The 2024 Election Gets Its ‘Game Change’

The authors of 2021’s Lucky: How Joe Biden Barely Won the Presidency and 2017’s Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign have returned with Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House. Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes have supplied the definitive chronicle of the 2024 campaign for president.

Both of the duo’s prior works are worthy books, but this is the best of the three because it focuses on all candidates instead of only Hillary in ’16 and Biden in ’20. Fans of Game Change, which chronicled the 2008 battle between Obama and McCain, and its 2012 sequel Double Down were bereft when the second half of the John Heilemann–Mark Halperin team fell to one of the more aggressive cancellations of the Me-Too era. To its benefit, Fight reads more like a successor to Game Change than to the previous two collaborations between Allen, a reporter at NBC, and Parnes, from The Hill.

Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House  
By Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes
William Morrow, 352 pages

Fight is jammed with juicy anecdotes, heroin for political junkies. The strongest tea is poured after Biden’s disastrous June debate. Whereas Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s Original Sin does a more thorough job describing the cover-up of Biden’s decline, Fight really puts the reader inside the agony among top Democrats over whether to replace Biden and with whom.

Lesser decisions are detailed with equal adventure.

For example, I always wondered why the Harris campaign scheduled a rally in Texas on Friday, Oct 25, barely a week before the election. Those closing days are precious. To spend even a minute in a state completely out of reach — especially on a fall Friday night in Texas — when you’re competing like crazy for the seven swing states seemed like a suicidal mistake on par with Hillary’s failure to visit Wisconsin in 2016. I learned from the book, however, that although her stated reason for going to Texas was to shine a light on the harm that restrictive abortion policies were supposedly visiting upon women, the real reason is that they were deep in negotiations with Joe Rogan’s team about coming to Austin to do his podcast. Rogan had refused to come to a location more convenient for her and wouldn’t agree to the campaign’s limits on subject matter.

It should be noted that Rogan disputed Allen and Parnes’ assertion in Fight that he misled the Harris campaign about being unable to see her for a “personal day.” The book claims that Rogan’s team told Harris team that Rogan couldn’t interview Harris on Saturday because he was taking a “personal day.” It emerged later that he wasn’t taking a personal day; he was interviewing Donald Trump. Rogan denies that his team claimed he was taking a personal day and also denies that Allen/Parnes ever contacted him to get their side of the story.

In any case, Harris has since acknowledged that it was a mistake not to go on Rogan’s show, whose audience is rich in the young men who were deserting her in droves. But that was a tactical mistake: her strategic mistake was that she simply refused to discuss her ideas and plans for the country. Trump was happy to go anywhere that would have him and to talk at (great, great!) length and with shareable sound bites.

Trump even appeared at the National Association of Black Journalists conference in Chicago in July. Some observers thought it was a disaster for Trump at the time, as the hosts predictably grilled him. And Trump memorably questioned Harris’ authenticity on identity: “I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn Black and now she wants to be known as Black. So, I don’t know, is she Indian or is she Black?” Ultimately, Trump’s willingness to engage proved more consequential than what he said.

Unfortunately, like a lot of speed books, this one has its share of clunky writing: Describing Texas Rep. Lloyd Doggett publicly calling for Biden to withdraw, they tell us that, “In doing so, he broke the seal, becoming the first sitting member of Congress to do so.”

The writing also suffers from similes so numerous and moronic that one wonders if all books will read this way as we enter the ChatGPT era.

• Biden’s letter to lawmakers “hit Capitol Hill like a crate of rotten eggs.”
• Trumpworld is “stocked with men who looked like bouncers and women whose surgical enhancements were as garish as their clothing.”
• Susie Wiles, Trump’s campaign manager, is “tougher than the bro squad that surrounded Trump.”
• Those just set the rhetorical scene, the real humdingers come when they write about the Democrat and Republican leaders. Nancy Pelosi sits “with a pained look, as though she were watching a nineteenth-century doctor saw off her child’s leg.” the melodrama deepens as her words “carried more weight … than the Ten Commandments.”
• Trump, we are told, “can drive news cycles like Max Verstappen drives Formula 1 race cars.” But then the writers veer into incomprehensible nonsequitur after Trump is shot in Butler, PA, “the bandage on his ear as clear as the moon on a cloudless night.” OMG.
• They just keep on coming. Describing Pa Gov Josh Shapiro’s outsize ambition, “the description stuck to Shapiro like a KICK ME sign.”
• Harris’ polling firm Impact Research sent around a memo that “had more bullets than an ammo emporium.”

