Editor’s note: The following is taken from Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes’ upcoming book FIGHT: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House (copyright2025), which William Morrow is scheduled to publish on April 1. HarperCollins Publishers is responsible for the reprinting.
As her sugar high wore off in September and early October, Vice President Kamala Harris was struggling in softball interviews.
However, she would have to subject herself to difficult interrogation if she needed to increase her support. When it came to guys, especially young men who weren’t purchasing her goods, that was especially crucial.
Joe Rogan is the obvious choice. With almost 15 million Spotify subscribers, Rogan, a late 1990s sitcom star who is now a bro-with-a-brain podcaster, had a following that dwarfed the entire genre. His 2018 interview with Elon Musk, in which the founder of SpaceX and Tesla drank whiskey and smoked marijuana, received tens of millions of views on YouTube and caused the stock of the next-generation automaker to plummet.
Since white men made up the great majority of Rogan’s audience and guests, Harris had a potentially fantastic chance to demonstrate her abilities by entering the lion’s den.
Rob Flaherty, Harris’s deputy campaign manager and the assistant responsible for digital strategy, initiated the first Zoom call to begin negotiations with Rogan’s representatives on October 11. He had no idea what to anticipate.He believed these may be supplement-guys, appearing like they belong in the UFC. He was shocked—and maybe a little let down—to learn that Rogan’s associates were more akin to Hollywood agents. In keeping with that, they listed the podcaster’s requirements for an interview: Harris would need to sign a waiver, there would be no personnel in the studio, and there would be no restrictions on the subject.
The fine print also stated that Harris would need to travel to Austin, Texas. Although Rogan had only conducted one interview with an out-of-studio guest, his representatives stated that it might be negotiable. That was Edward Snowden, the leaker who was wanted in the US at the time.
Flaherty offered up that Harris would be pleased to discuss marijuana, social media censorship, and other topics they believed his audience would be most interested in, along with fellow Harris campaign staffers Stephanie Cutter and Brian Fallon. They saw it as a list of potential subjects, not a comprehensive or exclusive one. Rogan didn’t want to talk about that. According to someone acquainted with the conversations, one of Joe’s representatives stated that he only wanted to discuss the economy, the border, and abortion.
Flaherty called the Rogan middlemen with an offer after two Zoom sessions. He suggested a time later in the week for Rogan to join him in Michigan. When the Rogan team arrived at the host on a weeklong hunting excursion, they stated, “No-go.” Austin or nothing.
“That will be difficult,” Flaherty remarked. The election is just a few weeks away. There was absolutely no need for Harris to be in Texas. The state was not swinging. It made no sense to remove her from the trail in order to gather money because her campaign was well-funded. Her mindset was “battleground-or-bust.” Additionally, to the media and funders, a trip to Texas may appear desperate and wasteful.
Jennifer O. Malley Dillon, the head of the Harris campaign, broke the deadlock. On October 24, Harris would join Bruce Springsteen and Barack Obama in Atlanta. In order to position her close to Austin, O Malley Dillon suggested that the campaign fly her to Houston for a rally while pretending to be in a state with some of the strictest abortion restrictions in the country. To prepare for Harris’s arrival, she sent an advance crew to the Texas state capitol to conduct a tour of Rogan’s studio. She gave her negotiating team permission to give Rogan the in-studio interview he requested on October 25 in Austin.
Harris set herself up for a coup by seizing the largest megaphone of all, despite former President Donald Trump’s efforts to reach apolitical voters through YouTube, podcasts, and other platforms. She would be taking advantage of a disagreement between Rogan and Trump if she did.
In 2022, Rogan had vowed not to interview the former president after calling Trump a man baby and a menace to democracy. One veteran Trump adviser at the time claimed that the feud was just another example of the social disapproval that Trump was subjected to following the attack on the Capitol on January 6. However, Trump retaliated on the Truth Social social media platform in August after Rogan seemed to support independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.: “It will be interesting to see how loudly Joe Rogan gets BOOED the next time he enters the UFC Ring??? MAGA2024,” Trump said.
In Harris’s camp at the time, Rogan was not popular. Longtime advisor Minyon Moore, her brother-in-law Tony West, and others opposed Harris’ inclusion on the podcast, particularly after her first foray into politically challenging territory—an interview with Fox’s Bret Baier during the Rogan negotiations—failed miserably.
