The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Lucky: How Joe Biden Barely Won the Presidency by Jonathan Allen, Amie Parnes

Episode Date: March 18, 2021

Lucky: How Joe Biden Barely Won the Presidency by Jonathan Allen, Amie Parnes 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.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. Chris Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com. Thechrisvossshow.com.

Hey, we're coming to the most amazing podcast. We certainly appreciate you guys being here today with us. Be sure to go see The Chris Voss Show on all the different social media platforms out there, multiple accounts, multiple groups, enjoy them. Go to youtube.com for just Chris Voss to see the notifications of the bell that you push there. And that gives you all those notifications you get on your phone. So you can know when all the brilliant authors are on the Chris Voss show. I'm really excited about today's show. We have two brilliant multi-book authors. These guys are studious,

studious, is that the right word? Studious journalists. They have been working in the journalism trade for many, many years and are brilliant at the work they do in covering the White House and everything else. So they have written another book together. They've done, I think, at least one before.

We'll get some details on that in a second. The book that just came out,, I think, at least one before. We'll get some details on that in a second. The book that just came out March 2nd, 2021, Lucky, How Joe Biden Barely Won the Presidency. This is from Jonathan Allen and Amy Parnes. And let me give you some background on them before we take you into the show. Jonathan is a senior political analyst with NBC News Digital. NBC, a winner of the Dirksen and Hume Awards for reporting. He was previously the White House bureau chief for Politico and the Washington bureau chief for Bloomberg News. Amy Parnes is a senior correspondent for The Hill newspaper in Washington, where she covers the Biden White House, you may have heard of him, and the national politics. She was previously a staff writer at

Political, where she covered the Senate, the 2008 presidential campaign, and the Obama White House. Welcome to the show, Jonathan and Amy. How are you? Good. How are you, Chris? Thanks for having us. Good, good, good. We're a little low on the energy today, but we're doing pretty good. Mine, my energy. We'll supply some. There you go. We got the coffee beverage here. So welcome to the show, folks. This is your second book together, is that correct? It's our third. Third book together. I knew I hadn't done enough research and going back with all those books on Amazon. So this is pretty amazing. One of the prior books you guys did together was Shattered Inside Hillary Clinton's Doom Campaign. And was the other one HRC?

That's right. Yes. There you go. There you go. And see, I knew I was close somewhere in there. I knew we were in there close. So give us your plugs or people can find you guys on the interwebs,

look you up, get to know you guys better. And of course, order the book. I'm at Amy Parnes, just like my name, A-M-I-E-P-A-R-N-E-S on Twitter. And that's where you can find me. I don't respond to tweets. Yeah. If you have something positive or just constructive criticism, I'm happy to read and reply to that. There you go. You can find me at John Allen DC on Twitter. That's J O N A L L E N D C. If you tweet something to me and at Amy, I might show up at your doorstep. Oh, and we were talking before the show, Jonathan does keep a baseball around the house.

So there's a former baseball player. There you go. He's going to swing for the fences as they once said in that one movie. I don't know what aliens have to do with this conversation. There is baseball bats. It's a connector. You guys have written three books together. What motivated you to write this third book together?

Vanity, clearly. Vanity, clearly. Okay, thanks for being here to my audience. No, I'm just kidding. No, I think what we found in our last book, Shattered, was the number one New York Times bestseller. What we found is that even though the outcome of the presidential election, I think most folks who are watching it in real time aren't really able to see what's going on behind the scenes. And we have had really unbelievable access to the top people in campaigns for the last

two election cycles. And we feel like there's a real opportunity to let Americans know a little bit more about how their politics play out and why. There you go. Amy, what motivated you? I love working with my co-author, John. But also, I think that, as John said, it gives you the upstairs, downstairs view. We all know what happened. But do we really know what happened? We pull the curtains back to let you understand, in particular, on this book, how close it was, even the last time in our book, Shattered, it was also close, but this election was even closer. We give you some insight into

what was going on behind the scenes. They all, politicians all say things, obviously, you know, publicly, but we want you to know what advisors are thinking in key moments. And we bring you a lot of those anecdotes. I think in every page, you've learned something new that you didn't know before you picked up the book. Awesome. Now you guys have, you guys have written two books before one, especially covering the Clinton run for the White House, Hillary's, I should say, people are going, well, he didn't win in the 90s. And so you guys covered this. Did you guys, when did you start trying to figure out, did you both sit down and try and figure out, okay, who's going to maybe come out with a nomination on this? And you guys were looking at all the players and trying to

figure out maybe who to write a book about? Or is there something specific that made you call the bet? Or at what point did you start writing and stuff? I think one of the things that's really important to our style is to not be predictive. And what we do is we report on all of the campaigns. Obviously, there were 25 Democratic campaigns. We were not following Marianne Williamson particularly closely. Are you sure? Yeah.

