Harris says lack of time to campaign doomed 2024 bid
In The View interview, former vice president Kamala Harris pins the loss on a compressed campaign window as she promotes her book 107 Days.
Former Vice President Kamala Harris told ABC's The View on Tuesday that she lost the 2024 presidential race because she didn’t have enough time to campaign. In promoting her new book, 107 Days, she described the campaign as defined by a compressed timeline and said the time constraint was likely the key factor in the outcome.
The co-hosts pressed her on whether the election might have been decided earlier. Harris described the race as very tight, but argued the short campaign window was the core reason for the loss, noting that she had to step in for President Joe Biden less than four months before Election Day.
Biden had abandoned his re-election bid in July 2024 after a poor debate performance in June, creating an unprecedented situation in which a sitting vice president ran against a former president with only 107 days left. Harris called the scenario historic, emphasizing that the contest unfolded with 107 days to go until the election.
The interview, conducted on the set of The View on September 23, 2025, also touched on the overall dynamics of the 2024 contest. Harris described the election as one of the closest presidential races in the 21st century in terms of the outcome. Trump won the Electoral College by about 86 votes and held a margin of roughly 1.6 percentage points in the popular vote. Those figures place the 2024 matchup among the tightest in recent memory, according to accompanying coverage.
The notes accompanying the segment also reflect historical context, noting that while Trump edged Harris in 2024, the 2000 race between George W. Bush and Al Gore remained closer overall — Bush winning the Electoral College by five votes while taking the popular vote by about 0.5%.
The appearance aligns with Harris's broader public push around her post-campaign work and book, and it underscores ongoing discussions about how a nontraditional, shortened campaign cycle may have affected the outcome of a contest pitting a former president against a sitting vice president.