Jonathan Allen got his start at 14, covering his high school's football, basketball and baseball teams for a local paper because his reporter father told him to get a job — and because it was the one gig his dad couldn't call fake work. Decades later, he's NBC News's senior national politics reporter and, with his writing partner Amie Parnes, the co-author of four bestselling campaign books: "HRC," "Shattered," "Lucky" and the newest, "Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House," about the 2024 race. We talked about how he and Parnes actually write together, what surprised him most while reporting "Fight," and what it takes to sell a book once it's finally out. Here's what stood out.
Key Takeaways
Jonathan Allen spent roughly a decade at Congressional Quarterly early in his career, a grounding in legislative detail he credits for the substantively grounded reporting he does today.
He and Amie Parnes write side by side in a shared Google document, sometimes literally back to back with laptops, trading paragraphs and pushing each other on interviewing style.
Their newest book, "Fight," was reported and written in about five weeks after their publisher called following the Biden-Trump debate, and runs roughly 100,000 words.
Allen's biggest surprise reporting "Fight" was how directly Joe Biden himself, not just his aides, pushed Kamala Harris to avoid creating "daylight" between them during her campaign.
Allen and Parnes protect their day jobs and their book reporting with explicit ground rules with sources, agreeing that nothing surfaces before an election so people stay candid.
Selling a finished book, Allen said, is almost a second career: work the phones, call people you don't know, and treat the release date itself as just the start of the hustle.
How Did Jonathan Allen Fall Into a Career Covering Capitol Hill?
Allen didn't have a plan coming out of college. What he had was a father who was a reporter and a teenage side gig covering local high school sports that "only requires like a few hours a week," as he put it, and that his dad couldn't dismiss as not a real job. From there: a local newspaper, then nearly ten years at Congressional Quarterly, the trade publication built around tracking how legislation actually moves through Congress or stalls out.
That grounding mattered more than he expected. "It was such a great background to have in terms of learning all the different policies, learning the different players on Capitol Hill," he said. He went on to run the White House bureau for Politico and the Washington bureau for Bloomberg before landing at NBC News — a run that, he's quick to say, involved plenty of moves that looked like mistakes at the time. His advice to anyone earlier in a career: "Bloom where you're planted," because thriving where you are is what gets you the next job, not misery you're just waiting out.
How Do Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes Actually Write a Book Together?
The partnership started almost by accident. An agent approached Allen and Parnes wanting a book on Hillary Clinton's time at the State Department, betting she'd run for president. Neither of them had written a book proposal before. "I don't think I've ever attempted anything so difficult in my life," Allen said of that first book, "HRC." They hit the New York Times bestseller list, a possibility Allen said he hadn't even considered until after the book was finished.
Their process hasn't changed much since: a shared Google document, sometimes typing side by side with laptops back to back, trading paragraphs and pushing back on each other in real time. "I'd write a few paragraphs and then she'd be like, that's terrible, let me write a few," Allen said. Their instincts diverge in useful ways — Parnes chases physical detail, Allen chases the bigger implication — and reporting interviews together, he said, has taught him more about the craft than reporting them solo ever did.
What Did "Fight" Reveal About Biden's Grip on Kamala Harris's Campaign?
Allen and Parnes didn't set out to write a 2024 book at all. Their publisher called after the Biden-Trump debate in the summer of 2024, and they reported and wrote roughly 100,000 words in about five weeks, publishing the following spring. The detail that stuck with Allen most: how much of the pressure on Harris to avoid breaking from Biden came from Biden himself, not just from aides managing the campaign around him.
"I think if she had it to do over again, she probably would have broken from him harder and faster," Allen said — not a full reversal, but enough distance to name a few things that would be different under a Harris administration. Harris hadn't run for president before and hadn't been Biden's peer in national politics for long, Allen said, and he came away surprised that Biden's own signals reinforced staying in lockstep even when some of his own White House aides were privately telling Harris to define herself.
How Do You Report a Campaign Book and a Day Job at the Same Time?
Allen doesn't sugarcoat the load. "It is literally a second job," he said, and both he and Parnes were often reporting the same events twice — once for NBC and CNN's day-to-day coverage, once for the book, with different rules governing each. To keep sources honest, they set an explicit agreement going in: nothing from book interviews surfaces before the election, so people can speak candidly without worrying they'll tip their own side's hand in real time.
When a source says something mid-interview that clearly belongs in daily coverage instead of waiting for the book, Allen and Parnes talk it through and go back to ask permission to break it out early. It's a level of source management most campaign reporters never have to build, because most reporters aren't running two separate, simultaneous accountability projects on the same candidates.
What Does It Actually Take to Sell a Book After It's Published?
The anxious part, Allen said, comes before publication — a lull where there's little to do except call everyone you know at television shows and hope. "The personal touch really matters," he said. Publisher PR departments send out the standard pitch, but Allen and Parnes have found that working the phones themselves, texting hosts they don't personally know, is what actually books the big slots. Their book came out on a Tuesday; by Sunday night before that, they were texting a major cable host cold and landed a Monday booking.
He's candid about how uncomfortable that part is for a reporter. His day job runs on being "fair and balanced ... in an objective fashion," he said, while book promotion means going out and pitching your own work as the greatest thing in the world. "It's an odd sort of transition to go from one to the other and then back," he said — one that gets easier only because he and Parnes stay focused on the story itself rather than the sales pitch.
What Keeps Sources Coming Back to Allen and Parnes for the Next Book?
Allen credits discipline, not access, for the run of bestsellers. Writing "Shattered" in 2016, he and Parnes sent their first twelve chapters to their editor two weeks before Election Day — a manuscript that assumed Hillary Clinton's campaign was flawed but that she'd still win. Their editor flagged the contradiction. Allen and Parnes didn't rewrite the ending to fit a theory. They waited to see what actually happened, and the reporting held up.
"The key is for us to be humble about letting the facts lead where they may," Allen said. That's also, he thinks, why sources keep talking to them for the next book even when the last one wasn't flattering: people on the losing side and the winning side both want to understand what they didn't know about their own campaign, and Allen and Parnes have built a reputation for getting that right rather than getting it loud.
Find Jonathan Allen
Jonathan Allen is NBC News's senior national politics reporter and, with Amie Parnes, the co-author of "HRC," "Shattered," "Lucky" and "Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House."
The Friday Reporter is hosted by Lisa Camooso Miller. Listen wherever you get your podcasts — and subscribe so you never miss a conversation.