Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House

Harris’s team grappled with the challenge of constructing a presidential campaign while running it. Most importantly, they had to figure out how to negotiate the presence and/or absence of Biden from the campaign. Harris had to show some loyalty and appreciation to Biden in order to display party unity, but she also had to differentiate herself from him: If the voters had loved Biden, he wouldn’t have had to drop out. Harris, when given opportunities to critique Biden during media appearances, went out of her way to defend him. This showed loyalty, but Trump’s team took advantage of “keeping her tethered to Biden and his record” (238). Harris was stumbling in easy interviews, and her message remained muddled. Voters had the impression that “her reason for running was one of circumstance” (239) and not energy, momentum, or an exciting vision for America.

In order to redirect that narrative, Harris’s team tried to book her on the Joe Rogan Experience, a massively popular podcast with a huge audience of young white men, her worst-performing demographic. Rogan, a former TV star and UFC commentator, had a recording studio in Texas that he rarely traveled from. Harris’s campaign team was reluctant to send her to Texas, a state that would never vote Democrat. They tried to get Rogan to travel to her, but he refused. Their negotiations went nowhere, and the authors view the Harris team’s unwillingness to accommodate Rogan as evidence of their disconnection from the American public. Rogan famously had reservations about Trump, having called him a “man-baby” and a threat to democracy in 2022. Harris could have easily focused in on Trump’s shortcomings as a candidate on Rogan’s platform. However, “the Harris high command was not built to lob Hail Mary passes” (241) and their strategies erred on the side of keeping her away from any risk of blundering on the national stage. This meant that Trump dominated the media narrative, since he and his team had no such compunction. Trump filled the media with bombastic and crude statements, attack ads that cast Harris as a radical far-left candidate who favored the LGBTQ community, and particularly trans people, over “strapped taxpayers” (244). Since Harris wasn’t in the media explaining her values or pushing back on the distorted and hateful narrative , possible swing voters had nothing else to go by. Trump’s campaign team also took advantage of Harris’s focus on abstracts like the preservation of democracy by framing Trump as the concrete candidate, the one who was focused on the economy and the taxpayers’ financial situations. Although Trump’s political history did not support this new persona, his ability to dominate the media with stunts flooded the news with his viewpoint and crowded out Harris’.

As part of her outreach to anti-Trump Republicans, Harris also decided to ally herself publicly with Liz Cheney, the Republican daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney, a widely reviled politician who had helped to saddle the US with a deeply unpopular extended war in Iraq. Liz Cheney had famously turned on Trump and been ousted from her party for it, but her principled stance hadn’t made her popular with either side, making this alliance a “head-scratcher for Democratic operatives outside the campaign” (249). Cheney and Harris decided to hold a rally in Texas together, offering up an opportunity for Harris to go on Joe Rogan’s podcast. However, the day that Harris offered to go on the show, Rogan’s team refused, and it later came to light that Trump would be going on that day instead. Because of this last-minute reconciliation between Trump and Rogan, facilitated by Rogan friends Elon Musk and Dana White, Harris lost her chance to go on the show. 

Beyoncé agreed to speak at the Harris rally, having previously refused to perform even though her song “Freedom” was the official campaign theme song. Though the global diva represented a last-minute coup for the campaign, a Rogan appearance would have demonstrated a willingness to make a “connection with a new and politically valuable audience” (250). Trump’s interview with Rogan went viral, and Harris’s rally was comparatively a flop.

Early ballot voting began to trickle in for both candidates, and despite Trump’s disdain for mail-in voting in 2020, he and his campaign team took heart from the early leads it created for him, especially in red states. However, Trump still distrusted the process, believing, without evidence, that it was easy for Democratic operatives to exploit.

Harris’s team also acknowledged that mail-in ballots showed Trump taking the lead, but they used that opportunity to showcase how the Republican Party had flipflopped on mail-in ballots over the last four years. Trump’s aides, including Susie Wiles, reflected that the Democrats were inadvertently acknowledging Trump’s lead through this rhetoric.

Trump, in 2024, had become preoccupied with winning the popular vote. He took it as a personal affront that he had “lost the beauty contest to Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden” (255) in the past eight years, and he planned a huge rally at Madison Square Gardens in Manhattan. Democratic leaders compared this rally to a pro-Nazi rally held in the same location in 1939, arguing that it was a purposeful dog-whistle to white supremacists.

Trump, undeterred, populated the rally with figures popular with young men, including billionaire Elon Musk, pro-wrestling figures Dana White and Hulk Hogan, and talk show host Tucker Carlson. Comedian Tony Hinchcliffe sent shock waves through the crowd by referring to the US territory of Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage” (256). Trump had been actively courting Latino voters, and his team panicked that this error would cost them the election. Undeterred, Tucker Carlson went on to call Harris, incomprehensibly, Samoan, Malaysian, and low-IQ, three demonstrably false statements.

Meanwhile, in the last few days, Harris and her team decided to ignore the racist attacks and instead try to clearly define her priorities as a candidate. Trump had a clear plan for his 2024 presidency. Harris, meanwhile, seemed to mostly urge voters to preserve democracy in general by using her to keep Trump away from the White House. This was not enough of a narrative to make a compelling case against Trump, though polls still showed that “the two candidates were within whispering distance of each other” (259).

