Former Vice President Kamala Harris: ‘I’m not into’ finality

For those remaining days, Harris would only sleep in her own bed one night. She hit the road and TikTok hard, raising over $1 billion. And at one point, she visited five states in a little over a day. But it wasn’t enough.

In the end, Harris lost, and now she’s had some time to reflect on why, and what’s needed to repair America’s trust in the Democratic Party long term. In a wide-ranging conversation at the Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit, Harris and Fortune Editor-in-Chief Alyson Shontell spoke about President Trump’s first eight months in office, her new book, and the approach she’s taking to listening to the needs of the American people.

You can watch the full video interview here or above, and subscribe to future episodes of Titans and Disruptors on Apple or Spotify.

Here’s some of what Shontell and Harris discussed on stage:

On 107 Days, the former Vice President’s new book

• How touring for the book is an opportunity “just to listen to people”
• Why telling the story of her campaign in her own words is important

On the idea of the “glass cliff”

• Why she doesn’t identify with the term’s “finality,” implying her political career isn’t done
• Why breaking “glass” barriers is always worth it for women, despite the pain and destruction of “breaking things”

On her loss in the 2024 election

• Why the former Vice President believes President Donald Trump won
• How she sees the legacy of her 107-day campaign
• Why Democrats lost support from former supporters, including Elon Musk

On capitalism vs. socialism and the future of the Democratic Party

• Why she disputes characterizations of Democrats as “anti-capitalist” and identifies as a capitalist herself
• Why she believes in the capitalist idea that “competition breeds the best” but explains that the nuance lies in leveling the playing field to ensure equal opportunity for success
• Why it’s become clear to her that Democratic Party must focus on the immediate needs of the American people, such as in-home elder care and affordability of basic necessities.

On AI

• How the technology could deepen existing struggles with misinformation
• Why government policy could be too late to protect Americans from AI’s adverse effects

Listen to the vodcast or read the transcript, which has been lightly edited for length and clarity, below.

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How former Vice President Harris has been since her election loss

Alyson Shontell: We’re honored to have you here with us. I think the first thing I just want to ask is, how are you doing? I want to hear how the last six to eight months have been.  

Kamala Harris: Oh, I’m great… It’s complicated. Doug and I, my husband, we left D.C. on the afternoon of the inauguration and I went back to LA, where I hadn’t lived in our home full time in eight years. Part of what I write in the book is [that] I do think your home—sometimes your house has karma. If you’ve neglected it, it will treat you badly. All of a sudden, your best friend is the plumber.

So, there was work to be done, there were boxes to literally and figuratively unpack, and I did a lot of cooking. I love to cook. And I started to write a book, and kind of get back to a bit of a normal life. Spent a lot of time with family, which is my favorite place to be. And so, all is good.

There are so many emotions that I’m sure you went through while going through the fastest campaign in presidential history, and you’ve likened the grief process, not just of losing the race, but of the loss that you felt—you haven’t felt that since you lost your mother. So, how are you doing with that process? Have you really felt like you’ve had time to let it sit and move forward? And how did the book play a part in that?

So, writing the book was very cathartic. I tend, like I’m sure every woman here, to be very task oriented, and it’s a strength and a weakness, I admit. I have a task. I must complete that task and then move on to the next task. And I, in fact, rarely give myself the opportunity, and frankly, often not even my team the opportunity, to take a moment and pat ourselves on the back, because the next problem needs to be solved. And certainly for the 107 days, it was 107 days of tasks every day, and I couldn’t do enough.

At the end of every day, which was well into the night, sometimes early-morning hours, my prayer was, I hope I have done everything I could possibly do. And during that time, and I think you all will appreciate this, that when you are in that mode where there’s something [that] must be done, and there is a competitive nature to it, and there is the reality of having ambition—which I applaud, and we must all applaud in each other—is that you expose yourself in many ways. It can render you vulnerable, in many ways, to other people’s approval or disapproval, to criticism or, compliment, but it’s about that old saying about putting yourself out there. It’s not without risk.

