Kamala Harris opens up about Joe Biden’s weird Philly phone call, Josh Shapiro’s VP interview, and more

Fifty-one days after unexpectedly being elevated to the top of the 2024 presidential ticket, former Vice President Kamala Harris was in a Philadelphia hotel room ahead of her only debate with Donald Trump when the phone rang.

It was Joe Biden.

She was expecting a pre-debate pep talk, but Biden instead called to let Harris know his brother had been talking to “a group of real power brokers in Philly” that didn’t plan to support her. Their lack of support stemmed from Harris “saying bad things” about Biden, though the former president said he didn’t believe them.

“I just couldn’t understand why he would call me, right now, and make it all about himself,” Harris writes in her new book, 107 Days, released on Tuesday. “Distracting me with worry about hostile powerbrokers in the biggest city of the most important swing state.”

It’s unclear which Biden brother made the call — James or Francis. It’s also unclear which “Philly power brokers” Biden was worried about.

Former Rep. Bob Brady, who is close with Biden’s brother James and chairs the city’s Democratic committee, denied being the power broker mentioned to The Inquirer.

“Not at all. Never. And the proof is we did everything we could for her, almost brought her the same outcome, about a percentage off,” Brady said.

After the campaign, Brady and Harris’ campaign exchanged some blame for the loss in Pennsylvania. Brady had been frustrated with his access to Harris. But he said he never went so far as to say he wasn’t going to support her.

“I never said that,” Brady said.

Harris’ book, written in a diary format, recounts her struggle to mount a successful presidential campaign over just a few months. In the book, which will bring her to the Met on Sept. 25, Harris is deeply critical of Biden’s team for allowing the 81-year-old to run for reelection, calling it a “reckless” decision that ended with Donald Trump’s victory in November.

“The stakes were simply too high,” Harris wrote. “This wasn’t a choice that should have been left to an individual’s ego, an individual’s ambition.”

It wasn’t as if Harris didn’t have concerns over Biden’s age. She describes the former president as being “tired” at times, had concerns about his frequent “verbal stumbles” and about the frailty of his voice. She also admitted to not having a deep relationship with Biden and his family during their tenure in the White House. She suspected former first lady Jill Biden “hadn’t quite forgiven” her for a 2019 presidential debate where Harris went at Biden hard over his past opposition to forced busing.

“Although I had regular working lunches with Joe, there wasn’t a lot of family socializing,” Harris wrote.

Due to Pennsylvania’s importance in the election and Biden’s long-standing connections to both the commonwealth and Philly, there are some local anecdotes that resurface in the book, such as her decision to pass on Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro as her running mate.

Here are a few moments from the book involving local politicians and Philadelphia settings:

On Sept. 11, following a memorial service for the victims at the Flight 93 National Memorial, Harris and Biden stopped at the nearby Shanksville Volunteer Fire Company, where first responders responded to the crash in 2001.

Harris wrote she had “a lot of mixed feelings about being there,” fearful of intruding among people wearing MAGA hats and Trump T-shirts who viewed her “through the lens of Fox and right-wing media.”

Biden made it a point to stop at the fire department every year, so Harris went along, and was horrified to see a man take off his MAGA hat and offer it to Biden. Harris described the entire chain of events in just 14 words:

The image quickly went viral, pushed out on social media by Trump’s campaign.

That was the final public campaign event Harris did alongside Biden, though the former president created headaches in other ways.

On Oct. 30, less than a week before the election, Biden appeared to call Trump supporters “garbage” in a Zoom call with a Latino get-out-the-vote effort. Biden was attempting to comment on a controversial remark about Puerto Rico made by comedian Tony Hinchcliffe at a Trump rally, and there was some question about whom Biden was referring to specifically.

Regardless, the damage had been done.

“What had been a big problem for the Trump campaign had been turned, instead, into a mess for us,” Harris wrote.

It’s no secret Harris seriously considered adding Shapiro to her presidential ticket, describing him as “poised, polished, and personable.” But his ambition didn’t align with her desire for a vice president to be a No. 2, not a “copresident.”

During an Aug. 4, 2024, meeting at the vice president’s residence at the Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C., Shapiro “peppered” Harris with questions about what she saw as the role of her vice president and “mused that he would want to be in the room for every decision.”

“I had a nagging concern that he would be unable to settle for a role as number two and that it would wear on our partnership,” Harris wrote.

She also described scenes of Shapiro inquiring about the residence (“from the number of bedrooms to how he might arrange to get Pennsylvania artists’ work on loan from the Smithsonian”) and wrote about a campaign aide’s annoyance over his apparent lack of discretion leaving the meeting.

Shapiro was one of three Democrats Harris considered adding to her presidential ticket, along with Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, whom she ultimately picked as her running mate.

“I haven’t read her book,” Shapiro said when asked about the passages during an interview on NBC’s Meet the Press Sunday. “The only thing I was focused on was working my tail off to deny Donald Trump a second term.”

“She said a lot of things about a lot of people,” Shapiro added, “but I haven’t spent time on it.”

After selecting Walz as her running mate, Harris was concerned about holding a long-planned rally at Temple University’s Liacouras Center on Aug. 6, 2024, to make the public announcement.

Harris wrote she was worried the rally “would seem disrespectful” to Shapiro, but he dismissed her concerns.

“It would, he said, be a great opportunity to show party unity around the newly decided ticket,” Harris wrote. “I appreciated his leadership.”

So the event went on as planned. Harris finally met Walz’s family for the first time in the locker room of Temple’s gym, “appropriate enough for Coach Walz,” she wrote.

Among the reasons Harris said she picked Walz as her running mate was he had no ambition to be president and no fixed ideas about the vice president’s role. Walz told Harris “he could do whatever I found was most useful for him to do,” she wrote.

Harris admitted in the book her first choice to run as her vice president was former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, a friend and colleague “with the rare talent of being able to frame liberal arguments in a way that makes it possible for conservatives to hear them.”

“He would have been an ideal partner — if I were a straight white man," Harris wrote. “But we were already asking a lot of America: to accept a woman, a Black woman, a Black woman married to a Jewish man. … But knowing what was at stake, it was too big a risk.”

Following the first debate between Harris and Trump, CNN invited both to participate in second debate on Oct. 23, 2024. Harris accepted, but Trump refused. Trump also declined an offer to debate on Fox News.

Instead, CNN invited both to take part in separate town hall events. Again, Harris accepted and Trump refused, setting the stage for a town hall event in Aston, Delaware County, on Oct. 23, less than two weeks before the election.

While Harris was ready to answer questions from a room filled with undecided voters, she was annoyed CNN anchor Anderson Cooper asked most of the questions.

“In the eighty minutes on air, only about a dozen voters — probably less than half the audience — got to ask me something directly," Harris wrote.

After the debate, CNN cameras caught Harris speaking to Joe Donahue, a registered Republican from Bucks County who opposed her views on abortion. Harris said aides were bothered by CNN not letting the campaign know their postdebate plans, but the conversation was very cordial. It ended with Harris telling Donahue she appreciated his question.

It’s unclear if Harris convinced him. Donahue voted in the 2024 election, according to election data from PA Department of State, so he made a decision one way or the other.

Staff writers Julia Terruso and Ryan W. Briggs contributed to this article.