The bad news for Kamala Harris came as a shock.
Kamala was completely unprepared for what she was about to hear.
And this one nasty surprise left her wallowing in a fit of despair.
Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes’ book, “Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House Ever,” details the complete clown car of a trainwreck that was the Kamala Harris for President campaign.
Allen and Parnes told journalist Tara Palmeri that on Election Night, both Kamala Harris and her running mate Tim Walz were dumbfounded at their defeat at the hands of Donald Trump.
Parnes said when Walz’s team broke the news, he was stupefied beyond belief and wondered if they should ask for a recount.
“He has no words. And people are kind of explaining to him, same thing with her. And she’s like, are you sure? Have we done a recount? Should we do a recount?” Parnes stated.
Parnes emphasized that both Kamala and Walz fully expected to win.
“They thought that they were going to win. And so, you know, when they come back now and say, ‘Oh, no, we didn’t really have a chance.’ No, that’s not what they were thinking. They thought they were going to win,” Parnes continued.
Kamala’s staffers felt betrayed by campaign leadership who painted a rosy picture that “things were looking good” – like senior advisor David Plouffe who claimed late-deciding voters were breaking to Kamala by more than 10 points.
Parnes said Kamala “bought the hype” and believed the vibes of her campaign were pointing towards victory.
“Kamala Harris was looking at her crowd size, and they felt like the vibe was strong and people were saying, ‘Oh, we have more boots on the ground. We’re doing better in fundraising,'” Parnes said.
“And she bought all of that. She bought the hype, and so did a lot of people in the campaign.”
But the data never pointed in that direction as journalist Mark Halperin reported throughout the campaign that internal polls from both Democrats and Republicans showed Trump leading.
“I just saw some new private polling that’s very robust. Private polling,” says @MarkHalperin. Kamala Harris “is in a lot of trouble … In the conversations I’m having with Trump people and Democrats with data, they are extremely bullish on Trump’s chances in the last 48 hours.… pic.twitter.com/KF3tSM2sLo
— 2WAY (@2waytvapp) October 9, 2024
Immediately after the defeat, Parnes and Allen reported that Kamala began making excuses that sounded like she was laying the groundwork for a 2028 campaign.
“She could have won, she told friends, if only the election was later in the calendar — or she got in earlier. In other words, Joe Biden was to blame,” Allen and Parnes wrote.
But even Kamala had to have known such an endeavor would be doomed to fail because Kamala was simply a bad candidate.
“That is f—ing bonkers,” one Harris staffer told Allen and Parnes. “If Election Day was October first, we might have actually somehow pulled it off. Shorter was actually better, not longer.”
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