We could tell Bill de Blasio wasn't going to go very far. You could check your some crystals and maybe that would give you. I know a crystal ball would have been good. We should have spent more time with him. But I think what's important to our storytelling is to actually have the reader go through the campaign as it happens. And for us to be able to do that, we have to not be predictive. It's funny for our last book, our editor called us in like October before the 2016 election and said, you guys have a real problem. And we were like, what's the problem? And he said, I'm reading through your chapter so far, and you're writing a book about a losing campaign, Hillary Clinton's losing campaign,

but she's going to win. How are you going to reconcile that? And there was like dead silence on the phone for about 10 minutes. But we knew what we had beforehand, but hadn't really recognized it ourselves. And I think part of that is us getting so deep into the storytelling of the moments that we're telling throughout the primary. So we didn't know this book. We didn't know this book was going to be involving Joe Biden as the nominee until basically when everybody else did in March. So you guys had to get on and just put a bet down or did you play the whole field? We played most of the field. We picked half a dozen or so candidates

that we thought had some shot of either being the presidential nominee or later coming back and being the vice presidential nominee. And that field, the vice presidential nominee field was a little broader. So we added in a couple of those and those bets paid off.

But there's a ton of stuff that's on the cutting room floor that would have been, had Elizabeth Warren or Pete Buttigieg been the Democratic nominee, that stuff would have been in and some of the Biden stuff would have been out. Yeah. Now you guys, you guys have, you guys chose this title and it's a very, I wouldn't say it's controversial, but in a lot of the research and reviews I've done, there's been some like, is this a good title or is this appropriate title? Why did you guys choose this title? I don't know if you want to take that question, Amy. Sure.

I think it's not lucky in the pejorative sense. Obviously, we leave this up to interpretation, I think, for the reader. Was Joe Biden lucky? Was the country lucky? And I think that that's how we framed this whole thing. The Republic stood. So I think for so many reasons, I think the country was lucky. But I think you read this book, and you figure out that Joe Biden did have a slew of lucky breaks go his way. He found his way into luck. He talks about luck a lot, even in his own

conversations. And so all of that sort of factored in and just how close this really was. I don't think people really realize how close it was. Everyone focuses on the 81 million, 74 million vote. But the reality is that we don't run on the popular vote. We run on the electoral college. And so I think what John and I aimed to do in this book was to tell you the real story, unbiased, of how this all played out. And how did you feel about the title, Lucky Jonathan? And also, what were your backups, if you failed? I think that there are a lot of people who talk about wanting to be, rather being lucky than good. And I think that the most successful endeavors, people are both. And to Amy's point, Joe Biden talks about luck and fate and fortune and whichever, whatever way you want to describe the things that aren't so empirical, that aren't so clear cut, that are

factors in campaigns. There were a lot of them that went Joe Biden's way, both through the primary and through the general election. And Amy said, what we saw on January 6th with the storming of the Capitol, you can see just how fragile this republic is. And yet it withstood one candidate saying that the entire thing was fraudulent and rallying his base around that. That could have gone another way. But we had secretaries of state in each of the states. We had judges at all levels. We had enough members of Congress in both parties to make sure that that election was not overturned, that the popular sovereignty was respected. And to Amy's point, I think we're all lucky. Yeah, I forget one of the authors, and I have to pull up the show, but one of the authors, you guys, we could know him. He's

written a lot of books, but he talked about how, and this was during the time when that was all beginning, when Trump was trying to interfere with the election prior to January 6th. And he talked about how one of the keys was Madison took and made the states have the control of the elections because they knew, or Madison knew, that if it was controlled at the federal level, it'd be easier to seize. And yeah, like you guys say, it would be interesting to see how that played out. We say in the book, luck is the residue of design, which is something Branch Rickey, the general manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers way back when, is credited with saying. And we think that Biden saw that, that his luck was the residue of design, that he set himself up to take advantage when the brakes went his way. And also to your point that Locke was the residue of design in terms of the founders of the Constitution, designing a system that could withstand all of the pressures that we saw this

