What do you think?
Rate this book
Battle for the Soul: Inside the Democrats' 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 man few 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 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 man few 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.
528 pages, Kindle Edition
First published May 25, 2021
154 people are currently reading
767 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 91 reviews
December 7, 2021
I was pleasantly surprised by this book. Expecting a straightforward “diary narrative” of the 2020 election - this is that but also much more.
First the author delves back into the Obama administration - as well as tracking the president’s input/effects on his party during and after his time in office.
Second the 2016 presidential election is covered here - although not in detail - to give a context to the 2020 campaign/election and the Democratic candidates. The majority of the book then tracking/following most of these Presidential wannabes until Joe Biden became the last candidate standing and then his victory. The last several chapters deal with the interim between the election and Inauguration Day 2021 - including the insurrection on January 6th.
The narrative here is Pearlstein-ish, (NixonLand), mini-bios, anecdotal inside stories with “fly on the wall” observations and opinionated analyses - although it should be noted - this author does have a sense of humor. Just one brief example - the author describing the multitude of “pundits/experts” in Iowa during primary/caucus season…
Imagine trying to get a room full of five year olds to agree on the best ice cream flavor ever.
Last note - it may take a bit of reading to acclimate to this author’s writing style. He digresses often - time lines or chronology be damned. Think Ron White’s Tater Salad comic bit - “I told you that story so I can tell you this one.”. This author does that a lot. Also Dovere’s sentences can - at times - be somewhat convoluted - I imagine diagramming one of them would resemble a John Madden drawing outlining a specific football play.
Also If it’s not clear at this point from both the book’s title and this review, “Battle for the Soul” is Democratic Party centric - Not a knock - just another heads-up.
Highly recommended.
First the author delves back into the Obama administration - as well as tracking the president’s input/effects on his party during and after his time in office.
Second the 2016 presidential election is covered here - although not in detail - to give a context to the 2020 campaign/election and the Democratic candidates. The majority of the book then tracking/following most of these Presidential wannabes until Joe Biden became the last candidate standing and then his victory. The last several chapters deal with the interim between the election and Inauguration Day 2021 - including the insurrection on January 6th.
The narrative here is Pearlstein-ish, (NixonLand), mini-bios, anecdotal inside stories with “fly on the wall” observations and opinionated analyses - although it should be noted - this author does have a sense of humor. Just one brief example - the author describing the multitude of “pundits/experts” in Iowa during primary/caucus season…
Imagine trying to get a room full of five year olds to agree on the best ice cream flavor ever.
Last note - it may take a bit of reading to acclimate to this author’s writing style. He digresses often - time lines or chronology be damned. Think Ron White’s Tater Salad comic bit - “I told you that story so I can tell you this one.”. This author does that a lot. Also Dovere’s sentences can - at times - be somewhat convoluted - I imagine diagramming one of them would resemble a John Madden drawing outlining a specific football play.
Also If it’s not clear at this point from both the book’s title and this review, “Battle for the Soul” is Democratic Party centric - Not a knock - just another heads-up.
Highly recommended.
May 29, 2021
Look, everybody who knows me knows that I'm a politco. I'm fascinated by politics and it's one of my major interests. So, naturally, I followed the 2020 election as closely as anyone - and not just because nothing short of American Democracy was on the line. As such, because I end up watching hours of MSNBC per day, I thought for sure I knew everything there was to know about the most recent presidential election that I lived through. Boy, did this book prove me wrong.
Edward-Isaac Dovere's "Battle for the Soul: Inside the Democrats' Campaigns to Defeat Trump" is excellent - not only in terms of writing style and quality, but also in terms of content. It's full of fascinating new information, stories, and behind-the-scenes stories, and makes for an excellent first draft of this period of History. Though we just lived through it, and obviously know the outcome, Dovere writes in such a compelling read, you're left turning the pages as quickly as possible to find out what happens next, as this well-crafted narrative spans from November 2016 through the first few months of 2021. (Though obviously, as the title suggests, the bulk of the text is focused on the presidential campaigns that began in 2019 and spanned through the end of 2020.)
If you're a politics aficionado like myself or a student of History, you'll adore this book. If you need help putting into context the past few years, this book will help you do that. And if you're just somebody who likes a good true story - especially one that's so outlandish in many ways, you'd expect it to be the subject of a paperback novel you'd pick up at the airport while waiting for your flight - you won't be able to put this one down.
For me, this easily earns its five stars, and if I could, I'd give it more. I can't recommend it enough. Here's hoping that in addition to being his first book, this isn't Dovere's last, and that he - at the very least - writes the stories of each presidential campaign season for years to come, if for no other reason than to provide future generations with a firsthand account.
Edward-Isaac Dovere's "Battle for the Soul: Inside the Democrats' Campaigns to Defeat Trump" is excellent - not only in terms of writing style and quality, but also in terms of content. It's full of fascinating new information, stories, and behind-the-scenes stories, and makes for an excellent first draft of this period of History. Though we just lived through it, and obviously know the outcome, Dovere writes in such a compelling read, you're left turning the pages as quickly as possible to find out what happens next, as this well-crafted narrative spans from November 2016 through the first few months of 2021. (Though obviously, as the title suggests, the bulk of the text is focused on the presidential campaigns that began in 2019 and spanned through the end of 2020.)
If you're a politics aficionado like myself or a student of History, you'll adore this book. If you need help putting into context the past few years, this book will help you do that. And if you're just somebody who likes a good true story - especially one that's so outlandish in many ways, you'd expect it to be the subject of a paperback novel you'd pick up at the airport while waiting for your flight - you won't be able to put this one down.
For me, this easily earns its five stars, and if I could, I'd give it more. I can't recommend it enough. Here's hoping that in addition to being his first book, this isn't Dovere's last, and that he - at the very least - writes the stories of each presidential campaign season for years to come, if for no other reason than to provide future generations with a firsthand account.
June 21, 2021
I really wanted to like this book, but the writing made it damn near impossible. First, the good: Lots of interesting tidbits about all of the democratic candidates for president in 2020; the author does know his stuff.
But the bad... First, although the book is purportedly organized by chunks of time throughout the 2020 primary season and presidential campaign, the time buckets for each chapter are purely window dressing. He goes back and forth in time in each chapter so much that I had trouble keeping track of who was doing what when. This also led (I'm guessing) to a tremendous amount of repetition. Yes, I know that Deval Patrick was the only politician who Barack Obama felt was worthy of his time and attention. You told me that a half dozen times.
The author also seemed to really despise most of the candidates. The book was full of snide asides about all of them, and he repeated and repeated and repeated them. OK, Kamala Harris didn't articulate why she wanted to be president. I get it. But the hammering repetition and the nastiness that would have been considered too juvenile for the Dartmouth student newspaper were too much.
But the bad... First, although the book is purportedly organized by chunks of time throughout the 2020 primary season and presidential campaign, the time buckets for each chapter are purely window dressing. He goes back and forth in time in each chapter so much that I had trouble keeping track of who was doing what when. This also led (I'm guessing) to a tremendous amount of repetition. Yes, I know that Deval Patrick was the only politician who Barack Obama felt was worthy of his time and attention. You told me that a half dozen times.
The author also seemed to really despise most of the candidates. The book was full of snide asides about all of them, and he repeated and repeated and repeated them. OK, Kamala Harris didn't articulate why she wanted to be president. I get it. But the hammering repetition and the nastiness that would have been considered too juvenile for the Dartmouth student newspaper were too much.
May 31, 2021
I'm not entirely sure why I subjected myself to this. This purported chronicle of the 2020 primaries actually spans several years of the Trump presidency, mainly because the entire book is determined by access and the author had an in with Barack Obama, forcing him to rehash tangential events like his speaking fees and the 2017 DNC chair race, and make a former president trying at every turn to ignore politics a central figure in it. Much of the primary stories are summary; the author had I think one interview with Elizabeth Warren that he went back to over and over, and nothing with several other figures. The story pads out with a series of rehashes, as if the editor forgot what tidbits were already in the draft. Outside of screaming "look who I got to talk to" there's not a lot to hang onto here.
