"Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House," which chronicles the 2024 race for the White House between Donald Trump, Kamala Harris and Joe Biden, hit No. 1 on The New York Times bestseller list this week. Below, author Amie Parnes writes about some of the lessons she and co-author Jonath an Allen learned while putting it together. You learn a lot covering a presidential campaign. You learn even more when you’re writing a book about it. We found out which of the politicians kneecapped one another, which of them prioritized victory and which of them put themselves first.  We also learned major lessons on what went right, what went wrong and what went ugly for the campaigns.  There’s enough of that to fill an entire second book, but here are five themes that kept recurring in our reporting.  Democrats searching for new ideas may want to ditch some of their Obama-era operatives Democrats have been relying on ex-aides to former President Obama for their political campaigns. It may be time for them to rethink that strategy as they look for fresh ideas to reinvigorate their party. Obama’s victories in 2008 and 2012 gave rise to a class of senior operatives who got a lot of credit and cache themselves for his wins. But they also worked for a unicorn-like political figure in Obama, who himself benefited from running in a year in which the incumbent Republican president, George W. Bush was deeply unpopular. The Obama operatives have held control or at a minimum been highly influential in the Democratic Party’s 2016, 2020 and 2024 campaigns. Collectively, they use data to dictate strategy — such as when they chose not to respond to President Trump’s “trans” ad because focus groups told them it wasn’t effective — rather than using it to inform strategy. That had some negative consequences in the 2024 race. For example, anyone could see that Trump’s Harris “is for they/them, Trump is for you” transgender ad was devastating for former Vice President Kamala Harris. Such missteps don’t mean banning everyone who worked on Obama’s campaign or administration from future presidential campaigns. But the losses do suggest Democrats must dig harder for fresh faces and new ideas n their party’s campaign hierarchy.  You can’t offer the status quo in a change election, and almost all elections are change elections. The one thing just about everyone agreed about heading into 2024 was that the vast majority of Americans thought the country was on the wrong track. But even before his debate debacle, former President Biden didn’t offer much change to voters. He said he would defend democracy and abortion rights (the issues that were central for him in 2020 and Democrats in the 2022 midterms). When he handed the baton to Harris, she refused to say what she would do differently. Even to the extent she proposed new policies, many of them were simply extensions of his existing proposals that fit neatly into his annual budget plans. Her message was also about defense — preserving democracy, abortion rights, Medicare, Social Security and the like. This ended up being a big problem for Harris. With little new on policy or messaging, she was left explaining the major change would be that she had a different background than Biden. That effectively turned Harris into an identity candidate. What if Democrats had seen Biden’s exit as the opportunity it was to offer a forward-looking vision for a modern American economy at a time when voters were worried about inflation and their ability to keep up? Harris even kept Biden’s campaign leadership team in place (see lesson No. 1). Trump learned from defeat Throughout his first term, Trump tilted as hard as he could toward his base — reflecting the instincts of a businessman whose greatest success has been in creating and sustaining a brand. But that hurt him in 2020, when he alienated more people than he brought in. This time around, he ran a more disciplined campaign in which he gave plenty of red meat to the base but also allowed his team to guide a handful of key decisions. First and foremost, when Harris was gaining steam after the handoff, and Trump was losing his lead, he ultimately decided to keep Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita in charge — bucking an effort by Corey Lewandowski to oust them. In doing so, he chased stability rather than the chaos he often prefers. Beyond that, Trump decided not to back a national abortion ban, a choice that resulted from policy aide Vince Haley putting together a slide deck showing that a national ban would take away abortion rights in swing states. If he endorsed state-by-state laws, which he did, voters in those swing states would not have to worry that he would take away their rights. That would tamp down energy on the left and make it easier for abortion-rights supporters who otherwise liked him to vote for him. Finally, and perhaps most important, his aides convinced him to endorse early voting — which he HATES — by pointing out that “banking” early votes would save money because the campaign could stop spending to contact voters who had already cast ballots. This version of Trump was a much more disciplined candidate — and one who kept his eyes squarely on victory, even at the expense of following his instincts. Don’t hold a rally just so you can be close enough to do a podcast Harris did not lose because she failed to appear on the "Joe Rogan Experience." But the episode, reported in an early excerpt of "Fight" in January, was emblematic of her campaign. She knew Trump was reaching potential voters — particularly young men — who spent their time in the "manosphere." Her campaign aides debated whether she should go on with Rogan — some worried it might send the wrong message or, against type, that he would attack her —  and ultimately went for it. But she had to come to him in Austin, and, during negotiations, her campaign manager, Jen O’Malley Dillon, decided to set up a rally in Houston in October to try to be in proximity to Rogan in case the deal could be made. It fell through. As a result, Harris found herself campaigning in a deep-red Republican state in the final weeks of the campaign on a Friday night — you know, the one reserved for football in the Lone Star State. The consolation prize was that Beyoncé came to the rally. But Beyoncé didn’t sing. In the end, Harris lost the opportunity to campaign for votes in key states, looked foolish in doing so, and got zero from her Joe Rogan experience.  Money isn’t everything Harris raised a ton of cash. It didn’t matter. Trump spent his money more efficiently. The main super PAC supporting her, Future Forward, withheld hundreds of millions of dollars until the final phase of the campaign. And it almost categorically refused to attack Trump, which is the main thing a super PAC is good for — running negative ads that don’t blow back on the party’s candidate. In the end, Harris wasn’t talking about the issues that swing voters and loosely attached voters cared the most about and Trump was. You can put all the money in the world into advertising, but the product won’t sell unless the consumer believes it will work. Not enough voters believed Harris would put the country on a better track than Trump. ...read more read less