Kamala Harris has described the point in the 2024 campaign when she first sensed “something was a little off” with Joe Biden, saying a phone call from his debate-preparation camp days before his 27 June debate with Donald Trump left her worried he “didn’t want that debate,” a concern she now says she should have raised more forcefully with senior aides. Speaking in a newly released interview to promote her memoir, Harris said the call was brief but memorable because Biden sounded disengaged from the looming prime-time clash and less interested in rehearsing arguments than she expected from a veteran debater. “He called me from debate camp … and I could tell something was a little off,” she said. “And I was concerned about — I just, I don’t think he wanted to debate, is my point.” The recollection, shared during a taping of the Diary of a CEO podcast and echoed in write-ups of the interview on Thursday, is the most direct account Harris has given of her private misgivings ahead of the debate whose faltering performance ultimately set in motion Biden’s withdrawal and her own brief, 107-day general election campaign that ended in defeat that November.
Harris said she weighed whether to escalate her concern in real time but decided against it, worrying that questioning the incumbent’s readiness would be read as self-interested coming from his running mate and potential successor. According to summaries of the conversation, she frames the moment as an inflection point that, in hindsight, she wishes she had handled differently. “He didn’t want that debate,” she reiterated, describing the call as a departure from Biden’s usual appetite for political combat and retail politics. The vice president at the time had been part of Biden’s informal read-in circle for the CNN debate in Atlanta, but she was not at the Georgia “debate camp” when he phoned. She recounted sensing a lack of urgency that contrasted with the high-stakes event awaiting the campaign amid voter concerns about inflation, immigration and the president’s age.
Biden’s debate performance on 27 June 2024 was widely judged a political calamity for the re-election bid. He delivered uneven answers, trailed off in several exchanges and failed to parry Trump’s attacks with the clarity allies hoped to see. As subsequent reporting and fact checks noted, the months that followed saw a surge of deceptively edited “cheap-fake” clips designed to exaggerate his verbal stumbles, but the live debate itself did not require editing to register as damaging: the images of a halting delivery and moments of visible confusion were broadcast to tens of millions. Harris’s account places her private alarm before that night, locating it in the cadence and content of a preparatory call rather than in hindsight alone.
In the podcast conversation, Harris connects that phone call to a broader critique of the campaign’s judgment about whether Biden should press forward after the debate. She says she regrets not pushing harder when senior Democrats began to counsel a reset, and she describes her own posture in July as deferential to a president who was still weighing his options. As she tells it now, she feared that urging a change would be read as disloyalty or ambition; when Biden ultimately ended his bid later that month and endorsed her, the party moved with speed to consolidate behind her. Harris would become the Democratic nominee, assemble a fast-moving campaign that leaned on grassroots energy and new running-mate optics, and lose the general election to Trump in November by what she has lately described as a narrow national margin. Her revised timeline — concern before the debate, restraint as a matter of loyalty, acceleration after the withdrawal — is laid out as part of an attempt to explain decisions that are still raw among Democratic activists and donors.
The former vice president has spoken about these events across a series of international interviews this week while in London and Sydney to promote her book, 107 Days, a title that refers to the span between Biden’s exit and Election Day. In a tense exchange on Australia’s ABC 7.30 programme, journalist Sarah Ferguson pressed Harris on whether Biden’s “frailties” harmed Democrats’ chances and whether Harris bore responsibility for failing to confront them sooner. Harris deflected by attacking Trump’s record; Ferguson cut in, calling it a “world-class pivot,” and repeatedly pushed her to address Biden specifically. Harris defended his capacity to serve while acknowledging she had concerns about the grind of a national campaign after the debate. The back-and-forth underscored the line Harris is now walking: affirming Biden’s achievements and character while admitting that, by late June, she heard tones that made her worry the debate could go badly.
The Diary of a CEO remarks add the most quotable formulation to that stance — “something was a little off” — and they have been amplified across U.S. outlets that cited the show’s clips and early book excerpts. In one aggregated account, Harris added that the call felt “disappointing” because it was “all about himself” rather than about the argument they needed to make to voters, a description presented as her subjective impression of a single conversation rather than a medical or cognitive assessment. She has not claimed specialized knowledge about Biden’s health and has rejected language about “frailty” when pressed, instead situating her concern in readiness, desire to prosecute the case and the burdens of debate prep.
The details Harris offered track with the public timeline. Biden’s campaign entered the June debate seeking to arrest Trump’s momentum and reset perceptions about the president’s age; the performance instead accelerated doubts inside the party. Within weeks, Biden announced he would not seek re-election and endorsed Harris, who secured the nomination after a compressed consultation with state parties and delegates. Her general election sprint, conducted alongside a new running mate and a reoriented message on abortion rights and restoring normalcy, fell short in November. In the months since, Harris has kept a public schedule that blends party-building with international travel and, in recent days, a media push around the memoir, in which she recounts internal debates among Democrats about how to respond to the debate’s fallout. She has been asked repeatedly whether she will run again; she has left that question open while insisting she remains committed to public service.
