Long after the 2020 primary was over—and even after their candidate emerged victorious—campaign aides to President Joe Biden still felt the sting of the lowest moments from the humbling early stages of the race. The emotions, as emotions tend to do, got wrapped up with food.
“If I see a District Taco, I cross the street,” one staffer reminisced to a friend who had gone on to work in the White House.
The restaurant that haunted Biden’s team was a modest Mexican fast-casual chain. One of the locations was near Biden’s early campaign offices in Washington, DC. For staff, it became a bad-luck charm.
Debate season for the Democratic presidential hopefuls began in late June 2019. The initial skirmish was a bruising experience for Biden, who announced his race two months earlier and had been the front-runner in the polls ever since. The candidate stood dead center on that first debate stage and received incoming fire from all sides—most memorably, Kamala Harris launched her busing attack at that first encounter, arguably the pinnacle of her campaign. The other would-be presidents took turns painting him as old and out of touch as staffers in Washington headquarters picked at a lukewarm buffet of District Taco.
That downtown DC office, which was located just a block from District Taco, was always supposed to be temporary. In a nod to his working-class Scranton, Pennsylvania, roots, Biden planned to establish his home base in Philadelphia. The team moved there in July 2019 hoping the change in scene could bring new energy. Yet when they arrived in the City of Brotherly Love, a District Taco stood just on the other side of Penn Square.
Worse, the new headquarters were boring. One staffer described walking into the building and thinking that the stale, corporate space was exactly what the online left might have imagined for a stuffed suit like Biden.
“When I got there … someone told me that the Biden campaign has the office that Twitter thinks the Biden campaign has,” the staffer said. “It was just drab. There’s nothing on the walls … The water wasn’t potable; it was brown water,” and the campaign manager Greg Schultz “didn’t pay for a water cooler.”
In an interview for this book, Schultz dismissed the complaints about the water out of hand.
“I drank that water every single day, and it was fine,” Schultz said. “I grew up in Cleveland, where a few years before I was born the river caught on fire, and I’m fine,” he added, “That’s so funny.… I don’t know what people complain about.”
A longtime loyalist who made his way from both of the Obama campaigns to Biden’s vice-presidential team, Schultz was a fast talker with a head of short hair gone prematurely gray. He’d been involved in planning discussions for the race since 2018 and was close enough to Biden that he’d never had to interview for the campaign manager post. It began as a quiet assumption that Schultz probably would be tapped to run a potential campaign, and then one day “the verb tenses changed.” And they were off.
As Biden’s campaign manager, it was Schultz’s job to strategize and manage resources. Being in charge of the budget meant Schultz had to nix various requests. The role helped make him a divisive figure for some of Biden’s team even as, by his account, he came up with the strategy that ultimately brought them success.
“What I have to remind headquarters teams,” Schultz said, “is that most of the campaign is nowhere near a big city, with no resources, in some field office with probably little heat and shoddy internet. Headquarters can’t be splurging like we’re a Silicon Valley startup, in particular until money comes in.”
To all outside appearances, however, the campaign wasn’t just scrimping and being patient; it was genuinely struggling. Polling showed Biden had failed to gain traction with Iowa voters after campaigning heavily in the state. It was shaping up to be a potentially disastrous setback.
Schultz said he was unfazed by Biden’s poor standing. His plan for the race did not rely on the first two states on the primary calendar. Biden’s prior presidential campaigns proved he was no favorite among the mostly white, largely non-union voters who made up the bulk of the electorate in Iowa and New Hampshire.
Schultz believed South Carolina, the third state to vote, was where it would come together for Biden. Focus groups showed Biden’s standing was strong among Black voters, and Schultz believed that was his essential advantage. “The way to be the nominee of the party is to do okay among most groups and do really well among Black voters,” Schultz said. South Carolina, where roughly 60 percent of Democratic primary voters are Black, was the key to the race.
