A revealing new political exposé, titled 2024, has cast an unflattering and deeply troubling spotlight on the Biden and Harris campaigns, confirming what many observers suspected: they were not just bad — they were catastrophically dysfunctional.
Written by seasoned political reporters Josh Dawsey, Tyler Pager, and Isaac Arnsdorf, 2024 dives into the chaotic inner workings of the Democratic Party’s efforts to retain the White House during the 2024 election, painting a portrait of a party in disarray, consumed by infighting, denial, and a stunning lack of leadership.
The book, released amidst a wave of post-election analysis, follows in the footsteps of previous campaign chronicles like Fight by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, and Original Sin by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson.
But where those books detailed campaign mechanics and intrigue, 2024 plunges deeper into the raw dysfunction that plagued both the Biden re-election bid and the subsequent Harris campaign that emerged after Biden’s faltering debate performances made his candidacy untenable.
At the heart of 2024 is the recounting of a now-infamous Democratic Senate Conference meeting held at the offices of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, an event that reads like a political horror story.
The meeting, which took place in the aftermath of President Joe Biden’s disastrous debate showing on June 27, 2024, saw every Democratic senator in attendance except Jon Tester of Montana and Sherrod Brown of Ohio. What unfolded was a display of panic, despair, and sheer disbelief.
The most jarring detail comes from pages 182-184 of the book, where Rhode Island Senator Jack Reed, a respected and sober-minded Democrat with credentials from West Point and Harvard Law, demanded that two independent neurologists be appointed to evaluate President Biden’s cognitive health and publicly release their findings.
For Reed, the concern was not merely political; it was about national security and the fitness of the Commander-in-Chief. His demand was a blunt acknowledgment of what many within the Democratic Party had been whispering in private — serious doubts about Biden’s mental acuity.
The scene grew even more surreal when Senator Alex Padilla recited the Serenity Prayer aloud in an attempt to stabilize the mood. Then, when Senator John Fetterman called for a show of hands to see who still supported Biden, only three senators — Fetterman himself, Chris Coons of Delaware, and Tammy Duckworth of Illinois — raised their hands.
The moment captured not just the lack of confidence in Biden but the extent to which his support had completely evaporated within his own party’s upper echelons.
Despite these glaring concerns, what Dawsey, Pager, and Arnsdorf meticulously reveal is that the Democratic leadership, paralyzed by inertia and internal rivalries, did little to change course.
While CNN’s Tapper and Thompson had already chronicled how widespread the concerns about Biden’s age and health were within the party, 2024 illustrates how these concerns translated into paralysis rather than action.
Party elites, consultants, and donors seemed more interested in preserving their own positions and attacking rivals than in salvaging the Democratic ticket.
In contrast, the Trump campaign is depicted in 2024 as organized, focused, and disciplined, largely due to the leadership of Susie Wiles, Trump’s formidable chief of staff, and her deputy Chris LaCivita.
Dawsey, Pager, and Arnsdorf paint Wiles as a figure of competence and clarity, capable of navigating the turbulence of Trump’s political universe while keeping the campaign machinery running efficiently.
Her partnership with LaCivita ensured that Team Trump 2024 remained a cohesive and strategic operation, in stark contrast to the chaos engulfing the Democrats.
The portrait of Wiles is particularly compelling. While Trump critics often depict his campaigns as chaotic extensions of his impulsive personality, 2024 shows that Wiles brought a level of strategic rigor and steadiness that was essential to Trump’s resurgence.
The same cannot be said for the Biden and Harris teams, who are described as consumed by backbiting, miscommunication, and an inability to respond effectively to crises.
Harris’s own campaign, launched hastily after Biden’s withdrawal, fared no better. Burdened by the lingering dysfunction of the Biden apparatus and plagued by her own strategic missteps, Harris failed to energize the Democratic base or establish a coherent campaign identity. The result was a campaign adrift, lacking clear messaging and weighed down by internal divisions.
The implications of 2024 are sobering for the Democratic Party. As the authors make clear, the debacle of 2024 was not simply the fault of an aging and faltering president, but of a political machine that had grown complacent, arrogant, and dangerously disconnected from reality.
The consultants and strategists who presided over the debacle are described as more interested in preserving their Beltway clout than in winning elections. The knives came out swiftly after Biden’s debate collapse, with party figures like Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer turning on him in public and private, while consultants scrambled to deflect blame.
Democrats, according to the book, have entered a period of depression and denial, unwilling to confront the hard truths about their failures. Meanwhile, Trump marches from one victory to the next, bolstered by a campaign team that knows how to win and an electorate increasingly skeptical of Democratic leadership.
For the 2028 election, the stakes could not be higher. Republicans are expected to field a crowded and competitive slate of candidates, with many likely to seek the services of operatives like LaCivita, whose reputation has only grown.
For Democrats, the question is whether any future nominee will be foolish enough to hire veterans of the Biden or Harris campaigns, now thoroughly discredited in the eyes of political observers.
2024 is more than a postmortem of a failed campaign; it is a cautionary tale about the perils of political complacency and the dangers of ignoring uncomfortable realities.
It should be required reading for any Democrat considering a run for the presidency or national office. The Beltway political elite, often hailed as experts, are exposed in the book as anything but — a club of insiders who failed their party and the country through a toxic mix of hubris and incompetence.
If there is a lesson to be drawn, it is that political success requires more than lofty ideals and identity politics; it requires competent leadership, strategic clarity, and the courage to face hard truths. The Democratic Party’s 2024 nightmare, as chronicled in these pages, is a wake-up call that the party can ill afford to ignore.