It’s unrelenting, all of it awful.

The book is also hastily edited. For example, the authors explained that Fla. Democratic Chair Nikki Fried was at a Janet Jackson concert when she gets Harris’ call — just a few pages after having already told that anecdote. Elsewhere, Harris’ campaign manager Jennifer O’Malley Dylan is described as being referred to by her initials JOD, a concept that was already explained earlier in the narrative. The fact that 13% of Democrats in Michigan supported “uncommitted” or someone other than Biden is also repeated.

Even the audio version has editing mistakes. Normally flawless narrator Joe Knezevich notes that a Hamptons fundraiser for Biden is attended by “Sarakah Jessica Parker.”

Happily, there’s some deliberately funny writing, as well. Speaking of Gov. Doug Burgum’s slender odds of becoming Trump’s running mate, they write of the North Dakotan, “he could put a roomful of hyperactive kids to sleep in a single sentence and came from a state that many Americans could identify only on a map of the Dakotas.”

The real reason we have to fear a future of bad writing is that the book survives its errors, and survives them well. There are even a surprising number of moving passages. Amid a campaign packed with spectacle — assassination attempts, withdrawal of candidacies, and nomination knife fights — it’s possible to forget there are human beings behind the drama. Biden calls Harris at the end of July to tell her of his final decision to withdraw from the race.

When Harris answered [the phone], he told her what he had decided to do. Harris contained a swirl of emotions long enough to pose an appropriately reverent question. “Are you sure?” she asked. “Yes,” Biden said.

“Don’t let them push you out,” Harris told Biden. “Are you sure this is the decision you want to make?” “It’s getting untenable,” Biden replied. “Will you step up?” “If you’re sure you want to do this, I will,” Harris said. “But only if I have your support.” “You have my support, kid,” Biden said.

I can certainly live with breathless similes and a few careless edits, especially in a book that hurtles along so grippingly. More troubling is my worry that these memoirs have become a forum for anonymous score-settling.

The authors write, “We spoke to [more than 150] sources exclusively ‘on background’ so that they could avoid the fear of retribution and speak frankly about sensitive topics.” For those too young to recall names like Jayson Blair or Stephen Glass, the problem with anonymous sources is that the reader cannot evaluate whether the source has an agenda — and in politics, everyone has an agenda.

With no accountability, sources can take shots at rivals within the campaign or use the authors to portray their own poor decisions more favorably.

In Fight, some of the sources are obvious and they are mostly Dems. There were surely GOP sources as well, but politicians from the losing party naturally need to do more resume polishing than those who led the big comeback.

Nikki Fried, for example. As chair of the Democratic Party of Florida, she has presided over the dismantling of her party in a once purple state. In Fight, however, she’s whooping it up at a Janet Jackson concert with her sister when Harris calls looking for support. Then she’s on a fishing trip with her fiancé and his sons when the president calls. “Shut the fuck up!” she tells the three brats, cementing her role, at least in the imagination of the book’s readers, as a salty and sassy lady who ought to be considered for future big roles in the national party.

Nancy Pelosi clearly cooperated, as well. At every turn, her advice is sage — from the unforgettable moment she knifed Joe Biden (“is this an episode or a condition?”) to Election Night when she is depicted in matronly fashion with her daughter, Alexandra, and several aides.

Why not just agree to be quoted? If the thinking is that insiders will no longer trust you if they read your name in a tell-all book, then they’ll trust you even less when they deduce it was you but you did it sneakily. 