June 10, 2021
I never thought that I would cry at the last paragraph of a non-fiction book about an election, but I did. This was a fantastic book. As someone whose job was also covering the 2020 presidential election, I learned a lot from this book, and it's a great narrative that incorporates a cast of very interesting people from history, and must be a fun and great read for non-election nerds too.
July 10, 2021
Some takeaways from Battle for the Soul:
The Author Hates Everyone Sanders is a selfish asshole, Warren is a shrew who plays the victim, Beto is an airheaded pretty boy, Buttigieg is a robot, Harris is a cynical power-grabber who doesn't believe in anything, and the rest are either too unorthodox for his liking or just irrelevant. But the candidates aren't the only people Dovere can't stand. Progressives are delusional cultists. Conservatives are imbeciles, too stupid and deplorable to have any value in society. Hunter Biden is a wastrel, Mitt Romney has no backbone--and then, of course, there are the Trumps.
. . . except for Biden and Obama Dovere has a lot of respect for Joe Biden, which is maybe to be expected given that he is ultimately the protagonist of this story. The author's massive man-crush on Obama is more distracting. Although Dovere tosses in a few half-hearted critiques of Obama's "neglect" of the DNC, he dedicates scores of pages to Obama's commanding presence and sage wisdom. One comes away wondering if Dovere had really wanted to write an Obama bio and got saddled with this book instead.
Trauma-Mongering At first, the anecdotes about Biden's grief over his son Beau are touching, and it makes sense that a father would carry the memory of his late son with him for the rest of his life. But after a couple hundred pages, Dovere's constant beckoning of Beau's memory and his father's grief stops feeling poignant and starts to feel exploitative. A similar feeling of manipulation is found in his constant mentions of Trump's racism and the legacy of racism in the country (one egregious example is one congresswoman's fear during the Capitol riot that if she took off her name tag, the cops wouldn't protect her from rioters because she's Black--because clearly Capitol police can't make the connection that a finely-dressed woman inside the congressional chamber is a congresswoman). Instead of creating the intended emotional core, the trauma-mongering just feels gross.
Is It Worth It? As someone who followed the 2020 primary closely, I would say no. There's little in Battle for the Soul that can't be found in Jonathan Allen and Aimee Parnes' Lucky, which I personally found more insightful and less frustrating. Sadly, Trump broke a lot of reporters' brains, and the evidence for that is all over this book.
The Author Hates Everyone Sanders is a selfish asshole, Warren is a shrew who plays the victim, Beto is an airheaded pretty boy, Buttigieg is a robot, Harris is a cynical power-grabber who doesn't believe in anything, and the rest are either too unorthodox for his liking or just irrelevant. But the candidates aren't the only people Dovere can't stand. Progressives are delusional cultists. Conservatives are imbeciles, too stupid and deplorable to have any value in society. Hunter Biden is a wastrel, Mitt Romney has no backbone--and then, of course, there are the Trumps.
. . . except for Biden and Obama Dovere has a lot of respect for Joe Biden, which is maybe to be expected given that he is ultimately the protagonist of this story. The author's massive man-crush on Obama is more distracting. Although Dovere tosses in a few half-hearted critiques of Obama's "neglect" of the DNC, he dedicates scores of pages to Obama's commanding presence and sage wisdom. One comes away wondering if Dovere had really wanted to write an Obama bio and got saddled with this book instead.
Trauma-Mongering At first, the anecdotes about Biden's grief over his son Beau are touching, and it makes sense that a father would carry the memory of his late son with him for the rest of his life. But after a couple hundred pages, Dovere's constant beckoning of Beau's memory and his father's grief stops feeling poignant and starts to feel exploitative. A similar feeling of manipulation is found in his constant mentions of Trump's racism and the legacy of racism in the country (one egregious example is one congresswoman's fear during the Capitol riot that if she took off her name tag, the cops wouldn't protect her from rioters because she's Black--because clearly Capitol police can't make the connection that a finely-dressed woman inside the congressional chamber is a congresswoman). Instead of creating the intended emotional core, the trauma-mongering just feels gross.
Is It Worth It? As someone who followed the 2020 primary closely, I would say no. There's little in Battle for the Soul that can't be found in Jonathan Allen and Aimee Parnes' Lucky, which I personally found more insightful and less frustrating. Sadly, Trump broke a lot of reporters' brains, and the evidence for that is all over this book.
January 17, 2022
Interesting look into the interpersonal dynamics of the Democrats' primary campaigns, but hindered by issues with the writing. I gradually grew accustomed to Dovere's style, but having just read some much more coherently constructed non-fiction books, Battle for the Soul's style was a bit jarring. Even by the end of the book I found that some sentences were difficult to parse. Dovere's book isn't so much a work of political analysis as it is a play-by-play of who said what, when. If you want to know which Democrats told which other Democrats to go eff themselves (and I certainly do), this is your book. The focus isn't a bad thing, per se, but I would have appreciated more analysis along with the "tea."
Dovere structures Battle in roughly chronological order, but he deviates from chronology with such great frequency that it's difficult to keep track of events at points. Dovere opens every chapter by designating the respective time period that it covers, yet some chapters begin their prose with flashbacks to events before the time period listed in bold on the very same page! It gets confusing.
The author also seems to have a strangely contemptuous view of all the candidates besides Biden—while he isn't afraid to criticize Biden, it's clear that he reserves a lower level of acrimony for the President than for any of the other candidates. One chapter opens with Andrew Yang's throwing up because he is so nervous to appear on the debate stage, and this despite the fact that Yang has no role in the rest of the chapter. Why? Am I supposed to delight in another human being's suffering just because Dovere didn't think his campaign was serious enough?
The book definitely picked up for me towards the end, as the events covered (George Floyd protests, COVID-19, concern about Trump overturning the election results) are fresher in my mind. Battle for the Soul was worth a read, but I don't think I'll be returning to more political books by this author.
Dovere structures Battle in roughly chronological order, but he deviates from chronology with such great frequency that it's difficult to keep track of events at points. Dovere opens every chapter by designating the respective time period that it covers, yet some chapters begin their prose with flashbacks to events before the time period listed in bold on the very same page! It gets confusing.
The author also seems to have a strangely contemptuous view of all the candidates besides Biden—while he isn't afraid to criticize Biden, it's clear that he reserves a lower level of acrimony for the President than for any of the other candidates. One chapter opens with Andrew Yang's throwing up because he is so nervous to appear on the debate stage, and this despite the fact that Yang has no role in the rest of the chapter. Why? Am I supposed to delight in another human being's suffering just because Dovere didn't think his campaign was serious enough?
The book definitely picked up for me towards the end, as the events covered (George Floyd protests, COVID-19, concern about Trump overturning the election results) are fresher in my mind. Battle for the Soul was worth a read, but I don't think I'll be returning to more political books by this author.
August 29, 2021
After her loss in the 2016 election, Hillary Clinton said, "Don't let Bernie Sanders and his progressives take over the party." In this book, Dovere traces the rise of the new progressive left during the Trump years, and how Joe Biden restored the moderate claim to the Democratic Party in the end. Though there are many elections ahead, Dovere's book reads like a eulogy for the progressive presidential candidate.
Dovere traces a party in crisis in 2017, struggling to find meaning in organizations like Run For Something and Women's March, and trying to find its future. Though some have criticized the book for its superficial details, such as Bernie's travel rider, it is overall a work of modern history. Dovere has also been criticized for his harshness, but it is necessary: every one of the 2020 candidates was narcissistic enough to think they were effectively the only one to beat Trump, and it is the job of journalists to hold politicians accountable.
The "anyone can win" logic spurred by Trump led to a lot of wild people considering the 2020 field, and a number of them entering. In such a crowded race, even minor distinctions proved major. The main progressives Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders were quite different from each other, while Tom Steyer and Michael Bloomberg exhibited very different ideas of hobbyist super-wealth. While some of the "also-ran" candidates aren't given much credit, a lot of candidates in the race are given detailed descriptions in insight, making most who were invested in the 2020 field have time to analyze their preferred candidate.