There were hard numbers behind this strategy. New Jersey senator Cory Booker said that he and Kamala Harris, the top Black candidates in the race, saw data as they prepped their campaigns that showed Black communities were particularly delegate-rich and that they tended to consolidate around one candidate after the first three states on the primary calendar. The theory behind the numbers presented to Booker and Harris was that, as Black candidates, they had a natural edge with this decisive base. However, Biden had his connection to Obama—and he had South Carolina, where his campaign was confident that history and a key ally would push him over the line.
In spite of his confidence in South Carolina, as Schultz planned the campaign, he confronted a number of hurdles. Biden had never been a particularly strong fundraiser. He lacked whatever magnetism attracted the rush of small-dollar donations to Bernie Sanders. Biden was also not a master of the big-money circuit. Democratic donors at every level, it seemed, underestimated Biden politically.
With limited resources, Biden needed to survive Iowa and New Hampshire with enough gas in the tank to compete in South Carolina. That meant pinching pennies. It meant there was no room for a plush headquarters or bottled water. It meant calling the donors he did have, soothing their anxieties, and asking for patience during early losses. And it meant beseeching the press to ignore Iowa and New Hampshire and not to write Biden off.
Schultz believed in the plan. He had faith, and he had data to back it up.
However, Schultz’s staff didn’t all share his confidence. Those lean early days had a grinding effect on the team’s morale.
As the Iowa caucus approached, Biden was polling well behind Sanders, and his team was already seeing numbers indicating they would fare poorly in New Hampshire, which was set to vote just over a week later. Biden was staring down two straight losses. The Narrative was turning dark. And there was another dire omen: on caucus night, the campaign ordered Mexican. When they “saw District Taco in the office,” one campaign operative said, “people thought it was going to go bad.”
“It was literally one of the most depressing nights of my life,” the operative continued. “We knew we were not going to win, but just the reality of the entire thing was … you’re thinking ‘Shit, we’re in really big trouble.’ … We knew we were going to lose New Hampshire. And we knew that just getting reports from the ground, our organization was in bad shape.”
Even though the exact caucus results were lost to the app-crash chaos, there was enough data to know Biden did not have a strong showing. When the smoke cleared days later, he officially stood in fourth place, nearly five points behind Elizabeth Warren, the third-place finisher. Biden was more than ten points behind Sanders and Buttigieg.
In hindsight, the Iowa Democratic Party’s meltdown that night might have saved Biden’s campaign. Neither Buttigieg nor Sanders got a definitive boost, and the confusion blunted the impact of Biden’s loss. Had his opponents been able to sink a knife in him after Iowa, or following the subsequent loss in New Hampshire, Biden might not have made it. In the moment, however, it looked like a disaster.
During his time leading Biden’s team, Schultz enjoyed military metaphors.
“He’d be like, ‘We are Spartans. This is Sparta. We are Spartans and we are fighting against everybody. It’s everyone versus us. This is Sparta,’ ” a senior Biden campaign staffer recalled, before adding, “But dude, do you know what happened to the Spartans? They all die.”
Ultimately, the campaign did survive. Somehow, over the three weeks following New Hampshire, Biden managed to vault from a trailing position in a six-way race to a dominant lead in a two-way contest.
In Schultz’s view, Biden’s rapid rebound was always the plan. That may have been true, but, shortly after losing New Hampshire, Biden shook up his staff and sidelined Schultz.
One staffer was relieved. They had compared “the Greg regime” to the situation in Afghanistan: “There was a weak—a nominal—federal government, but it was really ruled by a series of warring warlords.”
This criticism was valid—but it also may have been more on Biden than Schultz. This was generally how Biden’s world worked. Biden surrounds himself with key advisers, many of whom have been with him for a very long time. The setup ensures multiple power centers.
Among those key advisers were Mike Donilon and Steve Ricchetti, who had been inner-circle aides during Biden’s vice presidency. In 2015, during Biden’s previous flirtation with running for president, Anita Dunn and her husband Bob Bauer joined that inner circle. Both had come into the White House working for Obama—Bauer was White House Counsel—but, according to a New York Times profile of the couple, they stood by Biden as the Obama team tried to usher him out of the 2016 race, and with that show of loyalty, had earned his enduring gratitude. Dunn, a forty-year veteran of Democratic presidential campaigns, was a force unto herself. She had staff from SKDK, the “strategic communications firm” where she is a partner, installed throughout Biden’s team. Bauer, in addition to being a close Biden confidant, was the campaign’s lawyer.
