Page 14 of 107 Days

“Thank God you guys are top of the ticket. We weren’t going to make payroll,” a senior campaign finance official on the plane confided to Sheila. Until that moment, my team had no idea how bad things had been.

The streets were lined with people waving handmade signs saying MADAM PRESIDENT and singing the Woody Guthrie anthem “This Land Is Your Land.”

One sign, LOTUS FOR POTUS , might’ve confounded anyone who didn’t know Sanskrit. It came from a meme posted by a fifty-three-year-old South Asian pediatrician right after Biden endorsed me. “In Sanskrit, Kamala means LOTUS. In America, Kamala means POTUS.”

Pittsfield is a city of about forty thousand, and despite its picturesque location in rolling, wooded hills, it struggles with many of the issues of small-town rural America, such as a stubbornly high poverty rate and opioid addiction.

But in summer, an influx of affluent arts lovers, drawn to the rich cultural offerings at nearby Tanglewood, masks those realities.

The event at the historic Colonial Theatre had been planned as a fundraiser for the Biden Victory Fund but had been quickly rebranded as the Harris Victory Fund.

Solidly blue Massachusetts wasn’t used to seeing the presidential candidate this close to the election, when swing states generally get the lion’s share of a candidate’s time, and organizers had half expected, now that I was top of the ticket, I’d send a surrogate. But I’d wanted to keep my commitment.

The concert would feature A-list talents such as James Taylor and Yo-Yo Ma, both longtime Democratic supporters.

The two Massachusetts senators were there: Elizabeth Warren, whom I’d come to know when fighting the big banks as California AG, and Ed Markey, whose wife, Rear Admiral Susan Blumenthal, had helped Doug find his way in the foreign land of the Senate spouse.

It was a warm, familiar crowd, slightly on the older side, dotted with longtime supporters and friends who’d driven west from Boston and Martha’s Vineyard.

As the campaign went on, the venues would get bigger and the crowds more diverse: posses of young girls taking selfies, dads with their kids on their shoulders, tattooed teenagers ushering a grandma to a better vantage point.

People of all ages, colors, wallet sizes.

All standing shoulder to shoulder, being immensely kind to one another.

I could feel the intensity of emotion, and my only thought, when glancing down at a tear-streaked face or grasping a hand on the rope line:

There is so much at stake. I cannot fail these people.