Harris pleaded with Biden for speedy endorsement

Former Vice President Kamala Harris pleaded with former President Biden to endorse her White House bid on the same day as his historic move to end his 2024 reelection bid, according to exclusive excerpts from a forthcoming book. 

“You need to endorse me,” Harris begged Biden in the moments before the ticket switch-up, as reported by The Hill’s Amie Parnes and NBC News’s Jonathan Allen in excerpts from “Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House,” which is set for release Tuesday. 

Harris, who would face a short runway to build momentum before the November election, knew she had Biden’s support to take up the torch. But she wanted to avoid a bigger gap between his exit and his endorsement, which could have created an opening for a messy contested nomination fight as some key figures in the party hoped to pass her over.

“She knew that if Biden stepped aside without explicitly backing her, it would be taken as a statement that he lacked confidence in her ability to win or to do the job —­ or both,” according to the book. “That could mean crib death for a battle that she had not yet begun to fight. She also knew that a failure to throw his weight behind her would suggest that he had made the wrong decision in choosing her as his number two in the first place.”