Review: Not Enough Fight
'Fight' by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes offers a gripping account of the 2024 presidential election, placing blame on both Biden and Harris for Trump's victory.
Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes (2025). Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House. William Morrow.
In Fight, veteran political reporters Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes guide us through one of the most momentous electoral campaigns in recent memory, offering a post-operative assessment of Kamala Harris’s whirlwind 107-day effort—launched in the wake of Biden’s less-than-stellar debate performance in late June 2024—and Trump’s third-iteration campaign machine that ultimately secured him a second term. Figuring out what went wrong with Harris’s campaign, and why Trump was successful after crashing so decisively in 2020, should be of essential interest to anyone to the left of fascism.
As Fight’s taut and surprisingly thrilling narrative makes clear, the odds were always stacked against Harris: forced into turbo mode, with little more than three months to convince the American people of her suitability for highest office, her campaign was rolled out under the shadow of a president still clinging to the throne—Biden, of course, wasn’t going anywhere. “Nobody walks away from this,” as one senior White House advisor is quoted as saying. “No one walks away from the house, the plane, the helicopter”—a reminder of the banal material seductiveness of U.S. presidential power. Biden was unwilling, or unable, to let go and give Harris the necessary room to maneuver.
Could Biden’s avarice for power have cost the Democrats the White House? More positively, what could Biden have done to help Harris win? After the switch to Harris as the presumptive Democratic nominee by late July, he could have resigned as president, handing over the presidential mantle to Harris and allowing her a share in the enormous prestige of the presidency, which might have given her a clearer shot at the White House. Less dramatically, he could have never opted to run for a second term in the first place, leaving the field open for a proper Democratic primary to run its course.
Hovering Biden
As political reporters, Allen and Parnes do not speculate about the what-if questions of alternate history, but they do offer a convincing implicit argument about the long arc of the Democrats’ election campaign—what I would describe as the “No Daylight Hypothesis.” From the outset of Harris’s late start, Biden made it clear—in paternalistic terms—that he would permit Harris no substantial deviation from a course already laid out by him:
To the extent that she wanted to forge her own path, Biden had no interest in giving her room to do so. He needed just three words to convey how much all of that mattered to him. “No daylight, kid,” Biden said.”
Their political fates were intertwined, their projects one and the same: even as the Democratic presidential nominee, Harris was not to distance herself from her increasingly unpopular boss.
By the end of the summer, Biden had become the hoverer-in-chief, hanging over the Harris campaign, and on multiple occasions Biden directly undermined her efforts—perhaps most notably with the infamous “garbage” remark: “The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters,” Biden had said during a live webcast that, incredibly, was scheduled to take place as Harris herself was delivering an important speech at the Ellipse. Biden claimed he was using the possessive, “his supporter’s,” singular, but it seems implausible. “At least Hillary Clinton had shown enough compassion to apply her ‘basket of deplorables’ label to only half of Trump’s base,” Allen and Parnes (hereafter A&P) write. “It was a gift,” one senior Trump aide says in the book, and Biden’s blunder stole the spotlight from Harris at a crucial final moment in the campaign. “Why are you doing anything public-facing during her speech?! Why are you competing with us, dude?” one senior Harris advisor vents to the authors.
While “no daylight” was probably sensible on the economic and cultural issues for which Biden was still sufficiently progressive to allow a repeat of 2020, tying Harris to his catastrophic position on Gaza was another matter altogether. Biden’s unwillingness to block the Netanyahu government’s genocidal policies in Gaza, continuing instead to provide extensive military and financial support to Israel, combined with Harris’s disinclination to distance herself from Biden’s position, was a devastating liability.
A&P report Harris’s aides’ claims that “behind the scenes,” she had “urged Biden to pay more attention to civilians in Gaza,” even if it “was not an issue that she raised publicly.” While difficult to assess, what we do know is that both as vice president and as presidential contender Harris made little effort to signal a change of course on Gaza—or even just to offer an outstretched hand to voters repelled by the killing of tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians by Israeli forces. A&P describe the Gaza question as “the deepest, most painful rift in their party,” heading into the Democratic National Convention in August, but it was a rift neither Biden or Harris seemed at all interested in repairing. Harris’s steadfast continuation of support for Netanyahu’s government—a case of “no daylight” if there ever was one—surely contributed to her defeat. It likely suppressed the youth vote, and it pushed genocide-conscious voters into the arms of third-party candidates and even Trump himself, however misguidedly.
The Cheney Disaster
But A&P show that Harris’s problems went far beyond “no daylight,” emphasizing instead how Harris wielded agency and was an active participant in her campaign’s undoing. In particular, A&P are unenthusiastic about Harris’s decision to tack rightward and seek out disaffected Republican voters alienated by Trump’s MAGA extremism. The “Cheney experiment”—Harris’s cultivation of Liz Cheney during her late October “blue wall” tour—always seemed unlikely to succeed, if only because Harris and Cheney “made for strange political bedfellows, agreeing on virtually nothing but their disdain for Trump.” The strategy was perhaps well-intentioned, motivated by an attempt to “find new GOP voters—particularly suburban women—and attract media attention.” But just like Harris’s promise to include a Republican in her future cabinet, the Cheney experiment simply didn’t work. As The Nation’s John Nichols later observed, under the pointed headline “Liz Cheney Was an Electoral Fiasco for Kamala Harris,” her Republican courtship “added few if any votes to the Democratic total” and likely “alienated voters” who still remembered her father’s role in the disastrous Iraq War.
