Battle for the Soul: Inside the Democrats' Campaigns to Defeat Trump

by Edward-Isaac Dovere

Overview

An award-winning political journalist for The Atlantic tells the inside story of how the embattled Democratic Party, seeking a direction for its future during the Trump years, successfully regained the White House.

The 2020 presidential campaign was a defining moment for America. As Donald Trump and his nativist populism cowed the Republican Party into submission, many Democrats—haunted by Hillary Clinton’s shocking loss in 2016 and the resulting four-year-long identity crisis—were convinced that he would be unbeatable. Their party and the country, it seemed, might never recover.

How, then, did Democrats manage to win the presidency, especially after the longest primary race with the biggest field ever? How did they keep themselves united through an internal struggle between newly empowered progressives and establishment forces—playing out against a pandemic, an economic crisis, and a new racial reckoning?

Edward-Isaac Dovere’s Battle for the Soul is the searing, fly-on-the-wall account of the Democrats’ journey through recalibration and rebirth. Dovere traces this process: from the early days in the wilderness of the post-Obama era to the jockeying of potential candidates; from the backroom battles and exhausting campaigns to the unlikely triumph of the man few expected to win; and on through the inauguration and the insurrection at the Capitol.

Dovere draws on years of on-the-ground reporting and contemporaneous conversations with the key players—whether with Pete Buttigieg in his hotel suite in Des Moines an hour before he won the Iowa caucuses or with Joe Biden in his first-ever interview in the Oval Office—as well as with aides, advisors, and voters. Offering unparalleled access and an insider’s command of the campaign, Battle for the Soul takes a compelling look at the policies, politics, and people, as well as the often absurd process of running for president. This fresh and timely story brings you on the trail, into the private rooms, and along to eavesdrop on critical conversations. You will never see campaigns or this turning point in our history the same way again.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781984878090
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	05/31/2022
Pages:	544
Sales rank:	1,112,617
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 8.30(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Edward-Isaac Dovere is a staff writer for The Atlantic and its lead political correspondent. He has covered Democratic politics for fifteen years, beginning in his native New York City and carrying him through the Obama White House and then across twenty-nine states during the 2020 election cycle. His reporting has won the Merriman Smith Award for Excellence from the White House Correspondents Association and the Daniel Pearl Award for Investigative Reporting from the Society of Professional Journalists, among other awards. He lives in Washington, DC, with his family.

