One of the more curiously inapt proverbs, especially as it applies to politics, is the idea that, while success has a thousand fathers, failure is an orphan.
We know, in fact, from the thousands of accounts that pour forth after every presidential election, that the paternity of electoral defeat in particular is litigated over as aggressively as that of any hapless progeny. This isn’t mere prurient entertainment, the giddy Schadenfreude to be had from learning fresh details about how bad a candidate was. Understanding how and why a campaign lost is essential for the course correction that will let the losing party win again.
Kamala Harris’s defeat in 2024, while not the landslide that Donald Trump likes to claim, was nevertheless a historic reversal for the Democratic Party. For the first time in 20 years the party’s candidate lost the popular vote in a presidential contest; the shift among a wide range of demographic groups and geographies toward the Republicans betokened a seismic change in American voter behavior; and the fact that a candidate as flawed as Trump could pull off one of the great political comebacks in history—all suggest something profound about the condition of a Democratic Party that had enjoyed electoral success for so long.
In any election outcome, there are two broad sets of factors that drive voter sentiment. The first is what we might call structural reasons, the great impersonal forces that shape the political landscape. In 2024 these were easy to identify and bad for incumbents around the world in an unusually busy election year. But to the steepest rise in prices in a generation, lingering economic and social disruptions from the pandemic, and widespread insecurities generated by unstable geopolitics, Joe Biden’s administration added its own causes for voter discontent: uncontrolled illegal immigration, the disaster in Afghanistan, and full-hearted embrace of some of the most extreme wackadoodle elements of the woke ideology.
In addition to the impersonal forces and policies that determine elections, however, there is inevitably, the human factor: the individual choices, behavior, and character of the players in the drama; the candidates, their campaigns, and the supporting cast around them.
And it’s here of course where most of the reporting fun is to be found in the postmortems of losing campaigns.
Jonathan Allen of NBC News and Amie Parnes of The Hill are first out of the gate in the quadrennial race with this gossipy tale of the tape. This is their third campaign collaboration—a previous book, Shattered, chronicled the calamity of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 run for the presidency, and once again they prove themselves entertaining observers of the very special combination of ineptitude, backbiting, and hubris that go into every losing political campaign.
Though their work purports to be a general account of the election—and there is plenty of the sort of fly-on-the-wall detail from both Republican and Democratic camps, it is the dysfunction, disunity, and ultimate disaster on the Democratic side of the house that yields the most revealing nuggets.
There is no new grand revelation here. We all knew that Biden was old and failing, that Harris was an empty vessel, and that the party was at war with itself for most of the period from the president’s catastrophic debate performance in June until Election Day. But it is still valuable—and good reading—to have some of the excruciating anecdotes to flesh it all out.
The collusion of the media in the White House’s attempts to cover for Biden’s advancing senility will rank as one of the landmark episodes in the collapse of trust in American journalism, but now that it’s safe to report on all this we learn, among other things, that the president once took a visiting family on a tour of the White House that ended up inexplicably with him wandering around the locker room of the swimming pool, and that he would have a makeup artist on hand almost constantly to gloss up his deathly pallor before Zoom meetings with staff—meetings for which he would then frequently not show up.
“Everybody kind of woke up wondering if today was the day when something went sideways,” the authors quote one aide as saying.
The biggest revelatory details though come in the reporting of the feuding between the main protagonists in the Democratic Party over the summer as Biden was pressured to drop out after his disastrous late June debate with Trump, as Harris maneuvered herself into the nomination, and as some of the party’s luminaries tried to stop her.
The quarreling reads like high school kids texting each other about their vicious rivalries. Joe hates Barack, and Jill hates Nancy, but they all agree that Kamala is an absolute LOSER.
It was Barack Obama who weighed in to prise Biden from the campaign in July—in a tense phone call repeatedly questioning him skeptically about whether he really had any path forward to an election victory after the debate debacle.
According to the authors—given an unusual verbatim account of Biden’s thinking—a furious president mused:
“‘What’s my path?’ Biden thought as he listened to Obama: ‘What’s your fucking plan?’”
Nancy Pelosi played the other tag team member in the Get Biden Out match as she schemed among fellow Democrats on Capitol Hill to persuade Biden to step down.
Like a candidate for euthanasia, we are told that she believed Biden must be “afforded dignity.” “Trying to force (his) hand would boomerang, she told friends.” And yet in a series of television interviews in which she strikingly gave him no backing, and in backroom conversations, she eventually succeeded in dialing the political morphine up to the max.
The scars they left were raw. “We were hurt by Obama,” said one Biden adviser. “We were fucking pissed at Pelosi.”
In the Delaware bunker Biden’s family and close friends were the only ones left urging him to fight on. Dr. Jill (“Lady McBiden” as Pelosi’s daughter memorably dubbed her) and son Hunter clung on desperately.
“Hunter he sees as his best political adviser, which can be a little annoying,” they report another Biden adviser as saying, which could count as understatement.
As we know of course the Bidens’ rearguard action failed. But if Obama and Pelosi were successful in getting Biden eventually to withdraw, they had less luck in persuading fellow Democrats to replace him with an open contest for the nomination in their effort to thwart Harris.
Biden was determined to get a measure of revenge on them by anointing her—and forcing the party to. But remarkably, this choice wasn’t out of any enthusiasm for his vice president. As the authors note, Biden’s team had actually been using the widespread fear in the party of a Harris candidacy as their best means to keeping him in the job. But, when he withdrew, “Harris became Biden’s best hope for vindication. Before that, she was the threat his campaign brandished to keep Democrats lined up behind him.” And when she did get the nod, Biden repeatedly insisted she campaign in effect as his surrogate, telling her repeatedly to put no distance between them.
“No daylight, kid,” he told her.
They were all right in the end to have their doubts about Harris, as her vapid and vain campaign showed. And yet, you are still left wondering: Did the campaign really matter? The election of 2024 was a turning point for the American republic. A failed Democratic president and a failure of a Democratic candidate had already made certain of that.
Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House
by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes
William Morrow, 352 pp., $32
Gerard Baker is editor at large of the Wall Street Journal and author of American Breakdown: Why We No Longer Trust Our Leaders and Institutions and How We Can Rebuild Confidence (Twelve).