With the benefit of hindsight, one can appreciate this book more. Back-room deals, chaotic caucus results, and potential corruption linked to Hunter Biden were all real in the 2020 Democratic field, and Dovere is able to discuss them easier now that the race is over. Moments that were confusing and tense, like the Iowa caucus debacle, are able to be described in easy-to-understand language thanks to all of the details coming out. Tara Reade's accusation too is able to be analyzed, with much more information having since come out and casting doubt on that sudden Biden accuser. Context is everything in history, and Dovere is able to provide context as a hybrid journalist-historian in this book.
Joe Biden has a theory that you can change people's minds as long as you don't lower their standard of living. This campaign argument, or perhaps the simple act of not being Donald Trump, paid off in 2020. One would think that the book would end after the primaries, but it goes through the general election and beyond to analyze the full effects of Biden's realignment of the Democratic Party. And just as one thinks the progressive movement might be dead, Dovere takes a step back to look at the Senate race in Massachusetts where Joe Kennedy faced off against Ed Markey. If you're a political junkie like me, you'll love this book. But even if you're just a regular Democrat looking for insight, the 2020 election will make a lot more sense after you read this.
P.S. All people should remember Tom Perez's parting advice as the outgoing DNC Chair: "Whatever you do, don't type your name in on Twitter. It's never good for mental health."
Dovere traces a party in crisis in 2017, struggling to find meaning in organizations like Run For Something and Women's March, and trying to find its future. Though some have criticized the book for its superficial details, such as Bernie's travel rider, it is overall a work of modern history. Dovere has also been criticized for his harshness, but it is necessary: every one of the 2020 candidates was narcissistic enough to think they were effectively the only one to beat Trump, and it is the job of journalists to hold politicians accountable.
The "anyone can win" logic spurred by Trump led to a lot of wild people considering the 2020 field, and a number of them entering. In such a crowded race, even minor distinctions proved major. The main progressives Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders were quite different from each other, while Tom Steyer and Michael Bloomberg exhibited very different ideas of hobbyist super-wealth. While some of the "also-ran" candidates aren't given much credit, a lot of candidates in the race are given detailed descriptions in insight, making most who were invested in the 2020 field have time to analyze their preferred candidate.
With the benefit of hindsight, one can appreciate this book more. Back-room deals, chaotic caucus results, and potential corruption linked to Hunter Biden were all real in the 2020 Democratic field, and Dovere is able to discuss them easier now that the race is over. Moments that were confusing and tense, like the Iowa caucus debacle, are able to be described in easy-to-understand language thanks to all of the details coming out. Tara Reade's accusation too is able to be analyzed, with much more information having since come out and casting doubt on that sudden Biden accuser. Context is everything in history, and Dovere is able to provide context as a hybrid journalist-historian in this book.
Joe Biden has a theory that you can change people's minds as long as you don't lower their standard of living. This campaign argument, or perhaps the simple act of not being Donald Trump, paid off in 2020. One would think that the book would end after the primaries, but it goes through the general election and beyond to analyze the full effects of Biden's realignment of the Democratic Party. And just as one thinks the progressive movement might be dead, Dovere takes a step back to look at the Senate race in Massachusetts where Joe Kennedy faced off against Ed Markey. If you're a political junkie like me, you'll love this book. But even if you're just a regular Democrat looking for insight, the 2020 election will make a lot more sense after you read this.
P.S. All people should remember Tom Perez's parting advice as the outgoing DNC Chair: "Whatever you do, don't type your name in on Twitter. It's never good for mental health."
May 27, 2021
I enjoyed this book far more than Lucky: How Joe Biden Barely Won the Presidency, since I feel it was a much more comprehensive look at the state of the Democratic Party. Different dynamics came out -- especially the Sanders-Warren dynamic which has been missing the past. There are a few causes for complaint: Obama gets far too prominent a role in the early chapters and the author's highly non-linear style can come off as a bit odd. Nevertheless, this book sets the bar for books about the 2020 primary and it does a great job bringing the main characters: Biden, Sanders, Warren, Buttigieg, Harris and (briefly) Bloomberg to life.
June 2, 2021
Closer to 3.5. This book is jam-packed w the trivia I love but you can feel Isaac-Dovere's perspective throughout, and it often feels... Needlessly antagonistic to the left. If I agreed w him I'm sure I wouldn't mind the tone, but I... Don't, and so I do! Still fun tho
July 7, 2021
This is actually the first book I ever read entirely on my phone, and it was pretty long, so I was skeptical of myself, but it was easy to get through because it was very enjoyable and interesting to ready. Before reading this, I listened to the book “Lucky” which is also about the 2020 Democratic primaries and subsequent election, but I found this book to have much more reporting that I didn’t know about.
It starts with Hillary Clinton losing the election in 2016 and takes you into former President Obama’s reaction and takes a hard look at how Democrats went from controlling congress when he won in 2008 to completely losing control in 2016 - it seems to imply that Obama could have done more to go to states like Wisconsin (especially when “right to vote” laws were replacing unions), Michigan, Wisconsin and promoting the good things his administration was accomplishing, but Obama didn’t see that as the roll of the president and he didn’t really take the roll of the DNC seriously either, which wasn’t good for fundraising and keeping local democratic seats blues — Obama was a young president and the book takes a hard look at how he took some things for granted.
I believe that in 2020, many reporters failed in covering some of the clownery that went on in the Bernie Sanders campaign. This book, again, takes a hard look at that campaign and how after Clinton’s loss, Bernie Sanders managed to convince many eventual Democratic presidential hopefuls to sign onto his “Medicare for All” bill, which really lacks substance but is more symbolic — in theory Bernie is arguing to do away with the Affordable Care Act and replace it with government run Medicare for All, the Democratic hopefuls all signed onto this not really deeply considering whether this was viable, and it allowed Sanders to create a litmus test for who is/isn’t progressive. You didn’t sign onto Medicare for All? Then you’re not progressive. Members of the media seemed to challenge candidates for answers on what Medicare for All would mean if they were president and it really arguably led to the downfall of candidates like Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren, who ultimately stumbled on questions about Medicare for All. Candidates like Joe Biden who didn’t sign onto it, or candidates like Pete Buttigieg who flipped the script and proposed “Medicare for All ‘who want it’” didn’t exactly get caught in the Sanders trap. But, one thing for sure with the Sanders campaign is that he hired a lot of staffers who would sling mud on Twitter and smear opponents — and Sanders would not do anything to stop them. Other candidates would not allow their staffers to be tweeting overtly false smears about other candidates - but that wasn’t the case with Sanders. Elizabeth Warren should have listened to the lessons Hillary Clinton shared about Bernie Sanders and his allies because it seemed to come as a shock to her that he would let his staffers (not simply crazy people online — his staffers) sling mud, but he did.
It was interesting that the Bernie campaign really believed they could win the nomination by just appealing to 30% of the electorate and that ultimately really backfired. Democrats also seemed to have learn the lessons Republicans didn’t learn in 2016 about preventing a candidate who only appeals to 30% of the electorate from winning the presidential nomination.
But there’s a lot of interesting stuff in here about Obama who seemed engaged throughout the presidential process and would allow several candidate to confide in him — Biden, Sanders, Buttigieg, etc.
Seems like the Obama team always kind of took Biden as a nominee for president seriously — including when he flirted with running in 2015. But Biden seemed to win the nomination because there wasn’t a mainstream democrat breaking through the pack early on in the primaries — and maybe things could have gone differently if Pete Buttigieg was declared the winner of the Iowa caucuses the night that they occurred (another example of a place where the Sanders campaign really did some mudslinging in a way that took away from the first LGBTQ person winning a primary contest. So, that’s unfortunate.)
The book also really takes you through the search for Biden’s Vice President. It seems like he knew in the beginning it should be Kamala Harris but because of their tense debate exchange, he flirted with other picks. I get the impression that his #2 pick was Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, but Biden ultimately realized, I think, that Kamala Harris had the resume, was already experienced with handling the mud slinging, was a strong debater, and the moment called for. Black woman. But I could see a future Hulu mini series revolving around the search for Biden’s veep.
Ultimately, Biden won the election and there’s some lessons to learn from his victory. He won by appealing to large swaths of the country - Black voters in Georgia, he won back some of the white working class voters in MI/PA/WI that Hillary Clinton lost. But the democrats still lost seats in Congress. For Democrats to win, the book suggests they should take a Biden approach by not appealing to activists and their slogans, but by actually presenting reasonable ideas to voters who don’t spent their days looking at Twitter or listening to podcasts about why rich kids need free college. Many of the democrats who lost their seats had ads playing in their districts linking them with “defunding the police.”