After the loss in New Hampshire, Biden opted for a regime change and effectively replaced Schultz as campaign manager with Dunn. The change had been brewing for some time. Even before voting started in the primaries, according to some aides, Dunn had been overruling Schultz on specific management and personnel decisions. Schultz would nominally hold the position of “campaign manager” through Super Tuesday. But after New Hampshire, Dunn was in charge.
Biden aides tend to reach for diplomatic platitudes when asked to compare Schultz and Dunn.
“He’s a pretty good person,” one staffer said of Schultz. “But I just think that Anita had been through so many experiences, she’s a more battle-hardened type. And I think that ended up serving us extremely well.”
After Anita Dunn took control, this person said, “Things just started to flow more quickly. I think part of it was that she just knew: This is do or die, and I’m going to make some fucking decisions.”
Another member of Biden’s team praised Dunn’s almost unnerving calm.
“Anita was so chill about Iowa, and I thought that she was insane,” they said.
For his part, Schultz maintains that, whoever was in charge, they were following his roadmap: “I would say the strategy, the campaign theme, the focus on the Democratic primary vote that was actually the path to victory, was established well before the campaign launch and continued on that established trajectory through securing the nomination.”
But Dunn didn’t just keep calm and carry on with the initial plan. After taking charge, she immediately shook up the Nevada organization. One staffer reported, “She made crucial choices about how they’re going to redeploy folks to Nevada, because it was essential that we have a strong showing there.”
Losing the first two states was one thing, but to make it to the friendly confines of South Carolina, Dunn knew Biden would have to survive Nevada—and Bernie was set to win big.
The Biden campaign, for all of its snakebitten luck in the early days, knew that the party would line up behind him if he managed to get on track. That’s one of the perks of running with a former VP and party elder as the candidate. Aides to Sanders, his anti-establishment rival, on the other hand, sometimes had nagging doubts.
Sanders had his own lingering trauma from 2016, when he had felt cheated by Clinton and party officials. Four years later, even when things were going well for Sanders, he and his team sometimes had trouble convincing themselves he could actually win the nomination. They always assumed that the Democratic establishment would somehow snatch it away from him. The night of the Nevada caucus, February 22, 2020, was one rare moment where they truly dared to dream.
Arianna Jones was quieter than her mostly male colleagues, and one of the more pragmatic figures in the organization. With a background as an MSNBC producer, she had a more traditional political résumé than many of them as well. And she prided herself on seeing the big picture.
“I think I did a good job … never buying into the idea that we could ever win, because the whole point was we could never win.… It was an impossible task,” she said. The night of Nevada, she added, “was probably the closest I’ve ever come working for him and being like, ‘Wait a second, could it happen?’ ”
In Nevada, everything seemed to go right for Bernie Sanders. He was coming fresh off the victory he had earned less than two weeks earlier in New Hampshire, his northern New England home turf. Powered by a Spanish-speaking field operation that courted Latino voters door to door with a message of shared economic struggle, the campaign was going so well that the message often outran the boots on the ground. Volunteers would routinely visit homes only to find Sanders signs or residents who’d already voted for the man they called “Tío Bernie.” Sanders managed to win Nevada by over twenty-six points and dispel the notion he struggled with voters of color.
After starting his morning in Las Vegas, Sanders had already flown on to Texas. He was holding an evening rally in Austin when Nevada was called. Sanders’s voice was piped from Texas to the backyard of a bar his campaign had taken over in Las Vegas’s arts district. He framed the win as vindication, “an historic victory because we won it in one of the most diverse states in the country.”