in the past year. It's amazing how much they, we had a lot of authors on, we talked about this in the last year. It's amazing how much foresight those guys had. Just amazing. And maybe it was because they had kings and stuff they had to deal with. But it really is interesting. And Amy was saying this came down to very few votes. I think Michael Cohen had somebody on the show recently, and they broke down exactly. You guys, I think, do in the book exactly how thin the margins were and how this could have gone any which way and probably decide the future or failure of our democracy. Yeah, and it's something that Democrats don't really want to think about. I think a lot of people think, well, a win is a win is a win. And I think what this book does, in my opinion, is it doesn't just talk about the past,

but it talks about the future. And Democrats are really going to have to learn some lessons here going into 2022 and 2024 if they want to win again. Especially with the GOP legislatures that are going back to gerrymandering and making election laws and pulling their usual games of excluding voters. One of the things that was interesting to me, because I remember what you guys talked about shattered, there's so much different problems with the Hillary campaign. She could have gone to Wisconsin. Excuse me. Sorry. The infighting, I think, between the heads of her campaigns and the different

things, fighting with Bernie, of course. And I think I saw in one of the interviews you guys did, you talked about how there was a key woman who didn't end up, she was like a second runner up, didn't end up getting on Hillary's campaign as the top campaign person, but she took over for the Biden campaign. Do I have my story correct? That's right. Jennifer O'Malley Dillon. Hillary Clinton went in another direction after interviewing Jen O'Malley Dillon in 2015 for the 2016 job. And she was known as a really tough, tough operative, somebody extremely capable, having come off the 2012 Barack Obama campaign. And with Barack Obama's encouragement, Biden hired her for the general

election this time around, and it would be difficult to quarrel with that decision given the outcome. Do you guys think, and that was my follow-up question, that do you guys think if Hillary had appointed her, maybe the outcome would have been different? Maybe. We basically talked about how a slew of factors contributed to her loss. And maybe it's hard to say, but there were a number of factors that definitely contributed. She could have went to Wisconsin. Excuse me. Sorry.

That's one of them. God bless you. Wisconsin, did you say? She could have went to Wisconsin once. Excuse me. Sorry. It's an SNL joke. But the with O'Malley Dillon is one of the differences we saw and we report on in this book in this campaign is that even though there were

tensions within this campaign and there was infighting to some degree what O'Malley Dillon was able to do was a better job of managing up in terms of the candidate and the sort of senior advisor class that's around him and also managing down. And that made some people down, not happy, but they all kept it inside. I think there was a whole sort of sentiment within the Democratic Party to not let anybody's individual priorities, not let anybody's resentments get in the way of defeating Donald Trump. And so I think four years of Trump is one of the reasons that Democrats won the presidency in 2020 and lost in 2016. was doing so good i'm just kidding the it's just it's just extraordinary and he even got more votes which is even more extraordinary you're like seriously has anybody been here those last four years um 17 more votes yeah yeah it was not a small new margin yeah you're just like holy crap

wow i just wow it's just amazing to me so you guys break this down in the book you guys walk It was not a small new margin. Yeah. You're just like, holy crap. Wow. I just, wow. It's just amazing to me. So you guys break this down in the book. You guys walk through all the different, the backstories and everything that's going on with the campaigns and the challenges. And of course he goes through the first, I think it's three or four failures. There's a New Hampshire, I think Ohio and Nevada. And everyone's like going this dead man walking.

Right. Yeah. I mean, it was really bad. At one point, his aides came to him and essentially say that he has to think about maybe putting his house to refinance his house because they were running on fumes and $1.5 million, which isn't a lot to run a presidential campaign. And it was bad for him. I mean, they never expected to come in fourth place in Iowa or fifth place in New Hampshire, but they had lost trust in their leadership at the time. And so there was a soft coup building to oust or to demote the primary campaign manager, Greg Schultz, who was well-liked in the campaign. But I think that Biden himself thought that he would do better in those states. And so, yeah,

they had to rejigger the entire campaign and do it very quickly. And he kept promising people that it would turn around. Even his wife, Jill Biden, he had to turn to her a couple of times and say, hang on, Jill, hang on to South Carolina. But it shows you sort of what what the campaign was dealing with. And what we do in the book is we really take you inside. I think everyone knows just how badly they were doing at the time, but no one knows the play by play and what they were going through and talking about. So we do that in the book. And what's interesting is I was talking about this about Jonathan before the show is the empathy of Joe Biden. He's been through some

