SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
It's July 2024, and Vice President Kamala Harris seems to be taking off like a rocket.
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KAMALA HARRIS: Good evening, Philadelphia.
DETROW: Fast-forward a month, and suddenly the overnight Democratic presidential nominee is stalling.
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UNIDENTIFIED COMMENTATOR #1: Today the race has become a dead heat.
UNIDENTIFIED COMMENTATOR #2: No clear leader within the margin of error.
UNIDENTIFIED COMMENTATOR #3: The polls are virtually in a tie.
DETROW: We've heard a lot in recent months about what was happening behind the scenes in former President Joe Biden's inner circle last year. But what about Harris? What was Harris and her team thinking as they leaped into a national presidential campaign with just 107 days to go before Election Day? We're going to talk about that now with journalists Tyler Pager and Isaac Arnsdorf. Along with Josh Dawsey, they wrote the new book, "2024: How Trump Retook The White House And The Democrats Lost America."
I want to pick up with this moment of President Biden dropping out of the race. Tyler, Vice President Harris, as we all know, finds out in the Naval Observatory, gets to work right away in her hoodie, surrounded by aides and friends. And it seems like it's off to this fast start. But how would you describe the structural disadvantages that Vice President Harris faced at that moment when she found out - you are suddenly likely the Democratic presidential nominee?
TYLER PAGER: Yeah, I think it's this remarkable moment where she's making pancakes for her grandnieces in the vice presidential residence, and she gets a call from Joe Biden. And at that exact moment, her brother-in-law is leading a secret meeting just across the way, plotting and planning for the hypothetical that she would take over the campaign. And they knew immediately that they would have to work to win the nomination. But they also recognized, as you said, Scott, a lot of structural disadvantages that they would have to overcome - chief among them, that there was a campaign built around a different candidate who was of a different generation, a different gender and, in some ways, a different message. And she needed to, in this very tight time window, turn over the campaign to not only reflect her as a person, but what she would do as president.
DETROW: What was the biggest, most dramatic change that her brain trust made right away when they suddenly took over that Wilmington infrastructure?
PAGER: One of the decisions they made that was not so dramatic but ultimately proved to be was they kept everyone in place. They didn't really make any huge fundamental changes to the campaign structure. And in retrospect, a lot of her close advisers thought that was a mistake. In the moment, the advice to her and the decision was, it would be more disruptive to try to reinvent the wheel, bring in new people and fundamentally alter a campaign that had been going for more than a year. But now a lot of Harris aides thinks that was actually a fundamental flaw because the people who were driving the process were not her people.
DETROW: So Isaac, at this moment, President Trump has defeated Joe Biden in a debate where Joe Biden had one of the, you know, biggest self-collapses in the history of American politics. He has survived an assassination attempt and had a Republican convention where he just seemed like on a glide path to the presidency to that moment. Then suddenly, he finds out he has a new opponent. How did he and his team react to Harris suddenly jumping in?
ISAAC ARNSDORF: Trump really had a hard time dealing with that change. He felt like he had won. He felt like the election was over. We had a very revealing conversation with one of his advisers that we have in the book where he says I just don't have any respect for her. And he took it out on his own team because they had encouraged him to do the early debate and told him that Biden wasn't going to go anywhere. And he came very close to blowing up his own operation that, until that point, had been running very smoothly.
DETROW: So Tyler, let's go back to the Harris campaign. And she starts hitting the campaign trail, and suddenly Democratic events are packed. And there's energy, and there's excitement. And she's raising insane amounts of money that have never been seen before, and it seems, in many ways, like this is a rocket ship taking off. And then it starts to stall. And I think the one thing that we in the media latched onto - to, I think, the frustration of her campaign - is the fact that she takes weeks and weeks to agree to a substantive sit-down interview. How much did that hesitancy hurt her campaign, and what was going on behind the scenes?
PAGER: Yeah. It undoubtedly hurt her campaign, and it contributed to this idea that a lot of Americans kept saying, we just feel like we don't know her. I think it not only impacted her, but I think one of the interesting findings in the book is that it also stymied her vice presidential candidate, Tim Walz. Tim Walz had this boom onto the national scene, as there was the conversation about who might be her running mate. He did all these cable interviews. He did all these media appearances that he got a lot of attention for. But then once he joined the ticket, his team was basically told, you can't do anything until Kamala Harris does something, so he couldn't go on cable news until she did. And so a lot of the enthusiasm around the ticket was sort of - was stymied because they didn't get her out there enough.
DETROW: So that approach to strategic decisions is, like, one big storyline of the Kamala Harris campaign. And another one - and I want to talk to both of you about this - is the way that Kamala Harris just would not or could not distinguish herself from Joe Biden in any way. And Tyler, you all reported that there was a direct conversation between Biden and Harris about that and that Biden almost pressured - well, he did pressure her. What happened?
PAGER: Yeah, so this is a really remarkable moment. On the day when she is going to debate Donald Trump, she receives a phone call from Joe Biden. And ostensibly, he's calling to wish her good luck ahead of one of the most important moments of the campaign. And he says, you know, you should be careful. And he frames it as political advice that he's very popular in Pennsylvania, and if she tries to break with him, it could have harmful impacts on her electoral ability, which is just amazing, right? If you think about this moment, Joe Biden has dropped out of the race because of all this pressure from Democrats. The polling shows that he cannot win, and he's calling his replacement, his vice president, to basically cajole her into being more supportive to him. And what's striking about it, Scott, is that she was not even breaking with him at that point. Democrats wanted her to do more, and she wasn't.
DETROW: So Isaac, this all culminates in September when Kamala Harris is on "The View," and this moment happens.
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SUNNY HOSTIN: Would you have done something differently than President Biden during the past four years?
HARRIS: There is not a thing that comes to mind.
DETROW: How did the Trump campaign respond to that moment in this broader trend of Harris lock stepping with Joe Biden?
ARNSDORF: Well, they were ecstatic because in this period that she was not doing interviews, there were two things happening. First, they convinced themselves that she was hiding because she couldn't handle it. And second, they went into that void and said, well, we're going to define Harris. And the way we're going to define her is exactly the same as Biden. So then you've got this moment on "The View." And she was making the exact same argument that they were making in all of their ads, that they were pouring millions of dollars into this argument that she was just the same as the candidate who the Democrats had cast aside, who voters didn't like. And now, it was coming out of the Democratic nominee's mouth.
DETROW: Is there one or two moments that anyone on the Trump campaign thinks, if this goes differently, the election outcome is differently?
ARNSDORF: Well, I mean, obviously, the first one that comes to mind is the assassination attempt. I mean, a quarter of an inch difference there, who knows what would have happened. But we'll put that aside for a second. One of our findings in the book is that it was not inevitable that Trump was going to take the rematch and that he really got pushed more and more to running again because of the prosecutions. And it was ultimately the search of Mar-a-Lago, and this is where we start the book for this reason, that convinced him that he had to go for it because it was his best hope of avoiding prosecution or avoiding jail.
DETROW: Become president or go to jail...
ARNSDORF: You know, that...
DETROW: ...Is the choice.
ARNSDORF: ...Those personal stakes for him really focused him as a candidate and as a politician in a way that was lacking in the previous campaigns.
DETROW: Yeah. That was Isaac Arnsdorf and Tyler Pager. Along with Josh Dawsey, they wrote "2024: How Trump Retook The White House And The Democrats Lost America." It's out July 8. Thanks to both of you.
ARNSDORF: Thank you.
PAGER: Thanks so much.
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