Sanders couldn’t hear the crowd at the bar, who drowned the next sentences with cheers. For many who were at the Sanders campaign’s watch party that night, the memory would become uniquely crisp—images of stormy blue desert night sky, glowing bar lights, the joy of the packed crowd. In the weeks to come, the idea of standing with people packed shoulder to shoulder would become surreal.
An ocean away from the Sanders faithful, multiple cities in China had been on lockdown for weeks due to a little-understood “novel coronavirus” that was causing outbreaks and hopping continents. Italy had emerged as a hotspot in Europe, and the day of the Nevada caucuses, ten municipalities in Lombardy had joined several Chinese cities in shutting down.
Months later, as lockdowns spread across the United States and the death toll climbed, Sanders’s team would remember that Nevada night as one of the last of the Before Times. It was also the first—and last—moment it seemed like Bernie Sanders could actually become president.
Sanders supporters and staffers in Vegas paid little attention to the virus. Some in the crowd talked about the recent headlines and wondered whether it would be a passing situation, another SARS or swine flu. Their anxiety was focused instead on the Democratic Party, and what it might do to stop Sanders’s rise.
Asked about the campaign’s feelings that Nevada night, Arianna Jones said, “We had just seen already what people were doing in terms of their reactions to him having success.” The Democratic establishment was afraid of Sanders’s revolution. Some doubted his electability. Others resented the threat he posed to the established order and their way of doing business, which relied heavily on corporate donors who were not eager to support Sanders’s socialized tax schemes. There was a barrage of attacks as Sanders vaulted to front-runner status.
“We risk nominating a candidate who cannot beat Donald Trump in November,” one fundraising text from the Buttigieg campaign had said, taking aim at Sanders, “and that’s a risk we can’t take.”
For Sanders’s team, their strong position after the big Nevada victory heightened the worries they would face an all-out assault from the mainline party.
“I think it was also a little bit of fear of like, people think we can win now, which is a scary place to be,” Jones recalled.
Those worries were valid. As Jeff Weaver later said, “I certainly knew that there would be a last-ditch effort to sort of stop him, which there was.”
Sanders may have won nevada by twenty-six points, but the Biden team was feeling quietly confident. They had “survived” after all. And their survival had come with an unexpected gift: strategic obscurity.
For weeks, the former front-runner had been counted out. One senior staffer recalled that the media wasn’t even bothering to write negative stories about Biden—“incoming,” in campaign operative parlance.
“After Iowa, we really stopped getting incoming because reporters were writing us off,” a senior Biden staffer said.
Biden’s team used this time to their advantage.
Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire former mayor of New York City, made a relatively late entry to the race in November 2019. He had an unconventional strategy to go with his unusual schedule. Bloomberg planned to skip the early races—Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, and South Carolina—to focus on Super Tuesday, March 3, 2020, when voters in fourteen states and the territory of American Samoa head to the polls. Bloomberg’s massive fortune bought lavish advertising campaigns and sushi lunches for his staff. It also dominated the headlines.
“The whole conversation between Iowa and really South Carolina—a lot of it was focused on Bloomberg and not Biden. He was kind of like an afterthought during that period of time,” recalled Sanders aide Tim Tagaris.
Bloomberg’s cash—and the fact he was presenting himself as an experienced, moderate alternative to Sanders—were problems for Biden.
“Bloomberg was the biggest threat to us because he was gunning directly for our base,” the senior Biden staffer said. “He was trying to essentially buy our base off.”
With the focus off of Biden, his campaign team launched a hidden offensive against Bloomberg.
“So suddenly our bandwidth exploded, right? … And so the rapid response and research teams basically became an anti-Bloomberg super PAC for several weeks,” the staffer explained. “The press interest in him was at its highest point. And there was so much on him.”
Bloomberg’s long history in government and business meant the Biden opposition research team had a lot to work with. They blasted unflattering stories about Bloomberg’s record throughout the media landscape.
“He said a whole bunch of extremely offensive stuff,” the Biden staffer said of Bloomberg. “He said that the financial crisis in 2008 was caused by the end of redlining, aka Black people being able to buy houses. We got that out there and it was a big hit.”