serious trauma and experience and it's given him an incredible empathy. I think everyone can, I don't know about everybody, but we can get most people agree on that. You go through that sort of loss. There's a connection you have to pain and empathy that at least hopefully you do. I can't imagine going through the losses he's gone through and you're just like, I'm sure it's fine. He's a man for the moment, it seems right now. He's handling the coronavirus very empathetically. He seems to come across as a caring president. I might be biased because I voted for him. But I wonder if, you know, what you guys talked about, if he kind of knew that in his heart and soul, that he was like, look, I'm either the president of a country that needs an empathetic, an empath like me or whatever, or it's going to go the other way. But if there is a man for the moment, it's me. Does that sound like a good observation or am I smoking?

I think he saw that he talks about the battle for the soul of the nation. And those could be empty words, but they're not in terms of his campaign, filling in the details of that in terms of the way he talked on the campaign trail, in terms of he wanted to run for president before Charlottesville. But he used that as his moment where he describes that as the moment where he really felt like he needed to do something. And I think one of the things that he brings to the public arena is an old school sense of how to deal with other people, even people who are adversarial. And you really seldom see Biden turn to ridicule or to demeaning

people. And our politics have been so nasty and hostile. And we talk, if you're on the right, you talk about the left as some sort of nameless, faceless, heartless group. And if you're on the left, you feel the same way about the right. And I think what Biden has been really capable of doing is having some authenticity around that compassion, some authenticity around really actually caring about not just the people in front of him, but even his adversaries in the country more broadly. And it's such a divergence from where Trump was that it helped him really make that contrast clear during the campaign. It's going to be an interesting bet what he's doing because like we were talking before the show, I saw an article and they were talking about

how he's not stepping into the culture wars. Even with the checks they sent out, he put his name on it. Of course, most presidents didn't do that from if I recall rightly other than Trump. But he also, he's sidestepping the culture war. He's, he put his name on it. Of course, most presidents didn't do that, if I recall rightly, other than Trump. But he also, he's sidestepping the culture where he's not even getting the shit on him. He's not even, he's just, it's kind of like that, I don't know if it was Kung Fu or some sort of martial arts. Jiu-Jitsu.

Jiu-Jitsu, where you're basically a dodger instead of an engager. And that actually makes you a better fighter. And it's almost like a jujitsu that they stayed away from putting his name on the big package and trying and keeping that from being politicized, which was very different than what Obama did with Obamacare. And so it'll be really interesting to see how that plays out, because your point, Jonathan, where you were talking about how there's been so much vitriol and so much anger, maybe he does read the tea leaves and he recognizes that there's a certain way he needs to heal he recognizes that there's a certain way he

needs to heal the nation. There's a certain way he needs to bring us together. He's got to go the distance. He knows it's not going to be overnight. And he's just, he's going to wear us down with all with his jujitsu moves by not getting into the shit, not getting it on him and being the president, hopefully that maybe unites us that are or we'll still hate each other in four years. It's definitely a huge contrast, I think, from his predecessor. And I think that was all part of the plan, though. You're right. It does remain to be seen, Chris, if he can unite the country and break the fever, as he claims he intends to do. I just, the Republicans aren't willing to give him anything at the moment. And I don't think it's going to get any easier for him. So that might be an uphill battle. And I

think it's going to be tough for him because he is someone who has worked with Republicans and believes in working in a bipartisan way. But I just don't think that that climate is now. Yeah, it's definitely going to be a challenge. I mean, you just look at how much this hung on Georgia. And then just to do a callback to the previous thing that we were talking about, the one thing that was funny was when I was watching Biden look like he was a dead man walking, was I'm like, Trump just got himself impeached for a dead man walking, dude. He just wasted his shot, put himself in history, maybe over somebody who's a dead man walking. But that leads me to our next point.

We hit South Carolina, and that's the big bet Biden thinks he's got in the bag. And then you tell the story of Clyburn, who basically, would a kingmaker be the correct word, maybe? I think that's right. Certainly an influencer. We go into the book a little bit in detail. Not only do we go behind the scenes with how that endorsement came about, which was months in the making. Biden and Biden's allies were begging Clyburn to get off the sidelines and endorse him. It didn't happen. It didn't happen. We take you behind the scenes in this moment where Clyburn has already told Biden that what he wants from him is to name, to say that he's going to name a black woman to the Supreme Court. Biden isn't doing it in debate in South Carolina where he's supposed to do it.