The book also looks at the Senate primary race between Joe Kennedy and Ed Markey (btw I also learned from this book that Ed Markey and Carol King once dated — the more you know). Ed Markey had a voting record similar to Joe Biden, and he was not popular in Massachusetts; he wasn’t accomplishing much and his approval rating was low — even Bernie Sanders never would have considered him “a progressive” the book says. So he was unpopular until he signed onto the “green new deal” which gave the bill some credibility because he’s a senator, but really the bill lacks any substance, there’s not really a plan in it, it’s just symbolic, a fun slogan and sells some t-shirts. But because Ed Markey signed on he was endorsed by Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and the “justice democrats.” Ed Markey, who previously was seen as a deadbeat and really old, had his campaign revived and he’s seen as a progressive hero among young people. Meanwhile, the leftward media brands Joe Biden, who voted the same way as Ed Markey, as a senile secret Republican — so basically the smears from the leftward media are meaningless. Joe Kennedy is then smeared as an “establishment” democrat who only is riding off the coattails of his rich family — the whole section on this election just really wreaks of slime and smears and yucko.
But this book is really in dept, I could go on, but there’s interesting stuff about the Sanders campaign desperately trying to use the Tara Reade allegations to make Sanders the nominee, and there’s just a lot of juicy stuff that wasn’t reported elsewhere and if you’re a news junky who likes a behind the scenes look at campaigns then this is a must read.
It starts with Hillary Clinton losing the election in 2016 and takes you into former President Obama’s reaction and takes a hard look at how Democrats went from controlling congress when he won in 2008 to completely losing control in 2016 - it seems to imply that Obama could have done more to go to states like Wisconsin (especially when “right to vote” laws were replacing unions), Michigan, Wisconsin and promoting the good things his administration was accomplishing, but Obama didn’t see that as the roll of the president and he didn’t really take the roll of the DNC seriously either, which wasn’t good for fundraising and keeping local democratic seats blues — Obama was a young president and the book takes a hard look at how he took some things for granted.
I believe that in 2020, many reporters failed in covering some of the clownery that went on in the Bernie Sanders campaign. This book, again, takes a hard look at that campaign and how after Clinton’s loss, Bernie Sanders managed to convince many eventual Democratic presidential hopefuls to sign onto his “Medicare for All” bill, which really lacks substance but is more symbolic — in theory Bernie is arguing to do away with the Affordable Care Act and replace it with government run Medicare for All, the Democratic hopefuls all signed onto this not really deeply considering whether this was viable, and it allowed Sanders to create a litmus test for who is/isn’t progressive. You didn’t sign onto Medicare for All? Then you’re not progressive. Members of the media seemed to challenge candidates for answers on what Medicare for All would mean if they were president and it really arguably led to the downfall of candidates like Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren, who ultimately stumbled on questions about Medicare for All. Candidates like Joe Biden who didn’t sign onto it, or candidates like Pete Buttigieg who flipped the script and proposed “Medicare for All ‘who want it’” didn’t exactly get caught in the Sanders trap. But, one thing for sure with the Sanders campaign is that he hired a lot of staffers who would sling mud on Twitter and smear opponents — and Sanders would not do anything to stop them. Other candidates would not allow their staffers to be tweeting overtly false smears about other candidates - but that wasn’t the case with Sanders. Elizabeth Warren should have listened to the lessons Hillary Clinton shared about Bernie Sanders and his allies because it seemed to come as a shock to her that he would let his staffers (not simply crazy people online — his staffers) sling mud, but he did.
It was interesting that the Bernie campaign really believed they could win the nomination by just appealing to 30% of the electorate and that ultimately really backfired. Democrats also seemed to have learn the lessons Republicans didn’t learn in 2016 about preventing a candidate who only appeals to 30% of the electorate from winning the presidential nomination.
But there’s a lot of interesting stuff in here about Obama who seemed engaged throughout the presidential process and would allow several candidate to confide in him — Biden, Sanders, Buttigieg, etc.
Seems like the Obama team always kind of took Biden as a nominee for president seriously — including when he flirted with running in 2015. But Biden seemed to win the nomination because there wasn’t a mainstream democrat breaking through the pack early on in the primaries — and maybe things could have gone differently if Pete Buttigieg was declared the winner of the Iowa caucuses the night that they occurred (another example of a place where the Sanders campaign really did some mudslinging in a way that took away from the first LGBTQ person winning a primary contest. So, that’s unfortunate.)
The book also really takes you through the search for Biden’s Vice President. It seems like he knew in the beginning it should be Kamala Harris but because of their tense debate exchange, he flirted with other picks. I get the impression that his #2 pick was Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, but Biden ultimately realized, I think, that Kamala Harris had the resume, was already experienced with handling the mud slinging, was a strong debater, and the moment called for. Black woman. But I could see a future Hulu mini series revolving around the search for Biden’s veep.
Ultimately, Biden won the election and there’s some lessons to learn from his victory. He won by appealing to large swaths of the country - Black voters in Georgia, he won back some of the white working class voters in MI/PA/WI that Hillary Clinton lost. But the democrats still lost seats in Congress. For Democrats to win, the book suggests they should take a Biden approach by not appealing to activists and their slogans, but by actually presenting reasonable ideas to voters who don’t spent their days looking at Twitter or listening to podcasts about why rich kids need free college. Many of the democrats who lost their seats had ads playing in their districts linking them with “defunding the police.”
The book also looks at the Senate primary race between Joe Kennedy and Ed Markey (btw I also learned from this book that Ed Markey and Carol King once dated — the more you know). Ed Markey had a voting record similar to Joe Biden, and he was not popular in Massachusetts; he wasn’t accomplishing much and his approval rating was low — even Bernie Sanders never would have considered him “a progressive” the book says. So he was unpopular until he signed onto the “green new deal” which gave the bill some credibility because he’s a senator, but really the bill lacks any substance, there’s not really a plan in it, it’s just symbolic, a fun slogan and sells some t-shirts. But because Ed Markey signed on he was endorsed by Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and the “justice democrats.” Ed Markey, who previously was seen as a deadbeat and really old, had his campaign revived and he’s seen as a progressive hero among young people. Meanwhile, the leftward media brands Joe Biden, who voted the same way as Ed Markey, as a senile secret Republican — so basically the smears from the leftward media are meaningless. Joe Kennedy is then smeared as an “establishment” democrat who only is riding off the coattails of his rich family — the whole section on this election just really wreaks of slime and smears and yucko.
But this book is really in dept, I could go on, but there’s interesting stuff about the Sanders campaign desperately trying to use the Tara Reade allegations to make Sanders the nominee, and there’s just a lot of juicy stuff that wasn’t reported elsewhere and if you’re a news junky who likes a behind the scenes look at campaigns then this is a must read.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
July 18, 2021
Battle for the Soul: Inside the Democrats’ Campaign to Defeat Trump is a richly detailed overview of the primary and general election campaign to take back the White House. It begins with the heartbreaking defeat of Hillary Clinton through the inauguration of Joe Biden and into the first month of his administration. As a writer for The Atlantic, Dovere had extraordinary access, including interviewing candidates, campaign staff, and voters.
There is a lot of inside information including new information. For example, many people saw Bernie’s staff and key people in alternative media who supported him amplifying the false allegations of the fabulist Tara Reade. But we didn’t know that Bernie’s own staffer, David Sirota, put her in touch with an Intercept reporter. We all saw the people on Twitter suggesting Biden stop down and Bernie step in because of the allegations, but we did not see the machinations behind her allegations.
He also recounts Biden’s decision to choose Kamala Harris as his Vice-Presidential running mate. And yes, some of the influence efforts were obvious, but the actual efforts were far more interesting.
Battle for the Soul is an interesting history of the primary and general election on the Democratic side. It is rich with the kind of details that bring the candidates to life. It also shows how some of the sausage is made and is as interesting and dispiriting as you may expect. We get some of the background to the mess in Iowa, the Sanders – Warren spat and splintering, and other key inflection points in the campaign.