Table of Contents

Prologue 1

1 Benign Neglect 9

2 Breaking the Glass 29

3 I Hope 47

4 Fate and Planning 74

5 Not Friends 92

6 The Spark 109

7 Democrat X 131

8 Why Not? 145

9 Launched into a Void 159

10 "God Knows How Rusty Joe Is" 171

11 That Little Girl 186

12 How Much Fun 198

13 The Line from Kyiv 207

14 Heart Trouble 232

15 This System Is Crazy 258

16 What Was the Plan? 281

17 A Billion Dollars for Samoa 302

18 Seventy-Two Hours That Changed History 320

19 Take Him Seriously 339

20 Tic Toe 353

21 A Knee on the Neck 369

22 A Horrible, Horrible Process 382

23 You Have Got to Be Kidding 406

24 White House Petri Dish 424

25 The Other Side of the Desk 433

26 What if It Wasn't? 450

27 The Dog That Caught the Bus 481

Afterword: "In This Breach" 499

Acknowledgments 509

Note on Sources 513

Index 515

Editorial Reviews

06/14/2021

Atlantic staff writer Dovere debuts with an incisive and deeply reported portrait of the Democratic Party in exile during the Trump presidency, and the confluence of events that brought Joe Biden to victory in 2020. Opening with election night 2016, Dovere discusses various factors contributing to Hillary Clinton’s defeat, including her flaws as a campaigner and Obama’s “negligence” of Democratic Party infrastructure during his presidency, and describes initial discussions about how best to organize the resistance to Trump. Turning to the 2020 primaries, Dovere offers sharp assessments of each candidate (“At his best, could appear to be working his way through the primaries as if he were solving a Rubik’s Cube”); sheds light on how Bernie Sanders’s push to get others to commit to Medicare for All set a ceiling on how far a progressive could go in the race; and documents how the Biden campaign navigated Tara Reade’s sexual assault allegation and the “October surprise” of Hunter Biden’s laptop. But in Dovere’s estimation, none of that would have mattered if the Covid-19 pandemic hadn’t masked Biden’s weaknesses and made him the best “fit” for the moment. Though somewhat baggy, Dovere’s narrative is littered with rich characterizations, wry humor, and impressive insider access. Political junkies will savor this satisfying deep dive. (May)

Publishers Weekly

"In the tradition of Theodore White’s The Making of the President . . . . A riveting account . . . filled with turning point moments. . . . Scenes jump off the page."
—The Washington Post

"Essential reading. . . . Dovere’s first book is informed and granular, filled with up-close quotes and lacerating observations, a must-read for newsrooms and political junkies. . . . Battle for the Soul provides ample warning and plenty of food for thought."
—Lloyd Green, The Guardian

"A wide-ranging history of a tangled campaign."
—Kirkus Reviews

"An incisive and deeply reported portrait of the Democratic party in exile during the Trump presidency . . . . Littered with rich characterizations, wry humor, and impressive insider access."
—Publishers Weekly

"There’s so much in it. It’s so dishy. It’s so fantastic. You’ll learn a lot."
—Julie Mason, SiriusXM

"Candy. . . . Even if you think you know the dynamics, you read a great book like this by a great reporter, and you learn these new things."
—John King, CNN

"One juicy book."
—Alex Witt, MSNBC

"It is outstanding. Strongly recommend. I think it is probably the best read of the 2020 campaign. The success of the book is that it doesn’t get bogged down in the horse race, electoral math type thing, but it talks about the personalities, how the personalities drove what happened in an extraordinarily unpredictable campaign."
—Charlie Sykes, The Bulwark

"Highly recommend - it is a dynamite book."
—John Fugelsang, SiriusXM

"An extraordinary new book."
—Thom Hartmann

"The inside campaign details I was craving. . . . Buy the book."
—Dave Weigel, The Washington Post

From the Publisher

★ 2021-05-18
A carefully structured account of the many moving parts that turned the Democratic Party into a resistance movement against Trump.

Barack Obama, writes Atlantic lead political correspondent Dovere, “never understood why people disliked [Hillary] Clinton so much. He could also never get over how bad a campaigner she was.” He didn’t do much to help in her campaign until it was too late. Somehow Trump managed to squeak by her even as Obama finally told aides, “do you really want a psychopath sitting at that desk?” and ordered them to do something to get that message through to voters. Yet, Dovere writes, there was a certain continuity to a vote for Obama in 2008 and a vote for Trump in 2016: Both were outsiders running a populist campaign, if of very different dispositions. Obama tried to guide Trump to effectiveness after the election, suggesting that he “make a few patches to Obamacare and call it Trumpcare” and warning him not to hire Michael Flynn, whose Russian connections were already well known. Trump ignored the advice. His intransigence emerged early, moving Nancy Pelosi to challenge his claim that he had won the popular vote. Trump was great for Obama, Dovere notes, retrospectively erasing the errors he made in office, while resistance to Trump soon became marching orders for party stalwarts. Some of the newsworthy items in this book: Clinton contemplated running again in 2020 only to conclude that if she did, Bernie Sanders would be the guaranteed candidate. She hoped instead for a deadlocked convention by which the Democrats would call her back by acclaim. It was to the Democrats’ good fortune, Dovere suggests, that Trump was so inept, especially with respect to the pandemic, and that the Republican Party “was defining itself as the check against America’s changing.” That America was changing seems to have eluded them all, leaving Trump a loser “on the biggest stage of his life.”

A wide-ranging history of a tangled campaign—catnip for politics junkies.

Kirkus Reviews