Page 86 of 107 Days

Election Day began as I stepped into the motorcade in Philadelphia at midnight.

Maya and Tony, Meena and Nik and the girls would spend the night. Kerstin Emhoff, Cole and his wife, Greenley, would join us in the morning, Ella in the afternoon. Chrisette Hudlin and her family would also be there, along with Doug’s brother, Andy, and his wife, Judy, and their kids.

I got a couple of hours’ sleep before Kirsten arrived at the crack of dawn to help me wrangle numerous drive time radio call-ins.

Doug and Tony headed off to do Election Day campaigning in Michigan. In the afternoon I dropped in to the DNC to thank the volunteers working the phone banks. I brought them a big box of my favorite Doritos. While I was there, I grabbed a phone and made a couple of calls:

“Hi, it’s Kamala Harris, have you voted yet? You have? Thank you!”

To an eight-year-old kid who picked up: “Waiting for you to grow ten years more.”

And then I returned to the residence to do the most difficult work of all: nothing. After running so hard, I’d almost forgotten how to stop.

Every morning during the campaign, Bishop Leah Daughtry, a pastor I’ve known for twenty years, would send me a meditation. That day, the meditation was titled, simply, “Stand.” The reflections she’d prepared were perfect for me in that moment:

“There comes a point when you’ve done all you can do. When your work has been completed… That’s when you just stand. Stand believing and knowing that you’ve done your part. Stand in the strength given to you by God.”

We’d rearranged the residence, moving the table out of the entry foyer and pulling in sofas and a big TV. In the dining room we’d set up three round tables for a family dinner.

There were two other centers of gravity that night.

JOD, David Plouffe, and Brian Fallon had set up a boiler room in a series of interconnecting ballrooms at the downtown Marriott.

There, they had our staff of election analytics experts, tasked with comparing our voter modeling with the numbers actually coming in from polling booths.

At the Conrad hotel, a party was underway for our friends, big donors, and campaign luminaries such as Cedric Richmond.

Later, they’d be bused over to Howard University for the speech I fully expected to give there.

We expected one of two things: a victory speech in the early hours, or, if it was too close to call, an optimistic holding statement.

The residence was straining at the seams. Storm had wrangled staff to be on standby to drive family members to Howard.

My core team—Adam, Ike, Lorraine, Kirsten, and Sheila—were crammed into office space meant for two people, polishing sets of remarks and adjusting them as required.

They worked quietly as family members swirled around the house in high spirits.

When my family and friends sat down to dinner, Storm was strict: she would be the only staffer who would enter that room. She wanted to protect this time for me, a short period that night that was not public, not political, just a private respite.

While we consumed a supper of baba ghanoush, dolmas, hummus, and shish taouk, my team took the chance to head out to Cactus Cantina, a restaurant near the Washington National Cathedral.

A family place, it had the advantage of being out of the way of the Capitol Hill–K Street crowd who’d know who they were and would be scrutinizing them on that suspenseful night.

Doug and Tony arrived back from their Election Day swing. They’d headed to the Detroit suburbs, dropping in on coffee shops and local diners, doing press interviews. Tony’s account of their day sounded great to me. If Doug seemed distracted, I put it down to the heightened emotions of the evening.

It says a lot about how traumatized we both were by what happened that night that Doug and I never discussed it with each other until I sat down to write this book.

I had no idea that Doug was carrying a heavy weight when he walked back into the residence.

He’d left that morning thinking we were going to win.

Not probably going to win. That we would win.

His confidence had only been reinforced during the day by the enthusiasm of the voters he encountered and intel he and Tony received from the teams running our ground game.

They reported that turnout seemed to be flowing just as we hoped.

On the flight back to DC, their spirits were high.

Then Tony received a text from a friend in the Fox News war room.

It did not start well. Being at Fox today is brutal.

The text went on to say that the decision desk was predicting a Trump sweep in North Carolina, Georgia, and Arizona, and that the poor early showing by my supporters in Pennsylvania had the state leaning toward Trump.

