Battle For The Soul: Inside the Campaigns to Defeat Trump

"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, which led to a four-year-long identity crisis-were convinced 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 and 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, though the jockeying of potential candidates, to the backroom battles and exhausting campaigns, to the unlikely triumph of the manfew expected to win, and through the inauguration and insurrection at the Capitol. Dovere draws on years of on-the-ground reporting and contemporaneous conversations with the key players-whether in Pete Buttigieg's hotel suite in Des Moines an hour before he won the Iowa caucuses or Joe Biden's first-ever interview in the Oval Office-as well as aides, advisors, and voters. With unparalleled access and an insider's command of the campaign, Battle for the Soul offers a compelling look at the policies, politics, people and 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"--
The award-winning Atlantic staff writer and Ticket podcaster offers a critical assessment of the splintered Democratic party during the Trump years, citing the disparities that are challenging the party's political stances on moderation, multiethnic liberalism and socialism.
An award-winning political journalist for The Atlantic tells the story of an embattled Democratic party during the Trump years, and its fractious attempt to regain the White House in 2020In You Are Right to Be Concerned, Edward-Isaac Dovere, staff writer for The Atlantic, will follow the Democratic Party into the wilderness, from the inauguration of Donald Trump on January 20, 2017, to the swearing-in of a new president on January 20, 2021. Four years have passed since the Democratic Party's leaders, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, fell away, and in that time--with the ascendancy of Trumpism, "the damaging cycle of rot and convulsion that Democrats seem unable to break out of" has continued to plague the party, even in the face of a historic midterm win. Never before has it had presidential candidates as disparate as Sanders, Biden, Buttigieg, Warren, and Bloomberg. Never before has the standard playbook been thrown quite so far out the window. Behind Dovere's fly-on-the-wall stories is a a critical look at Democrats' search for a message and an identity, the energy gathering for more progressive policies, shifting geographic and demographic voting trends, and the recalibration of what the party stands for. Democrats are fighting over how much to define themselves in opposition to Trump, but they're also fighting over whether the answer is a return to the moderate politics of Bill Clinton, an embrace of the multiethnic liberalism of Obama, or a dramatic pivot to Bernie Sanders's European-style socialism. Dovere has spoken with most of the key players in the Democratic Party, and will be drawing on conversations with Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, Pete Buttigieg, Tim Kaine, Cory Booker, Tom Perez and many more, including key players throughout all the Democratic presidential campaigns and beyond. Rarely in history is it clear how defining the changes are as they unfold, and even more rarely are those changes so caught up in the shape of politics itself--pair that opportunity with an insider's command of the politics and contemporaneous access to the key players and You Are Right to Be Concerned will be a fresh, timely, and timeless story like no other.