Kamala Harris’ Book Tour Fuels The Critiques That Dogged Her Candidacy

LOS ANGELES — Kamala Harris may have written her memoir as an act of personal healing. But her book has reopened painful rifts in the Democratic Party.

Chief among them is Harris herself.

In the immediate aftermath of the 2024 election, Democrats largely spared the former vice president from the harshest judgments. Many credited her with turning around a ticket that was careening toward catastrophe under Joe Biden and for giving her party a fighting chance at the White House.

Now, as she reemerges after months of near self-exile with her memoir and media blitz around it, her telling of the 2024 campaign — vacillating between blaming herself for her loss and finger-pointing elsewhere — has reinvigorated the longstanding critiques that dogged her political life. Her potshots at ostensible allies, the post-publication walkback of whether Pete Buttigieg would be a viable vice-presidential pick and her winding media interviews have fueled a pile-on about Harris’ inherent weaknesses as a candidate.

“It's emblematic of a lot of the things that have plagued her throughout her career,” said Doug Herman, a Democratic consultant based in Los Angeles. “There’s a high degree of caution, an overplaying of her hand and an under-consideration of the overall consequences.”

By some measures, the book has been a success. It's a top seller on Amazon, and the tour has proven Harris’ continued ability to draw large, enthusiastic crowds in major cities, including a sold-out event in Los Angeles Monday evening.

But relitigating the previous election is the last thing many in the party want to do.

“There's virtually nothing in the book that provides direction on a path forward, or a solution to the problems plaguing the party,” Herman said. “And that's what folks are looking for right now.”

For Harris’ allies, the reception to her book is reminiscent of what she faced during the campaign: how the knives, in their view, always come out for the former vice president.

“I saw it throughout the vice president's tenure as vice president — this ultra-scrutinization and hyper-critical caricaturization of her in a way that I don't see for other folks who have been in the same role,” said Jaime Harrison, former chair of the Democratic National Committee.

In Los Angeles, Harris basked in the glow of her hometown audience, which included family (her husband, Doug Emhoff, and stepson Cole Emhoff), friends (Chrisette Hudlin, who set her and Doug up on a blind date) and celebrities (the actress Yvette Nicole Brown).

Harris told the crowd she wrote her memoir “to remind us how unprecedented this election was.”

“It is important for us to remember so that we know where we've been, to decide and chart where we are and need to go,” she said. Later, she pointedly remarked, “By the way, I did not write this book for the political pundits.”

Harris was eager to call out what she viewed as broken promises by President Donald Trump and her prescience in predicting that he would go after his enemies once in office.

She was less surefooted when it came to how Democrats should respond to Trump, though she did urge her party to stand firm in demanding health care concessions in the government funding standoff and acknowledged some strategic missteps in addressing voters’ economic concerns by not prioritizing issues such as affordable child care.

Her kick-off event in New York last week brought in a notably young crowd of twenty- and thirty-somethings listening to Harris’ rebuke of corporate titans capitulating to Trump.

But Harris was interrupted multiple times by pro-Palestinian protesters, a reminder of a divisive issue that fractured Democrats’ coalition in 2024 and continues to rankle party leaders to this day. Harris expressed empathy with the Palestinian people, but also showed flashes of annoyance, saying, “I’m not president right now. There’s nothing I can do.”

In the book, Harris puts distance between herself and Biden, writing that she found the then-president’s remarks about innocents in Gaza to be “inadequate and forced.”

It was important that Harris’ tome acknowledged Gaza was a decisive issue in last year’s election, said Hamid Bendaas, a spokesperson for the Institute for Middle East Understanding Policy Project. But she stopped short of directly addressing activists’ call for the conditioning or restriction of weapons to Israel as the country’s fierce response to Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack stretches into its third year.

“People are still asking to see themselves reflected in these people who are Democratic Party leaders and whose voice matters,” Bendaas said. “She said, ‘I'm not the president,’ and that's true, but she's an important voice.”

The memoir also picked at the scabs of other barely-healed wounds: the circling-the-wagons that enabled Joe Biden to initially seek reelection; the ideological and strategic choices that shaped Harris’ losing campaign; and the hot-button topics such as transgender rights that continue to vex the Democrats.

Harris has faced criticism for her diagnosis of her party’s bruising defeat. She repeatedly points to her truncated campaign, arguing that with more time, she could have persuaded more voters. But her momentum stalled out weeks before Election Day — and some observers say her fixation on the compressed timeline gives short shrift to her other weaknesses as a candidate.

“If Harris had an extra 100 days — given how she performed in the 900 days before [that] and given how she’s performed on the book tour — I don’t think if she had more time, she would’ve magically been able to introduce people to a different Harris,” said one national Democratic strategist, who was granted anonymity to bluntly discuss political dynamics.

Harris has largely stuck to friendly turf for her media rollout, where she has displayed some familiar tics: wordy responses and hedged answers. Her performance in the launch interview with MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow was panned by the Washington Post’s editorial board as “uncomfortable and inauthentic.”

The strategist said the book has gotten a sour reaction from the party because it forces Democrats to revisit their crushing loss without offering many solutions for the future.

“It’s an unseemly conversation,” the strategist said. “The midterms are in 13 months. We have bigger things to worry about than her being angry with her comms staff for not prepping her well for an interview.”

The book has also set off angry sparring between Biden’s and Harris’ orbits, with the former vice president detailing how Biden’s inner circle undermined her success.

While some saw petty point-scoring, Harrison said the book shed some important truths about Democrats undermining the first woman and woman of color to ascend to the vice presidency.

“Sometimes we all have to take medicine that doesn't taste good in order to get better,” he said. “I applaud the VP for giving us a little medicine that probably doesn’t taste good.”

The book is “maybe not the best thing” for Harris’ personal ambition, Harrison said. But it may have served another important purpose for her — to help make sense of the tempest she just experienced.

“Sometimes these things aren’t about other folks,” he said. “Sometimes it’s actually just for you, to quiet the demons that you have to deal with.”

Nick Reisman contributed to this story.