Fox has an exceptional election desk. They were, after all, the ones who accurately called Arizona for Biden long before anyone else had the data to do so.

Robert Wolf, former CEO of UBS in the United States, is a frequent contributor on Fox News and Fox Business.

He’s also a staunch Democrat who had advised Hillary and Barack.

I’d met him years earlier at a Young Democrats of America event when I was elected DA.

We’re friends; he and Tony are close. He was tasked with being on camera after three p.m. that day and wanted to know if Tony had info from our side that countered the Fox desk’s narrative.

Tony texted back that Detroit was overperforming and gave him the turnout figures, including higher Puerto Rican turnout than expected, and of that increased turnout, we were getting more of it than Trump was.

The Georgia turnout also was running ahead of what we needed.

He had been in North Carolina the day before and had positive reports from the campaign there as well.

Tony was unsettled but still confident. Doug, however, was dismayed.

At home, he went through the motions, mingling with our ebullient family, sitting down to dinner, raising a glass when I stood to thank everyone for all they’d done and all they’d sacrificed to get us to this night. He remembers none of it.

All he remembers is standing in the shower, freaking out, praying, hoping the Fox intel wasn’t right.

At 9:15 p.m., I left the family, still enjoying a rowdy dinner, and went upstairs. I put on sweats to do my hair and makeup. The aubergine suit I planned to wear to Howard was pressed and ready on a hanger.

On my dresser was a handwritten note from Joe that he’d sent over the day before: I could not have asked for a better partner and friend, he wrote, and can hardly wait to call you Madam President. I smiled gratefully as I reread it.

The plan was to head to the university around 10:45 p.m. and be there when the last polls closed. If we couldn’t yet claim victory, we would give a holding statement, an upbeat address saying, Stay tuned, it looks good, we’re still counting .

Why were we feeling so confident in a race that had never shifted out of toss-up territory?

We had been getting signals—objective information—from external sources.

If we won in Nevada, as Ralston had predicted, that would be an indicator for other states where we were in an even better position.

On the Friday before the election, the internal analytics team in the field had found we were winning by small margins in all the battlegrounds.

And our final poll in Pennsylvania had us up 50 to 48—a big jump from the previous numbers.

We had plans for all kinds of contingencies—that Trump might win Pennsylvania and claim premature victory, that we might win narrowly and Trump’s supporters would react with violent rejection of the result, that the count might drag on for days.

We’d planned for everything, it seemed, except the actual result.

My team had come back from Cactus Cantina and were in constant touch with JOD’s boiler room. They were getting snatches of info.

Turnout in Philly is better than expected.

Georgia not great.

Atlanta suburbs lagging.

Black votes are coming through in North Carolina. White votes are not.

North Carolina is gone.

Sherrod Brown has lost his Senate seat in Ohio.

Georgia is gone.

Okay, well, they were our toughest. It’s going to have to be the Blue Wall.

Everyone was waiting for the word to go to Howard. When it looked like the family was getting ready, Kirsten went outside to get the waiting press pool into the van. Then the direction was contradicted: Wait, we’re not leaving yet. She told the press to unload.

In the house, Chrisette shrugged off the jacket she’d just put on. Oh well, she thought, it might not be decided tonight . She poured more wine.

She had campaigned for me in four battleground states and had come to a certain conclusion: America gets it, they love her, they understand who she is .

Adam had worked up a holding statement and sent it over to the boiler room.

They’d sent back an edited version. My team thought it was too bloodless.

It didn’t have a feel-good line. They wanted to pump it up a bit.

The message was meant to be: We expect to prevail, be patient, go home, rest up, but we’ve got this .

Sheila sent that message and waited for what she thought would be a quick response. But minutes passed and nothing came back. She texted Brian: What’s taking so long?

At the table in the boiler room, Brian read the draft aloud. Meg, the top analytics expert, grimaced.

Brian, surprised by her reaction, asked, “Is that line problematic?”

Meg replied that it could be contradicted within an hour of me saying it.

Brian recalls that it was the first time anyone had said, out loud, that it was more likely we would lose than we would win.

In the boiler room, the tone shifted.

