Excerpted from “FIGHT: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House” by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, to be published April 1 by William Morrow. Copyright © 2025 by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes. Reprinted courtesy of HarperCollins Publishers.
Donald Trump and Kamala Harris both understood the importance of being seen as the bigger change agent.
For Trump, that meant continuing to promise an antidote to the Biden-Harris years.
For Harris, there was more flexibility to define her brand of change.
She could risk looking hypocritical by making clean breaks with Biden on policies she had supported as vice president, rejecting parts of their record to forge her own agenda. She could identify new issues to run on that avoided the pitfalls of turning her back on the Biden era. Or she could rely on voters to see her gender, her genes, and her “lived experience” — a middle-class upbringing, schools outside the Ivy League, and a career as a prosecutor — as symbols of change.
Biden and his loyalists took the first option off the table.
He would say publicly that Harris should do what she must to win. But privately, including in conversations with her, he repeated an admonition: let there be no daylight between us. “No daylight” was the phrase he had used as a vice presidential candidate in 2008 to bind Republican nominee John McCain to an unpopular president, George W. Bush.
Almost everywhere she went, Harris walked among former Biden aides who sought to defend his presidency. Her campaign was run by a former White House deputy chief of staff — whom she had just empowered to box out her own confidants — and a phalanx of department heads who had served Biden until the previous month.
The day before Harris’s first interview, a joint appearance with [Vice Presidential nominee] Tim Walz, she dived into the recurring question of whether and when she would let daylight shine between herself and Biden. Veteran Democratic communications strategist Stephanie Cutter launched into a proposed preamble — a list of all the items that made Harris proud of her work with Biden.
“Wait, wait, wait!” said Sean Clegg, a longtime Harris adviser who was regarded with suspicion by the Biden holdovers running the campaign. “Let’s not do this. Let’s not go down memory lane.”
That was the last time he was invited to media prep. Cutter, another Harris confidant later joked, cut him out.
When Harris sat down with Walz and CNN’s Dana Bash the last week of August, the segment produced a little bit of news: Harris said she would name a Republican to serve in her Cabinet. She also said that she no longer supported a ban on fracking. Her 2019 call to end the practice threatened to hurt her in Pennsylvania, even though she had adopted Biden’s no-ban policy as his vice presidential candidate in 2020. But the first portion of the one-on-two interview — the part more viewers were likely to watch — featured Harris reciting a laundry list of Biden’s policies.
Sitting next to Walz in a chair that seemed to place her below him and heaping praise on Biden’s record, Harris did not look like a candidate seeking the highest office in the land. The whole scene reinforced the criticism that the vice president was either incapable, or afraid, of answering tough questions on her own.
For the rest of the campaign, her team required that she be provided a chair that met certain specifications: “Leg height no less than 15 inches; floor to top of seat height no less than 18.9 inches; arms on chairs may not be very high, arms must fall at a natural height; chairs must be firm.”
No matter how firm her chair, the question facing Harris was whether she could build a sturdy platform.
Her rallies and convention speech had not answered the question of why she was running for president — or how her vision for the country would deliver for voters — other than having been next in line. She was running out of major moments to explain a vision to a broad audience. Her September 10 debate with Trump would offer another opportunity — perhaps a last chance before voters cast early ballots — to establish that key part of her narrative.
But the day of the debate Biden called to give Harris an unusual kind of pep talk — and another reminder about the loyalty he demanded. No longer able to defend his own record, he expected Harris to protect his legacy.
Whether she won or lost the election, he thought, she would only harm him by publicly distancing herself from him — especially during a debate that would be watched by millions of Americans. To the extent that she wanted to forge her own path, Biden had no interest in giving her room to do so. He needed just three words to convey how much all of that mattered to him.
“No daylight, kid,” Biden said.
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