Fight is at its best when it contrasts the competing styles of the two campaigns. The book does an excellent job of revealing just how data driven the Trump team was. There’s a fascinating section about how Wiles quietly but relentlessly worked on Trump to soften his opposition to early voting. Trump’s data czar, Tim Saler, pored over early voting from Georgia, North Carolina and Nevada. He created models for determining whether the stronger than expected Trump vote was simply cannibalizing their election day vote. But the key insight occurs when he hears a Harris data guru thinking that the Dems might see the same cannibalization. He realizes that the Harris team is seeing troubling signs for her candidacy.

At the same time, Fight makes an argument that Harris’s campaign was occasionally handicapped by overreliance on data that could be flawed. The book particularly faults Anita Dunn, the Obama and Biden loyalist who had been exiled to the Super PAC. They blame her for hoarding money instead of spending when Trump was bashing the shit out of Harris with the “Kamala Harris is for they/them” ad. JOD, too, inexplicably fails to notice how much damage that devastating ad was doing to her candidate, using the data to overrule action when when some of her colleagues were picking up the vibes about that damage. That was a huge miss and such a data reliant campaign simply failed to pick it up.

One wonders if Trump’s over-performance in data, reminiscent of Brad Parscale’s brilliant use of Facebook in 2016, and Harris’s under performance on data in 2024 somehow reflects an innate bias. Democrat professionals tend to see Trump and everyone around him as fools and incompetents. They’ve lost to him many times, at nominations, in court, in elections, and more and yet never seem capable of interpreting those results as evidence of his team’s intelligence or their team’s unpreparedness. They mention flukes, no matter how unsupported by evidence, such as Comey’s late knock on Hillary, which probably changed almost no one’s mind, but is still cited to this day as her campaign’s undoing rather than, for example, her long history of unlikability, noted by no less an expert in American politics than Barack Obama.

According to the authors, the Harris campaign, “together with the DNC, had raised and spent roughly $2 billion … building a juggernaut that made the Death Star look like a speck of dust. Trump’s operation spent about half that, a model of precise efficiency by comparison.” I made a similar point in noting Trump’s efficiency in 2016 compared to Hillary’s profligate spending. The Harris campaign should have read my article.

The book’s final compelling scene takes place in Harris’s election night data room. JOD is trying to decide whether Harris should concede or not and turns to her two data chiefs Becca Siegel and Meg Schwenzfeier. They tell O’Malley Dylan, “Turnout in Philadelphia was only a little bit lower than 2020, but Trump was winning more of it. It would be slightly up in Bucks County — but Trump was doing better there too.” JOD just wants to know if the race still has a path for the vice president and “Siegel and Schwenzfeier responded in lawyerly fashion.”

It was a metaphor for the Harris campaign’s entire 107-day problem. They didn’t have the right people in the right positions.

And that’s how it ended. Trump swept all seven battleground states, improved his totals in every demo, and won the popular vote.

Some of the reviews of Fight have missed the point. This isn’t a book about policy or character or which candidate’s ideas deserved to carry the day. This is a book about campaign tactics, the success or failure of which determined the policy, character and ideas that would lead America, regardless of which ones should. Panning the book in the Washington Post, Sam Tanenhaus faults Fight for mentioning Gaza only seven times. That’s a ridiculous misunderstanding of the book and the campaign.

Despite its purple writing and occasionally sloppy editing, this book is a pleasure to read, and will surely be even more enjoyable for those pleased by the outcome of the election. As Chuck Grassley’s office revealed the truly shocking excesses of the Arctic Frost investigation, it becomes ever more clear what was at stake. If you aren’t familiar with a scandal in which President Biden’s investigators spied on numerous Republican representatives, with a scope is far more unAmerican than anything Joe McCarthy ever tried, you ought to read the actual documents, not just the media summaries that downplay their seriousness.

However pleased or horrified a reader is by the results of last 2024 election, this fair-minded, balanced book opens a fascinating window on the process. A tad breathless and hyperbolic window to be sure, but 2024 was worthy of breathlessness. (Yes, I realize that someone who just wrote that we almost became South Africa could comfortably be accused of hyperbole himself.)

The highest praise I can heap upon Fight is that for the first time since 2008 I don’t miss the Game Change books.