ANATOMY of a Fall

Inside the first week—and final hours—of the Harris campaign

- By Chris Whipple

In his new book, Uncharted, the author dissects the 2024 presidential race. Here, he offers fresh reporting on the genesis of Harris’s campaign—and its sorrowful conclusion.

The drama began the week before President Biden bowed out. At the time, Kamala Harris was navigating a political minefield: Any hint that she was plotting to replace the president could have been politically fatal. But while Harris was lying low, her political operation was working behind the scenes. Her chief of staff, Lorraine Voles, had been thinking about a contingency like this since November 19, 2021. That was when the president, under Section 3 of the 25th Amendment, had voluntarily transferred his powers and duties to Harris while he underwent a colonoscopy. It concentrated Voles’s mind. She and her staff needed to be ready for anything.

Still, taking Biden’s place on the ticket was a lot more complicated and fraught than being the acting president for a day. To prepare, Harris’s team launched a stealth operation; they recruited people with no direct connection to the VP. On Thursday, July 18, three days before Biden made his decision to step aside, a veteran Democratic operative heard from Stephanie Schriock, the former head of Emily’s List. “I got a call to help the Harris campaign come up with an ‘if he drops out plan,’ ” this operative told me. “ ‘Can you take a look at all the rules? What we would actually need to do in terms of signatures?’ They 100 percent did not know at that point. They were like, ‘We just feel like we should put a plan in place. Maybe something happens.’ We were all very careful that this was not Kamala. This was, ‘If someone [Biden] wants to drop out, we desperately want a woman president, and us women have to be there.’ That was the framing.”