Joyce/Bloomberg—Getty Images

One of the points that I was conscious of for myself, and I would say it to my team, I’m not going to ride the roller coaster. Meaning, I’m not going to ride the highs or the lows. I was so clear about the task in front of us that I needed to do everything I could do on one day and then get to the next day, and I did not, therefore, allow myself room for reflection, because there just wasn’t time, and it wasn’t about me. When I went home and all of a sudden there was a stillness, that’s when the reflection began.

It was difficult, and it was painful in many ways, but there were also moments where you also realize, in a very conscious way, the beauty of a process and the joy that comes with it.

Former Vice President Harris’s new book, 107 Days

And so, in writing this book, what was the purpose of it for you? Was it to document from your voice, this historic election? Why write it? Because the candor is there. And candor, by the way, of course, is not always popular. And you’ve felt that as you’ve gone out on tour. But as you said in the book numerous times, I felt like I had to have this armor on, and it felt like you were letting your armor down in that book.

It was unprecedented, as mentioned in the introduction. A president is running for re-election for President of the United States. Three-and-a-half months before the election, he decides not to run. The sitting Vice President decides to take up the mantle against the former President of the United States, who had been running for 10 years, with 107 days to go.

This is part of American history, and it will be written about. It has been written about. And to be very forthright, I was not about to let history tell the story of these 107 days without my voice being present.

The story will get written either way.

It will. There’s this often-used phrase, maybe cliché at this point, which is, own your voice, use your voice. But there is a lot of truth to that. And we, especially as women who are hardworking and ambitious and goal-oriented, in spite of all of the strength that that requires and the courage that requires, can sometimes be susceptible to the messages that are sent to us, explicitly and implicitly, that—don’t talk too much about yourself or the experience you’re having. Endure it or deal with it, and don’t talk about it.

In many ways, in my career—you know, I actually talk about a wonderful interaction I had when I first entered the Vice President’s residence. We came into office during the height of COVID, and so there were months where it was literally just me and Joe and a Zoom board.

But the first person that I received at the Vice President’s residence, in a bilateral meeting with heads of state, was then-Chancellor Angela Merkel. And let me just tell you what you may know. This woman, who, at this point, was 15 years the putative head of Europe. Brilliant. Who often the press would portray as someone without humor. She was so warm, had such a wonderful sense of humor, and she and I got on so well, and we talked about a variety of things. This was before Russia invaded Ukraine, but we talked about the future of the EU. We talked about China and Russia. We talked about so many things.

And I, as an American, was acutely aware, and I say this with all respect, I was meeting with the German chancellor, and I was not going to be that American who was imprompt or taking too long. So I had my team understand that five minutes before this is supposed to wrap, pass me a note, because I was going to be on time for everything. And she waved off her team and said, No, I want to stay longer. And it was interesting, because she was supposed to go to another event.

And she leaned over, and she shared with me a story, which was, when she was on the rise politically in Germany, she was the subject of a lot of criticism and ridicule. And our conversation had mostly been in English, but she had a translator sitting behind her. And she said, and then they started calling me this, and she reached over to the [translator], spoke a word in German, and the translator said, It’s an ugly bird. And this was a word that they would call her, pejoratively. And she looked at me and she said, Never let them make you cry.

So when I say it’s right to tell our story and not be silent, that does coexist, at least for me, with—but I’m not going to wear my emotions on my sleeve, not publicly. But it is important to make sure one’s voice is present and that you tell your own story. My mother used to say to me, Kamala, don’t you ever let anyone tell you who you are. You tell them who you are.

Former Vice President Harris’s experience with glass ceilings—and glass cliffs

You clearly gave the campaign everything you had. It comes off on every page. You slept in your own bed one night in 107 days. At one point, in 28 hours, five different states you were in. You never slept.

Even still, being in that position with 107 days to go, you are someone who has shattered numerous glass ceilings. You have been the first, sometimes the second, but usually the first, in many, many places you’ve gone.

There’s another term that women have in their careers, which is the glass cliff. It’s when a job is impossible, and you get to have it. Was your 107 days the ultimate glass cliff?

