Page 45 of 107 Days

I was back on the swing state trail the next day with an event in Charlotte.

People in the audience shouted “Concepts!” and I knew they were referring to one of Trump’s low moments in the debate.

Moderators asked if he had a plan to replace the Affordable Care Act, which he’d tried and failed to destroy in his first term.

It had been saved thanks to the vote of the late Senator John McCain.

“I have concepts of a plan,” Trump had said.

Forty-five million Americans are insured under the ACA, and he wants to destroy it. For “concepts of a plan.”

I told the rally we owed it to the voters to have another debate, “because this election and what’s at stake could not be more important.”

Our campaign had raised $47 million in the twenty-four hours that followed it.

Trump, meanwhile, was running hard in the opposite direction, telling a rally in Tucson that he was done debating. And, on his social media platform, even more emphatically: “THERE WILL BE NO THIRD DEBATE!”

David Plouffe answered with a post of his own: “At long last we discover his spirit animal. The Chicken.”