National reporters reveal back stories behind 2024 Presidential campaign

Former Vice President Kamala Harris’ deputy campaign manager put his head in his hands when she flubbed a question about what she would do differently than former President Joe Biden. President Donald Trump will answer a reporter’s calls on his cell phone. Biden was preoccupied with son Hunter’s legal problems before he left the campaign.

Those revelations and others came during a discussion by Wall Street Journal investigative reporter Josh Dawsey and New York Times White House correspondent Tyler Pager at the Clinton Presidential Center earlier this week.

The two wrote “2024: How Trump Retook the White House and the Democrats Lost America.” Based on more than 300 interviews, the book is listed at No. 15 on the New York Times Best Sellers list.

They appeared as guests of the Clinton School of Public Service and Central Arkansas Library System. Clinton School Dean Emeritus Skip Rutherford moderated the discussion.

After Biden left the race on July 21, 2024, Harris’ polling numbers rose and there was excitement around her campaign, Dawsey said. Trump was in a foul mood. His team encouraged him to focus on inflation, convinced him her numbers would fall, and moved to define her using her own words.

It worked. Trump’s campaign discovered a video from 2019 where she expressed her support for taxpayer-funded gender transitions for prisoners. The comments moved voters in every focus group. The campaign began running ads saying, “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you.”

Harris also hurt her campaign when she was asked on the television show “The View” if she would have done anything differently than Biden and said, “There is not a thing that comes to mind.” Pager said her deputy campaign manager, Rob Flaherty, put his head in his hands. Her team had practiced a different response with her. Another aide asked without success if the question could be asked again. The Trump campaign again capitalized.

Dawsey said the campaign tested what it could say, couldn’t come up with a solution, and decided to do nothing. Her campaign struggled to respond to this situation and others. It often made no decision “while Trump was sort of running a hundred miles a minute.” Her team tried to find ways to break with Biden, but she didn’t want to do that. He had advised her not to be disloyal to him because he was popular in Pennsylvania.

Dawsey said Harris in early 2024 convened meetings because she saw the Biden-Harris campaign was slipping with Black and Latino voters. Democrats laughed off Trump’s claim that he would do better with Black voters than any Republican in history. But Dawsey was with Trump when he was in South Carolina speaking to several hundred Black voters who cheered his claim that his legal problems helped them identify with him because of the discrimination they have faced.

“I think when you look at Trump’s victory, he fundamentally reshaped the Republican electorate,” Dawsey said.

Dawsey said Trump’s campaign ran a disciplined and serious operation that focused on the economy and inflation, and that it did particularly well with Black and Latino men. Trump’s campaign strategically decided early in the 2024 presidential race to focus on winning male voters and voters who only vote when Trump is on the ballot, rather than seeking to woo other groups such as suburban women or independents.

“If you look at the data across the country, almost every place they targeted moved right,” Dawsey said. “They won more voters than they did in the past, and they had a lot of success with that.”

Meanwhile, the indictments against him crystallized Republican support. Trump told Dawsey while at his Mar-A-Lago Club that he was surprised how quickly he gained the backing of Republican voters. Furthermore, the campaign capitalized on the legal proceedings through its fundraising efforts.

Pager said Trump’s immediate response to the assassination attempt in July 2024 in Butler, Pennsylvania, offered a vivid contrast with Biden’s halting debate performance a couple of weeks earlier.

“I think there was a split screen that Americans saw from Joe Biden on the debate stage struggling to complete sentences to Trump at Butler standing up with his fist raised and sort of yelling, ‘Fight,’” he said. “And that I think crystallized for many Americans the difference between these two men.”

The two said Trump and Biden varied considerably in their accessibility. Dawsey said Trump answered his personal cell phone on a Sunday morning after Trump had ordered the bombing of Iran’s nuclear program.

In contrast, Pager tried repeatedly without success to schedule an interview with Biden. He was able to reach him on his cell phone, but Biden, boarding an Amtrak train, only answered two questions where he said he had no regrets. When Pager tried to call him again, the call was blocked, and when he tried again two days later, a message said the number had been changed or disconnected.

“Whatever you think of Trump, like him or not, you can reach him, right? … He is quite reachable,” Dawsey said. “And really near the end, Biden had basically been blocked off entirely from talking to anyone.”

Son Hunter Biden’s legal problems weighed heavily on the president. June 2024 was a consequential one for Biden. Scheduled were foreign trips to France and Italy, a star-studded fundraiser, and the debate. But before that month, he told a friend that the only thing he cared about was his son not being convicted. At one point, he offered to testify in court.

The session ended with Rutherford asking if a president and a speaker of the House from opposing parties could ever have a beer together. Dawsey said many lawmakers from opposing parties are friends behind the scenes. Pager said it was possible.

“The last thing I would say is, when Joe Biden called Donald Trump to invite him to the White House after he won, Donald Tump said on the phone, as we report for the first time in the book, ‘In another life we would be friends and go golfing,’” Pager said. “So you never know.”