‘You guys are part of the story,’ Kamala Harris tells Philly crowd on her book tour stop

Toward the end of their extremely friendly conversation Thursday night, college basketball coach Dawn Staley asked former Vice President Kamala Harris if she had considered how her book would be received by fellow Democrats or the American people.

“Or the haters!” someone in the packed audience at the Met yelled.

“I love Philly,” Harris said, smiling and shaking her head.

Harris returned to the state where she spent the most time in her presidential campaign to promote her new book, 107 Days, a diary-format memoir chronicling the historic run and ultimate defeat.

The book recounts an unprecedented election with candid and sometimes unflattering reflections on fellow Democrats, including former President Joe Biden, in a moment when the party is struggling to define itself and fight back against Republican-controlled Washington.

Harris wrote the memoir, she told the crowd, to ensure her voice was part of the historical account.

As for its reception, Harris told Staley she regrets that excerpts may have been judged outside the context of the whole memoir.

“It’s not a tell-all. It really is about so much as anything just lifting the hood on how this stuff works,” she said. “There is so much about the process that is really opaque and I wanted to bring some transparency to it.”

Ultimately though, Harris said she hoped it gave permission for her party “to have those difficult conversations,” as it tries to rebuild.

The majority of the night in Philadelphia was far from a difficult conversation, though.

Staley, the Philadelphia native who has coached South Carolina Gamecocks to three national championships, led Harris through an hour of reflection on a stage bathed in cool blue lighting that often felt like a group therapy session or motivational seminar, for the former Democratic nominee and her adoring crowd.

“You guys are part of the story,” Harris told the mixed but majority female Philadelphia crowd as they chanted her name.

Harris recounted being on the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art the night before Election Day and her husband, Doug Emhoff, returning home from a final blitz of campaigning in the state on Election Day. She said it wasn’t until she sat down to write the book that she and Emhoff even discussed election night.

“It was just too painful,” she said.

“The emotion I felt, I hadn’t felt anything similar since my mother died,” Harris said of learning Trump had won. “I was grieving so hard and it was honestly for our country. I knew what was gonna happen.”

The book has sparked speculation about Harris running again in 2028. Several moments Thursday felt like a campaign rally.

“I would also like history to recall and to point out that it was the closest election in the 21st century,” Harris said, rising from her chair and walking to the lip of the stage. “That was not a mandate.”

Harris’ 1.5 percentage point popular vote loss was the closest since 2000 when Al Gore won the popular vote by 0.5% — but still lost the election to George W. Bush, who narrowly won the Electoral College.

Harris’ defeat in the Electoral College, the system that elects presidents in the U.S., was not the narrowest of the 21st century. Trump, who won the 312 electoral votes to Harris’ 226, demanded an apology from Harris after she used a similar line in an interview on MSNBC.

Throughout the night Harris attacked the president with whom she’d sparred over the 107 days. “Part of what is warped about this guy who’s in the White House … the suggestion that the sign of a leader is based on who you beat down, instead of what we know, that the real strength of a leader is who you lift up," she said, repeating a line from her campaign.

Harris said she believes Trump won in large part because he promised to fix the economy “on Day One,” which she called a lie, given prices have not decreased significantly since he took office.

For a good portion of the evening, Harris and Staley talked about female leadership and breaking barriers in their fields.

Staley mentioned her recent interview to be head coach of the New York Knicks. She said she asked the organization at the time how it would prepare to potentially have the first female NBA coach.

“Your organization has to be prepared,” Staley said. “I equate you running for the presidency as one of those moments where we the American people have to be prepared.”

Staley told Harris she hoped she’d “give it another shot,” before adding, “Can you tell us how we can prepare you for that moment?”

“I didn’t see that coming,” Harris replied. “How about I speak to what you were just saying about the Knicks? Breaking barriers.”

When Harris became the Democratic nominee, she inherited Biden’s campaign operation and a party platform tailored for him, the pitfalls of which she discusses in the book.

On stage Thursday she said she thinks she should have run on an “American Family Plan” that included affordable childcare, family leave, and child tax credits, instead of focusing so heavily on past achievements, like the infrastructure bill.

“We needed to answer the question about what are you doing for me now?” Harris said.

Harris said Democrats should focus less on who their next leader will be with more than two years until a presidential election.

“We have lots of stars. We have so many stars who are doing great work and covering different ground,” she said. “Let’s not … clutch our pearls waiting for ... ’The One.’”

Her closing comments to the Philadelphia audience on a tour about a book that ruffled some feathers was that Democrats tend to be rule followers and that they should rethink that approach.

“We follow decorum. But look, right now? We need to fight fire with fire,” she said.

“I’m not playing.”