Kamala Harris Faced a Reckoning—She Blamed the Clock

Kamala Harris recently told The View that the reason she lost the 2024 presidential election was simple. She "didn't have enough time."

Not enough time?

She had four years. Not four minutes. Not four months. Four years—as Vice President of the United States. That's not a cameo role. That's front-row access to every policy rollout, every crisis briefing, every opportunity to lead, pivot, or at least explain what the administration was doing.

She ran on Biden's platform. She echoed his talking points. She doubled down on the same agenda while inflation ballooned, the border buckled, and public confidence tanked. Through all of it, she kept saying, "It's working."

It wasn't.

Let's be clear. Harris didn't lose because she lacked time. She lost because she lacked traction over ideas that weren't even remotely popular. She lacked clarity around what ideas she had to solve problems—which the Biden administration created by the way. Most of all, she lacked credibility.

Her campaign, short though it was, was not a spirit. It had no real substance behind it, and worse, it had no real accomplishments to bolster it either. When she stepped up at the podium as the selected nominee, she really had nothing to run on, and she continued to deny things could have been done differently, or that she would take another approach.

She'd simply be Biden Deux, and frankly, his former policies had already worn people down enough. At the very least she could have taken the polls about what concerned Americans most at face value and could have actually worked to address those concerns and understand that, at least with Biden at the helm, Americans lacked confidence that he had the solutions that were needed. Instead, she chose to ignore they were even problems at all.

To be fair, Harris did inherit a mess. Biden dropped out of the race in July 2024 after a disastrous debate performance against Donald Trump. It was a performance, by the way, that turned everyone's heads.

But hers.

Harris stepped in with just over three months until election day. On top of that, no one actually elected her. She was selected by her party. That may have been fine for loyal Biden supporters and loyal Democrats as a whole. But for the rest of America? For the people in the middle who don't align with any particular party?

She'd have quite a lot more to prove.

Perhaps she talked about some of that in her memoir, 107 Days. I don't know. I haven't read it. From the Cliff's Notes, she certainly chronicled a lot of things that she felt made her campaign more difficult.

Even still, I think it's all too clear that the problem wasn't the calendar. It was the candidate.

Harris had already spent four years tethered to Biden's sinking approval ratings. She didn't just inherit his campaign. She inherited his baggage. And instead of distancing herself, she leaned in. When she'd been on The View the first time, when she was asked if there was anything she would've done differently than Biden, she replied, "There's not a thing that comes to mind."

Her staff reportedly went pale, as they should have.

You don't run for president during a change election and say, "I'd do everything the same." Especially when all the polls showed most people, even on her own side, disapproved of much of what had happened.

Part of her problem, I think, is that she felt that her campaign would sort of run on autopilot. She had a sense (albeit a false one) that all that the Democrats did, and what the media portrayed of Trump would make her path to the White House a literal shoo-in.

She didn't have to be a leader. She didn't have to have solutions. She just had to be Not Trump. She'd be handed the keys to the Oval Office just because.

Let's talk about the issues. Inflation wasn't just a blip—it was a gut punch to working families. Groceries, gas, rent—everything went up. We saw numbers not seen since the Carter administration. And Harris, instead of offering a plan or even a coherent explanation—we were just being gouged by corporate America, remember that?—she gave us word salads and nervous cackles.

Then there's the border. She was literally in charge of it. Biden appointed her Border Czar and tasked her with what they labeled as a "migration crisis." Something, it should be noted, that was largely under control when Trump left office. No less, when she was pressed on what she was doing, she pivoted to vague diplomacy and photo ops. The border became a revolving door, and Harris was nothing more than a ghost in the machine.

And when it came to defining her own platform—what she stood for, what she'd fight for—she couldn't explain it. Especially when most of what she was saying in the 107-day campaign was a complete 180 degree turn from what she was saying all along before.

She couldn't explain that either. Not in interviews. Not on the trail. Not even in debates. Her message was not only muddled and downright confusing. It was absent of any logic or sense.

So now, post-defeat, she's saying she didn't have time. That if she'd had a few more months, she could have built a more compelling narrative and better warned the public about Trump and rallied key voting blocs.

But here's the thing. Time doesn't fix a broken compass. If you don't know where you're going, more time just means more wandering. I mean, consider this; she actually started off with an impressive launch. That was before she went off teleprompter, of course, and the real Kamala Harris stood up. The more she talked, the more we were reminded we had no idea what she was talking about.

And neither did she, by the way.

The fact remains that Harris had years to build trust and define her voice. She had years to show leadership. She had the podium, the press, and the power. What she didn't have was a plan that resonated, or even a record that showed results. She also did not have the political instincts to pivot when things weren't working—or frankly, the wherewithal to know things hadn't worked despite her and her party's bold attempts to say otherwise.

And voters noticed.

Harris lost because she represented more of the same. At a time when Americans were hungering for change, she offered continuity. The three key issues of concern for the American people were inflation, the border and returning to a social understanding around gender identity.

The Biden administration failed miserably on all three.

She never once challenged Biden's record. She didn't offer any fresh vision. She didn't even remotely acknowledge the elephant in the room—that the administration she was part of had lost the public's trust.

And that's not just an opinion from a conservative like me. Biden's approval ratings were clear as a bell.

Instead, she was banking on loyalty. On party unity. On the hope that simply not being Donald Trump was all she needed to be to win.

It didn't work.

Now, in interviews and book tours, Harris is grieving the loss—not just politically, but personally. She's described election night as one of the most difficult moments of her life, comparing it to the grief she felt when her mother died. That's raw. That's human. Perhaps it deserves some empathy.

But grief doesn't rewrite history. And memoirs don't erase missteps.

If Harris wants to run again—and she hasn't ruled it out—she'll need more than time. She'll need a reckoning. She'll need a complete realignment. A willingness to break from the past and speak plainly about what went wrong.

Because voters aren't asking for perfection. We've never had a perfect president. It's never been a #1 prerequisite to win an election, or even garner support or keep it.

Voters are asking for honesty. They're looking for leadership. They're looking for someone who can not only look at a broken system and say, "Here's how we fix it." They want someone who can see that it's broken.

Time is a luxury, but clarity is a necessity. And in 2024, Kamala Harris had one but not the other.