Subtitle: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House
I am confused about the purpose of this book.
The authors Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes have certainly put into many small details surrounding the big details of Election 2024. Where were the political players when Political Event #31 happened? Who was with them? What were they eating? What were they saying? What were they thinking?
Did the authors really interview all these players? Did the interviewees actually provide this minutia? I have my doubts. But maybe it doesn’t matter. Whether the minutia is correct, partially correct, or even incorrect, it fits well within the story line we had seen on our TV screens. If a few liberties with the facts were taken, it is not that important.
However, the minutia contributes to a sensationalist style of writing. Take, for example:
In a betrayal worthy of Brutus, Pelosi slipped her blade between Biden’s ribs with bloodless lips and one bra strap visible to her audience.
My take on the 2020 Presidential race
As I watched Joe Biden in the 2020 Democrat primary, my side of the TV screen suggested that Joe Biden was not as sharp as when he was vice-president: he was sliding into old age. If I could see this, the people around him must be seeing more.
My experience in politics suggests most politicians are working 12–14 hours a day. They are always around people, talking, talking, talking. They have people to engage, perspectives to assess, information to process, egos to stroke, and decisions to be made. Skilful politics requires many balls to juggle — and finding the right people to help juggle those balls. Right from Day 1 of his presidency, Mr. Biden did not have the abilities to do this job well.
Fight confirmed that there were significant dementia-related issues as soon as Mr. Biden took office in 2021. His handlers were adjusting his day to not overwork him.
So I believed that, in the 2020 Democratic primary process, between the old age and the controversies surrounding Hunter Biden, the Democratic Party should have found someone else as its presidential candidate. The USA has at least 300 million people to draw from.
My take on the 2024 Democratic primary race
After the 2020 victory, I thought, “Maybe Joe Biden has enough chops left in him to do a reasonable job.” His many years of respectable politics might carry him through his promised one term.
In my mind, Joe Biden had one job to do. In the next four years, he was to expand the Democrats’ 2020 margin of 81m to 74m votes to a bigger margin. He needed good manipulation of Congress and the media, good legislation, and good messaging to add at least another four million votes to the 2020 margin. If so, that would have given the Republican Party a signal to reform itself.
Fight clearly states that the Democrats knew they were heading for a coin-flip election in 2024. Clearly, Mr. Biden had failed in the political mission to enlarge the vote margin. He should have been fired for this alone.
The June 27 Presidential debate
What can I say here? The debate showed that Mr. Biden was far from 100% capable for the rigors of the presidential job. Some of us were not surprised that something dementia-related was bound to become public sooner or later.
Fight then gets into the dynamics of the after-debate. Biden and Democrat apologists tried to downplay the performance. But the issue would not go away. In a nutshell, it was the donor class that made the decision. They started withholding their money from the Democratic Party. Coin-flip elections cannot be won with a smaller war chest. The Democratic Party was forced to abandon Joe Biden.
According to Fight, Ms. Harris skillfully manipulated the situation to ensure her nomination, without a mini-primary. Was she an opportunist? Or did she show great political skills/instincts to recognize the opportunity and take advantage of it?
However, she was in the right place at the right time. Often politics is more about placement and timing than about talent.
The Trump assassination attempt
Fight spent some time on the Trump assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania. I will just proffer my thoughts on these two citations:
It will never be fully clear what motivated Crooks, but he was methodical . . .
For a book that gets into the minds, hearts, and souls of many political players, Fight cannot comment much on the character of the assassin.
Maybe the book is not at fault here. The formal investigation was not thorough. For reasons I do not understand.
Trump’s MAGA hat, which an agent had picked up, fell to the ground. Trump stopped the human caravan so that his hat could be retrieved.
For someone with no military training, getting shot at induces a certain psychological state of panic or near panic. Is “picking up the hat” not an unusual response? Especially after the “spontaneous” photo op?
The Harris campaign
For me, Fight was not a I-can’t-ever-put-it-down book. Political intrigue does not interest me that much anymore. I read this book mostly to get an understanding of pop political culture. So I had been reading Fight off and on for a couple of weeks. One evening, I started reading a chapter on the Harris campaign before my bedtime. I put the book down and expected to fall asleep. Nope.
My usual technique for insomnia is to read or write for a half hour, then lie down again. Just get myself a little more tired while doing something constructive. This time, this technique did not work. I did several read/try-to-sleep cycles with Fight: I realized that something from this book was agitating me. I finally found sleep at 6:00 a.m.
Initially, I thought my agitation was caused by the difference in social standing between me and the two authors. They are somewhat famous and will earn some good money from this book. I am ignored and working poor. I have a solution for the underlying forces that create the story around Fight. The authors do not.
Jealousy is a petty reason for being agitated. I don’t think I am a petty person. After some thought, I realized that my anger was more about how the two authors dismissed all the political dysfunction they were writing about as being normal. In other words, Fight reinforces that American democracy is the highest form governance humanity can ever invent. Even more sensible Americans seem to accept this conclusion. We are more deeply inculcated than I had originally thought.
The authors are quick to point all the flaws they saw with the Harris campaign. But they were equally critical of the flaws in the Trump campaign. I doubt the authors would do better if they somehow moved from the outside of politics to the inside. Armchair quarterbacks, indeed.
On Medium after the election, there were many armchair quarterbacks who were critical of Ms. Harris and her campaign team. I read an article that she was too dumb to ever be in politics and another article that she was not able to dumb down her message enough. Both articles were well written with reasonable logic. Then there was an article that suggested she should have stayed on the “high side” of politics; another article suggested she needed to go lower than her enemy was going. So who is right in these assessments?
