The lights were dim. The champagne was cold. The cupcakes said “Madam President.” But behind the smiles, something was missing. When Michael LaRosa finally spoke, it wasn’t spin—it was a crack in the surface. A sentence too simple to ignore, too late to change. And in that moment, the story of 2024 stopped being about numbers. It became about everything no one wanted to say out loud

Longtime press secretary to Jill Biden, Michael Larosa, said Tuesday on Fox News’ “The Ingraham Angle” that it was obvious that former Vice President Kamala Harris would lose the 2024 presidential election and asked why her staff had not been more prepared.

Harris on Tuesday released her new memoir, “107 Days,” recounting her time in the Biden White House. The book also offers what Harris says is a behind the scenes look at her brief presidential run. Fox’s Laura Ingraham cited an excerpt from the book. In it, Harris recalled a staff member, Storm, who adjusted celebratory food on election night. Ingraham asked Larosa to comment.

“I know Storm. She has a good heart, so I’m glad she was able to anticipate the vice president’s needs. But what’s a little bit jarring to me is anybody who — I’m from Pennsylvania, from the Lehigh Valley, a ground zero,” Larosa said. “I was preparing family, friends who are not political as early or as late as August. You could see the numbers.”

“How am I watching the numbers in Pennsylvania lacking the yeast, lacking behind Republican registration in a state that we won a couple of years ago? Why were they not more prepared to lose?” Larosa asked. “Because if you were paying attention, if you were living out of the bubble, you kind of knew it.”

In her memoir, Harris recalled that on Election Night, Storm “quietly” went to the kitchen to remove “celebratory preparations” after realizing” things were going wrong.”

“Storm, who was the go between, the only one moving from family to staff, had a sinking realization that things were going wrong. She had ordered up champagne for the celebration and specially decorated cupcakes. She quietly went to the kitchen and hid all signs of celebratory preparation,” Harris wrote. “She painstakingly peeled icing that read Madam President off the top of each cupcake. Having converted them to innocuous comfort food, she sent them out along with more wine in case people needed it.”

Nearly a week after the first assassination attempt against President Donald Trump, former President Joe Biden announced he would withdraw from the 2024 election and endorsed Harris on July 21, 2024. Harris was repeatedly asked about her flip-flopping on left-wing policies she promoted prior to 2020, as well as her reportedly avoiding corporate media for in-depth interviews.

Despite the limited number of interviews Harris gave, she often received backlash due to her infamous word salad answers. By Election Day, Democrats lost both the Electoral College and the popular vote to Trump. Some Democratic pundits appeared confused as to how Harris could have lost.

Exit polls from the 2024 race showed Trump gained major ground among black and Latino men, voting blocs that had once been key to Democrats. According to Reuters, the president gained 14 points among Hispanics nationally since 2020 and saw gains among black men in swing states like North Carolina.