Former Vice President Kamala Harris is back in front of the public — this time as a private citizen — as she promotes her 2024 campaign-memoir, 107 Days.
But as she returns to the public eye for the first sustained time since her defeat, the onetime standard-bearer of the Democrats is coming to terms with the fact that her party remains bitterly divided over the manner by which the Biden administration and her campaign treated the issue of the war in Gaza throughout 2024, and especially after she became the nominee.
Rather than the war in Gaza, in her memoir, Harris blames the Biden family for not realizing sooner that the president was not up to the task of running for re-election, and explains away her defeat as the result of taking on an insurmountable challenge.
Not everyone attending her tour agrees with that version of events, however, as proven in footage shared by left-leaning commentator Kaivan Shroff.
In the video from Harris’s appearance in Chicago, the former vice president is seen clapping back at a heckler who’d shouted a comment about her “legacy.” Nonvoters, she argued, had earned a “legacy” of Donald Trump’s return to the presidency by refusing to support her campaign.
“I’m not president, and if you want to talk about legacy, let’s talk about the legacy of mass deportations, of not voting, and Donald Trump,” said a clearly incensed Harris in the clip.
“Are you the same person that was telling people not to vote?” she also asked the protester, according to Newsweek.
The crowd, which was made up entirely of Harris’s supporters, cheered in response.
But the vice president’s quip to the heckler is likely to feed criticism from her detractors in the party, a group that has swelled in size since she lost the last election. Especially those who are fiercely critical of the Biden administration’s response to the war in Gaza.
At another point in the evening in Chicago, Harris was interrupted by hecklers blaming her and Biden’s stance on Gaza for her defeat to Trump. A similar episode played out in New York City, where Harris was repeatedly shouted over by protesters during an event in Times Square.
“I understand your concern and how you feel — I think I do,” she told one heckler, according to PBS. “And the reality of it is where we are right now didn’t have to be this way — in terms of the blank check that this president has given [Israel].”
Writing in 107 Days, the former vice president laid the blame for those decisions on Biden, claiming that she’d urged her former boss to show more public compassion for Palestinians. Campaign officials, meanwhile, disputed that there was ever daylight between the two politicians.
As she recovers politically from the defeat to Trump last year, many have questioned whether Harris will run again for public office. Earlier this year she said in a statement that she would not run for governor in California, her home state, in 2026.
Harris has not ruled out serving in other settings as her party gears up for the next presidential election cycle in 2028.
Though she hasn’t indicated any clear interest in running, her name has been floated as a potential contender for the Democratic nomination. On Sunday, Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly said in an interview that she’d be an “incredibly strong” candidate in the next cycle.
In an interview with MSNBC’s Eugene Daniels that aired Sunday, Harris said that she hadn’t spoken with Biden since news broke that the former president was due to begin radiation therapy to treat prostate cancer, but told Daniels she’d left him a message and called him a “fighter.”
However, should she make a run for president, many in her party will have questions over how the White House deflected criticism about his age, the issue Harris says ended up costing her the election.
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