How the Democrats Lost the White House

In 2024, the latest 400-page dispatch from last year's presidential contest, the authors, a trio of veteran journalists from different august papers—Josh Dawsey (The Wall Street Journal), Tyler Pager (The New York Times) and Isaac Arnsdorf (The Washington Post)—write that "there was a view popular among some political insiders that this election had been over before it was started."

- SAM ADLER-BELL

The authors end up arguing that things were not so fated, but reading what they have to report, I couldn't help feeling those political insiders had a point. In this account, Joe Biden's operation resembles its candidate: Listless, semi-coherent, sleepwalking toward calamity. It exists for its own sake, impervious to outside input, pushed along by inertia alone. The Trump campaign—at least after his first indictment—provides a burst of energy and purpose—appears driven, disciplined, capable of evaluating trade-offs and making tough decisions. Trump seems to want to win; Biden just wants to survive.

Things do change when Kamala Harris enters the fray. She gives Donald Trump a run for his money, but her campaign is held back from the start by the slow-moving disaster that made it necessary in the first place.

2024 is a well-paced, thorough and often (darkly) humorous account of the two-year campaign season that began when Trump announced he was running for president again—at a Mar-a-Lago launch so disorganized and half-hearted, the authors write, that even sycophantic Trump allies admitted it was "a dud."