New Book Exposes Kamala Harris’ Absurd Demands On Campaign Trail
Kamala Harris’ 2024 presidential campaign appeared to be doomed from the outset.
A passage from FIGHT: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes exposes a series of bizarre requests from Harris’s team and how the insistence on maintaining “no daylight” from former President Joe Biden ultimately sank her run.
According to the book, Harris’s debut interview turned out to be a catastrophe.
As the broadcast aired nationwide, with millions watching to see whether she could step up as Joe Biden’s successor, Harris came across as unsure and, more troubling, diminished in stature.
Her team quickly blamed the chair she was seated in—not her dodging of questions or the fact that her running mate, Tim Walz, dominated most of the discussion. Moving forward, anyone wanting to interview her would have to comply with an unusual checklist specifying exact chair dimensions and features.
“Leg height no less than 15 inches; floor to top of seat height no less than 18.9 inches; arms on chairs may not be very high, arms must fall at a natural height; chairs must be firm,” said the staging guide distributed by her staff to journalists, as reported by The Hill.
Just days after launching her struggling campaign, Harris began offering praise for the Biden administration while carefully stepping away from its most criticized decisions—something her campaign team had demanded. Still resentful about being pushed out, Biden consistently stressed what he expected from Harris moving forward.
His message to his advisors—many of whom eventually took charge of Harris’s campaign—was crystal clear: her platform must not overlap with his own.
In a private discussion before her first debate with Donald Trump, Biden metaphorically cornered Harris, reiterating that she was now responsible for protecting and promoting his legacy.
“No daylight,” he told her.
But the campaign's internal chaos soon became visible. Harris started making off-the-cuff promises that surprised even her allies. She assured CNN’s Dana Bash she’d appoint a Republican to her cabinet. And despite having strongly backed the Green New Deal during the primaries, she pledged that fracking would remain legal in key battleground states like Pennsylvania.
That first sit-down interview—despite being carefully managed—ended up making Harris seem more like she was being babysat than prepared to lead.
As voters assessed whether Harris or Trump represented the bigger political shift, even supporters acknowledged that having Walz speak for most of the interview may have steadied her nerves, but it ultimately made her appear passive—“a shrinking violet,” hesitant to assert herself.
She, Walz, and Bash finally appeared together on air over a month into her compressed 90-day campaign. Much of her messaging warned about the impending Trump “oligarchy” if voters didn’t support her ticket. Meanwhile, journalists increasingly portrayed her campaign as closed-off and overly controlled.
After the election, as Harris and Biden packed up and prepared to leave public life, they were rarely seen together. And in his final media appearances, the 82-year-old Biden began to issue pointed criticisms of his former running mate.
Harris was “saddened,” according to aides who spoke with her in those closing moments.