Our exclusive interview with Edward-Isaac Dovere

On his new book, "Battle for the Soul: Inside the Democrats' Campaigns to Defeat Trump"

Dear Friends,

As we previewed for you on Sunday, we are trying something new — weekly interviews with civic leaders, journalists, new authors and more. We’re excited to share with you an exclusive interview with journalist Edward-Isaac Dovere on his new book, “Battle for the Soul: Inside the Democrats' Campaigns to Defeat Trump” which releases today. We encourage you to buy it here.

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Yours,

Michael & Melissa

Michael: Let’s start with the Democratic primary. In some ways, it was fairly conventional—the last sitting Vice President consolidated the party behind him and wrapped up the primary relatively early compared to the last two competitive Democratic primaries—yet the conventional wisdom heading in was that Biden was a weak frontrunner, out of touch with the Democratic electorate and the wrong fit for an increasingly diverse Party that, at least in its own mind, values youth, passion and “progress.” We’ll get to Biden himself, but what did you uncover about the rest of the field? Did Biden scare anyone out of running? What were some of the most misguided assumptions about the electorate held by Biden’s opponents? 

Edward-Isaac: Biden didn’t exactly scare anyone out of running, but there are several people who would much more likely have gotten into the race if he hadn’t run. High up on this list was Terry McAuliffe and to a lesser extent, Mitch Landrieu, who both didn’t want to run against Biden and also didn’t believe they’d do very well if they had. With the way the race was shaping up of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren as the other leading contenders, Bloomberg would likely have gotten in earlier, before he pulled the plug on running in March 2019 and it was clear Biden was getting in (similarly, Bloomberg only changed his mind in November 2019 to jump in when Biden was collapsing).

For the rest of the field, there was a feeling summed up by a frustrated joke Amy Klobuchar was making to people, which is in the book that Biden was like a low pressure system: “He never rains. He never lifts. He’s always just there.” Some of this is because Biden had a firmer lock on Black voters than anyone had anticipated, and which floated him through the primary race even as nearly everything else about his campaign went wrong all the way through the New Hampshire primary. Some was because voters were being more pragmatic in worrying who could beat Trump. And some was because of specific mistakes and fumbles that the other campaigns and candidates made... all the way through November.

Yes, Biden was leading in the polls throughout and ended up being the nominee (and, obviously, the president). But even he, as you’ll see, had moments when he thought his campaign might be over. And from having covered the race up close day by day, and then built out the reporting in all sorts of new ways for the book, I can tell you he had good reason to feel that way.

Michael: Did the Biden campaign always feel like South Carolina would be a turning point? At what point did that become his path to the nomination, and how confident were they in that path? Related, to what extent was Biden’s campaign (including Biden himself) confident that he would perform strongly among older Black Americans, even with multiple Black candidates in the race? 

Edward-Isaac: I'll start by quoting, with humility, an article I wrote for Politico in 2015, when Biden was thinking about jumping into that race: "Joe Biden thinks he can win South Carolina. And that victory, he believes, would hurtle his campaign into a rally toward the Democratic nomination no matter who has already taken Iowa and New Hampshire." You can tell from the tone that I was making fun of this a little then. And of course, four years later, this is exactly what happened.

But as you'll see in the book, this came very close to not happening in several different ways. Biden had to be convinced that coming in a distant second in the Nevada caucuses (the third contest, after being crushed in the first two) was a good thing, because by that point, he felt like the race had slipped away from him. He wasn't wrong: we all know that the Jim Clyburn endorsement was key, but if Biden hadn't recovered to the extent that he did in Nevada, Clyburn was very close to staying out of the race, and even eyeing other candidates whom he thought would stop Bernie Sanders from being the nominee--particularly Mike Bloomberg. Others were skeptical as well, including Harry Reid, who endorsed Biden after his home state caucuses even though Sanders was the one who came in a very powerful first there. The book covers four years of Democratic politics, but there's a reason there are individual chapters just about those few days around each of the early primaries: a lot of pieces were moving at once, and they only clicked in as they did because they all came together that way. Also: Biden and his campaign knew he'd win South Carolina by the day of that vote, but they didn't have any sense his win would be that big (48%), and that all the other candidates would be so far behind (Sanders, in second place was at 19%). It's also important to remember how much energy there was to stop Sanders from winning the nomination. Biden's comeback probably couldn't have happened if the alternative had been a candidate who wasn't riling up so many of the party's traditional leaders, top media figures and average Democratic voters who worried that the senator just wouldn't be able to beat Trump. 

