Page 8 of 107 Days

The bleachers in the very warm gym of West Allis Central High School just outside Milwaukee were packed.

Hundreds more supporters crammed the floor in front of the stage, fanning themselves for some relief from the heat.

When the cheering finally died down enough to allow me to start speaking, I told the crowd, “The path to the White House goes through Wisconsin.” I would campaign in the state seventeen times before Election Day, the venues getting ever larger to accommodate swelling crowds.

But this was the first rally of my campaign: my first chance to define the intersection of what Joe stood for and what I stood for, and how, as much as we were alike, we were also very different.

With my staff, in the prep room, I’d come up with a new line for the speech.

Trump’s slogan, “Make America Great Again,” was very telling.

“ Again. ” His agenda was to drag America backward.

Not a goal of progress, but regression. I also wanted to remind the audience how cruel and chaotic his first term had been.

“We’re not going back.”

As soon as I delivered the line, the audience, unprompted, began chanting it back at me emphatically. Backstage, Ike, Brian, and Sheila nodded. “That works.”

I’d been trying to draft the speech at home the night before, after Doug, Tony, and I returned from Delaware. It had been an emotional seesaw of a day: the poignancy of Joe’s remarks and then the enthusiastic reception that had followed.

Meena had stayed on at the VP residence, wanting to be helpful.

She also, I think, wanted the girls to experience this moment in history.

But my baby nieces weren’t all that interested in history.

They were interested in making meatballs.

I wasn’t the candidate embarking on the fight for the future of their country.

I was still just Auntie. While I huddled with Tony and Doug, trying to work on the next day’s priorities, the girls zoomed around the house, oblivious.

“What’s for dinner? What movie can you watch with us?”

It was Doug who gently pointed out that, at this moment, it was a level of multitasking above even my capacity.

The girls, he said, would need to head back home.

When I left for Milwaukee, they traveled with me in my motorcade, two munchkins flanked by burly Secret Service agents, to the landing zone for Marine Two.

I blew a kiss and waved goodbye to them as the chopper rose over the rooftops of Washington, DC.

As I was delivering my speech in Milwaukee, Doug was in McLean, Virginia, for an event that had long been on his schedule: a roundtable with people affected by the Dobbs decision, held at a reproductive health clinic that had opened in response to the overturning of Roe v.

Wade . It was serving not only Virginians, but also rising numbers forced to travel from states with abortion bans.

Since Dobbs , Doug had made it a big part of his role to talk to men about why the crisis of reproductive freedom was an issue for all of us, not only women.

He was determined to keep the clinic on his schedule to highlight what he termed “the post- Dobbs hellscape.”

Doug was staffed by a tiny team—all that had been necessary for campaign events of a Second Spouse.

At most of his previous events, there might have been one or two local reporters.

Now there were scores of national media.

As he left the meeting, reporters shouted questions.

One asked for his reaction to a remark about me that Trump had posted on Truth Social.

“Lyin’ Kamala Harris destroys everything she touches! ”

“That’s all he’s got?” my Jersey boy shot back.

My Dougie.

I had kissed a lot of frogs before fate—and my best friend, Chrisette—delivered me the amazing Douglas Craig Emhoff, first Second Gentleman of the United States.

Doug was born into a loving Jewish family in Brooklyn.

His dad was a shoe designer, and they moved to New Jersey when Doug was about five.

He had most of his schooling there, and the guys from his kindergarten remain some of his best friends.

They’re still on a group chat that’s active every day.

When he was sixteen, the family relocated to California, and that’s where he went to college and law school.

Money was tight, so he worked full-time parking cars, waiting tables, and slinging burgers at McDonald’s so that he could afford to go to college part-time.

(Later in the campaign, when Trump put on a McDonald’s apron, serving fries as a stunt, it was particularly galling.

Doug, my sister, Maya, and I had all sweated over those McDonald’s deep fryers in our teens—I vividly remember my annoyance when I learned that my cousin, who was bagging groceries that summer, made more than me.

