Editor’s note: The following is extracted from the next book “Fight: Within the wildest battle for the White House“(Copyright © 2025), By Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, which will be published on April 1 by William Morrow. It is reprinted by courtesy of the editors of Harpercollins.
Vice President Kamala Harris was not working well in softball interviews, since her sugar vanished in September and early October.
But if he wanted to expand his support, and he needed, he would have to expose himself to difficult questions. That was particularly important with men, specifically young men, who were not buying what I was selling.
The obvious answer: Joe Rogan. A comedy star from the late 1990 Spotify. His 2018 interview with Elon Musk, during which the founder of Tesla and Spacex smoked the pot and drank whiskey, obtained dozens of millions of views on YouTube and crashed the actions of the next -generation car company.
The vast majority of Rogan’s guests and listeners were white men, presenting Harris a potentially golden opportunity to demonstrate his temper entering the lion’s lair.
On October 11, the deputy manager of the Harris campaign, Rob Flaherty, the assistant in charge of the digital strategy, made Zoom’s first call to begin negotiating with Rogan’s representatives. I didn’t know what to expect. These can be compensated for UFC -looking supplementsthought. He was surprised, perhaps a bit disappointed, to discover that Rogan’s associates were more as Hollywood agents. In that sense, they described the podcast conditions for an interview: there are no staff in the study, without restrictions on topics, and Harris would have to sign an exemption.
There was another article in small impression: Harris would have to come to Austin, Texas. Rogan’s representatives said it could be negotiable, but that he had only done an interview with a guest outside the study. That was the Edward Snowden filtration, which was wanted in the United States at that time.
Together with Harris’s campaign, Stephanie Cutter and Brian Fallon, Flaherty offered that Harris would be happy to talk about the censorship of social networks, grass and other issues that thought they would be of greater interest for their listeners. From his perspective, it was a suggestion of possible themes, not an exhaustive or exclusive list. It’s not what Rogan wanted to talk. “Joe just wants to talk about the economy, border and abortion,” said one of his representatives, according to a person familiar with negotiations.
After two Zoom sessions, Flaherty called Rogan’s intermediaries with an offer. Could I beg Harris to join Michigan? He asked, proposing a date later in the week. No -go, Rogan’s team said after arriving at the host on a one-week hunting trip. Austin or nothing.
“That is going to be hard,” Flaherty said. “We are just a few weeks after the elections.” Harris had less than zero reasons to be in Texas. It was not a swing state. His campaign was full of cash, so it made no sense to remove it from the road to raise money. I was in battlefield mode or mode. In addition, a deviation to Texas could smell desperation for the press and a loss of money for donors.

Harris’s campaign chief Jennifer O’Malley Dillon broke the impasse. Harris would be in Atlanta on October 24 with Barack Obama and Bruce Springsteen. O’Malley Dillon said the campaign could fly to Houston for a demonstration, on the cover of visiting a state with one of the most restrictive abortion laws of the nation, to put it near Austin. He sent an early team to the capital of the state of Texas to take a tour of Rogan’s study and prepare for an arrival of Harris. She authorized her negotiation team to give Rogan what she demanded, an interview in the studio in Austin, on October 25.
For all the work of former President Donald Trump to reach the apolitical voters through podcasts, YouTube and other points of sale, Harris positioned himself to score a coup d’etat grabbing the largest megaphone of all. If I did, a crack would be exploiting between Rogan and Trump.
Rogan had called Trump a “man man” and a “threat to democracy” in 2022, promising not interviewing the former president. At that time, the meat was just one more signal of the social stigma attached to Trump after the assault of January 6 to the Capitol, a Trump advisor said for a long time. But when Rogan seemed to support the independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. In August, Trump responded to the Truth Social Network Platform: “Is it interesting to see how strong Joe Rogan is the next time he enters the UFC ring ? ? Maga2024. ”Trump wrote.
At the same time, Rogan was barely the popular Mr. inside the Harris camp. His brother -in -law, Tony West, the advisor for a long time Miningon Moore and others argue Rogan, bombed.
It was not known what I could ask or how I would treat her. In addition, his “Antiwake” crusade had made him a out of the left. They were annulled by the O’Malley Dillon crew, but not because the concerns were considered invalid. “Even for those of us who were in favor of it, it was a close decision,” said one of Harris’s advisors involved in the return to height.
