"Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House," which chronicles the 2024 race for the White House between Donald Trump, Kamala Harris and Joe Biden, hit No. 1 on The New York Times bestseller list this week. Below, author Amie Parnes writes about some of the lessons she and co-author Jonathan Allen learned while putting it together.

You learn a lot covering a presidential campaign. You learn even more when you’re writing a book about it.

We found out which of the politicians kneecapped one another, which of them prioritized victory and which of them put themselves first.

We also learned major lessons on what went right, what went wrong and what went ugly for the campaigns.

There’s enough of that to fill an entire second book, but here are five themes that kept recurring in our reporting.

Democrats searching for new ideas may want to ditch some of their Obama-era operatives

Democrats have been relying on ex-aides to former President Obama for their political campaigns.

It may be time for them to rethink that strategy as they look for fresh ideas to reinvigorate their party.

Obama’s victories in 2008 and 2012 gave rise to a class of senior operatives who got a lot of credit and cache themselves for his wins.

But they also worked for a unicorn-like political figure in Obama, who himself benefited from running in a year in which the incumbent Republican president, George W. Bush was deeply unpopular.

The Obama operatives have held control or at a minimum been highly influential in the Democratic Party’s 2016, 2020 and 2024 campaigns.

Collectively, they use data to dictate strategy — such as when they chose not to respond to President Trump’s “trans” ad because focus groups told them it wasn’t effective — rather than using it to inform strategy.

That had some negative consequences in the 2024........

© The Hill