Harris’s description of the “off” moment is grounded in her long working relationship with Biden, dating to their post-primary rapprochement in 2020 after a bruising primary debate clash over busing. As vice president, she was a central surrogate on voting rights and abortion access, a frequent emissary to foreign capitals and a manager of portfolios that included migration diplomacy with Mexico and Central America. Her defenders argue that those assignments — often thorny and incremental — obscured her role as a day-to-day political adviser with standing to tell a sitting president to reconsider his debate plan. Her critics say that, as the person next in line, she had a unique obligation to speak with candour as soon as she sensed a serious risk. The new remarks invite those arguments to be relitigated, but they do so with a clearer anchor: a specific call, before a specific debate, that she now says should have prompted a more direct intervention.
The interview circuit has also revisited Harris’s own debate against Trump in September 2024, for which she says preparation was intense and uneven. She has credited her team’s focus groups and mock sessions with sharpening lines that, in her telling, briefly tightened the race in key states before late-October events and third-party dynamics intervened. Asked this week about what, if anything, she heard from Biden after her debate, Harris has stayed general — praising his counsel and character — while steering back to the June phone call that she paints as a moment of intuition she failed to trust. That framing places responsibility on her choices without assigning clinical conclusions to Biden’s demeanour.
Her remarks land amid a continuing online battle over selectively edited clips that purport to show Biden’s decline, a phenomenon news organizations documented in real time during the 2024 campaign as “cheap fakes” that stripped context to exaggerate missteps at the G7 and other appearances. Harris’s emphasis on a private, contemporaneous impression — rather than on viral montages — has the effect of sidestepping those videos entirely. She does not cite them; she does not endorse their narrative; she locates her concern in her ear and experience. That distinction matters because her phrasing — “a little off” — is inherently subjective and because independent fact checks last year flagged a wave of manipulated content that muddied public understanding of Biden’s public moments.
The ABC 7.30 exchange in Sydney illustrated how charged the subject remains. Ferguson pressed Harris to reconcile her current candour with statements from mid-2024 in which she vouched for Biden’s fitness after the debate. Harris replied that she believed then, and still believes, that Biden had the capacity to govern, and that her concern in late June related to the particular demands of a campaign and the appetite for a high-stakes television clash — a distinction between governing competence and debate readiness that her critics find unconvincing. The segment ended abruptly when staff sought to wrap, according to Australian reports, with online reaction split between those who accused Ferguson of “bullying” and those who praised the persistence. Harris did not retreat from the “off” characterisation in that setting; she simply declined to expand it into a diagnosis.
In the People magazine account of her podcast remarks, Harris ties the debate-prep call to an argument in her memoir that the campaign’s inner circle underestimated how quickly one bad night could harden doubts among undecided voters and donors. The book’s title — 107 Days — captures the compressed, improvisational character of the run that followed Biden’s withdrawal: the scramble to unify factions, the selection of a running mate, the balance between prosecuting the case against Trump and articulating a forward-looking agenda. The memoir casts those choices as necessary but insufficient against structural headwinds, including inflation’s drag and scepticism about a late-breaking ticket. Her new interview does not relitigate strategy at length; it offers one scene, a phone call, as a window into why the reset came too late.
Harris’s willingness to describe what she heard in Biden’s voice — not a symptom, but a reluctance — is the closest she has come to answering critics who say she avoided candour last summer. She does not claim to have known that the June debate would unfold as it did, nor does she suggest that one conversation should outweigh a president’s decades of public stamina. She does say, however, that the call felt different, that she sensed a flattening of energy, and that when she now tells the story, it is partly to account for why she did not act on that instinct. As with much political memory, the account will be tested against contemporaneous notes and the recollections of others who participated in debate prep. But in supplying a quotable marker — “something was a little off” — Harris has given allies and critics alike a focal point for a campaign post-mortem that is still unfolding.
Whether the admission changes minds inside a party that remains divided over 2024 is uncertain. For some Democrats, the acknowledgement is overdue and incomplete; for others, it is an honest description of a loyal vice president wrestling with a judgment call under intense pressure. Harris has said she remains open to another run and that her focus is on rebuilding trust with the coalition that backed her ticket last year. In that context, the debate-prep anecdote functions less as score-settling than as an origin story for the turning point that followed — Biden’s withdrawal, her ascension, and the sprint that ended short on 5 November. If there is a clear, reportable takeaway from the new interview, it is this: Harris dates her first internal alarm to a phone call before the 27 June debate, she believes she should have pressed that concern more aggressively, and she is now prepared to say so in her own words.