I talked with Biden the night before the South Carolina primary and the next morning as voting was starting (back in the days when the coronavirus seemed like some far off thing, and we could actually get up close to him), and it was pretty obvious how much he was processing the reality of what was happening himself. Those scenes are in the book, but a little too long to reproduce here. There was also a sense among his supporters that maybe just maybe something was coming together. “When you connect as a white guy with Black people, it convinces white people that you’re good too,” a former state representative told me in South Carolina at that rally the night before the primary. “All over America, this same kind of conversation is going to help him punch through.

Michael: How did the Biden campaign feel as they pivoted to the general? There’s a sense now that some of President Biden’s aides are not all that bought in to Biden’s approach to unity, bipartisanship and faith that resonates with much of America, but not so much with some Democratic pundits and decision makers. How much churning was there among campaign staff to take a more robustly partisan approach? How does the selection of Kamala Harris as his running mate fit into this story? My sense has been that Mike Donilon was and is critical to letting Biden be Biden rhetorically and thematically, but what did you find in your reporting on this?

Edward-Isaac: One of the dynamics that I get into in the book is that there was a division on the Biden campaign between the people working for him pre-Super Tuesday and those who signed on post-Super Tuesday. The pre-Super Tuesday group were not only true believers in Biden himself, but not coincidentally, were more inclined toward the more moderate and less woke strains of the party. The post-Super Tuesday group signed on after it became clear he was going to be the nominee, and saw it as their mission not just to get him elected (they had a sneering opinion of the pre-Super Tuesday group as being largely incompetent, which was apparent to the pre-Super Tuesday group and a source of tension) but to try to pull Biden to where they had wanted the Democratic nominee to be. This manifested in a major way around the "defund the police" debate. Biden himself doesn't believe in that kind of policy approach, but he also thought it would be losing politics, and he resisted attempts to push him into talking that way. What you'll see, though, is a rapid evolution in his thinking post-George Floyd, which is part of what led him to pick Harris. Even after picking Harris though, he and she had moments in which they differed on what to do. But one of the points that was made to me by Biden folks, and which is also explored in several other ways in the final few chapters, is that Biden got more votes than pretty much any other Democrat he was on the ballot with. Some of that is the profile of running for president, and some of that was running against Trump, but a lot had to do with that voters were more inclined to support him than they were to support what many of the more left-leaning Democrats were pushing for.

Michael: What did you learn reporting for and writing this book that you find most critical for understanding the way the Biden-Harris Administration will unfold?   

Edward-Isaac: If 2020 hadn't unfolded as it did, with the pandemic and the racial reckoning, this would have been a very different race, and a very different Biden presidency (if he'd still won). It also would have been a very different last 150 or so pages of the book for me. But already in the months leading up to winning the nomination, the book traces how Biden's thinking was evolving--including right as he first got into the race, when he changed his position on the Hyde Amendment because he came to feel that his existing view was out of sync with where Democratic politics demanded he be, and with how the intersection of policy with abortion had developed (even though he remains personally anti-abortion himself). Overall, what you'll see in this book is a story of the last four years, but also one which explains why and how the person who's president now came to be reshaped, late in life, around so much that his presidency is going to include. When I interviewed Biden, he pointed out that he has his FDR portrait hanging above the fireplace in the Oval Office. That's how he has been orienting and inspiring himself these days. I'm not sure whom he might have guessed at the beginning of his campaign might have been the central portrait of his White House, but I don't think it would have been FDR. Much of what I tried to do is trace the story of what happened to help explain what's going to happen next. 

Buy Edward-Isaac Dovere’s new book, Battle for the Soul: Inside the Democrats’ Campaigns to Defeat Trump, today.