The book suffers from 20-20 hindsight, giving it an inevitability that did not exist. This makes Biden”s staff seem more prescient than is humanly possible. Dover does cover the month’s in the wilderness for Biden, but always with a “wait and see” sense that of course, it will work out in the end.
The other great flaw is far more serious. Dovere has no respect for women who have the ambition to be president. He asserts repeatedly that Clinton was a horrible candidate even though she won the popular vote by three million and was the first woman to successfully compete for a major party nomination. If there is any negative quality in Warren or Harris, he expands on it, often unfairly. Warren emerges as a scheming, manipulative woman seeking power by any means. Kamala Harris suspended her campaign before the first primary but he recycles the Willie Brown relationship. He is more evenhanded about her career as a prosecutor but has obviously scoured her every public utterance to find the most inane he could find. Seriously, everyone babbles at times, but he seems to find every moment. He is kinder to Klobuchar and Whitmer, but then they both publicly withdrew from consideration. I guess women who renounce personal advancement are the good ones.
I don’t want to say Edward-Isaac Dovere is a misogynist. I am certain he supports women’s rights and would vote for a woman candidate, but he has no charity for women of ambition. What might be ignored or shrugged off in a man is given no leeway for women. He does not actively support anti-women initiatives, but women seeking power are seen as suspect and given no room for error. He seems oblivious to these biases, but compare his admiring coverage of the men, Buttigieg in particular, to any of the women, and the difference is stark.
This made for a book that was alternately fascinating and infuriating. I am sure most men won’t notice, but for a woman, his coverage of women has harsh double standards and no room for error. He seems to be the perfect American voter, one who always say they want a woman president, but will also always say, but not that woman.
Battle for the Soul at Penguin Random House
Edward-Isaac Dovere author site
https://tonstantweaderreviews.wordpre...
There is a lot of inside information including new information. For example, many people saw Bernie’s staff and key people in alternative media who supported him amplifying the false allegations of the fabulist Tara Reade. But we didn’t know that Bernie’s own staffer, David Sirota, put her in touch with an Intercept reporter. We all saw the people on Twitter suggesting Biden stop down and Bernie step in because of the allegations, but we did not see the machinations behind her allegations.
He also recounts Biden’s decision to choose Kamala Harris as his Vice-Presidential running mate. And yes, some of the influence efforts were obvious, but the actual efforts were far more interesting.
Battle for the Soul is an interesting history of the primary and general election on the Democratic side. It is rich with the kind of details that bring the candidates to life. It also shows how some of the sausage is made and is as interesting and dispiriting as you may expect. We get some of the background to the mess in Iowa, the Sanders – Warren spat and splintering, and other key inflection points in the campaign.
The book suffers from 20-20 hindsight, giving it an inevitability that did not exist. This makes Biden”s staff seem more prescient than is humanly possible. Dover does cover the month’s in the wilderness for Biden, but always with a “wait and see” sense that of course, it will work out in the end.
The other great flaw is far more serious. Dovere has no respect for women who have the ambition to be president. He asserts repeatedly that Clinton was a horrible candidate even though she won the popular vote by three million and was the first woman to successfully compete for a major party nomination. If there is any negative quality in Warren or Harris, he expands on it, often unfairly. Warren emerges as a scheming, manipulative woman seeking power by any means. Kamala Harris suspended her campaign before the first primary but he recycles the Willie Brown relationship. He is more evenhanded about her career as a prosecutor but has obviously scoured her every public utterance to find the most inane he could find. Seriously, everyone babbles at times, but he seems to find every moment. He is kinder to Klobuchar and Whitmer, but then they both publicly withdrew from consideration. I guess women who renounce personal advancement are the good ones.
I don’t want to say Edward-Isaac Dovere is a misogynist. I am certain he supports women’s rights and would vote for a woman candidate, but he has no charity for women of ambition. What might be ignored or shrugged off in a man is given no leeway for women. He does not actively support anti-women initiatives, but women seeking power are seen as suspect and given no room for error. He seems oblivious to these biases, but compare his admiring coverage of the men, Buttigieg in particular, to any of the women, and the difference is stark.
This made for a book that was alternately fascinating and infuriating. I am sure most men won’t notice, but for a woman, his coverage of women has harsh double standards and no room for error. He seems to be the perfect American voter, one who always say they want a woman president, but will also always say, but not that woman.
Battle for the Soul at Penguin Random House
Edward-Isaac Dovere author site
https://tonstantweaderreviews.wordpre...
June 14, 2021
Following the footsteps of “Lucky,” this proves to be another trashy “fly on the wall” account of the 2020 primaries. On top of a questionable level of accuracy, Dovere’s editorializing careens from poorly landed metaphors to weird and frankly creepy (like describing the candidates as a group of “horny teenagers.”) If you’re looking for insight into the political trends that landed in Biden at the top of the ticket, look elsewhere. Dovere’s account is as vapid as it is poorly written and loaded with excessive details about candidates personal traits (Bernie wanted to sleep near an ice machine at his hotel—what a monster, according to Dovere) and skips over any real discussion of what voters wanted or perceived. TLDR: this actually might be the worst book I’ve read in years.
June 1, 2021
I cannot imagine a book that will do a better job of telling the story of the 2020 campaign than this book. (Although I am hoping that the team that wrote Identity Crisis, will do a similar analysis of the data from the 2020 election.) The writer writes in a clear fashion, tells stories with insight, focuses on why Biden was the only candidate who could have beaten Trump, and presents Biden as a much stronger figure than others have presented him (probably due to the author having much access to Biden and his top aides).
There are some revelations here: everyone hated Sanders, his top advisors are even more loathsome than they come across in other accounts, Harris run a horrible campaign and was not much of a force in the 2020 Presidential campaign, and there was much infighting when Biden was choosing his running mate.
Bloomberg comes across as someone who had no plan for the campaign and was totally unprepared for the first debate. And Beta O'Rourke comes across, consistent with other accounts, as someone who was so in love with his image and had no clear sense as to why he wanted to be President. It would have been good to hear even more of his inane campaign statements. Difficult to believe how he was taken seriously.
And Obama does not come across all that well. He is someone who failed to help his party, he is someone who believes he is the smartest person in the room, and his pronouncements on what would happen in the campaign were less than insightful.
It is difficult to remember some of the bizarre things that happened during this time period. It is difficult to believe how horrible a person and President Trump was. It is also surprising how the January 6th riot is being papered over, downplayed, and ignored by spineless Republicans (including the Congress person Peter Stauber who unfortunately represents my district and is one of the most unprincipled people I have ever encountered).
There are some revelations here: everyone hated Sanders, his top advisors are even more loathsome than they come across in other accounts, Harris run a horrible campaign and was not much of a force in the 2020 Presidential campaign, and there was much infighting when Biden was choosing his running mate.
Bloomberg comes across as someone who had no plan for the campaign and was totally unprepared for the first debate. And Beta O'Rourke comes across, consistent with other accounts, as someone who was so in love with his image and had no clear sense as to why he wanted to be President. It would have been good to hear even more of his inane campaign statements. Difficult to believe how he was taken seriously.
And Obama does not come across all that well. He is someone who failed to help his party, he is someone who believes he is the smartest person in the room, and his pronouncements on what would happen in the campaign were less than insightful.
It is difficult to remember some of the bizarre things that happened during this time period. It is difficult to believe how horrible a person and President Trump was. It is also surprising how the January 6th riot is being papered over, downplayed, and ignored by spineless Republicans (including the Congress person Peter Stauber who unfortunately represents my district and is one of the most unprincipled people I have ever encountered).
August 16, 2021
I consider myself a political junkie so I figured I knew most of this subject matter. I did not.
Dovere takes us behind the scenes of mainly the 2020 campaign where none of the candidates really came out looking fantastic in Dovere's view.
Biden becomes the default candidate seemingly by accident. Because. . .the majority of the voters just wanted all the crazy to stop. Biden, it seems, was the perfect candidate at the right time--the direct opposite of Trump.
Dovere takes us behind the scenes of mainly the 2020 campaign where none of the candidates really came out looking fantastic in Dovere's view.