And Clyburn gets up out of the audience and rushes to the exit. And some of his friends are looking at him going, oh, 79-year-old man, he's got to pee, right? But actually, Clyburn's going backstage during the commercial break in the debate to find Biden. And he doesn't actually grab him by the lapels, but more or less grabs him by the lapels and says, don't you dare leave this stage without saying that. And at the moment, Clyburn had already cut an endorsement ad for Biden, but he hadn't released it yet. It's just hanging there in the air. And Biden goes back out on stage and muddles out that he's going to name a black woman to the Supreme Court if he gets an opportunity and thinks that's good enough. And he goes out and endorses the next day. And he doesn't put out like a paper statement or

some dry, I'm happy to endorse Joe Biden. He talks about how his late wife loved Joe Biden and how much he was his late wife's favorite politician, other than Clyburn, of course. And you see this sort of real emotional connection between these two men. And as a result, we believe and many others believe, our sources believe, as a result, Biden's margin in South Carolina pushes up from a place where he might have won it, probably would have won it with a small margin to a place where he wins by a huge margin. And then just as everybody remembers, and we take people through the behind the scenes of this, it just sort of takes off over the next few days to Super Tuesday. And by the end of Super Tuesday is the front runner for the nomination. And within

a week or two is clearly the nominee. This is what I love about books like this and the strategy play in, of course, politics and stuff is sometimes it comes down to those moments. And South Carolina, you mentioned he might have won, but it's a hell of a mic drop. It's a Thor hammer drop. And just everybody is stunned that it's competing against him. Is that correct, Amy? Yeah, no one, no one thought that he would be able to pull this off. Everyone was writing his obituary, basically, and the campaign's obituary, because no one has ever done it before. And that's why I think after New Hampshire with the fourth and fifth place in New Hampshire, and then even second place in Nevada, most campaigns wouldn't have been

able to survive that. And I think even reporters were looking past him in that moment. And South Carolina just gave him that jolt that he needed. And it caused everyone else to move out of the way because they were so worried about Trump and repeating the mistakes of 2016 that John and I talk a lot about in Shattered, that even Bernie Sanders himself was compelled to get out of the way quickly and endorse Biden. And that's when you saw the dominoes fall, where Buttigieg endorses him klobuchar everyone warren eventually so everyone feels the need to to get behind him right away to prevent another kind of deja vu from 2016 and what is what is by or i'm sorry what does trump think at this point or what's going into this point if you want to give me a lead up and then and then what is trump thinking when biden

basically everyone goes and kisses the hands and goes oh you, you are the man. I'm sure he doesn't go, that was impeachable. It was worth it then, I guess. But Trump is of two minds. Obviously, he went to the trouble of getting impeached in an effort to get Ukraine to announce an investigation into him and his son. On the one hand, he used every lever in his grasp to try to take down Biden. On the other hand, he doesn't see Biden as a particularly effective politician. And he really thinks until, certainly until coronavirus hits, he sees Biden as a very weak front runner for the Democrats. And even after coronavirus hits, we report in the book, and there's a ton of stuff about what's going on behind the scenes in Trump world, we report in the

book that his campaign manager says to him, Brad Parscale says, Hey, look, this is basically coronavirus could take down your presidency. And Trump's response is what does that have to do with politics? And, and so how does that play out? Because I think I saw this in another interview you guys did. There's a real comparison between Trump's experience in true politics and long experience compared to Biden's, who probably has a better play of the game or outlook. It's funny because at the time, you might recall, Trump is at center stage and he is doing these briefings every day to talk about COVID, but he's making these really big mistakes, like telling people to inject themselves with bleach and some other things that were just not helpful to him, I think, ultimately.

And Biden, at the same time, is getting ridiculed for hanging out in his basement. And his aides are trying really hard to find ways for him to break through. They build a TV studio, and we take you behind the scenes on how that came to be. He thought originally he was going to do a TV studio. And we take you behind the scenes on how that came to be. He thought originally he was going to do a TV studio outside his house, and they figured out they should do it inside his house. And Biden himself made the decision to stay home, which served, I think, a good purpose for him because it essentially said, look, I'm following the guidelines. I'm staying home. I'm showing you what a leader would do. But it also saved him in a way.

