Editor’s note: The following is excerpted from the forthcoming book “FIGHT: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House” (copyright © 2025), by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, which is due to be published April 1 by William Morrow. It is reprinted courtesy of HarperCollins Publishers.
Vice President Kamala Harris wasn’t performing well in softball interviews as her sugar high faded in September and early October.
But if she wanted to expand her support — and she needed to — she would have to expose herself to tough questioning. That was particularly important with men—specifically young men—who were not buying what she was selling.
The obvious answer: Joe Rogan. A late-1990s sitcom star turned bro-with-a-brain podcaster, Rogan boasted a subscriber base that amounted to a total eclipse of the genre’s universe, with nearly 15 million signed up just on Spotify. His 2018 interview with Elon Musk, during which the Tesla and SpaceX founder smoked pot and sipped whiskey, garnered tens of millions of views on YouTube and crashed the next-generation car company’s stock.
The vast majority of Rogan’s guests and listeners were white men, presenting Harris with a potentially golden opportunity to prove her mettle by walking into the lion’s den.
On October 11, Harris deputy campaign manager Rob Flaherty, the aide in charge of digital strategy, made the first Zoom call to start negotiating with Rogan’s reps. He did not know what to expect. These might be juiced-up, UFC-looking supplement people, he thought. He was surprised—perhaps a tad disappointed—to find out that Rogan’s associates were more like Hollywood agents. In that vein, they outlined the podcaster’s conditions for an interview: no staff in the studio, no topic restrictions, and Harris would have to sign a waiver.
There was one more item in the small print: Harris would have to come to Austin, Texas. Rogan’s reps said that might be negotiable, but he had only once done an interview with an out-of-studio guest. That was leaker Edward Snowden, who was wanted in the United States at the time.
Along with fellow Harris campaign advisers Stephanie Cutter and Brian Fallon, Flaherty offered up that Harris would be happy to talk about social media censorship, weed, and other issues they thought would be of most interest to his listeners. From their perspective, it was a suggestion of possible topics, not an exhaustive or exclusive list. That’s not what Rogan wanted to talk about. “Joe just wants to talk about the economy, the border, and abortion,” one of his reps said, according to a person familiar with the negotiations.
After two Zoom sessions, Flaherty called the Rogan intermediaries with an offer. Could Rogan join Harris in Michigan? he asked, proposing a date later in the week. No-go, the Rogan team said after reaching the host on a weeklong hunting trip. Austin or nothing.
“That’s going to be tough,” Flaherty said. “We’re only a few weeks out from the election.” Harris had less than zero reason to be in Texas. It was not a swing state. Her campaign was flush with cash—so it made no sense to take her off the trail to raise money. She was in battleground-or-bust mode. Plus, a detour to Texas might smell like desperation to the press and a waste of money to donors.
Harris 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 her to Houston for a rally—under the cover of visiting a state with one of the nation’s most restrictive abortion laws—to put her in proximity to Austin. She dispatched an advance team to the Texas state capital to do a walk-through of Rogan’s studio and get ready for a Harris arrival. She authorized her negotiating team to give Rogan what he demanded—an in-studio interview in Austin—on October 25.
For all of former President Donald Trump’s work to reach apolitical voters through podcasts, YouTube, and other outlets, Harris positioned herself to score a coup by grabbing the biggest megaphone of them all. If she did, she would be exploiting a rift between Rogan and Trump.
Rogan had called Trump a “man baby” and a “threat to democracy” in 2022, vowing not to interview the former president. At the time, the beef was just one more sign of the social stigma attached to Trump after the January 6 assault on the Capitol, said one longtime Trump adviser. But when Rogan appeared to endorse independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in August, Trump fired back on the Truth Social media platform: “It will be interesting to see how loudly Joe Rogan gets BOOED the next time he enters the UFC Ring??? MAGA2024.,” Trump wrote.
At the same time, Rogan was hardly Mr. Popular inside Harris’s camp. Her brother in law, Tony West, longtime adviser Minyon Moore and others argued against putting Harris on the podcast, especially after her first venture into politically tough terrain—an interview with Fox’s Bret Baier in the middle of the Rogan negotiations—bombed.
There was no telling what Rogan might ask her or how he would treat her. Plus, his “antiwoke” crusade had made him a pariah on the hard left. They were overruled by O’Malley Dillon’s crew, but not because the concerns were considered invalid. “Even for those of us who were in favor of it, it was a close call,” said one of the Harris advisers involved in the back-and-forth.
The Harris high command was not built to lob Hail Mary passes. Its leaders, starting with O’Malley Dillon, cut their teeth on campaigns that ridiculed fellow Democrats for “bed-wetting” whether crises were imagined or real. Seeking an interview on a popular podcast hardly qualified as a desperation throw downfield. But it was a relatively risky move for a campaign leadership that had kept its candidate hermetically sealed in the manufacturer’s box, like she would retain more value without exposure to air and sunlight.
On October 10, the day before Flaherty first spoke with Rogan’s team, the Harris campaign’s weekly internal analytics assessment of the race—a 129-page document—had projected Harris winning exactly 270 electoral votes. She was on track to take the Blue Wall and Nebraska’s 2nd District—but lose the rest of the swing states—at least according to her own analysts.
Beneath the top-line numbers, though, the analytics showed why it was so important for Harris to reach the type of voters who listened to Rogan. In battleground states, Trump led Harris by 10.6 percentage points among men and trailed her by 9.3 percentage points among women, according to her team’s figures. In both gender splits, Trump did about 2 points better against Harris in the battlegrounds—the area of greatest concentration for the campaigns—than in national polling. He led her among young men, was tied with Hispanic men, and trailed her among Black men by a smaller margin than Biden beat him by in 2020.
For many Democratic operatives outside the campaign, the October 22 announcement that Harris would hold a Houston rally felt like a palm-to-face moment. She was going to lose Texas, by a lot, and a visit would not force Trump to spend his limited campaign money there.
Her aides scheduled the rally for a Friday night in the fall — October 25 — in Texas! It was as if no one on her team knew that the night reserved for high school football was more sacred than Easter in the state. 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.
Only a few people knew the real reason: the whole Houston rally was built to put her in proximity to Rogan. The ongoing negotiations on that were touch-and-go.
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.
“What about Saturday morning?” 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. Beyoncé was in Houston and willing to perform at the rally. “The plan changed like 20 times that day, and they landed on her singing ‘Freedom’ a cappella before Harris walked on stage,” said one person familiar with the back-and-forth between the campaign and Beyoncé’s team.
As consolation prizes go, a Beyoncé 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 Beyoncé 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, Beyoncé 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.