Biden becomes the default candidate seemingly by accident. Because. . .the majority of the voters just wanted all the crazy to stop. Biden, it seems, was the perfect candidate at the right time--the direct opposite of Trump.
September 19, 2021
BATTLE for the soul of the Democratic Party was a good book. I really enjoyed reading about how the Democratic Party came back together after losing the election in 2016. A must read for anyone who is a political junkie like me
August 17, 2021
Enjoyable, fun, big overview of the 2020 election campaign and why Biden won. Entertaining and great to read.
July 12, 2022
This was quite biased, but it was an interesting take on the democratic side of the elections.
September 16, 2021
This was a little hard to get through. It felt very rambling at times, and I was hoping it would have data to back up some of its “candidate A appeals to these people, but candidate B did this better and won” type of statements. I was a little disappointed but it was really insightful with hearing some of the information about Kamala and of course Biden, and how amazingly centrist he is and was.
The book gets me in the head of Biden, it gets me in the head a little bit of Kamala but does not even try to do that with Buttigieg or any of the other candidates. A little bit with Sanders, but Bernie doesn’t discuss is private life much - that’s a given.
Overall this book was around 100 to 150 pages too long.
The book gets me in the head of Biden, it gets me in the head a little bit of Kamala but does not even try to do that with Buttigieg or any of the other candidates. A little bit with Sanders, but Bernie doesn’t discuss is private life much - that’s a given.
Overall this book was around 100 to 150 pages too long.
June 2, 2021
There is much to like and much to criticize in Edward-Isaac Dovere’s Battle for the Soul. These combine to produce a 3-star review.
Pros:
-Substantial (indeed, exhaustive) detail on the Democratic primaries and the general election campaign of 2020. There is enough content here to satisfy the most obsessive of political enthusiasts.
-Fascinating nuggets of information that have gone unreported or under-reported elsewhere, such as: the 600-person pro bono legal team recruited to prepare Democratic responses to potential Republican election challenges; Kamala Harris’s isolation and anxiety as the vice-presidential nominee.
-Well-rounded portrayals of some subjects (to whom Dovere presumably had extended access): New Jersey Senator Cory Booker, Democratic National Committee chair Tom Perez.
Cons:
-Slow start to the book. So much space is given to the minutiae of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 loss to Donald Trump that the reader may be forgiven for wondering when the narrative will advance to 2020. This material could have been condensed to good effect.
-Uneven or flat portrayals of many of the subjects of Dovere’s reporting, often tending toward stereotype (Obama: unfailingly wise; Biden: decent but too old, too uncertain, too dim; Buttigieg: the young hero.)
[Dovere’s brief savaging of Massachusetts Senator Ed Markey is so one-sided as to cast doubt upon his judgment and balance concerning the political figures he covers. Markey is depicted as an irrelevant, dull-witted and insecure political hack. Ignored are Markey’s effectiveness in building bridges to colleagues, his deep command of environmental and telecommunications policy, and his ability to work across the aisle even in a deeply partisan era. Markey’s central role as a lead sponsor of the only climate change legislation to pass a chamber of Congress is dismissed as a failure. Even worse is Dovere’s use of a quote disparaging Markey from a Boston Magazine article; conveniently, Dovere ignores the article’s many qualifiers and distorts the point of the piece.]
-Reporting that centers on the personalities of individuals to the exclusion of the influence of organized interests. One especially telling example: the roles of Democratic donors and the party hierarchy are neglected in the discussion of the rapid coalescence around Biden’s candidacy in the wake of his South Carolina primary victory.
Pros:
-Substantial (indeed, exhaustive) detail on the Democratic primaries and the general election campaign of 2020. There is enough content here to satisfy the most obsessive of political enthusiasts.
-Fascinating nuggets of information that have gone unreported or under-reported elsewhere, such as: the 600-person pro bono legal team recruited to prepare Democratic responses to potential Republican election challenges; Kamala Harris’s isolation and anxiety as the vice-presidential nominee.
-Well-rounded portrayals of some subjects (to whom Dovere presumably had extended access): New Jersey Senator Cory Booker, Democratic National Committee chair Tom Perez.
Cons:
-Slow start to the book. So much space is given to the minutiae of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 loss to Donald Trump that the reader may be forgiven for wondering when the narrative will advance to 2020. This material could have been condensed to good effect.
-Uneven or flat portrayals of many of the subjects of Dovere’s reporting, often tending toward stereotype (Obama: unfailingly wise; Biden: decent but too old, too uncertain, too dim; Buttigieg: the young hero.)
[Dovere’s brief savaging of Massachusetts Senator Ed Markey is so one-sided as to cast doubt upon his judgment and balance concerning the political figures he covers. Markey is depicted as an irrelevant, dull-witted and insecure political hack. Ignored are Markey’s effectiveness in building bridges to colleagues, his deep command of environmental and telecommunications policy, and his ability to work across the aisle even in a deeply partisan era. Markey’s central role as a lead sponsor of the only climate change legislation to pass a chamber of Congress is dismissed as a failure. Even worse is Dovere’s use of a quote disparaging Markey from a Boston Magazine article; conveniently, Dovere ignores the article’s many qualifiers and distorts the point of the piece.]
-Reporting that centers on the personalities of individuals to the exclusion of the influence of organized interests. One especially telling example: the roles of Democratic donors and the party hierarchy are neglected in the discussion of the rapid coalescence around Biden’s candidacy in the wake of his South Carolina primary victory.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
August 3, 2021
Definitely a "first draft of history" kind of book. A lot of interesting behind-the-scenes reporting tidbits, but not a book organized in a systematic way that would give a full picture of the 2020 election to someone who was unfamiliar with it. A lot of jumping around within chapters and sections that I imagine might confuse some readers. A campaign junkie, though, will find a few new items of interest, a few explanations (or at least justifications) for important events like Kamala Harris' nomination for the Vice Presidency or the Warren-Sanders divide. I got it from the library. That was the right decision.
July 28, 2021
I wanted to like this book because I've read the author's pieces in The Atlantic. I didn't. I also wanted to like this book because it was written about the 2020 using the Democratic Party as the focal point rather than Trump as the focal point--- a somewhat unique perspective in these times when we have been deluged by books about the "former guy". I didn't. The biggest problem with this book is it has no "theme" or focus. The author skips from thing to thing with no coherent arc to the narrative. What is this book supposed to be about? A rift in the Democratic Party? Joe Biden's ascendancy in the Democratic primary? A reflection of the shifting sentiments of the American polity? It is unclear what this book is about. The lacking of coherent editing in this book is not just a "meta" problem. There were many a sentence that begin in one place and end in an entirely different universe. Some of the sentences in this book don't make sense. I like to read campaign books but this isn't the one to read about 2020.
July 12, 2021
Battle for the Soul is the latest in what has become a quadrennial tradition: an insidery account of a just-concluded presidential election, a model most recently refined by the uber-successful Game Change books in 2008.
Edward-Isaac Dovere's effort focuses entirely on the dozen or so Democrats who vied to replace Donald Trump after an eventful (to say the least) four years in office. For people who paid even glancing attention to the primaries in 2019 and 2020, much of this story is familiar. The early favorite, Vice President Joe Biden, was nearly fatally wounded by lackluster debate performances and a near total failure to drum up voter enthusiasm. But the rest of the field, including Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren, became tangled up trying to stake out a coherent position on the issue that dominated the primary: health care. Harris, undone by a chaotic campaign structure, dropped out early; Warren hung around but never gained traction. Pete Buttigieg, the boy wonder mayor of South Bend, Ind., came out of nowhere to become a favorite, but could not connect with Black voters.
And so that left the two old white men of the bunch: 2016 runner-up Bernie Sanders and the senescent Biden. Buoyed by a passionate army of supporters, Bernie looked, in early February, to be the likely winner, a prospect that filled the Democratic establishment with existential dread. But Biden's commanding victory in South Carolina swung the race decisively in his favor. A couple weeks later, the coronavirus brought American life to a standstill and the primary was, in effect, forgotten.
Battle for the Soul delivers what it promises: a juicy, fun, engaging narrative about the campaign, filled with enough juicy tidbits to thrill political obsessives. Dovere is also a sharp analyst, showing how the events of 2020 — the coronavirus and the racial justice protests — catered to Biden's strengths.
