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THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY BOTCHED THE 2024 ELECTION  
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Anne Colamosca
May 23, 2025
Tribune [[link removed]]

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_ The Democrats neglected their voter base in 2024 and failed to
respond to Trump’s campaign with anything beyond the maintenance of
a bankrupt neoliberalism. _

Kamala Harris and Joe Biden onstage at the end of the first day of
the Democratic National Convention on August 19, 2024, in Chicago,
Illinois. , Joe Raedle / Getty Images

 

Review of _Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House _by
Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes (HarperCollins, 2025)

On November 5, 2024, the night of Donald Trump’s historic second
election victory, it suddenly — and unexpectedly — looked as
though he would win Pennsylvania. Of all the seven swing states Trump
needed to win in this intense, closely fought race, Pennsylvania was
said to be the most important, not least due to the fact that it was
the birthplace of Joe Biden.

Among Kamala Harris’s senior staffers, a sickly feeling spread. It
had been only four and a half months since Biden had suffered a
professional catastrophe while debating Trump; the entire country
witnessed a frail, mentally challenged man appearing as if he had
scant knowledge of what was going on around him.

High-powered Democratic donors were the first to explode in their cell
phones, followed by top party officials, often sitting alone in their
living rooms, vaguely expecting something of what actually happened.
This is covered for the first time in _Fight: Inside the Wildest
Battle for the White House_, the new book
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by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes.

In _Fight_, these two veteran Washington, DC–based journalists
portray a devastating inside-the-Beltway tale in which a small cadre
of Democratic leaders — mainly Bill and Hillary Clinton, Nancy
Pelosi, and Barack Obama — basically disagree about what to do next.
As Allen and Parnes put it, “The same scene played out on the
screens of politicians, party operatives, and progressive pundits
across the country — a widespread freakout unlike any other in
American history.”

In all, it took twenty-four days for the Democratic apparatus to
finally turn on an enraged Biden, forcing him to leave the race. His
family and small circle of insiders insisted he had only been
suffering from a cold that night. A furious First Lady Jill Biden
attacked his detractors, buoyed by Hunter, the family’s
scandal-plagued son, who played a leading role in bashing his
father’s “enemies.”

“People close to would never cop to the complicity of their own
silence,” the authors write. To them, “it wasn’t a linear
process” and Biden was not always exhibiting what could be called
dementia-like symptoms. But still, his condition was disturbing, as
everyone now understood. Even before his fateful debate, Biden’s
ratings had significantly fallen, with the party gearing themselves up
for a very tough battle.

The first decision was to coax Biden to remove himself from the
running — a very difficult chore. The second decision was to choose,
in some manner, a new party nominee. Harris was eventually settled
upon as the replacement by his longest friends, Bill and Hillary
Clinton, who had worked hard to develop statewide Democratic
coalitions in response to what they saw as Obama’s neglect of the
party faithful. Led by long-standing loyalist Donna Brazile, there was
a large groundswell for Harris as Biden’s loyal vice president.

Obama — never a big Harris fan, according to the authors — wanted
to stage a series of mini primaries so that the public could decide
for itself. Beyond that, Obama was a big fan of Michigan governor
Gretchen Whitmer for her intellectual heft. Pelosi, a fellow
Californian, wanted another candidate — as one staffer put it,
“She doesn’t like Harris.”

Clintonworld — the term widely used for the huge informal network of
political staffers who have passed through Bill and Hillary’s
operations over the years — effectively controlled the decision to
give Harris the job. Some in other factions of the party, usually
never named, complained that she had made little, if any, impact in
her own presidential run, dropping out early because of mismanagement
and money problems. Others pointed out her reputation for gaffes
during interviews and lack of vision. “You know who did that,”
said one unhappy insider, “Bill and Hillary motherfucking
Clinton.”

Pennsylvanians Wandering Away

“It had just been a couple of hours earlier when I was looking at a
six-hour line of college students in fucking Altoona, PA,” said one
overwrought Harris staffer. “But once it switched, man, it went down
quick and hard.”

Turnout in Philadelphia was only a little bit lower than in 2020. But,
as the same staffer explained, “Trump was winning more of it.” It
would be slightly up in nearby Bucks County, but Trump was doing
better there too. Harris had massive crowds in Philadelphia itself but
was lost in nearby mostly white middle- and upper-middle-class towns
after choosing to campaign with Liz Cheney, the noted Trump-basher and
daughter of Iraq policy leader Dick Cheney.

Trump, incredibly cunning and playing to working-class financial
problems, campaigned near Bristol, aiming at the working-class whites
that Harris usually avoided. During his extensive campaigning through
that state, Trump made repeated promises to bring down grocery prices
and bring in new jobs, never hinting he’d be signing off on the
destruction of Medicaid and social security just months later. In the
end, Trump would win in Pennsylvania by 50.4 percent to 48.7 percent,
as well as Michigan, Georgia, Wisconsin, Arizona, Nevada, and North
Carolina — making up more than ninety electoral votes.