It was impossible to predict what Rogan might question her or how he would behave toward her. He was also a hard-left outcast because to his antiwoke campaign. O Malley Dillon’s crew overruled them, but not because they didn’t have reasonable concerns. According to one of the Harris advisers who participated in the back and forth, it was a tough call, even for those of us who supported it.
Hail Mary passes were not intended for the Harris high command. Its leaders, beginning with O Malley Dillon, gained experience in campaigns that made fun of other Democrats for bedwetting, regardless of whether crises were real or contrived. It was hardly a desperate downfield to ask for an interview on a well-known podcast. For a campaign leadership that had kept its candidate hermetically sealed in the manufacturer’s box, believing that she would keep greater worth without exposure to air and sunshine, it was a rather dangerous decision.
The Harris campaign’s weekly internal analytics evaluation of the race, a 129-page document released on October 10—the day before Flaherty first met with Rogan’s team—projected Harris winning precisely 270 electoral votes. According to her own experts, she was on course to win the Blue Wall and Nebraska’s 2nd District but lose the remaining swing states.
However, beyond the headlines, the data demonstrated why it was crucial for Harris to connect with the kind of voters who paid attention to Rogan. According to data from her team, Trump was ahead of Harris by 10.6 percentage points among men in battleground states and behind her by 9.3 percentage points among women. In the battlegrounds, where the campaigns are most focused, Trump outperformed Harris by almost 2 points in both gender divisions compared to national polling. He trailed her among Black males by a narrower margin than Biden did in 2020, tied with Hispanic men, and led her among young men.
The news that Harris would host a rally in Houston on October 22 felt like a palm-to-face moment for a lot of Democratic operatives outside the campaign. A visit would not compel Trump to use his meager campaign funds in Texas, where she was likely to lose by a significant margin.
Her assistants planned the gathering for October 25, a Friday evening in Texas! It seemed as though none of her teammates were aware that the high school football game night was more revered in the state than Easter. Campaign adviser David Plouffe responded to the criticism publicly, explaining that Harris wanted to shine a spotlight on a place where she believed Trump s anti-abortion policies had done the most damage to women s health.
Few people were aware of the true motivation, which was that the entire Houston gathering was designed to place her close to Rogan. Negotiations on it were still in progress.
Flaherty had called his Rogan contacts on October 18, before the rally was set.
We could do Friday, the 25th, Flaherty said.
Wish we had known about this sooner, because he has the 25th blocked out as a personal day, one of Rogan s reps said.
How about early on Saturday? Flaherty countered.
Only if it s before 8:30 a.m., came the tough reply.
The tone is different, Flaherty thought.The vice president of the United States is offering to come to your f ing show, and you keep putting up more hoops. Harris s team still wanted to make it work, but a new wariness set in.
On October 22, the same day the Harris camp announced the rally, 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 Rogan to bury their dispute, according to a Trump aide. There would be no Harris interview.
In this wild hand of Texas Hold Em, Harris aides thought they had one more ace to play. Beyonc was in Houston and willing to perform at the rally. The plan changed like 20 times that day, and they landed on her singing Freedoma cappellabefore Harris walked on stage, said one person familiar with the back-and-forth between the campaign and Beyonc s team.
As consolation prizes go, a Beyonc performance ranked pretty high. She was a bigger star than Rogan a bona fide global diva and Freedom was the campaign s theme song. But Beyonc would not give Harris the potential benefits of a Rogan interview: demonstration of her willingness to go outside her comfort zone and connection to a new audience.
Worse for Harris, Beyonc didn’t perform. She would speak. But she would not sing.
No Rogan. No Freedom. The campaign kept its poker face, but it had played out a losing hand. Trump spent three hours with Rogan in an interview that instantly went viral. The contrast amounted to a traumatic event, said one Harris aide, that I will never forget. But it wasn t quite over. Rogan would later blame the missed connection on Harris and accuse her of refusing to talk about marijuana, even though her platform included legalization.
Harris aides made a final stab, offering to let Rogan talk with the vice president in Washington, D.C., the day after a closing-argument speech at the foot of the White House. Rogan s team balked, citing the Austin-only condition.
Flaherty had seen enough. You get one trip to Texas within three weeks of the election, he told Rogan s associates. You don t get two.
Jonathan Allen is a senior national politics reporter for NBC News and the co-author, with Amie Parnes, of three previous books, including the No. 1 New York Times bestseller Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton s Doomed Campaign. Parnes is the senior political correspondent for The Hill.