that she’s right, the Democrats need to have a united front on issues and move forward, and I feel like we are going to be the catalyst for the change, and I feel very inspired to move this party forward,” she said.

Sylvia Alston, who traveled from central New Jersey, said she wanted to hear how Harris “was feeling” and found it disappointing that the Biden camp didn’t do more to support her.

“They were loyal to Joe Biden in a way that they were not loyal to her,” she said. “She talked about the disappointment in a way that we hadn’t heard of how he hadn’t stood up for her, how his team didn’t stand up for her when the media and the right were maligning her.”

Still, Alston said Harris’ story felt empowering — not just for Black women, but for anyone facing challenges and working to move the country forward in difficult times.

Tickets for the event started at $56. Everyone who attended also received a free copy of “107 Days.”