This article appears in the June 2025 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Subscribe here.
Uncharted: How Trump Beat Biden, Harris, and the Odds in the Wildest Campaign in History
By Chris Whipple
Harper Influence
Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House
By Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes
William Morrow
Kamala Harris was poised to win the 2024 presidential election when her message included America getting control of its border and her championing economic and political change.
In her campaign launch addressing the economy and in her DNC acceptance speeches, she made the cost of living singularly important, showed empathy, and offered concrete policy solutions. She promised that Congress would enact the bipartisan border control bill. She embraced President Biden’s expanded Child Tax Credit and attacked Donald Trump’s tax cuts for billionaires. Her speeches made the election a battle for the middle class. She was laser-focused on the cost of living, while portraying—correctly, as we are seeing today—Trump tariffs as an inflationary tax on imports. She made that the principal fight of the campaign.
And after her debate against Trump, Harris moved into a three-point lead nationally and, critically, ahead in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.
But it was not to be.
More from Stanley B. Greenberg
Two books, one by Chris Whipple, Uncharted: How Trump Beat Biden, Harris, and the Odds in the Wildest Campaign in History, and the other by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House, show the disastrous decisions that put Donald Trump in the White House. I will also describe my efforts with various participants to impact those decisions.
You need to read both these important books to understand the 2024 election. Harris could have won, but her campaign had so many 180-degree turns and was so burdened by Joe Biden’s continued presence in the campaign that she lost. The lessons for Democrats are painful.
Allen and Parnes had strong access to the managers and campaign operations for both Biden and Harris, making the book indispensable to understanding the campaign’s many turns. Harris kept on Biden’s campaign manager Jennifer O’Malley Dillon. That fateful decision contributed mightily to the disaster.
But Whipple’s will be the more important book because it had better access to the advisers closest to Biden, understands the implications of changes in message and strategy for the election, and effectively uses other research to tell a fuller picture.
The further I read in these books, the angrier I grew with the Biden advisers who failed to act as his senescence accelerated, while Biden’s deep personal insecurity and paranoia produced a preposterous campaign based on his accomplishments, in what was really a change election. I was also maddened by the apparent sexism of the Biden team that assumed his vice president could not win the presidency, disastrously delaying his exit from the race.
Now, 2024 was a tough year for incumbent parties all over the world. The highest inflation in 40 years rated 20 or 30 points above the next problem in polls. All saw surges in refugees and illegal immigration. Conservatives successfully whipped up a frenzy about the elite’s “woke” liberal policies.
They were all sinking Biden. James Carville and I still speak every morning, and we were depressed, certain Biden would lose. James went on every show to vent. Despite the daunting problems, both books portray Biden—as well as Trump—as men with few doubts. And the advisers and managers are depicted as “loyalists” helping the leaders achieve their goals. In particular, Ron Klain was depicted in both books as the adviser fighting the hardest and longest to keep the president in the race.
But that does not capture the reality of doubts, fractures, and debates that I saw personally. I sent regular emails to the White House and the Biden campaign, including Anita Dunn, Ron Klain, Mike Donilon, Steve Ricchetti, John Anzalone, and later, Ted Kaufman and Chris Dodd. After Biden withdrew, I wrote to David Binder, Harris’s chief pollster, and later, Lorraine Voles, Harris’s chief of staff.
As chief of staff early in Biden’s term, Klain pushed for economic messages that empathized with voters’ pain and promised to help lower prices. He tried to reverse the changes in immigration policies that were producing millions of new border encounters. He was not alone. And he too felt that President Biden’s legacy could be best achieved by him not running for re-election.
By late 2023, two-thirds of the country thought we were on the wrong track, so before Thanksgiving I wrote a report named “The Change Campaign That Can Contest America.” Klain wrote, “I agree with this 100% and have been pressing an argument similar to this with Jeff [Zients] and Mike [Donilon].” Feel “their pain and stand for change.” But “they are not there. You have to move Mike considerably.”
After watching President Biden praise the economy for two years straight, I responded ironically. How is it going? “You have conducted an experiment—speaking positively about the economy for two years. Your overall approval rating has only declined every month.” Klain agreed but added, “In 2020, Biden was a change candidate. But today, he is the incumbent preaching stability. And a lot of black people in our country want to shake things up.”
The Biden media firm ran ads on how the Inflation Reduction Act saved you money and raised taxes on big corporations. It got strong positive reactions from voters. But I also tested Biden declaring, “We are now living through the strongest—fastest—most widespread and equitable recovery in American history.” It brought Biden’s approval rating down further.
Finally, in December that year, I wrote a letter to share with the president, saying Biden has a historic domestic legacy and could have an international one as well. Trump will be difficult to beat, and “his sole mission will be the destruction of your legacy.”