Residents of Dearborn, Michigan — home to the United States’
largest Arab community — voted Trump rather than Harris, believing
his promises that he would end the war in Gaza, even though his actual
plan was to collaborate closely with Israeli prime minister Benjamin
Netanyahu and advocate the removal of Palestinians to make Gaza into a
luxury resort for the rich.

But this isn’t to say that Biden hadn’t manipulated voters. Always
used for gauzy photo shoots near Independence Hall, Philadelphia had
become over the years “the country’s poorest big city,” stealing
that title from Detroit. A fifth of the city’s residents live in
poverty, trying to make ends meet on the federally mandated $7.25 an
hour. In contrast, Philadelphia’s suburbs are mostly prosperous, and
along with Center City competed with legal, medical, architectural,
and design peers up and down the East Coast.

Nevertheless, rusting factories — often shut down as a result of
Clinton’s neoliberal 1990s trade policies — still remained for
miles, despite Biden’s ongoing braggadocio about
reindustrialization. In the ongoing economic malaise, many
working-class men and women in Pennsylvania were in no mood for
Harris’s “happy talk” campaign, totally bereft of Bernie
Sanders’s important “laundry list” of political demands. With
Harris, there were few specifics.

The Clintons, however, had conjured up a plan in restructuring state
organizations — as the authors point out, “in large part it was
designed to stop the party’s left wing from taking control” — to
keep “progressive outsiders” out of the picture. And at the
Democratic Convention, Harris saw to it that no pro-Palestinian voices
would address her convention.

On the night of the convention, Biden was seething. His speech was
pushed out of prime time to 11:30 p.m. “They were all so eager to
get rid of him,” the authors surmise. “This final insult, his gold
watch retirement ceremony playing out to an emptying arena and a
smaller TV audience, really burned.”

No Daylight, Kid

During the previous few months, Biden had repeatedly reminded Harris
that loyalty to him meant everything. And she had complied, never once
wavering in her support. The way he put it was “no daylight, kid”
— any attempt to encourage intrigue and disunity was not helpful to
her campaign.

“Most voters did not see Biden’s first term as the most compelling
recommendation to give him a second term,” said one staffer. When
Harris was interviewed on the extremely popular show _The View_, she
was asked what she would have done differently than Biden. She
replied, “There is not a thing that comes to mind,” creating a
response that would hurt the campaign to the end.

In a very dramatic way, the ludicrous mid-August debate highlighted
the difference between the two candidates. In an incredibly tense
atmosphere, the general sense was that Harris “ran circles around
Trump,” the authors wrote, but that he “landed serious blows that
previewed his fall campaign.”

Trump countered Harris’s policy comments by calling her a
“radical-left liberal” who “wants to do transgender operations
on illegal aliens that are in prison” and accusing the Haitian
community of Springfield, Ohio, of “eating the dogs, eating the
cats. . . . They’re eating the pets of the people that live
there.” Harris laughed at these remarks but failed in adequately
responding when asked whether people were financially better off than
they were before Biden took office.

What her aides soon discovered was that the debate had only given her
a statistically insignificant bump in national polling — less than a
point in the RealClearPolitics average. She had effectively hit a
ceiling that would trail her campaign until Election Day.

Only a couple of weeks before the election, Biden upended Harris’s
carefully planned speech by making a bizarre call appearance that went
instantly viral. Saying in a strange, disjointed way that “the only
garbage I see floating out there is supporters,” Biden enraged many
Trump voters who were instantly reminded of Hillary Clinton’s 2016
mockery of Trump supporters as “a basket of deplorables.” “It
was a gift,” a senior Trump aide reflected.

In a final projection of the race, Harris aides presented her numbers
showing she would probably lose Georgia, North Carolina, Arizona, and
Nevada, while she seemed poised to win Michigan and Wisconsin (which
never happened). And while Harris would never renounce Biden’s close
relationship with the Israeli government, Trump traveled to Dearborn
to convince them that he was sympathetic to the Palestinian people’s
plight. He increased his share of Latino votes from 32 to 46 percent,
Asian American votes from 34 to 40 percent, black women from 13 to 14
percent, and black men from 19 to 21 percent.

In the end, _Fight_ is a profoundly unsettling microcosm of the
Democratic leadership as it currently stands. Since Trump’s
administration has veered so hard to the Right, there has been a
noticeable shift — at least for now — toward attacking Trump’s
actions in a direct manner.

It can only be hoped that this is a growing progressive fightback, and
that it is not strangled at its infancy by those forces in the
Democratic leadership who have been so low on ideas for much of this
century so far — and proven completely incapable of providing their
own responses beyond the maintenance of neoliberalism.

* Joe Biden
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* Democratic Party
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* 2024 Elections
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