Battle for the Soul isn't perfect. The book loses much of its momentum after Biden cinched the nomination and breezes through the next several months, likely a function more of Dovere's publishing schedule than anything editorial. And Dovere himself is often too cynical by half — you get the distinct impression he didn't care for any of the candidates he wrote about. That's not a terrible quality in a political reporter, but the relentless snark became grating after awhile.
I'd rather poke my eyeballs out than speculate about the 2024 election. But inevitably, unless it gets canceled in some sort of authoritarian putsch, there will be one — and I'm sure I'll be buying a book just like Battle for the Soul sometime in 2025. Hopefully Dovere will be the one writing it.
Edward-Isaac Dovere's effort focuses entirely on the dozen or so Democrats who vied to replace Donald Trump after an eventful (to say the least) four years in office. For people who paid even glancing attention to the primaries in 2019 and 2020, much of this story is familiar. The early favorite, Vice President Joe Biden, was nearly fatally wounded by lackluster debate performances and a near total failure to drum up voter enthusiasm. But the rest of the field, including Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren, became tangled up trying to stake out a coherent position on the issue that dominated the primary: health care. Harris, undone by a chaotic campaign structure, dropped out early; Warren hung around but never gained traction. Pete Buttigieg, the boy wonder mayor of South Bend, Ind., came out of nowhere to become a favorite, but could not connect with Black voters.
And so that left the two old white men of the bunch: 2016 runner-up Bernie Sanders and the senescent Biden. Buoyed by a passionate army of supporters, Bernie looked, in early February, to be the likely winner, a prospect that filled the Democratic establishment with existential dread. But Biden's commanding victory in South Carolina swung the race decisively in his favor. A couple weeks later, the coronavirus brought American life to a standstill and the primary was, in effect, forgotten.
Battle for the Soul delivers what it promises: a juicy, fun, engaging narrative about the campaign, filled with enough juicy tidbits to thrill political obsessives. Dovere is also a sharp analyst, showing how the events of 2020 — the coronavirus and the racial justice protests — catered to Biden's strengths.
Battle for the Soul isn't perfect. The book loses much of its momentum after Biden cinched the nomination and breezes through the next several months, likely a function more of Dovere's publishing schedule than anything editorial. And Dovere himself is often too cynical by half — you get the distinct impression he didn't care for any of the candidates he wrote about. That's not a terrible quality in a political reporter, but the relentless snark became grating after awhile.
I'd rather poke my eyeballs out than speculate about the 2024 election. But inevitably, unless it gets canceled in some sort of authoritarian putsch, there will be one — and I'm sure I'll be buying a book just like Battle for the Soul sometime in 2025. Hopefully Dovere will be the one writing it.
November 19, 2021
We all want to like the books which we read - specifically if we’re interested the topic, but that doesn't always happen. I read “Battle for the Soul: Inside the Democrats' Campaigns to Defeat Trump” by Edward-Isaac Dovere, which I'm giving 3 stars.
Why am I giving the book 3 stars? To start, Dovere appeared to use an inconsistent timeline - going back and forth between events to get his point across. As a writer, I can sympathize with what goes behind piecing together a long puzzle, but I also bear in mind that a ‘long puzzle’ must be cognizable to the reader, as to avert instances of confusion. An example can be found between pages 294 and 295. The paragraph starts by discussing the enthusiasm associated with Pete Buttigieg’s candidacy and how he had been trying to establish himself as a “local celebrity” before announcing for president, before mentioning Bernie Sanders’ campaign in Nevada ahead of Super Tuesday, and the “wave” associated with his levels of support. “The Sanders wave peaked the next morning in East Las Vegas, at a community center that filled with multiple different precincts caucusing,” and ended by discussing where Joe Biden’s new campaign manager moved staffers ahead of the South Carolina primaries.
This unclear timing took a book which contained lots of information, that by any stretch of the imagination was very interesting, such as an excerpt about former President Obama on his views relating to a potential 2020 field back from August of 2017. Page 48 says “Obama started his latest round of his favorite game, Who Do You Want To Be The Democratic Nominee,” which included who Obama would want to win in his head, in his heart, and which potential Democratic presidential candidate would be the most likely to defeat Donald Trump in 2020.
To summarize, “Battle for the Soul,” in my view, contained elaborate details which someone with a basic interest in politics would understand and enjoy to the point where they would not want to put the book down, so long as they can overlook a layout which is not the easiest to follow. Did Edward-Isaac Dovere successfully “battle for the soul” of his readers? This one says that he came pretty close.
Why am I giving the book 3 stars? To start, Dovere appeared to use an inconsistent timeline - going back and forth between events to get his point across. As a writer, I can sympathize with what goes behind piecing together a long puzzle, but I also bear in mind that a ‘long puzzle’ must be cognizable to the reader, as to avert instances of confusion. An example can be found between pages 294 and 295. The paragraph starts by discussing the enthusiasm associated with Pete Buttigieg’s candidacy and how he had been trying to establish himself as a “local celebrity” before announcing for president, before mentioning Bernie Sanders’ campaign in Nevada ahead of Super Tuesday, and the “wave” associated with his levels of support. “The Sanders wave peaked the next morning in East Las Vegas, at a community center that filled with multiple different precincts caucusing,” and ended by discussing where Joe Biden’s new campaign manager moved staffers ahead of the South Carolina primaries.
This unclear timing took a book which contained lots of information, that by any stretch of the imagination was very interesting, such as an excerpt about former President Obama on his views relating to a potential 2020 field back from August of 2017. Page 48 says “Obama started his latest round of his favorite game, Who Do You Want To Be The Democratic Nominee,” which included who Obama would want to win in his head, in his heart, and which potential Democratic presidential candidate would be the most likely to defeat Donald Trump in 2020.
To summarize, “Battle for the Soul,” in my view, contained elaborate details which someone with a basic interest in politics would understand and enjoy to the point where they would not want to put the book down, so long as they can overlook a layout which is not the easiest to follow. Did Edward-Isaac Dovere successfully “battle for the soul” of his readers? This one says that he came pretty close.
June 2, 2021
Excellence Is Marred by Flat Portrayals & Vitriol
There is much to like in Eric-Isaac Dovere’s Battle for the Soul, and much to deplore.
Pros:
-Detailed look at the 2020 campaign and those who shaped it.
-Truly fascinating pieces of information that have been little reported or unreported by others: the 600-strong team of lawyers who prepared for possible GOP challenges to election results; Kamala Harris’s feelings of isolation and uncertainty as the vice presidential nominee.
-Sensitive, well-rounded portrayals of New Jersey Senator Cory Booker and Democratic National Committee chair Tom Perez.
Cons:
-Flat portrayals of many players:
-Obama, while rightly criticized for his detachment from fellow Democrats and for failing to build the Democratic Party during his presidency and afterward, is nonetheless depicted as an eminently wise sage, decisively guiding events from behind the scenes. (Which is it— detachment or decisivenes? Both are of course possible, but Dovere doesn’t bother to reconcile these characteristics for readers.)
-Biden is relentlessly portrayed as too old, too dim and too insecure, although eminently decent. What is not portrayed, however, is the leader who gradually emerged after Sanders’ withdrawal from the race. Yes, it’s possible that this was the result of good speech writers or handlers, but Dovere depicts neither the improvement nor its origins.
-Massachusetts Senator Ed Markey is savaged as an irrelevant, dull-witted party hack with no achievements. Ignored is the Waxman-Markey Act(the only climate change legislation to ever pass a chamber of Congress)
There is much to like in Eric-Isaac Dovere’s Battle for the Soul, and much to deplore.
Pros:
-Detailed look at the 2020 campaign and those who shaped it.
-Truly fascinating pieces of information that have been little reported or unreported by others: the 600-strong team of lawyers who prepared for possible GOP challenges to election results; Kamala Harris’s feelings of isolation and uncertainty as the vice presidential nominee.
-Sensitive, well-rounded portrayals of New Jersey Senator Cory Booker and Democratic National Committee chair Tom Perez.