And this is one of the lucky breaks we talk about in the book because his aides had been really, really worried about him making these missteps and verbal gaffes and all these things that he is known for his Uncle Joe persona. And so staying in his basement or in his house prevented him, took him off the trail and prevented him from making headlines and being the news of the day himself. And so I think that was helpful. And we have an anecdote in the book talking about Anita Dunn, who tells an associate at the time, COVID is the best thing that ever happened to him. Of course, they would never say this publicly, but this gives you some insight into what his aides were thinking behind

the scenes. It was almost like an Allie Frazier foreman rope-a-dope sort of event where because of COVID, he's in the basement and he's able to control messaging, like you say, and everything else. And meanwhile, Trump is just the bleach thing. I think the rant somewhere in there, there was the ramp thing. He's calling Biden weak. And, and yet he, he does a little jibber down the, the thing that just makes him look like just the weakest president ever down the, I think it was at the army or military thing. He went down that ramp and it was the whole ramp gate thing.

He's doing stupid stuff with the bible and and all that and and he's basically just biden's it's almost like uh just give him rope he'll hang himself yeah they just aim to get out of the way and that was that was a good strategy for them at the time yeah i think all listeners of the chris voss show should know that you should not inject yourself with any sort of disinfectant or bleach. I suspect all the listeners know that, but there are plenty of foreign substances you can put in your body. Don't put disinfectant or bleach in. And do not put disinfectant or bleach in.

That's a note to self. PSA, the more Jonathan and Amy. This is really interesting. And so do you guys talk a lot about the Trump side of it in the book? Do you cover a lot of what Trump's, how they're reacting on the Trump side and everything else? Yeah, absolutely. There's, it's one of the things that I'm glad you brought up because we've done a number of interviews on this and most of the folks are focused on the Biden side. There's a ton about what Donald Trump was doing and thinking and,

and also the people around him because Trump can be one thing on Monday morning and another thing by Monday late morning and a third thing by early Monday afternoon and trying to figure out what is it that's actually going on under the surface in terms of how the campaign is processing the events in front of it and the arguments he's having with his advisors and what's working for them and what's not. Because there were things that in an election in which very little moved the needle, I think we can conclusively say that COVID moved the needle against him and for Biden. And that we can also conclusively say that the defund the police argument against Democrats was extremely effective

up and down the ballot. And the Trump people understood that. They understood that portraying Biden as a puppet of a left that would push him into defund the police, into socialism, that that was having an effect on a lot of Democratic candidates. What they weren't able to do ultimately was to sink Biden's credibility with it. Because Biden went out there and we write about the internal debate in his campaign about, do they say defund the police? Does he apologize for the crime bill? All that stuff. But ultimately, Biden goes out there and pretty strongly says, I'm not going to defund the police.

I'm going to put more money into local policing. He says, I'm not a socialist. I ran against a socialist in the primary and I beat him pretty handily. Biden was able to counter most of their moves more effectively than Democrats down ballot were. And I remember even Democrats that were my friends were like screaming about that. Like, ah, he's a centrist. We should add Warren. And Warren is good. Warren and Bernie, they're like basically, look, he's a centrist. He's not the ultra, whatever, that whole bit. I think it was pretty interesting on how it played out. You know, George Floyd, of course, as you mentioned, was a factor, that whole experience and how deep he wanted to get

wrapped up in that and whether or not the GOP would paint him with certain aspects with it. And Biden, to your point earlier, Chris, Biden was throughout that period, no matter what he said about policy, he talked in compassionate, and he talked with empathy for people who are the victims of violence, for people protesting for racial justice, for police officers. And that infuriated some of the people on the left, but I think it was consistent with him talking about just bringing down the temperature. And when we look at a Washington that is still divided and Biden's going to have trouble legislating, one thing that can be certainly said about Washington and the Biden era so far is the temperature of all that has been turned down. The votes may not have changed a whole lot in terms of the Senate's 50-50, the House is barely Democratic majority, 51% of the seats.

But what has changed tremendously is the tone of all the discussion. Yeah. It's interesting to me how the Betsy DeVos, the Council for National Policy and all that, they've always played a pretty smart long game at targeting the college and beating that. And of course, the GOP legislature are going to be doing. It's going to be interesting what's going to see happening coming up in 2022 and 2020. And what are some teasers maybe that we haven't talked about in the book or stuff that's maybe a little salacious that we can tease people to want to buy the book? I'll give you guys both a shot at that if you would. And maybe if you want to give us a little teaser on maybe a story that is in the book, people should check out. I think a lot, Chris, a lot of people find

