The Last Few Weeks
On the campaign trail
Greetings from a folding table in the press zone outside of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where I’m waiting for Kamala Harris’s final rally of the 2024 presidential campaign to begin. After a very fun tour for Health and Safety I’ve been back on campaign coverage for The New Yorker for the past few weeks. I figured I’d send an update before all of this ends tomorrow (or, if not tomorrow, eventually.)
Until late summer, I had been ignoring this year’s presidential election. On the day of the first assassination attempt on Donald Trump, I was camping in the backcountry of Sequoia National Park. I didn’t have cell service, and all I received of the news was a single WhatsApp message with one of those squirtmoji memes people send on holidays. That was the only text that came through. I saw four bears and many marmots sunning themselves on rocks. For forty-eight hours I had to ponder what this meant.
After I came down from the mountaintop and learned that Trump had lived and Biden might drop out, I was assigned to cover the Democratic candidate, so with the exception of a break of a couple of weeks when the book came out in mid-September that’s what I’ve been doing. I went to Kamala Harris’s first campaign rally in Milwaukee. I went to North Carolina, and the Democratic National Convention. I went to Georgia and New Hampshire. I did a story on Door County, Wisconsin, which has a history of voting for the winning candidate. I did a story on the Obamas campaigning with Harris. I wrote a couple of blog posts about Tim Walz. Now I’m here, in Philadelphia, along with Fat Joe, DJ Jazzy Jeff, Lady Gaga, and Oprah. Tomorrow I’ll be filing a couple of short dispatches from the Harris campaign watch party at Howard University in Washington D.C. but I would recommend turning off your phone and reading eighteenth-century poetry or going to a museum or forest bathing or something.
The weekend before last, I was in the Airport Sheraton in Detroit. I filed my article about the Obamas at three o’clock in the morning but I was too wired to sleep so even though I had to wake up and fly back to New York and be on a New Yorker Festival panel about the election the next day I drove into the city and went to a warehouse party for exactly an hour and a half. It’s this feeling of needing to reclaim my mind, but also I was in one of my favorite cities in America the weekend before Halloween. After the Democratic National Convention, I went to the Art Institute of Chicago and only looked at pre-enlightenment art. Anyway, The Roots just started playing, it’s T-minus Oprah. Thanks as ever for reading, I’ll send out some more updates on Health and Safety as soon as all this is over.
