Exclusive: Inside the Kamala Harris Campaign’s First Week—and Final Hours

In his new book, Uncharted, VF contributor Chris Whipple 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.

Harris’s cell phone buzzed. “Hello, Mr. President,” she said. “Listen,” said Biden. “I’ve decided I’m not going to run.”

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.”

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Other Harris allies were also wrangling prominent Democratic senators to make a promise: If Biden didn’t retreat by Monday, July 22, they would call on him publicly to do so. Even at this late date, Nancy Pelosi, who’d been putting her own pressure on Biden, was thought to oppose a coronation of Harris; she wanted a primary. Barack Obama reportedly wanted one too. And he was said to favor a governor, not Harris, as the nominee. But as Biden weighed his options at his Rehoboth beach house that fateful weekend of July 20–21, he was practically alone. The only counsel he was taking was from close aides Steve Ricchetti and Mike Donilon.

On Sunday, just a little after noon, Biden called Harris. The vice president, wearing sweatpants and a Howard University hoodie, was in the kitchen of the VP mansion at the US Naval Observatory. The second gentleman, Doug Emhoff, was in California. Harris’s niece Meena was visiting and her two daughters, Harris’s grandnieces, were sitting down to do a jigsaw puzzle. Her cell phone buzzed. “Hello, Mr. President,” she said.

“Listen,” said Biden. “I’ve decided I’m not going to run.” Harris sounded dumbfounded. She replied, “Are you sure? Are you sure you want to do that?” The president was sure. Biden hung up, but he called back to say the White House would announce his decision soon—and he would follow up with a tweet endorsing her. At 1:46 p.m. the White House released Biden’s statement; at 2:13 p.m. he sent out the tweet.

Her chief of staff had been thinking about a contingency like this since November 19, 2021.

Now that Biden had actually ended his campaign, Harris would have to seize the nomination. She’d struggled with staff turnover during her first two years in office, but by 2024 she’d assembled a strong team, led by Voles; Sheila Nix, a senior adviser; Kirsten Allen, her comms director; and Brian Fallon, her senior comms adviser. They swiftly activated a formidable political machine. “There was a political operation in place that was minding her p’s and q’s well ahead of the ticket switch,” said an adviser. “We just were able to immediately utilize it for the sake of a whipping operation to secure the nomination.”

By that point a dozen Harris advisers had joined the vice president around her dining room table. Laptops open, cell phones buzzing, they were wrangling support from around the country. Suddenly, Harris shouted: “Could someone please get hold of my husband?” She’d called the second gentleman three times and got his voicemail—he was on a stationary bike at SoulCycle in San Francisco. Next, Harris stepped into the turret of the castle-like residence so she could speak without being overheard.

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First, she called Bill and Hillary Clinton. They offered their support and an immediate endorsement. She then called the Obamas. The 44th president was supportive but said he wanted to wait a few days before endorsing her to avoid the appearance of a coronation. (By now, Obama evidently preferred the appearance of a process to an actual open primary.) Michelle was not only all in, she also offered to campaign with Harris, something she hadn’t done for Biden.

Harris’s next calls were to potential rivals for the nomination: governors Roy Cooper, Josh Shapiro, Gretchen Whitmer, JB Pritzker, and Gavin Newsom. Some asked Harris what the “process” would be. She replied crisply that it should be settled in the normal way: Whoever earned a majority of the pledged delegates would win the nomination. Period. Cooper, Whitmer, Shapiro, and Newsom offered Harris their support that same day; Arizona senator Mark Kelly followed suit. (Outreach to potential running mates—she eventually chose Minnesota governor Tim Walz—wouldn’t begin for another week.)

The vice president was verklempt, in tears. “She welled up, for sure,” said an adviser. “We all did.”

Early in the afternoon the enormity of what was happening struck Harris. It was a moment none of her advisers and friends would forget. The vice president called her pastor and put him on speakerphone. Reverend Amos C. Brown, 83, led Harris, Voles, Nix, and Allen in prayer, asking God for guidance and wisdom for the good of the country. “What does the Lord require of you but to do justice,” he said, reciting from Micah 6:8, “and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?” The vice president was verklempt, in tears. “She welled up, for sure,” said an adviser. “We all did.”