Oh, cliff, to me, suggests finality, and I’m not into that. But I will say this, because I think you’re raising such a wonderful point: Like many here, I’ve mentored a lot of people, in particular young women. And sometimes, with a bit of frustration, I’ve said to them, Do you think that breaking barriers means you start out on one side of the barrier and just end up on the other side of the barrier? No, there’s breaking involved. And when you break things, you might get cut, and you might bleed. And it is worth it every single time. It is worth it every single time.

But the thing we recognize is, it is not without pain. And the other piece then, of that, is the piece about how we get through that. And one of the things I would advise us to all remember—look around this beautiful place and see what I see—what Alyson, what we see here from the stage. Because for many, many of you, there will be many occasions, and have been, where you have walked into a board room, or any room, professionally, where you are the only one that looks like you or has had your life experience.

And I would urge us to always remember, when we walk in those rooms, we must do so chin up, shoulders back, knowing we are not alone in that room. And knowing there are so many people who are applauding you for being in that room with an expectation that you will carry the voice that you so rightly have earned to deliver in that room. Because breaking barriers often means you feel very alone. And when you feel alone, that can be very disempowering. And then you’re working against your own leadership.

So, the point being, a very simple one: Don’t ever allow yourself to feel alone. And when you do, know that that’s what’s happening, and remind yourself of all of us here.

What went wrong with Democrats, and what’s next

So, I do want to talk about the path forward for Democrats, but in doing so, I want to look at some of what we saw in the election. And what we saw in the election was, President Trump pulled America to the right, even in some historic ride-or-die blue places. I think in New York, we saw a shift. In LA, San Francisco.

San Francisco, in particular, a lot of the tech billionaires who used to support the Democratic Party are now silent, or they’re throwing lots of money at Trump.

I’m curious—there’s a lot to unpack there, and why America shifted right in the various pockets, but when you look at it, what were the trends that did that?

So, I’m going to put the tech…

…We can talk about that next…

…I think their motivations are just extremely different than, if you will, the average Trump voter. I do believe that a significant number of people voted for the current president because they believed him when he said he would bring down prices on day one, and he didn’t. And he lied to them. And so, the price of groceries is up. Inflation is up. Unemployment is up. But I do believe that that was a big motivator.

The other point I would make is that, when we’re trying to figure out this divide, and there are voices that try to perpetuate it between, let’s say, the people who voted for me and the people who voted for the president, and reconcile that or judge the other side, I would ask us to consider that we may be making certain assumptions that we’re all operating with the same information about what’s happening in our country and in the world.

And by that I mean, there is a profound amount of, I think, targeting populations with mis- and disinformation. And that is part of the work that we have to do when we are trying to analyze or understand what we think is a divide in the nation. Because I don’t believe that it is necessarily grounded in a division based on what we believe is morally right or ethically right or legally right, or in the best interest of our democracy.

I think part of, a subtext to this that we have to be open to grasping and challenging ourselves to deal with is profound amounts of mis- and disinformation that are having an impact on what people think is happening in the country and how they feel then about their neighbor. I’ll add to that that we are—and you as leaders in business, I think, know this—we also are grappling, as a nation, with the fact that there’s a profound amount of distrust. That’s always existed, but I think it’s at a heightened level between the people writ large and systems.

And those systems may be industrial, institutional, government, but systems. There’s a profound amount of distrust in systems. I think one contributing factor is the pandemic, and what that did when the rug got pulled out from so many people, and they just realized they couldn’t trust that anything would actually work as it was supposed to. But the other piece on trust that I think is at a height like we’ve never seen in our lifetimes, is the amount of distrust between the American people.

And I don’t mean, can I trust you so that I can leave my door unlocked? I mean, can I trust that you don’t want to attack my very existence, that you don’t want to harm me? We’ve got a lot of deep work to do as a country right now, I think. 

The social platforms do, too.

Right. Talk about contributing and causal conditions.