If there was no likely path to victory, it didn’t make sense for me to go out on the stage at Howard unless to concede, and it was too soon for that.

“If we can’t insert this line she’s asking for, we need to rethink.”

Then JOD called Sheila.

“I’m recommending she not go to Howard.”

They merged me in on the call to tell me.

I was sitting on my bed, fighting off the first tendrils of alarm and apprehension.

Some of my family had left for the party at the Conrad, to be my ambassadors there with donors and supporters.

Kerstin, Ella, Cole and Greenley, Jasper and Arden, and the Hudlin kids—they had already left, anxious to join the celebratory crowd.

The others were still downstairs, not yet grasping what was happening, still waiting for the word to depart for Howard.

Storm, who was the go-between, the only one moving from family to staff, had a sinking realization that things were going wrong.

She’d ordered up champagne for the celebration, and specially decorated cupcakes.

She quietly went to the kitchen and hid all signs of celebratory preparation.

She painstakingly peeled icing that read “Madame President” off the top of each cupcake.

Having converted them to innocuous comfort food, she sent them out, along with more wine, in case people needed it.

My team, desperately seeking privacy, decamped to Lorraine’s car. Crammed into the small Audi hybrid, they took another call from JOD. Then JOD called me.

“I’m sorry, ma’am. I don’t think you’re going to get there.”

“Oh my God. What’s going to happen to our country?”

I could barely breathe.

“Should we fight this?”

“We’re just not in the zone to ask.”

I walked down the stairs in shock. Chrisette and Meena were the first people I saw, sitting together on the couch. I looked at them, slowly shook my head.

They had been with me in every campaign, and we had never experienced a loss. They both started to cry. Nik, sensing the tension, gathered up Amara and Leela and took them to their bedroom.

All I could do was repeat, over and over, “My God, my God, what will happen to our country?”

I found Tony and Maya. “JOD says we are going to lose. We need to concede.”

“Let’s wait,” said Tony. “We need to know if there are concerns, complaints. If people were able to vote.” He went off to call Karen Dunn and our election lawyer, Marc Elias. The answer: nothing actionable.

We would have to send the people at Howard home. But the person to do that could not be me. We decided on Cedric Richmond, the campaign cochair, and scrambled to find him.

Maya, stoic but exhausted, retreated to the pool house. Tony stayed by the TV, watching the count in disbelief.

At 12:45 a.m., Cedric Richmond walked out onto the stage that had been built for me at Howard.

The stage stood on the Yard, the tree-lined, grassy expanse flanked by the Founders Library and Frederick Douglass Memorial Hall—storied places where strategies were formulated for Brown v.

Board of Education and other landmarks in our nation’s history.

Cedric strode to the podium with head held high and addressed the crowd in a resonant voice that betrayed nothing of the abject disappointment and pain he was feeling.

“Thank you for believing in the promise of America,” he said.

“We still have votes to count. We still have states that have not been called yet. We will continue overnight to fight to make sure that every vote is counted, that every voice has spoken, so you won’t hear from the vice president tonight.

” A groan, like a breaking wave, moved through the crowd.

“But you will hear from her tomorrow. She will be back here tomorrow to address not only the HU family, not only to address her supporters, but to address the nation.”

Although his tone was upbeat, everyone there understood what had happened. That beautiful crowd turned as if it were a single organism. They walked out of the brightness of the Yard and melted away into the darkness.

Dazed, I went back upstairs to my room. Through the wall, I could hear Amara and Leela crying.

My mind was doing crazy things.

We can still do something about this! It hasn’t happened!

Tom Brady recounted an identical insanity after he and the Patriots lost the 2008 Super Bowl to the Giants in what would have been a perfect season: “I absolutely believed 100 percent that we were going to win and it was just devastating. I couldn’t speak for the rest of the night.

I just remember waking up the next morning and I thought, ‘That’s a nightmare.

That’s a nightmare. That game didn’t happen. ’?”

This was no football game. This was our country. Our democracy. Our freedom. And my mind simply would not allow me to believe that we had lost.