the Obama factor very interesting in this book. And we have him looming over the race. Of course, he doesn't really want to get into the discussion so much publicly. But we time and again show you where his mind is about Biden and all the other candidates. There's one particular scene where Obama's being asked by a group of influential Black donors, a small group, what he thinks of the horse race. And he weighs in and he jabs some people and he is supporting one person in particular. And he forgets his own former partner, Biden, and has to be reminded about that. And so I think all of that is really fascinating. I think John and I even learned a lot about where Obama was the entire time. And it's something we detail

in the book in great detail. Any teasers, Jonathan? Yeah, I think the blow by blow of election night is really exciting for readers, in part because you don't really get to watch what's going on in the campaigns as we take you into Joe Biden's living room on election night and his conversations with other people while this is going on, Jim Clyburn, among others. I think being able to live that anxiety that they're having on both sides, because what happens is walking to election day, the Biden people think they're going to win, but they're not 100 percent sure. The Trump people think they have a shot at winning, but they're certainly not 100 percent sure. And as the votes are coming in on election night, there's there's real anxiety on both sides.

It's playing out. And for the Trump team, it's in the map room at the White House. For the Biden team, it's spread a couple across a couple of places, Biden's house. There's a convention center that they're at in Wilmington, his campaign headquarters in Philadelphia. And to see the thinking of people as this is going on, I think most people remember when Fox News called Arizona for Biden was a huge moment. And there's been reporting on, we have reporting in the book, but there's been other reporting on Trump blowing a gasket at that moment. What people hadn't reported is at the Biden campaign headquarters, his top data analyst, the person watching all these numbers come in,

sees Fox call Arizona for Biden and thinks the same thing that Trump's people do, which is, how could they call this? There's no way you could be confident in this car right now. And so we walk you through that. And even into the early hours of the next morning, a lot of the Biden people were not confident that they were going to win. And it wasn't until there were some big vote drops early in the morning, but later early in the morning, like four or five in the morning,

where they started to have a better sense. And even Biden doesn't really believe it for days after he's, after it seems to be clear that he's won. So we take you through all those sort of moments and the conversations the the candidates are having with their aides and i just i i think that's really compelling and interesting for anybody who cares about politics i i think so too because i remember i had all my friends calling me jobs won and i like took a couple edibles and some vodka and i curled up into the fetal position. I went, I'm just, I'm just, maybe I do have to prepare myself for four more years of madness. That's breakfast for me. There

you go. And I'm just like, I just, I just got some faith. Maybe, maybe faith will help. I'm an atheist. And I actually thought about turning to Jesus at that point, but I guess it worked out. So I'm not sure what that tells us. That's interesting. Well, maybe it's not divine intervention. I think George Collins said, what, 50% of prayer works? So there you go. I'll leave it to him in the end. So this is pretty cool. You guys have written three books together.

What do you think, what do you like working about with each other and writing these books? And what do you think makes it so great for the reader that contributes to them to want to read the books and your guys's? I think that we're both very different. It's funny. We started our first book. I think we were so different. But now I think I wrote this in my acknowledgement to John. We see things very similarly, which I find really interesting. But we're a good mix.

John is kind of a detailed person and likes to find out what someone is having for breakfast. And that detail always finds its way in the book. I think John has learned from me in that way. And I've learned from him in so many ways because he's brilliant at analysis and numbers and all the number crunching and all of that. And this book comes from John and all of the analysis is really John's brainchild. I think we're a good pair in that way. Analysis and nuances. Those things make a difference.

If you don't have that power breakfast and that coffee in the morning, who knows if you win an election. Two vodkas, four edibles might be fine. There you go. There you go. We like to call the show Fridays. Anything we haven't covered in the book that you guys would like to plug? Yeah, I think that one of the things we didn't really touch on exactly is the sort of closeness.

We talked about the closeness, but just so people understand, if Donald Trump wins 43,000 more votes, which is like three hundredths of a percent of all the people who voted, wins 43,000 votes over Wisconsin, Arizona and Georgia. He is president for a second term. And I think a lot of the I think a lot of Democrats are like the folks who drove the car home and thought they made it across the train track safely. They get out of their car, they walk around the back and they see that the train clipped the back of the car and they don't really want to know about it. They're the passengers that don't want the driver to tell them what happened. But our elections are so close and they turn on such small margins. And we've had that sort of situation for most of the last 20

years, except for the 2008 election for Obama. From a historical perspective, we've had a pretty close era here. And I don't think either side has really figured out how to bring people from the other party over into their camp in a more permanent way. And until that happens, we're going to be pretty divided. And even my nightmare was, what if Biden gets COVID? And of course, I might have been secretly wishing somebody else got COVID. And he did. But I was thinking, what if Biden gets COVID?