One reality, though, is, and you say this in the book, too: Elon Musk had supported Democrats in the past. He, after the assassination attempt on Trump, decided to go all in and spent a ton of money on helping President Trump get elected. But I wonder how much of that, too, is, he wasn’t invited to the EV events, that—

Which I write about.

Which you write about as well. And I wonder, how does the Democratic Party start engaging with capitalists again in a healthy way? And can it coexist with a lot of the socialist ideals that we’re seeing expand in the Democratic Party?

As you rightly mentioned, Alyson, I write in the book that I thought it was a big mistake to not invite Elon Musk when we did a big EV event. I mean, here he is, the major American manufacturer of extraordinary innovation in this space. Well, and in space. And the fact that he was not invited, just on merit—a President of the United States, I believe, has to put aside political loyalties when they get in the way of what is actually and should be a source of pride for us as Americans, that we’re creating that technology and innovation. So, I thought that was a mistake, and I don’t know Elon Musk, but I have to assume that that was something that hit him hard and had an impact on his perspective.

Leigh Vogel/Getty Images for Fortune Media

On the relationship between the Democratic Party and capitalism: I think that there are voices that have perhaps led to the conclusion that somehow, that it’s anti-capitalism. I am a capitalist. I also believe that one of the most important theories therein is that competition breeds the best. And in order to understand that, I think we also have to understand that if everyone’s not starting out on an equal level, then of course, we can’t assume that the best will rise if you’re starting out on first versus third base. And so we have to take that into account, which is to create an environment where everyone can compete and the best will rise.

In terms of the direction of the party, I think the direction of the party has to be grounded in focusing on the immediate needs of the American people and being practical about that. And that includes, for example, the priorities that I’ve placed on issues like affordable childcare, paid family leave. I had a whole campaign that was about Medicare covering home health care for people in the sandwich generation.

When we made the decision as an administration to put the infrastructure bill and the CHIPS Act first, I actually think that was a mistake. Very important work, no question, but we did that before putting the immediate needs ahead of anything else. And the infrastructure bill is going to result in great improvements to America’s infrastructure. It needed it. But if the American people don’t have their immediate needs met, they can’t focus on other issues in a way that gives them a sense of confidence or even trust in their government, much less any political party.

Why putting the immediate needs of Americans first is important

I think that’s so true. There was a recent study that estimated that the American dream now costs $5 million for a couple of kids, college education, and a house. And that is not attainable. It’s a hierarchy of needs.

Part of why I decided not to run for governor of California is—I’m traveling the country just to listen to people. Many people talk about [how] they’re on a listening tour, but really it means listen to me. I actually want to listen to people, because I think we’re not doing a great job with that right now. And to your point, life is really unaffordable for a lot of people who, especially if you look at the cuts that are coming for Medicaid, I mean—I got my hair done for this event…

…It looks great…

…Thank you, nothing like a good blow dry. And the lady who does my hair was telling me, her daughter, who’s three, has special needs, and how right now, they’re reducing the resources in the Department of Education, so she’s on this very long waitlist just for an IEP for her kid. And one of her girlfriends has a child who has autism and another who has Down syndrome, waiting on a long list for an IEP. And so the way that they’re trying to resolve that is to pay a private provider to do that when they can barely afford their rent. And if we can’t meet the basic needs of the people, there will be this backlash, which is going to resonate and sound like it is about blame the rich. But really, I think at its core, it’s about, we need help for our basic needs, and please prioritize those needs.

Yeah, you can’t vote for stability if you need something to change.

And I think when we’re talking about people running based on a platform that is about bringing down rent or freezing rent, and that scares everybody—you know what I’m talking about, right?

And it scares everybody. I don’t live in New York, and I’m not telling New Yorkers what to do. But here’s my point: The guy’s running for mayor, and I think he’s really clear that he’s running for mayor, and he’s getting Trump supporters because they’re like, I have to take three buses a day to get to work, and I can’t afford it. They’re saying, I can’t afford my rent. Freeze my rent. And that’s appealing to people who, I think, are not really concerned about anything that’s about foreign policy or anything beyond, I need, at least at a local level, you to worry about my basic needs.