The Harris High Command was not built to launch Hail Mary passes. Its leaders, starting with O’Malley Dillon, cut their teeth in campaigns that ridiculed other Democrats to “loin” if the crises were imagined or real. Looking for an interview in a popular podcast barely qualified as a despair launch in the field. But it was a relatively risky movement for campaign leadership that had kept its candidate sealing hermetically in the manufacturer’s box, as if it retained more value without exposure to air and sunlight.
On October 10, the day before Flaherty spoke for the first time with Rogan’s team, the weekly internal analysis of the Harris Campaign of the race, a 129 -page document, had projected that Harris won exactly 270 votes electoral He was on his way to take the blue wall and the second district of Nebraska, but lose the rest of the swing states, at least according to his own analysts.
However, under the numbers of the upper line, the analysis showed why it was so important that Harris reached the type of voters who listened to Rogan. In the states of the battlefield, Trump led Harris for 10.6 percentage points between men and followed her with 9.3 percentage points among women, according to his team’s figures. In both gender divisions, Trump made about 2 points better against Harris in the battlefields, the area of the greatest concentration for campaigns, than in national surveys. He directed it among young men, was tied with Hispanic men and followed it among black men by a smaller margin that Biden defeated him in 2020.
For many Democratic agents outside the campaign, the announcement of October 22 that Harris would celebrate a Houston rally felt like a moment from palm to face. She was going to lose Texas, by far, and a visit would not force Trump to spend her limited money campaign.
His assistants scheduled the rally for a Friday night in autumn – October 25 – In Texas! It was as if no one in his team knew that the night reserved for high school football was more sacred than Easter in the state. The campaign advisor David Plouffe responded to criticism publicly, explaining that Harris wanted to highlight a place where he believed that Trump’s anti -abortion policies had caused the greatest damage to women’s health.
Only a few people knew the real reason: the entire Houston demonstration was built to put it near Rogan. The ongoing negotiations about that were tactile.
Flaherty had called his contacts from Rogan on October 18, before the rally was established.
“We could do on Friday 25,” Flaherty said.
“I wish we would have known about this before, because it has the 25th blocked as a personal day,” said one of Rogan’s representatives.
“What about Saturday morning?” Flaherty replied.
“Only if it is before 8:30 am,” came the difficult answer.
The tone is differentFlaherty thought. The United States vice president is offering to come to his F Ing show, and keep placing more hoops. Harris’s team still wanted it to work, but a new caution was established.
On October 22, the same day that the Harris camp announced the demonstration, The Associated Press reported that Trump would be Rogan’s guest on Friday, the “personal day” Rogan had originally reserved.
Mutual friends Elon Musk and Dana White had convinced Trump and beg to bury their dispute, according to a Trump assistant. There would be no Harris interview.
In this wild hand of Texas Hold ‘Em, Harris Ayes thought they had one more to play. Beyoncé was in Houston and was willing to act in the rally. “The plan changed about 20 times that day, and they landed in their song ‘Libertad’ A Cappella Before Harris took the stage, ”said a person familiar with the return part between the campaign and Beyoncé’s team.
As the consolation awards advance, a Beyoncé performance qualified quite high. She was a bigger star that Rogan, a global diva in good faith, and “Freedom” was the main song of the campaign. But Beyoncé would not give Harris the potential benefits of a Rogan interview: demonstration of his willingness to leave his comfort zone and connection with a new audience.
Worse for Harris, Beyoncé did not act. She would speak. But she didn’t sing.
They don’t pray. Without “freedom.” The campaign kept his poker face, but had developed a loser hand. Trump spent three hours with Rogan in an interview that instantly went viral. The contrast was equivalent to a “traumatic event,” said a Harris assistant, “I will never forget.” But it was not completely ended. Later, they would blame the connection lost in Harris and accuse her of refusing to talk about marijuana, although her platform included legalization.
Harris’s assistants made a final stab, offering to let Rogan talk to the vice president in Washington, DC, the day after a closing argument speech at the foot of the White House. Rogan’s team resisted, citing Austin’s only condition.
Flaherty had seen enough. “You get a trip to Texas within three weeks after the elections,” Rogan’s associates told. “You don’t get two.”
Jonathan Allen is a senior national policy reporter for NBC News and the co -author, with Amie Parnes, of three previous books, including sales success No. 1 of the New York Times “Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Dured Campaign”. Parnes is the main political correspondent of the hill.