Cons:
-Flat portrayals of many players:
-Obama, while rightly criticized for his detachment from fellow Democrats and for failing to build the Democratic Party during his presidency and afterward, is nonetheless depicted as an eminently wise sage, decisively guiding events from behind the scenes. (Which is it— detachment or decisivenes? Both are of course possible, but Dovere doesn’t bother to reconcile these characteristics for readers.)
-Biden is relentlessly portrayed as too old, too dim and too insecure, although eminently decent. What is not portrayed, however, is the leader who gradually emerged after Sanders’ withdrawal from the race. Yes, it’s possible that this was the result of good speech writers or handlers, but Dovere depicts neither the improvement nor its origins.
-Massachusetts Senator Ed Markey is savaged as an irrelevant, dull-witted party hack with no achievements. Ignored is the Waxman-Markey Act(the only climate change legislation to ever pass a chamber of Congress)
Read
August 17, 2021Pros:
This book is a really engrossing page-turner, despite the whopping page count, into the inner corridors of power and the calculations and maneuvers of the different Democratic candidates. I learned some new things such as how George Clooney almost single-handedly conceptualized, spearheaded, and organized the March for Our Lives event, which is nice of him.
Cons:
I feel this book flirts generously with speculations. It is not footnoted. The author repeatedly attributes certain thoughts or characteristics to people without much proof. For instance, there's chunky blocks of what Obama thinks or feels or desires at any given moment. I'm pretty sure 'no-leaks' Obama did not provide private air time to this reporter to be privy to an outpouring of his thoughts or feelings, especially not to this particular breed of unsympathetic reporter who labels Obama a 'parasite', a would-be elder statesman who doesn't want the responsibilities of active work, and an ex-politician that feels vindicated to get millions from paid speeches to furnish his 12-bedroom house and golf in Martha's Vineyard. At the same time, this reporter is not kind to progressives, repeatedly casting AOC and her 'squad' in an unfriendly light and giving short shift to her achievements, as the 'person who won a primary in a 90% democrat district' and a citizen of the Twitter bubble.
This book is a really engrossing page-turner, despite the whopping page count, into the inner corridors of power and the calculations and maneuvers of the different Democratic candidates. I learned some new things such as how George Clooney almost single-handedly conceptualized, spearheaded, and organized the March for Our Lives event, which is nice of him.
Cons:
I feel this book flirts generously with speculations. It is not footnoted. The author repeatedly attributes certain thoughts or characteristics to people without much proof. For instance, there's chunky blocks of what Obama thinks or feels or desires at any given moment. I'm pretty sure 'no-leaks' Obama did not provide private air time to this reporter to be privy to an outpouring of his thoughts or feelings, especially not to this particular breed of unsympathetic reporter who labels Obama a 'parasite', a would-be elder statesman who doesn't want the responsibilities of active work, and an ex-politician that feels vindicated to get millions from paid speeches to furnish his 12-bedroom house and golf in Martha's Vineyard. At the same time, this reporter is not kind to progressives, repeatedly casting AOC and her 'squad' in an unfriendly light and giving short shift to her achievements, as the 'person who won a primary in a 90% democrat district' and a citizen of the Twitter bubble.
August 26, 2021
Every Trump supporter ought to take a look at this story, as in case he runs again it seems unlikely very much about the Democrat party will have change in the meantime. And if someone other than Trump runs it will be wise to view the extent to which they will have shifted their stance to a more progressive(socialist?) to look more like ... I am reluctant to place the name Joe Biden here as I am of a mind he is likely also a one-term (or less?) president.
Dovere does cover a broad swath of the issues that got us to this point. For Democrats it ended up being only "how to defeat Trump" even as they trashed any number of candidates for good and bad reasons on the way to nomination and election. His conclusions on the election outcome almost demand that one suspend all thought of there having been problems with the November 2020 vote. And there is absolutely no mention of "early voting" problems even though he does talk at some length about Iowa caucus problems - almost surprisingly.
You will need a touch of thick skin to get past some of the "orange man bad" rhetoric, but that is really not the snake oil he is selling .
Dovere does cover a broad swath of the issues that got us to this point. For Democrats it ended up being only "how to defeat Trump" even as they trashed any number of candidates for good and bad reasons on the way to nomination and election. His conclusions on the election outcome almost demand that one suspend all thought of there having been problems with the November 2020 vote. And there is absolutely no mention of "early voting" problems even though he does talk at some length about Iowa caucus problems - almost surprisingly.
You will need a touch of thick skin to get past some of the "orange man bad" rhetoric, but that is really not the snake oil he is selling .
July 15, 2021
It reads like a Democratic version of Tim Alberta's "American Carnage," and this is intended as a compliment.
Dovere is obviously well-sourced on the left. He also possesses the ironic detachment of a campaign veteran who knows not to take any of his subjects too seriously, even as the stakes loom enormous.
The result is an entertaining and often funny tale of the Democrats' four-year quest to beat Trump. Dovere provides fly-on-the-wall accounts of all the major Democrat campaigns. He dishes it out with impunity, and the campaigns of Biden, Harris, Warren and others all receive withering criticism.
The book's weakest section is the (surprisingly brief) mention of the general election against Trump. It's obvious that Dovere lacks deep sources on the right, and his coverage of the Trump campaign is a rudimentary rehash of existing reporting.
Even with the benefit of hindsight it's not easy to understand exactly how Joe Biden became the Democratic nominee. But it's clear Democrats should be grateful that he did.
Dovere is obviously well-sourced on the left. He also possesses the ironic detachment of a campaign veteran who knows not to take any of his subjects too seriously, even as the stakes loom enormous.
The result is an entertaining and often funny tale of the Democrats' four-year quest to beat Trump. Dovere provides fly-on-the-wall accounts of all the major Democrat campaigns. He dishes it out with impunity, and the campaigns of Biden, Harris, Warren and others all receive withering criticism.
The book's weakest section is the (surprisingly brief) mention of the general election against Trump. It's obvious that Dovere lacks deep sources on the right, and his coverage of the Trump campaign is a rudimentary rehash of existing reporting.
Even with the benefit of hindsight it's not easy to understand exactly how Joe Biden became the Democratic nominee. But it's clear Democrats should be grateful that he did.
June 27, 2021
An entertaining read, the best parts of which were the small details captured about the different candidates and the major political players. You really get a sense of the democratic class of 2020 as flesh and blood people, who are vain, competitive, grasping, and petty just like the rest of us. No one really comes off well—which I really appreciated—though Biden, of course, winds up as the hero of the book.
The grand framing—which promises to take the reader ‘Inside the Democrats’ campaign to defeat Trump’—is never really achieved, however. The book simply moves too fast and gets too mired in cataloging each campaign’s strategic missteps and detailing each candidate’s character flaws to effectively zoom out and examine the larger Democratic strategy to recapture the White House. The chatty anecdotes are plenty entertaining; but this is not the place to gain deeper insight into the larger forces shaping the electorate and where the two parties might be headed in the future.
The grand framing—which promises to take the reader ‘Inside the Democrats’ campaign to defeat Trump’—is never really achieved, however. The book simply moves too fast and gets too mired in cataloging each campaign’s strategic missteps and detailing each candidate’s character flaws to effectively zoom out and examine the larger Democratic strategy to recapture the White House. The chatty anecdotes are plenty entertaining; but this is not the place to gain deeper insight into the larger forces shaping the electorate and where the two parties might be headed in the future.
December 23, 2021
I picked up Battle for the Soul: Inside the Democrats’ Campaigns to Defeat Trump after receiving it in an ongoing book exchange with a friend. While there isn’t a ton of new information if you consumed the primary campaign at tweet-speed, I did find it a great comprehensive narrative of what unfolded that eludes the hour-by-hour news cycle. The book also helped me more fully understand President Obama’s role in 2020 as an adviser, how closely he was communicating with candidates, and how carefully he was weighing his public engagement throughout the primary. The overarching narrative cemented for me the belief that Joe Biden was the right candidate for the moment in 2020 — both calming the fears stirred by Donald Trump and retaining some of the hope ignited by President Obama. It also reminded me how close Mayor Pete was to making history and how the crowded field drastically altered the dynamics of the primary for him and many other candidates. I’d recommend it to readers with a passion for politics but wouldn’t mark it as a must-read if you’re hoping to leave 2020 in 2020.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 91 reviews