Lucky
How Joe Biden Barely Won the Presidency
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4.2 • 46 Ratings
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Fortunate breaks allowed Joe Biden to overcome a slow start, uneven stump performances, and shoddy fundraising on his way to the White House, according to this familiar rehash of the 2020 election. Among the fortunate twists of fate, journalists Allen and Parnes (Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign) point to a technological glitch that allowed Biden to temporarily hide his disastrous fourth place finish in the Iowa caucuses; Elizabeth Warren's evisceration of Michael Bloomberg, Biden's main rival for centrist Democrats, on a Las Vegas debate stage; and Rep. James Clyburn's unexpectedly emotional endorsement of Biden ahead of the South Carolina primary. But at least one Biden staffer privately admits that the luckiest break was Covid-19, which took the air out of the Democratic primary right after Biden's Super Tuesday victory and gave him a credible reason to "lay low" while President Trump bungled the response to the pandemic. Allen and Parnes shed light on President Obama's doubts that Biden could win, and reveal that Hillary Clinton gave "serious consideration" to entering the race in November 2019. But much of the analysis will be old hat to news junkies, and attempts to add color (Bernie Sanders played catch with his advisors; Jill Biden sipped "fine wine") mostly fall flat. The result is a well-sourced yet unenlightening run-through of recent history.
Customer Reviews
Insightful and Revealing Book
This book gives great insight to the 2020 election campaign of Joe Biden and how close the 2020 election really was.
Enjoyable read but a little light on the follow-through
This book engaged me as it played out, but a lot of the symmetry of the premise and the content felt a little disjointed. The climaxes spread throughout the book were actually anticlimactic, and the “luck” factor cited by the title felt more like a degradation of the politics of the campaigns, and less like a true identification of coincidences. Overall, I was interested, but not enthralled.