Edward-Isaac Dovere - Battle for the Soul: Inside the Democrats Campaigns to Defeat Trump

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Copyright 2021 by Edward-Isaac Dovere

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ISBN 9781984878076 (hardcover)

ISBN 9781984878083 (ebook)

Book design by Daniel Lagin, adapted for ebook by Cora Wigen

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To Sarah and the boys who make every day happiness, no matter what else the days may hold. There is more day to dawn.

PROLOGUE

November 8, 2016

Election Day

How do you feel?

Hillary Clintons campaign manager, Robby Mook, was headed out of the Javits Center as the sun set, hours before the polls closed, when excited people were still showing up to get a good spot for the party. He looked up, trying to find whod called out to him.

I feel nothing, he said back.

They knew in the White House by the afternoon that they had a problem. The early vote from Florida could not have been better, but when they started seeing the numbers for the people actually showing up on Election Day, panic quickly spread. By quarter to eight, they realized that the state was probably gone.

Barack Obama spent the afternoon and the evening mostly alone, up in the residence. David Simas, Obamas political director, whod been assuring everyone in the White House every morning that Clinton was going to win, would check in every forty-five minutes by phone, telling him where things stood. He listened quietly, not asking many questions, and waited for the next update.

The Wisconsin results ended it. Wisconsin, where Obama had been scheduled to make his debut on the trail with her in June, before the Pulse nightclub shooting led them to scrap the trip. Where hed always won easily. Where the last Democrat to have lost the state in a presidential election had been Walter Mondale in 1984. Where Clinton had never gone for the whole campaign. Simas called Mook, holding a printout of the preliminary results from the state. What am I missing? he asked. Mook said something about more votes being out, but Simas wasnt buying it. Making up the margin in one state would be a historic shift. Then to replicate that in two or three states?

Donald Trump, Simas said when he next called Obama, is going to be the president.

There was silence for a few seconds. Obama asked them to get Trumps phone number. The closest contact they had was Chris Christie, from work the White House had done with the New Jersey governor during Hurricane Sandy. They started tracking down the ever more likely to be president-elect. Obama asked what the Clinton campaigns plan was for what was now unavoidable. They didnt seem to have one, Simas told him. They seemed to be buying time. Well, Obama said. Thats a problem.

Obama had never understood why people disliked Clinton so much. He could also never get over how bad a campaigner she was. When they had finally hit the trail together at the beginning of July in North Carolina and made the obligatory surprise stop at a barbecue restaurant, shed quickly slipped outJim Comey had announced the end of the FBI investigation into her email server that morning, and she was ducking reporters waiting to shout questions at her. Obama had been working the crowd so intently, shaking so many hands and buying so much food, that he hadnt realized shed gone until he was outside and looking for her to say goodbye. Where did she go? he asked aides, confused.

He liked that story. He has told it over and over again in the years since.

Obama shouldnt have been surprised. She was a pioneering force for feminism, an icon of Americas shift into the twenty-first century, and the most successful woman in the history of American politics, but she was also the frozen-faced embodiment of Democrats as Democratsall the good and bad qualities of government, all the promises it had made that hadnt addressed what was actually happening in the country. There was racism and sexism and xenophobia and nativist paranoia particular to Trump, the overnight pop culture icon whod wheedled his way into the public consciousness to the point of becoming an easy joke on sitcoms. But the core of Trumps campaign was the same as the core of Bernie Sanderss campaign, and it was the same as what had been the core of Obamas campaign against her: Change You Can Believe In. That 2008 slogan was just a shorter way of saying what Trump had charged her with in their first debateSecretary Clinton and other politicians should have been doing this for years, not right now, because of the fact that weve created a movement.

Voters went with the outsider they hated over the insider they despised.

Obama would have been able to make more sense of Clintons losing if it hadnt been to a man he thought of as a moronic carnival barker, who brought out the worst in people, and whom hed never forgive for turning a fringe obsession with his birth certificate into an issue hed had to address from the White House briefing room in 2011.

At the beginning of September, after a briefing to discuss how Trump was apparently bouncing back from yet another scandalat that point, it was the outrage of insulting Khizr Khans Gold Star military familyand how Clinton could never seem to make up any ground, Obama was starting to get exasperated. His order: fix it. Do you really want a psychopath sitting at that desk? hed asked. Find a way to break through to voters. Get someone to listen.

But of course she was going to win. If hed had any doubts about it, he never would have appeared on Jimmy Kimmels show just a few weeks before the election and done Kimmels standard bit of having a guest respond to mean tweets. He read an infamous one from TrumpPresident Obama will go down as perhaps the worst president in the history of the United States!and replied, Well, @realDonaldTrump, at least I will go down as a president, and then glared right into the camera and dropped the prop iPhone. He never really even considered Clinton could lose.

Until those last few days. The crowds didnt feel right. The previous Friday in North Carolina, they were into him in Fayetteville, but they were more into booing an old man in what might have been an old army jacket whod gotten up and started waving a Trump lawn sign. He couldnt get them to stop, to listen, shouting, Hold up! into the microphone over and over. I told you to be focused, and youre not focused right now, he said. A couple of hours later in Charlotte, the rally hadnt been interrupted, but it didnt feel right to him. They wanted to see him, they wanted to beat Trump, but they didnt seem to be thinking much about her.

At first he, like Clinton, blamed the lingering legacy of the long, brutal primary shed been through in the spring. Bernie hurt her more than I realized, hed told an aide that day. The only response from the Clinton campaign was all their data, their voter turnout models, their polls, and data, and data, and data. It was going to be a crappy, bitter win, especially after the Comey letter, but theyd done the math, and it was going to be a win. Like everything else shed ever done, she was going to have to grind it out, aim to be less hated, not loved. Trump would turn out his votes; shed turn out hers. It would be fine. I dont know, Obama would respond, hesitantly.