I thought Ms. Harris and her team put together a reasonable campaign. Information had to be processed quickly and decisions had to be made. A few things were bound not to work out well. It was a coin-flip election when she assumed the mantle; it was a coin-flip election on Election Day. She did not put herself in a worse position.
Hard support vs. Soft support
My six years in Canadian politics taught me about how close elections are won or lost. In a nutshell, voters are divided between “hard” and “soft” supporters. Hard supporters will walk through a blizzard and miss their mother’s funeral to cast a vote. Soft supporters are not so committed. Campaigns use ground teams to identify the soft support and encourage them to vote. Campaigns use negative advertising to convince the soft support of the other side that their candidate does not deserve the effort to cast a vote. These two actions can shift the voter turnout by a few percentage points — and be a factor in winning or losing close elections.
I have written about 20 articles on Medium that explain hard and soft support. These articles performed poorly, even by my bottom writer standards. Most political readers on Medium do not want to hear about that; they like the drama around switch voters, as if there is one magical message or event can move many votes from one side to the other.
Despite the drama-craved political junkies yelling from the sidelines, most professional campaign managers build their campaigns on the psychology of soft support. I suspect Allen and Parnes know about soft support strategies. While they do get a little bit into this political topic, they have a book to sell. My Medium experience is that political junkies do not like talking about hard and soft support — and manipulating the soft support. So Fight helps perpetuate the myth that elections are won and lost by vote switching.
The 78m non-voters
In the 2020 election, 78 million eligible American voters chose not to cast a ballot. That’s a big demographic, much bigger than the swing voters. Mr. Biden had four years to convince 10% of the 78m to vote Democrat. If he had done so, the USA would be in a better position today. But he didn’t.
Allen and Parnes do talk about why the non-voter demographic increased to 86m. They mention the broken promise of a one-term president, his slide into dementia, the do-not-much political agenda, and disgust with not reining in Israel in the Gaza conflict as reasons why another 8m voters chose not to vote — despite the obvious direction the Republicans wanted to take the USA.
But the authors give no mention of the original 78m from 2020. Almost as if this group was not important.
A Harris victory
A week before the election, I made this call.
I looked at the 78m nonvoters. I looked at the obvious stakes between the two political parties. I looked at The Madison Square Garden Republican Rally that openly confirmed that the Republicans were enhancing racism and misogyny in the USA. The theory of “vote for the lesser evil” should have been a serious political game changer for the 78m nonvoters. I thought the polls were wrong.
I was uncertain of whether the Harris victory would have been large or small. A large victory would have given Harris a people’s mandate. A narrow victory would have produced claims of election fraud — and many small cells of civil unrest. Would Ms. Harris and team have been able to manage this outcome? I don’t know. The narrow Republican victory might be the better short-term result for the USA. “Let the Republicans fall on their own sword,” I said.
Fight does not speculate on the outcome of a narrow Harris victory.
However, the book does mention that many Democrats believed that the Harris victory was a sure thing, just like in 2016. Sorry, coin-flip elections mean you win 50% of the time and you lose 50% of the time. The Democrats should not have gaslit themselves.
The blame game
Fight concludes with passing most of the blame on Joe Biden. Had he retired when he promised, the Democratic Party would have had a proper primary process to select its newest leader. Maybe Kamala Harris, with a more prepared campaign team and being less bridled to the Biden endorsement, would have won that contest. Maybe there was a first-string quarterback that could have led the Democrats to a decisively decisive victory against Donald Trump. But history suggests we would have eventually been disappointed with that first-string quarterback.
Joe was sliding into dementia. Whatever great political judgment he had before, he had less. Should we not be surprised that he might be making not-so-good decisions now? Like truly believing that he was the best person for the job?
Biden’s inner circle, who were working with him on a daily basis, saw the decline. While they were covering for him, they should have also been planning to convince him of a graceful exit, helping him stick to his one-term promise. They had an important role to play, and they failed. So maybe we should blame them.
My experience in politics is that people close to power relish being in that inner circle. If they challenge their political leader or the groupthink around that leader too much, they could lose the status, influence, and power they used to have. A dementia-addled leader will eventually find the sycophants he or she is looking for. For the aspiring political climber or a political hanger-oner, being on the inside with only a little influence is better than being on the outside with no influence. This psychological compromise is an inherent feature of all political parties. In other words, the system actually induces these people to preserve their position in the party.
So I do not blame Joe Biden. I do not blame his inner circle.
I blame the system.
My next article will talk about how a new system will prevent this debacle.
The purpose of this book
If the traditional non-voters read Fight, I believe most of them would have their cynicism and apathy reinforced. This book lays out the layers of political intrigue that decide who is on top and close to the top. Average people would feel they have no power while the power brokers play their power accumulation games. Average citizens would see this book as further discrediting the current system.
Maybe the writers believed this work would admonish the Democratic Party for being so unwise. Maybe the next time a geriatric president needs to let go of politics, his or her inner circle — for the good of the Party and society — will convince that person to step aside, just because they had read Fight. I have my doubts that even if the same scenario happens again, the inner circle will take the lessons of Fight. And the next crisis is likely to be something different — and players who read Fight will be unable to make a useful connection.
For sure, political junkies will like this book. The moves made by the various players to acquire more power is fascinating, almost like watching a sporting event with all the great plays. Like it or not, political stories play to the interests of political junkies.
I will ask this question:
How does Fight move society forward?
I have no answer for that question. Do you?
So I conclude that Fight is mostly about moving money from the bank accounts of political junkies to the bank accounts of the authors and their publisher. Millions of recreational hours will be spent on the belief that politics can and will change. But politics really won’t change, will it?
No wonder I could not sleep.
Published on Medium 2025