Harris had barely initiated her own rally when Biden confounded Harris’s team by releasing a public statement, stating that “the only garbage I see floating out there are his supporters” (259). This statement, referred to as a “gift” by Trump aides, allowed Trump’s team to quickly reframe the narrative around Biden’s disdain for Trump supporters instead of Hinchcliffe’s and Carlson’s racism and cruelty.

Trump also maximized this outrage by making a well-publicized visit to sanitation workers and riding in a garbage truck, signaling his support to American workers through symbolism if not through policy. Though Trump’s words and acts were often bombastic and fumbling, he “showed a political dexterity that the heavily scripted Harris seemed to lack” (260).

In the run-up to the race, both campaigns obsessively watched the polls. The complexity of the American voting system meant that both sides could make a good case for their own leads based on different polls. However, both campaigns recognized that the two candidates were neck-and-neck, and it would depend on whichever candidate had managed to scrape up the most momentum in these final days.

On Election Night, Harris’s confidence, bolstered by late enthusiasm from voters in the swing states, gave way to a bleak realization that none of it was enough to defeat Trump. “Everything added up to a win, she thought, except the actual votes” (264). As her team received dispiriting news about swing states, Harris contemplated having to call Trump to concede. Her team, including JOD, encouraged her to hold off, pointing out that Trump had never called to concede the race after the 2020 election, and still hadn’t.

Trump, meanwhile, was obsessed with beating the statistics of his 2016 run. It was very important to him that his percentage of the popular vote was higher than in 2016, and that the number of electoral votes in his favor was higher than before as well. Some of his longtime aides reflected on how the campaign operation was much more streamlined and professional than in 2016 and 2020, with serious political operatives replacing “boozy Trump friends” (270) like former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani. Although the preliminary reports were in his favor, Trump badgered his team about the electoral college, hoping for stronger results than necessary to take the presidency. Trump already had the 270 electoral votes needed to win, and some of his aides privately wished he would accept the 270 and not keep pushing. However, acceptance was not Trump’s strong suit.

Trump’s campaign succeeded not because its policies were popular or even coherent, but because he offered “a clean break from the unpopular Biden administration” (277) and its policies on economy, immigration, and the war in Ukraine. Harris, for all her momentum, never distanced herself from Biden, and continued his strategy of insisting that the challenges the US faced weren’t actually challenges at all. The “gaslighting on this campaign was unreal” (277) reported a Harris aide after the election. Trump’s policies and actions were abhorrent, but people seemed to respond to the fact that he admitted there were problems in the first place. The Democrats’ habitual optimism about the status quo no longer played well with the American public.

Meanwhile, Trump’s team “exploded in celebration” (279) after the race was officially called by the Associated Press at 2:30 am the morning after Election Day. Though positive emotions reigned, some personal tensions flared at the same time. In particular, Corey Lewandowski, Trump’s first campaign manager, tried to make peace with Chris LaCivita, the current manager, after badmouthing him in the press. LaCivita refused to forgive him, stating that Lewandowski had “messed with the wrong motherfucking guy” (280) and that LaCivita would destroy him. Trump, in contrast, “vowed to heal the country” (281).

Harris, contemplating her defeat, could not understand how victory had seemed so certain and the polling so positive, only to be overturned so quickly. She wondered whether she had been lied to or her aides and pollsters had just been wrong, and which of those options was worse.

Harris struggled to reconcile the “boom of excitement” (282) on the campaign with the “bust of Election Night” (282). She conceded the race to Trump via phone call the next morning. During the concession, Harris emphasized that she intended to help with the transition, while Trump told her that she was tough and had been a challenge.

Harris, Biden, and Nancy Pelosi met a month later at a White House holiday party, where relations between the three politicians remained stiff and awkward. In pushing Biden to drop out and then delaying her endorsement of Harris, Pelosi had done what she believed was necessary to protect a Democratic presidency. Her efforts hadn’t worked, and both Biden and Harris blamed her, at least in part, for Trump’s win. Other prominent Democrats, including Chuck Schumer and former President Obama, were forced to reckon with their incorrect belief that ousting Biden and rapidly locating another nominee would be the solution. However, Biden, too, had to reckon with his promise to act as a “bridge to the next generation” (285) in 2020, only to reverse course and run again in 2024. This decision, among others, lost him the faith of the American people. Biden, with characteristic stubbornness, still maintained publicly that if he hadn’t been forced to drop out, he would have won. This comment stung Harris, who took it as a personal rebuke. Biden had endeared himself to the Democratic Party in 2020, but throughout the course of his presidency and his subsequent campaign, he lost his credibility, his health, some of his friends, and his political career, leaving only the “naked egotism that compelled him to seek a second term” (286).

Democratic voters, meanwhile, were forced to reckon with the fact that they had been deceived by the Democratic leadership at multiple points. They had been assured that Biden was mentally sharp, then told that Harris was in position to triumph over most if not all of the swing states. Now, after the election, Democratic leadership and campaign aides told the public that, in fact, the truncated time frame of the campaign meant that Harris never really had a chance. This flip-flopping of narrative exhausted voters, leading to a historic loss of faith in the party.

Democratic leaders reflected that Trump’s ability to “tap into the anxiety of white people” (290) and, especially, his resonance with younger men, had earned him the slight advantage he needed to succeed. Though he ended up with a little less than 50% of the popular vote in the 2024 election, Trump treated the narrow win as an overwhelming mandate for his agenda, and he informed his loyal voters that over the next four years, he would fight for them.