He's old. He's the oldest running president or oldest running candidate, both. And you're like, COVID could decide this election. Like, he could be ahead, and then the polls show he was ahead. And then all of a sudden, he croaks from COVID, and you're just like, fuck. I think there were some elections that did that. Wasn't there? Wasn't there the one with Nixon and the one guy, and he gets shot, put in a wheelchair from Alabama, I think it was, or Georgia?

No, George Wallace. George Wallace. I think that had in a wheelchair from Alabama, I think it was, or Georgia? George Wallace. George Wallace. I think that had an effect on that race, didn't it? I don't know. Wallace was a third-party candidate. He wasn't going to win, but certainly capable of taking electoral votes at a time when you had the solid South. Yeah, that would have been interesting. So, guys, it's been wonderful to have you on and share this amazing book.

I think these things are great because, like I say said, I seem like a giant 3d chess thing. And of course, as we, John and I were talking about before the show, there was one guy eating the pieces as Rick Wilson, I think famously said, if we give him credit for that. Oh, go ahead, Amy. Oh, no, no. I was just laughing. I did have one question for you guys during the show. Did the Lincoln project make a difference now that we've brought up Rick Wilson? It's a good question. I don't think they made a big difference. I mean, they occupied a little space in Donald Trump's head. I think they made hard-hitting ads, but for the most part, I think they raised a lot of money. It didn't have a lot of effect. One other thing I would say, though, to your point about the chess match, I think the cautionary tale for Democrats here as they look at the 81 million votes and talk about a landslide is that you don't measure presidential elections by how many pieces you take from the other side. You measure them by whether you checkmated the other side.

And they came very close to not getting checkmated. Yeah. It all came down to Georgia. I'm just like, how do we have one state that has the whole nation by the throat? It used to be Florida. And that was Georgia. And you're just like, oh my God.

And I'm sure, of course, it seems like a lot of GOP legislatures are looking at those numbers you're talking about and are slicing and dicing and trying to figure out how they can cut that 40, you said 44,000? Yeah, but instead of trying to win votes, they're trying to prevent people from voting it's just astounding it's been wonderful to have you guys on so let me ask you i need to ask you this though do you guys plan on doing another

one in 2024 or 2022 we still are trying to um you know get this one going going. And we're, we're obviously going to keep doing books, but we just don't know what, what's what yet. Your book publishing company made me ask that question. We're exhausted, man. Yeah. We just put a book out, Chris, what the hell do you want from us? Yeah. And we put a book out quicker than our last book and during a pandemic.

And I think just for that, it's exhausting. We need a little bit of a break. There you go. You've got the book to write it out. Plus, you can do it from home, so that's nice. That's nice, but we don't get ghostwriters. It would be nice to be a celebrity and have somebody else do all the work. Where can people look you guys up on the internet and find out more about you guys?

Sure. I'm on Twitter, Amy, A-M-I-E-P-A-R-N-E-S, just my name. up on the internet and find out more about you guys sure i met on twitter amy a m i e p a r n e s just my name and i will always respond just be fairly be a troll i'm at john allen dc j o n a l l e n d c on twitter you can find my work at nbcnews.com and you can find me on the phone with amy soon discussing discussing whether and when and what about our next book will be. There you go. We'll look forward to it because you guys have written three brilliant books. You got to roll with it. You've laid down. I think this is the first book that's come out that's thrown down the gauntlet of what the Biden campaign was. So you're the ones

who set the stone. Yes. There you go. Thanks to both of you for coming on the show and spending time with us today. We certainly appreciate it. It's been a real pleasure. Thank you. And to my honest, thank you as well for spending some time with us. Pick up the book. You'll take and want to get this. It's just barely off the, it's a March 2nd came off the thing, but you definitely want to read it. So you can say you were the first one to get it. You can get it at your local bookstores or at some of those big box internet things.

Get the book, Lucky, How Joe Biden Barely Won the Presidency. This is an excellent book. I think you're going to love it. The inside story of the historic 2020 presidential election. And hopefully it'll motivate everybody to stay registered and get up for the next vote. Thanks, Miles, for tuning in. Be sure you can subscribe to us on YouTube. Follow us at Goodreads, Comforts, that's Chris Foss,

and all the other different social media things out there. Wear your mask, stay safe, and we'll see you next time.