2024 (The Book)

In this post-election cycle of excellent campaign accounts and election analyses, 2024: How Trump Retook the White House and the Democrats Lost America (Penguin Press, 2025) by journalists Josh Dawley, Tyler Page, and Isaac Arnsdorf, is truly outstanding. Journalists Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes wrote Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House, and Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson authored Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again. Both highlighted how Biden decisively damaged the Democrats' chances, first, by irresponsibly deciding to run for a second term, and, then, by resisting removal from the ticket for weeks following the June 2024 debate debacle. Now 2024 also retraces some of that familiar terrain, but it especially also highlights the amazing success of Trump's political comeback from an initially seemingly unfavorable position.

According to the authors, "the election hinged on accidents and incidental decisions that had enormous consequences and might just as easily have gone another way."

At the beginning, Trump surely looked like a loser. But he ran a relatively well disciplined campaign - focused heavily on matters which made sense to voters, like the economy and the cost of living (even in spite of how Trump often preferred to speak and conduct himself). The authors give a lot of credit to Susie Wyles' decisive influence on the management and conduct of the Trump campaign.

Another very important aspect of Trump's comeback was the politically foolish policy of indicting him (multiple times), which forced his potential Republican rivals to rally around in support of him, which further undercut the possibility of any other Republican emerging as a viable alternative.

On the Democratic side, in contrast, there were conceivable potential alternatives to Biden waiting in the wings prior to the 2022 midterms, who then largely gave up after the relatively successful midterm results, which Biden, with his long-term resentment at being underestimated (and his personal chip-on-his-shoulder against Obama), erroneously was enabled to interpret as a sort of vindication. Meanwhile, Biden's team worked hard to prevent effective opposition to Biden from competing against him, while no one really ever told Biden not to run - until the summer 2024 crisis. As other authors have also revealed, even the pollsters had been excluded from direct access to the insulated Biden.

Trump proved to be an authentic messenger for his message. In contrast, Kamala Harris'  campaign, which was effectively a continuation of Biden's, struggled to articulate a clear message of what the campaign was for as well as whom it was against. The account highlights how she struggled with how to deal with Biden's legacy, and how. much harder he made it for her to portray her own distinct identity.

Strangely, after running against rump for almost a decade, the Democrats, according to this account, seemed still unclear on how to run against him. Trump, on the other hand, remade and transformed the Republican coalition into his instrument.