Meanwhile, Trump got handed $413 million from his daddy—and then his companies went bankrupt four times.)

Chrisette met Doug when he quickly resolved a lawsuit for her family that had dragged on for years.

She was impressed by his smarts and his sense of humor.

When she set us up on a blind date in 2013, she implored me: “Don’t google him.

” She was afraid I’d see some corporate headshot of a bland white guy and back out of the date.

I was attorney general at the time; he was a successful law firm partner, specializing in entertainment law and intellectual property.

(One of his cases centered on who had created the character of the Taco Bell Chihuahua.) He was divorced, parenting two young teens with his ex-wife, Kerstin.

As a child of divorced parents, I was determined to take it slowly.

I didn’t want to come into Cole’s and Ella’s lives unless this was going to be serious.

Doug, however, already knew it was. “I’m too old to play hide the ball,” he emailed me after our first date.

“I want to see if we can make this work.” We were married less than a year later, with Maya officiating. So much for slowly.

Doug hadn’t been particularly into politics before we met.

He was always a Democrat; he always voted.

But like many people busy building a career and raising kids, he mainly tuned in around election time and wasn’t deep in the weeds.

I’d run virtually unopposed for my second term as AG, so the first year of our marriage was politically uneventful.

We were able to take weekends away and do relatively normal date nights.

Poor Doug didn’t realize that politics is hard .

When Barbara Boxer announced she wouldn’t be running for senator in 2016, we sat out by the firepit in the backyard with a big yellow legal pad and wrote out the pros and cons of running for her seat.

If I ran, I thought I would be elected to serve just as Hillary Clinton would make history as the first woman president.

It didn’t go that way, and we arrived in Washington, DC, to endure Trump’s first era of chaos and cruelty.

There was good work to be done pushing back against that agenda.

I’m proud of holding feet to the fire in Senate hearings, asking tough questions that revealed the nature of Bill Barr, Jeff Sessions, and Brett Kavanaugh.

I’m proud that we secured billions for community banks and that we raised federal relief for wildfires to the same level as other natural disasters.

And I’m proud that as a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee we investigated and then declassified our findings of Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential race.

But the job was frustrating. As a former AG, I was used to being in charge: I’d make a decision and I’d get something done.

Because Democrats were in the minority, the Trump-era Senate sometimes felt frustratingly performative.

I yearned for a bipartisan era when senators could reach across the aisle to accomplish real improvements in people’s lives.

I was lucky to have Doug at my side. It’s helpful to have a husband who wakes up with a smile on his face.

He’s also very protective. Once, when I was giving a speech, a man leapt onto the stage, trying to grab the mic.

Doug barreled down the aisle from the very back of the hall and shoved the guy offstage.

The fierce expression on his face went viral.

Sometimes, at home, I would see him staring into his laptop with a pained expression, and I’d know he’d found something malicious about me.

I’d adopt a resonant voice, like a horror-movie protagonist warning her partner not to go down in the basement: “ Don’t… read… the… comments! ”

Doug soon learned that American politics isn’t built for male spouses.

In DC, there are long-standing social structures and well-understood roles for wives.

Not for the very few husbands. While I was a senator, it didn’t matter too much, since Doug still had the law firm work that he loved.

But the day I got the call to be vice president, he made a huge sacrifice, gladly and without bitterness.

He knew it was essential that there be no appearance of conflicts of interest in our new roles.

So that was his last day at his law firm.

But what was his new role? No one even knew what to call him.

I came up with the title Second Gentleman, off the cuff, during a live interview on CNN.

(When I got back to the house he said, “Okay, I guess we figured that one out.”) Now, in White House–speak, SGOTUS is an established awkward acronym, just like POTUS and VPOTUS.

Since, as VP, I was also president of the Senate, Doug became the president of the Senate spouses, upholding the traditions of luncheons and events originally designed for an all-female association.