Klain responded, “This has been my view for almost a year, but Michael [Donilon] sees it differently.” Who else in the team felt that Biden should retire? Maybe most.
Joe Biden
In February 2024, President Biden’s campaign organized a session at the Democratic House members’ retreat to discuss their election plans. The campaign put sheets listing “Biden’s Top Ten Accomplishments” on all the tables.
Usually, the president loved these meetings with members where he went back and forth on policy and politics, ran late, and did a rope line. But this year, the president took only three softball planted questions, and he answered from a prepared text.
What comes through powerfully in these books is a Joe Biden who is extremely personally insecure and constantly looking for evidence of his success and approval. Accordingly, he blocks out negative information, and therefore ended up out of touch with public perceptions in 2024.
As a result, his advisers could not give the honest reason for why he should not have run: He was one of the most unpopular presidents in history; he would certainly lose and take many of his Democratic friends with him. Instead, they pointed fingers, saying Biden had a “path to victory,” but not with a disunited party and so many major leaders saying he should drop out.
That in turn bred an atmosphere of paranoia, and an enemies-list dynamic where critics were booed in campaign offices. It led the president to feel frustrated and unappreciated, wanting to defend himself in public and demanding Harris speak positively of their shared accomplishments. He freely interrupted White House press briefings to talk about good economic news. Biden also wanted to exact retribution for those not loyal, particularly former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and President Barack Obama. They were not viewed as patriots.
In reading the books, I wondered what the Obama advisers who had joined the Harris campaign were doing.
Allen and Parnes’s Fight depends heavily on reports by the Biden managers that treat that side of Biden as normal, while Whipple focuses more on Biden’s aging and ability to do the job.
But I was shocked at Whipple’s account of the debate with Trump—the moment that connected all the dots for many people in the country. President Obama and George Clooney had seen Biden’s aging at a star-studded Los Angeles fundraiser in mid-June, but the debate two weeks later moved them to act.
What I learned is that the Atlanta debate was better than Biden’s debate prep at Camp David two days before. Whipple writes that Klain “was struck by how exhausted he was—and out of touch with his own campaign.” Klain had 3×5 cards with his economic agenda for the second term, but Biden “wanted to talk about how much foreign leaders loved him.” Whipple reports that the president “was fatigued, befuddled, and disengaged.”
Why after Atlanta did the Biden team not stop and conclude there was no way for Joe Biden to wage this campaign against Trump or to serve a second term? What’s more, why weren’t they preparing Vice President Harris to be a stronger candidate?
Allen and Parnes report that “Biden’s team had inflicted serious reputational damage to Harris with Democratic insiders. [It] played on her reputation to help save him.” The Biden campaign conducted its own polls on Harris against Trump and shared them in all their conversations. They created a conventional wisdom that “Harris polls worse than Biden.” They were exploiting the sexism among politicians and voters, and perhaps their own. So, when I began sending my daily emails to the Biden team, I pushed every day against their conventional wisdom. Since the debate, Harris was running two points on average stronger than the president. Their own poll from an affiliated Biden group had her doing three points better. I wrote that Harris’s unfavorable rating was then five points lower than the president’s.
I also wrote that she would gain quickly from consolidated base voters and the Democratic convention. I inserted a graph showing that Al Gore had started nine points down before his convention and came out tied days after it closed.
I now doubt that the team was presenting Biden graphs showing Harris running stronger than Biden.
Biden did grudgingly drop out—but not until July 21st. The short remaining time led Harris to keep Biden’s campaign largely intact. Before her debate with Trump, he called her and insisted there be “No daylight, kid.”
Biden felt Harris had underutilized him and did everything possible to be part of the story at the close. That led him to join a campaign call during Harris’s closing speech on the Ellipse to observe that “the only garbage I see floating there is his supporters.” Using actual garbage trucks, Trump was able to fuse Biden and Harris and tie them to Hillary Clinton calling Trump voters “deplorables.”
Jennifer O’Malley Dillon and Wilmington
Jennifer O’Malley Dillon was a strong manager who had built a staff of passionate people who loved Joe Biden. She had built a campaign prepared to direct a billion dollars, as well as field offices and organizers across the country. Then Biden withdrew days before the convention and with only 107 days left before the election.
Harris’s prior campaigns and offices had staff issues and departures, and she was worried about “drama” during the transition. With a wink from Harris’s aides, EMILY’s List had prepared a campaign plan, and as I confirmed, its president Stephanie Schriock was ready to be manager.
But likely because time was so short, Harris told O’Malley Dillon and her staff to stay on, though probably not with everyone staying in their prior roles. Schriock was told, “No thank you.”
That meant they never sat down at the beginning and faced the biggest strategic issue of the campaign: How will you differ from Joe Biden? That produced the near-fatal interview with The View, in which Harris refused to identify any such changes.
