The inside story of the historic 2020 presidential election and Joe Biden’s harrowing ride to victory, from the #1 New York Times bestselling authors of Shattered, the definitive account of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign.
Almost
no one thought Joe Biden could make it back to the White House—not
Donald Trump, not the two dozen Democratic rivals who sought to take
down a weak front-runner, not the mega-donors and key endorsers who
feared he could not beat Bernie Sanders, not even Barack Obama. The
story of Biden’s cathartic victory in the 2020 election is the story of a
Democratic Party at odds with itself, torn between the single-minded
goal of removing Donald Trump and the push for a bold progressive agenda
that threatened to alienate as many voters as it drew.
In Lucky, #1 New York Times bestselling
authors Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes use their unparalleled access to
key players inside the Democratic and Republican campaigns to unfold
how Biden’s nail-biting run for the presidency vexed his own party as
much as it did Trump. Having premised his path on unlocking the Black
vote in South Carolina, Biden nearly imploded before he got there after a
relentless string of misfires left him freefalling in polls and nearly
broke.
Allen and Parnes brilliantly detail the remarkable string
of chance events that saved him, from the botched Iowa caucus tally
that concealed his terrible result, to the pandemic lockdown that kept
him off the stump, where he was often at his worst. More powerfully, Lucky
unfolds the pitched struggle within Biden’s general election campaign
to downplay the very issues that many Democrats believed would drive
voters to the polls, especially in the wake of Trump’s response to
nationwide protests following the murder of George Floyd. Even Biden’s
victory did not salve his party’s wounds; instead, it revealed a
surprising, complicated portrait of American voters and crushed
Democrats’ belief in the inevitability of a blue wave.
A thrilling masterpiece of political reporting, Lucky is essential reading for understanding the most important election in American history and the future that will come of it.
