Jon Stewart stunned viewers when he pushed back on Kamala Harris’ explanation for why she lost the 2024 presidential election. Appearing on The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart, Harris repeated her claim that she simply “ran out of time.”
Since releasing her memoir 107 Days, Harris has been promoting the book and arguing that the short campaign window after Joe Biden’s withdrawal cost her the presidency. She said the 107 days following Biden’s July 2024 exit weren’t enough to reach voters.
“I do believe one of the biggest factors that was at play in the 107 days — we just didn’t have enough time,” Harris said. “We didn’t have enough time.”
But Stewart cut her off.
“Or was it too much time? I mean, if you had done the election after 60 days, I think you win, honestly,” Stewart replied. “There seemed like a stagnation point. And then if you look at the lines … what would have changed?”
Polling from The New York Times showed that Harris had her strongest lead mid-campaign before support began slipping toward the end. Stewart’s comment hit right at the heart of that trend — her campaign didn’t stall because of time, but because voters had seen enough.
Harris conceded that other factors may have played a role, shifting blame toward what she called “mis- and disinformation.”
She claimed that Donald Trump’s campaign targeted her with false ads about her record, particularly regarding taxpayer-funded gender surgeries for prisoners and illegal immigrants.
“[H]e has spent tens of millions of dollars trying to hit me with a bunch of disinformation and misinformation on this, and he’s living in a glass house because the policies he’s speaking about in terms of those surgeries were also his policies,” Harris said. “And the reality of it is that also those ads relate to two people.”
But Harris’ own record contradicted her denial. During a 2019 press conference, she said she worked “behind the scenes” to provide sex-change operations for inmates at taxpayer expense. That same year, during her 2020 presidential run, she supported extending those taxpayer-funded procedures to transgender illegal immigrants.
Those statements resurfaced during the 2024 campaign when Trump’s team used them to question her priorities. Stewart pressed her on the topic, showing little sympathy for her insistence that “disinformation” was to blame.
The exchange left Harris flustered as Stewart pointed out that her struggles were not the result of timing or misinformation but a lack of voter enthusiasm.
For Harris, it was one more difficult moment in a long post-election tour that has brought more criticism than redemption. Her book’s title, 107 Days, was meant to frame her campaign as a race against the clock. Instead, it has become a reminder of how quickly her candidacy lost steam once Americans got a closer look.
Even among liberal audiences, patience with her narrative appears to be running out. Harris continues to defend her record, but even sympathetic interviewers like Stewart are no longer letting her rewrite the past.
In the end, the interview may have shown more clearly than any poll why her campaign collapsed. The problem wasn’t time — it was trust.