The campaign wrote an economic speech saying, “As president of the United States, it will be my intention to build on the foundation of this progress,” making it easier to brand Harris with “Bidenomics.”
As I saw, the Biden staff didn’t mind her sliding away from the “cost of living.” Biden would not utter the words because he thought it was criticism of the economy.
Finally, the campaign organization turned out to be a little outdated when dealing with the way Trump was reaching persuadable voters. Trump’s campaign manager Susie Wiles, Whipple writes, wondered why O’Malley Dillon’s team ran such a “flawed campaign.” I thought they did not fight to win each day. Wiles concluded “it didn’t seem like she even tried” to win.
Ending the Campaign on Cost of Living and Switching to Democracy
As soon as I listened to Tim Walz’s closing statement in the vice-presidential debate, I knew something had gone badly wrong. He mentioned the middle class and cost of living only once and instead talked about an amazing coalition that brought together progressives and Republicans, like Dick Cheney.
They stopped running the successful ad contrasting Harris and Trump on the cost of living. They stopped talking about an aggrieved middle class and stopped criticizing big business. Instead of talking about their economic plans, they attacked Trump to engage the anti-MAGA majority.
That was the strategy being promoted by Michael Podhorzer, a campaign strategist trusted by many Democrats.
I wrote to David Binder, “It is hard to understand how thick is the campaign.”
I called Lorraine Voles and exclaimed, “What the fuck is happening? Is she trying to lose the election?”
In reading the books, I wondered what the Obama advisers who had joined the campaign were doing. The campaign changed its main message, but they seemed more focused on adjusting the persuadable voter scale.
In the last ten days, however, Harris returned to talking about the cost of living and middle class. The contrast ad on Harris and Trump on the cost of living was back up. She put addressing the cost of living in first place on her “to-do list.” She did not mention Trump’s name for 24 hours.
Identity Politics, the Immigration Issue, and “Willie Horton”
Soon after taking over from Biden, Harris campaigned and gave speeches in Nevada and Arizona. I was surprised when she only briefly talked about securing the border.
Nevada and Arizona were not even close, unlike the other battleground states. Some of her biggest drops in support came in the Southwest and Mountain States with long borders with Mexico. Trump’s plan to deport undocumented immigrants en masse was popular there, particularly with Hispanics. A poll of Hispanic voters in Arizona and Nevada found that voters prioritized a pathway to citizenship for long-residing undocumented immigrants, cracking down on human traffickers, and expanding border security.
Immigration advocates told her that mentioning border security or the bipartisan bill to fix it would hurt her. That is why Harris gave her conventional speech on finally passing comprehensive immigration reform. They did not talk about the expanded monthly Child Tax Credit, her most popular policy in her communication directed at Hispanic voters.
With both Hispanic and Black voters, the campaign prioritized a cocktail of bizarre issues, like protecting crypto assets, fully forgivable loans for small businesses, and health inequities. Some of the ideas were fine. But what Black voters actually prioritized was affordability provided by the restored Child Tax Credit and lower drug prices, and safety provided by reduced violent crime.
Meanwhile, Trump spent $40 million on an ad attacking Harris for allowing transgender prisoners to get surgery at state expense. It ended, “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you.”
I reached out to both Binder and Voles on the issue. The books made clear that the campaign tested various responses but concluded none was as effective as changing the subject. I had some ideas. I had developed a response to the actual Horton ad that tested the strongest in California in 1988. You cannot leave such an attack unanswered.
It was emblematic of the entire campaign: unable to focus on the most obvious line of attack, switched between different campaigns, did not battle to win each day, and allowed the opponent to score many free hits. Harris did indeed benefit immensely from her launch, the Democratic convention, and debate. But then it fell apart. In my post-election poll, the top reasons to vote for Harris were to save democracy and stop fascism and to save the Affordable Care Act—not the issues that were at the top of voters’ minds.
And after she lost, Biden said he would have won.
Where 2024 Leaves Democrats
For the past 15 years, the great working-class majority has heard Democratic presidents and nominees praise the American economy. Along with the mainstream media and economists, they cheer it as “the envy of the world.”
Did our leader notice that the great majority have been largely treading water or worse for 25 years? The top 0.1 percent and 1 percent and 5 percent are devouring a growing share of income and especially wealth. At the same time, the obscene wealth of billionaires gives them tremendous political influence.
We also saw that voters believe Democrats govern unsafe, high-priced cities where mayors have lost control of homelessness, violent crime, and illegal immigrants. They believe “woke” elites prioritize transgender rights and education over bread-and-butter issues, and that elites think America’s legacy of slavery continues to limit America’s promise. Voters are not sure Democrats view America as exceptional and a land of opportunity.
Democrats can learn from that moment when Harris was poised to win. She was for the middle class, mainstream on cultural issues, and pushing clearly and consistently for economic and political change.
This article appears in Jun 2025 Issue.