The Worst Campaign Book Season of All Time Is Here

A feast for the middling political mind is just ahead, with upcoming releases from Kamala Harris, John Fetterman, and more.

Screenshot via X/KamalaHarris

I love reading—mostly contemporary fiction, which I’m appropriately self-conscious about. I do occasionally stray into political non-fiction for the content and rarely find anything illuminating when I do.

So it’s much to my chagrin that, this year, terrible political book season has come even earlier than usual and looks like a real doozy. We’ve got titles from such luminaries as a former failed vice president, a former failed senator, a current failed senator, and another current failed senator. What a treat for people who love bad things!

So let’s go ahead and rank how dreadfully excited I am about each one using a scale of one to five eye rolls, shall we??

FIRST UP, we have what will certainly be a new classic from Kamala Harris, who recently made news that she won’t run for governor of California, almost certainly because she’s going to run for president again in 2028 (a campaign that starts now, clearly). The book is called 107 Days (out Sept. 23) and details Harris running “the shortest presidential campaign in modern history.” It’s weird that the book looks so long—a cute gimmick, I say selfishly, as I’ll probably end up reading it, would be to make it only 107 pages long—because there’s one man to blame for why her campaign was so abridged, and it ain’t Donald Trump.

In a little video announcing the book posted to X, the site owned by the fascist who poured his fortune into electing her opponent and delivering our country to its current hell, Harris says the book started as journal entries based on conversations with friends, family, and the like. Written “with candor and reflection,” she says, a bit presumptuously writing her own eventual book review, Harris says, “I believe there’s value in sharing what I saw.”

via Simon & Schuster

(As an aside, my colleague Jack Mirkinson pointed out that the background of the book features every number from 1 through 107, just to drive home the point that this was far too short a time to win over the American people with impeccable messaging and dogshit politics.)

“One truth kept coming back to me: Sometimes, the fight takes a while,” Harris says in the video. To borrow a phrase from Gen Z, this all reeks of “reheated nachos” but even worse, like when the nachos weren’t even that good at the restaurant but you ask the waiter to pack them up, even though you know they won’t get any better, because you don’t want them to ask if “everything was alright” with the meal when it wasn’t but it’s not the waiter’s fault.

BUCKLE UP! I rate this FIVE OUT OF FIVE EYE ROLLS.

Next up, we have a book from Israel Derangement Syndrome victim Sen. John Fetterman (terminal diagnosis, no treatment available) cleverly titled Unfettered (out Nov. 11).