The Trump campaign made mistakes too, of course. In particular, the Madison Square Garden rally that included the MAGA-friendly comedian Tony Hinchcliffe, threatened to derail Trump’s rainbow strategy a little more than a week before Election Day. Hinchcliffe’s racist remarks about Puerto Ricans—at a time when Trump was courting Hispanic voters, including the nearly six million people who consider themselves to be of Puerto Rican descent in the continental United States—was described (understatedly) by one Trump adviser as a “staff error”:
We should be able to control everybody but the principal. If Donald Trump wants to get up there and say what he says, that’s his prerogative. But if a staffer invites some dipshit comedian, that’s a staff problem. And that’s where I get upset.
Given what Trump himself said about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio allegedly “eating cats, dogs and geese” the month before, those faux-aggrieved words ring hollow. But A&P show a Trump campaign that, setting aside the content of its politics, was far from technically perfect—a point easily forgotten given the final outcome.
In the Comms Shop
One thing the Trump team likely did better than Harris was its mastery of both national and local messaging. The Harris campaign was too nationally oriented, A&P write, often seeming to run a “campaign for Axios and Politico,” as one advisor put it, while Trump did well on both levels. “He obviously had a national message, but when he would go to states, he was so good at talking about local wedge issues in a way that we never could,” a Harris campaign official is quoted as saying. “Our leadership was always very adamant that everything was about national message.” Clearly, that was a mistake: contemporary political communication demands not just a coherent overarching message, but segmentation and specificity, tailoring narratives to target particular groups.
While Fight could have brought us deeper into the comms shop, de-emphasizing the candidates-in-themselves and recentering the massive communications operations that went into securing Trump’s victory (and, perhaps, ensuring Harris’s failure), including the technical solutions that lay behind them, A&P do give tantalizing glimpses of the considerable spin-doctoring that went on behind the scenes. Trump’s transgender attack ad is a case in point. The 30-second ad revolving around the transphobic message, “Kamala is for they/them. I am for you,” was depressingly successful: the New York Times reported that it “shifted the race 2.7 percentage points in Mr. Trump’s favor after viewers watched it,” and it “aired more than 30,000 times, including in all seven swing states,” according to NPR, in the final weeks of the election.
Here Fight turns into a case study in MAGA communications, which started with a question raised by one of Trump’s PR strategists: “What’s the craziest thing we’ve got on her?”. Answer: Harris’s response to a 2019 ACLU questionnaire where she—to her infinite credit—“pledged to make sure that transgender people who relied on the government for medical care—including those in prison and in immigration detention—would be able to have surgeries at taxpayer expense.” It was catnip to the Trump campaign, and the team ran through several attack-ad iterations, including Trump’s personal sign-off on the wording. The ad aired “during NFL games and later the World Series,” and it “used Harris’s own words to show her as a potential danger to voters. Soft on gender. Soft on crime. Soft on immigration. Reckless with taxpayer dollars,” the authors write. “In other words, she was an extremist.”
Too Little, Too Long
Of course, Harris wasn’t an extremist—that’s the whole point, and in part, the problem. Especially toward the end of the campaign, Harris seemed to pull rightward, or pull her punches, fearing she would be perceived as an extremist—though in the end, the Trump campaign ended up smearing her as one anyway.
Frustratingly, in purely policy terms, Harris had a strong economic populist streak. She carried forward elements from Sanders’ energizing 2016 and 2020 campaigns and Biden’s progressive economic stance. Released in early September, a Harris campaign ad, “Focused,” embodied all the tenets of economic populism, pledging to tackle “economic speculators” and “price gouging,” while attacking Trump for offering “tax cuts for big corporations.” A week earlier, Harris had promised to build 3 million new homes and offer a $25,000 subsidy for first-time home buyers, a “nod to the party’s populist mood,” in the words of a Washington Post commentator—but perhaps more than just a nod.
Still, something changed toward the end of her campaign: The economic populism went quietly slinking out the back door. “The campaign’s closing message centered more than anything on . . . the defense of democracy and the danger Trump posed to it,” as one analysis put it. She attended town hall meetings with the aforementioned Cheney, where there was much talk of rallying to “support and defend the Constitution”—undoubtedly an important point, but one that entailed a more muted emphasis on economic issues. The billionaire Mark Cuban was enlisted as a campaign surrogate, and recent reporting even suggests he was asked to submit for vetting as vice-presidential contender. Harris swung toward center-ground, probably more in terms of communication than actual policy substance, but the loss of nerve in messaging on the economy was ill-conceived. Pandering to that ever-dwindling demographic, the moderate conservative, she was also, to many on the left’s utter bewilderment, unwilling to speak up on Gaza. It cost her.
But in a way, by the late summer of 2024 it may already have been too late. The lesson I draw from Fight is that Harris never really stood a real chance. More time wouldn’t have helped: there was a moment in October where Harris’s numbers were solid across multiple swing states, and had the election taken place then, in some counterfactual universe, she might have eked out a victory. In a way, 107 days was both too much time—and too little.
For ultimately, it was Biden who sealed his party’s fate by deciding to run a second time around in November 2022—his “worst strategic decision” in the words of one commentator. Fight relays the words of a “former high-ranking government official who is close to both Biden and Obama,” who by July 2024 believed Biden had “damned his party by committing ‘the original sin’ of running for a second term.” By the summer of 2024, following the fateful late June debate with Trump, it was probably too late in the game to change Democratic horses: The time to give someone else a chance to run lay back in 2022, but Biden’s pride had led him to seek renewed power. When Donald Trump was shot on July 13th, the Democrats’ fate was certain. Harris’s only chance would have been to remain firmly progressive, but for this she lacked either the personal inclination or the maneuvering room—or both. Lesson learned, one hopes.