By 10 p.m. at the Naval Observatory, jigsaw pieces were still strewn across the kitchen table. But the puzzle of Harris’s nomination had been solved. She’d called more than 100 people. Not a single potential rival had challenged her. By Monday, Harris had the backing of a majority of Democrats in Congress. Within 48 hours she had the support of most delegates who would be at the convention. A senior adviser summed up Harris’s two-day marathon as a political tour de force: “A lot of people were like, ‘We need a process.’ Well, there is a process: getting the delegates to commit. We just needed to do it and we did it.”

One hundred seven days later, as history will recount, Team Harris hit rock bottom. Yet it didn’t seem so as Election Day dawned. Though Harris was behind in the battleground states, her spokespeople were oddly upbeat. Appearing on MSNBC back on October 27, campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon had declared, “We are very confident we’re going to win this thing.” On Friday, November 1, senior adviser David Plouffe posted on X that late-breaking undecided voters were going for Harris by more than 10 points.

A campaign has a gravitational pull, and chief of staff Voles was feeling it. “You get sucked into the momentum,” she said. “Like you believe it. I’ve been on winning ones and losing ones, and this felt more like [Bill] Clinton’s [in 1992] than [Michael] Dukakis’s [in 1988].” Voles wasn’t talking poll numbers or analytics, but intangibles. “The rallies were so big and so enthusiastic. People were lining the streets.” But Harris’s pollsters didn’t share the kumbaya cohesion. One ex-Biden campaign official couldn’t understand all the heady talk. “They still had consistent polling results that showed her down by two in every state,” she said, “and Trump always overperforms. How the hell were they going to make that up?”

They would not overcome the blue wall vote deficit. “Oh, my God,” said Harris, “What is going to happen to this country?”

On election morning Harris gathered with her family in the front part of the house while, in the back, Nix, campaign chief of staff Voles, and others monitored returns. O’Malley Dillon and company were running the campaign nerve center at the Marriott Marquis hotel near Howard University with an army of data crunchers, keeping Harris and her inner circle informed as returns came in.

The vice president was hunkered down with her family. “We saw her maybe one time that whole night,” said one of her close insiders, when the VP “came back” to their section of the house. As the evening wore on, “it was just like, ‘What’s going on?’ The SG [second gentleman] would come in. Doug would say, ‘What’s happening?’ ” The realization grew that it was going to be a difficult night. One key indicator: Voles had summoned a photographer and a videographer. They were supposed to head to the Howard University campus with Harris for her victory speech. Instead, they cooled their heels.

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The moment of truth came just after midnight. O’Malley Dillon huddled with her two best analytics experts. They were her barometer, her North Star, and when they told her they did not see a path, O’Malley Dillon knew there wasn’t one. She called the vice president. “We’re down in the blue wall states, and we’re not going to be able to make it up,” she said. “Oh, my God,” said Harris. “What is going to happen to this country?”

Suddenly, the race was over, as though someone had thrown a switch. “We sent people home,” said a Harris aide. “And then, ‘Find Cedric.’ ” Cedric Richmond, a Harris confidant, was tapped to deliver the bad news to the faithful at Howard University. He took the stage at 12:45 a.m. There would be no declaration of victory that night. There would be no Harris presidency.

Just after 1 a.m., O’Malley Dillon faced one of her most daunting tasks. She had to call her 12-year-old twin daughters. They’d gone knocking on doors for Harris in Arizona that weekend and were totally invested in the campaign. They’d sent their mother a note saying they had to go to bed, but that they knew the numbers were going to turn for Harris. O’Malley Dillon called them on FaceTime to give them the news. And that was the moment when the steely, take-no-prisoners campaign chair broke down.

As Harris’s devastated followers departed the campus courtyard, the ground was littered with discarded American flags and Harris-Walz posters. The inspiring lightning-speed campaign had imploded. So too, in ways too numerous to count, had its defiant theme, “We Are Not Going Back.”

From the forthcoming book Uncharted: How Trump Beat Biden, Harris, and the Odds in the Wildest Campaign in History by Chris Whipple. Copyright © 2025 by CCWhip Productions. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.