Former VP Kamala Harris told Jon Stewart, in an interview published Thursday, that 107 days wasn’t long enough to get her message across to the American people in 2024. “People in marketing will tell you that people need to hear things about three times before it actually settles in,” Harris said.

VICE PRESIDENT KAMALA HARRIS: There are real shortcomings and flaws in how we’re doing politics right now, and how we’re running campaigns-I give you that. When we look at 2024, at least when we look at those 107 days, I think we have to distinguish that from what was leading up to those 107 days. I do believe one of the biggest factors at play in those 107 days was that we just didn’t have enough time. JON STEWART: Or was it too much time? I mean, if you had done the election after 60 days, I think you win, honestly. There seemed like a stagnation point. And if you look at the lines, it doesn’t look like-what would have changed? HARRIS: Well, yeah, but there were so many variables that went into the outcome of that race. You can also look at where you started to see an infusion of resources going into mis- and disinformation. I talk about, for example, the Elon Musk factor in the book. There were certain inflection points that had an impact on the race. And to your point-it was, as David Plouffe said, those traditional inflection points, and there were others. So I don’t want to reduce what we need to do going forward to any one factor-around what we could have done better, what I could have done better in those 107 days, or what was happening before. I think there are a multitude of factors that all need to be addressed-including, again, the prevalence of mis- and disinformation, and our need to do better around data collection and analysis. STEWART: How do you feel about-and boy, this is going to be a really broad sort of sentiment-but you know, when you took over, and the way the crowds were responding, and that sense of possibility and hope-there was this real feeling of, Hey man, the momentum has shifted. We’re in this game again. But as the campaign moved on, misinformation and disinformation-all those things which existed-did it mean that the shift went from the emotion of change to, once again, the defending of the status quo? That the real kind of foundational problem is, once it moved into you having to defend this kind of status quo that people were dissatisfied with-would more time have changed that, if that’s the fundamental issue? HARRIS: I don’t want to relitigate the campaign, per se. But I will say that part of our challenge was that we needed to-well, people in marketing will tell you that people need to hear things about three times before it actually settles in. For example, our policy around Medicare covering home health care-we know, and the data showed us, that it was incredibly popular with a lot of people, regardless of how they were registered to vote. But we needed more time for more people to hear it. We needed more time for people to hear the point I was making about price gouging-and that we were going to go after corporate landlords who had been buying large amounts of property and jacking up rents. It just required more time. But again, there were a multitude of factors that contributed to the outcome of the election. And I think all of them have to be taken into account. STEWART: And the difficulty of that-when you talked earlier about the trust factor-feels eroded between people and their government. So even when you present certain things, if the trust isn’t there, that’s probably a more difficult sell at that point. HARRIS: Right. Because, for example, on that-you can have someone who says, Kamala, I agree with you, and I love that plan, and I believe that you understand it. I mean, look-my Medicare covering home health care proposal was born out of my personal experience taking care of my mother when she was dying of cancer. But there is that, and then to your point on the trust of government and systems, that person says: So I believe this is all genuine-I know it is-but can it be implemented? Can it actually happen? When will it happen in a way that impacts me? And that gets back again to this issue we have to address-and it’s going to take some real deep work-which is restoring trust in these systems and in government to actually do what we say it can do and will do. And that’s work.

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