Compulsively readable - I finished this lengthy book in 3 sittings. It provides a fascinating inside view of the 2024 election, giving the reader a sense both of the overall narrative and the microdetails (e.g. that the drive-by customers at Trump's McDonald stunt were all prescreened).
The structure is certainly effective, opening with a montage of the various major players on the evening of Biden and Trump's only debate, and closing with the aftermath of Harris' defeat, also from the perspective of the major players.
The sketches and portraits of the players themselves are detailed, rich, colorful and convincing. I particularly relished the characterizations of Obama and Pelosi, who both dreaded a Harris candidacy and were grimly vindicated in the end. (Biden did not return the favor of Obama's awarding him the Presidential Medal of Freedom.)
Of the three principals, oddly Trump comes off best: typically egotistic and self-aggrandizing, but also charming, gentle (as described by the authors when he took Harris' concession call - "Trump thanked her for calling. She was struck by his gentle tone." Ch. 15) and - this is important - politically astute. He really does seem to have become more self-controlled and disciplined with time (and certainly wise enough to have - and keep! -Susie Wiles as principal manager).
Harris is presented as the worst: an empty candidate whose only reason for running was that she was next in line. Furthermore, she was held aloft only by the sentiment that the Democrats - keepers of the DEI flame - could hardly afford to pass over the first Black Woman to be the presidential candidate of a major political party. She is portrayed, not without sympathy as having been handed a series of impossible tasks, but as overly ambitious, insecure, and politically dim. (Also, as not particulary quick on her feet - bizarre, for an ex-prosecutor: cf. her infamous pull-quote from The View.)
Biden is tragic but not in a grand or ennobling way, and Allen and Parnes do not spare him (or his family) the vituperation for allowing his 2020 victory and the fulfillment of a lifetime ambition to delude himself into fantasy and devolve his faculties into senescence. Caught in a web of contradictions, he picked Harris to be his VP (as a sop to the woke-ists in his party) but really did not want her to run as President in his place (in recognition of the reality of her incompetence). As the authors point out, he was indeed a bridge - but not, as he intended, from Trump to the bright younger generation of Democratic leaders, but from Trump's first presidency to his second. He is last seen slumping off stage, still declaring that he could have won. Sad.