And I think we should pay attention to that, is my point. This is not—I’m not campaigning for anyone at all, but we need to pay attention to that. I’m very focused on Gen Z. They’re a larger cohort, demographically, than boomers. Their range of age is from about 13 right now to somewhere around 27, 28, and they have only known the climate crisis. They came through the pandemic. They are so worried. If you have a high schooler or a college-age kid in your family, you’ll know that they’re so worried that whatever their major is right now, or if they’re in high school, that whatever job is available to them when they graduate will probably be something they’re not ready for. It is estimated that Gen Z will have as many as 10 to 12 jobs in their lifetime. Whereas when our parents came out of high school or college, the job they had was the golden watch, right?

And they’re experiencing what they’ve coined “climate anxiety,” which is their fear that because of changes in extreme weather, that the future of their lives is very much at stake. My goddaughter, who’s a junior in college right now, was crying to me just two days ago, worried about, what is the world going to be for me, Auntie? she said, when I want to have kids, should I even be thinking about having children?

That’s on top of—unaffordable, not for her, but for so many in that generation, they don’t aspire to own a home. They don’t believe it’s within their reach.

How America’s Most Powerful Women can help

Well, the good news is, we’re in a room with a lot of power in it. These women are not just powerful women, they are powerful executives across all industries. So what do you need from them? What does America need from them? What does leadership need to look like right now? And how can people running the world’s largest businesses help?

Well, you’re all doing it by virtue of being here, and I would ask you to just continue to stay active professionally and civically. There is so much right now that I think is making people generally feel alone and unseen, and as much as we can remain active in civic life in our communities, it is important.

I think this issue of mis- and disinformation is critical, and with the bully pulpit and the opinion leading that everyone here does, I think it’s really important that we are prepared to have difficult but doable conversations with people about sharing the facts as we know them to be. Again, and not assuming that we are working with the same information as other people. We need to try and build those bridges.

I would also, Alyson—there’s not time now for us to really get into it, but you and I have talked about the power of the consumer. I believe there’s an incredible amount of power that the consumer has right now as it relates to what’s happening with social media, and our concerns, in particular, of how it’s impacting our children. And I would ask you to think about, in the work that you do that is directly connected with the consumer of whatever it is that you are doing, that we figure out ways to increase the information the consumer has about the future of AI, both in terms of all of the good that it can do, but all of the risks. Because I am concerned.

I’ll just give a short version of it: I am concerned that when we think about the risks and the harm—again, on the other side of the ledger is great things, but on the risk side of it, I am concerned that the industry itself is not going to handle it. I don’t think the motivation is really there in terms of the industry as a whole. There are some, but not most.

It’s not going to come from Congress. And I say that as a devout public servant. The idea that Congress is going to catch up with the technology in real time and then get through its bureaucracy quickly enough to actually be relevant to a moment before that moment has passed—I hope it happens, but it hasn’t so far. So one has to ask that—and by the way, if the laws aren’t in place, then the courts really can’t act, because there’s no basis for the litigation.

There will be some, privacy and all of that, but you understand my point. So the question then becomes, well, then what are we to do? I think the other power base that we’re overlooking, in addition to the industry itself, Congress, legislation, and maybe the courts as an extension, to my point, the consumer.

So how are we informing parents, for example, in a way that it’s not only the public advocacy and nonprofits that are doing it, but leaders in business are doing it to help people know their power. To then demand of the market what they want, but with information enough. And some may decide I’m good with it the way it is, but at least they are fully informed.

As a former Attorney General of California, that was one of my main roles. I was the top cop of the biggest state, and I was also the consumer protector. And one of the biggest issues for consumers, always, is are they fully aware of the risk and benefit of their use of a product or service. So I would ask your help with that, because the clock is ticking on the rapid nature of the development of this technology, and if we’re going to get in front of it in any way, I think it’s going to be because of the leaders in this room playing an active role.

Vice President, thank you so much for spending this evening with us. We appreciate all of your thoughts. 

Thank you.