Page 87 of 107 Days

I woke from a brief, fitful sleep, still unable to believe what had happened. My mind tumbled through impossible scenarios:

It’s not true.

If it’s true, how can we fix it?

What if we do this?

Could we do that?

I was ashamed to realize I was in the denial and bargaining stages of grief, a very long way from acceptance. I could objectively diagnose what I was experiencing. I had no cure for it.

But for our democracy, for my dignity, and for the more than seventy-five million who had supported and believed in our vision for the country, I had to get past my personal mental turmoil and do my job.

And part of that was restoring the norms of a peaceful transfer of power that Trump had flouted. I asked Sheila to set up the concession phone call—the call that Trump had never made to Joe Biden.

It was a fair election, I said, and I told him I planned to speak about that in the afternoon. I promised that the president and I would help on the transition, “and of course we will facilitate a peaceful transfer of power.”

I thanked him for his call for unity. “I do hope you will be a president for all Americans. I think the country really needs their president to bring us together, and I hope you will do that.” I knew, even as I was saying it, that it would turn out to be a vain hope.

Trump was effusive and magnanimous in the glow of his win. “I am going to be so nice and respectful,” he said. “You are a tough, smart customer, and I say that with great respect. And you also have a beautiful name. I got use of that name, it’s Kamala.”

For once, he pronounced it correctly.

Adam Frankel had spent the night drafting a concession speech. I paged through it, barely able to focus on the words. I called Adam. It might be easier, I thought, to talk it through.

“How are you doing, ma’am?”

It wasn’t the moment to wallow in my feelings. We could do that later. Right now, I told him, “We have to get through this speech.”

In the early afternoon, the team gathered once again in the library. Pale, haggard faces. Tired eyes. I walked in and gave everyone a hug and thanked them. Then we got to work.

Crowds had already begun to gather at Howard. But the speech didn’t feel right.

“Let’s take a step back from this draft,” I said. “What do we really want to say?” I hadn’t watched or read the news. “How are people—how is the country—feeling?”

“Sad.”

“Resigned.”

Kirsten: “There’s a range of feelings: sad, angry, disappointed, dismayed…”

Then, monotone, from JOD:

“Gutted.”

Somehow, her one evocative, entirely apt word broke the desolate mood, and we all laughed.

“Well, we’re not going to have a pity party. I’m not going to get up there and cry. I am proud of the race we ran and the way we ran it.”

But this wasn’t just any election. I had argued throughout the campaign that the stakes in this race were exceptionally high.

I needed to find a way to motivate people—especially young people—to stay in this fight.

I wanted to communicate that the stakes were still high.

We did something, we had accomplished something, that we could not, just in one night, lose.

We had said it, chanted it, shouted it at every single rally:

When we fight, we win.

“There were all these families at those rallies, all those children. I can’t just say you win some, you lose some. That’s not what this has been about. We need to find a way to reconcile what they heard me say and what they chanted back with the reality we’re facing today.

“Sometimes the fight takes a while. That doesn’t mean that we won’t win.”

And there it was, the heart of my concession speech. While I would concede this election, while I would engage in the peaceful transfer of power that distinguishes democracy from monarchy or tyranny, I would not concede the fight that fueled my campaign.

Adam did a time check: the motorcade was set to depart in thirty minutes. I went upstairs and finally took that aubergine suit off its hanger. I ran through the draft of the speech in my head.

There was still something I needed to fix. Something not right.

On my way down to the cars, I saw Kirsten and Adam huddled over a laptop in the sunroom, putting in final edits.

“Take out the Trump language,” I said. “It feels bitter.”

There had been a section in the speech about the rollback of our rights and freedoms, but I’d said all that already. I’d prosecuted the case. The election was over. Going after Trump was not the work of this day. This day was about lifting our supporters.

Outside, the motorcade was loaded and waiting, but I needed to get this right. I told Adam the changes I needed. We sent half the speech to be loaded in the teleprompter and set up Adam with a secure hot spot so that he could work on the second half and send it from the car.

In the holding room at Howard, the immediate family had gathered. Then the Walz family arrived.

Tim said simply, “I’m sorry.”

His daughter, Hope, was distraught. Sobbing. I put my arms around her. “We are not defeated,” I said softly. “Our spirit is not defeated. There’s so much in your future, so much to fight for.”

At 4:24 p.m., to the percussive beat of the Howard marching band, I made the long walk down the blue-carpeted stage we had built out into the midst of that cheering, weeping crowd. Archbishop óscar Romero once said, “There are many things that can only be seen through eyes that have cried.”

In that sea of faces, four rows back, I recognized my auntie Lenore, my mother’s best friend when they were students together at Berkeley, two young idealists, fighting for civil rights.

She had navigated the big crowd, unannounced, not to sit in the VIP section, just to stand there, to smile at me, to say, It’s going to be okay, and I’m proud of you, and I’m here .

On that day, my task was to show everyone, especially the young people, that as hurt and traumatized as we felt, we would not retreat from the fight.

It might take a while.

But the fight for our country is always worth it.

And we will win.