During this time, Bloomberg made his own daring and secret overture to shake up the race. Shortly after New Hampshire voted, he sent a delegation to Cory Booker’s house in Newark, New Jersey. According to high-level sources on the Booker campaign, Bloomberg wanted to convince Booker, who had ended his own presidential bid ahead of the Iowa caucuses, to be his running mate.
“They said they ran the numbers,” one source who attended the meeting said, “they polled everybody—Kamala, Cory—and that Cory would give them the biggest boost and give them the chance to secure the nomination.”
The announcement of a vice president to run on the ticket before sewing up the nomination is a rare, and some would say desperate, move for a presidential candidate. On the Republican side, Ted Cruz and Carly Fiorina tried to team up during the primaries in 2020 to head off Donald Trump. It didn’t work.
According to the source, the pitch Bloomberg and his team made to Booker was all about thwarting Sanders.
“We’re worrying now. Biden can’t win. Bernie looks like the strongest candidate,” Bloomberg’s aide said, according to the source. “The only way to stop Bernie is for him to come out with a popular vice-presidential candidate. You’ve got the best numbers and you got some great history. Let’s announce that you’re a team.”
Booker turned Bloomberg down out of hand.
While Bloomberg’s drastic gambit failed, the Biden team’s strategy of piling on the former mayor from behind the scenes was paying off spectacularly. The press that had obsessed over Bloomberg’s late entry to the race ate up the controversies Biden’s researchers unearthed.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” the staffer recalled many months later, with still-evident glee. “It was NBC, AP, Wall Street Journal, boom, boom, boom, boom. Just shelling these motherfuckers. Torpedo to the hull!”
The Biden team took special pride when the 2008 remarks they had uncovered about redlining policy formed part of Elizabeth Warren’s devastating assault on Bloomberg’s record and character during one of the debates.
Warren had struck at the outset of the February 19 debate, with three days remaining before the Nevada caucus. She started in on Bloomberg’s alleged history of sexist remarks, before digging into his other similarities to the sitting president.
“So I’d like to talk about who we’re running against, a billionaire who calls women ‘fat broads’ and ‘horse-faced lesbians.’ And, no, I’m not talking about Donald Trump. I’m talking about Mayor Bloomberg,” Warren said, with prosecutorial precision. “Democrats are not going to win if we have a nominee who has a history of hiding his tax returns, of harassing women, and of supporting racist policies like redlining and stop and frisk,” she added, concluding, “Democrats take a huge risk if we just substitute one arrogant billionaire for another.”
Warren’s takedown over the course of that evening was widely credited with destroying Bloomberg’s campaign. For political observers, the impression that she’d landed a debate death blow was immediate. But it wouldn’t be ratified by data until Super Tuesday, when the billionaire lost everywhere, except American Samoa—a group of remote islands in the South Pacific spanning approximately seventy-seven square miles, population 55,000. He suspended his candidacy the next day.
In the meantime, significant things were happening at the front of the primary pack. On the day of the Nevada caucus, while Sanders’s team was focused on its own win—and moving to the Western states that were poised to be his stronghold on Super Tuesday, Biden’s team was entering the phase of the campaign where his strategic patience would begin to pay off.
Sanders was ascendant, but Biden was too. He had managed to climb up from fifth place in New Hampshire to second place in Nevada. It was a lifeline of precious momentum, enough for Biden to hang on until South Carolina, where his team was certain he had an advantage.
Two Bidenworld insiders described the Nevada caucus as the best night of the whole campaign, a moment filled with incredible promise, with Dunn and her lieutenant Jennifer O’Malley Dillon in command. It also happened to be the birthday of the campaign’s top lawyer, Dunn’s husband, Bob Bauer.
Bauer’s birthday party turned into an ecstatic celebration in Philadelphia and inaugurated a new tradition for Biden’s team.
“There was this birthday cake to celebrate Bob’s birthday, and the entire campaign sang ‘Happy Birthday’ to him with a sheet cake,” the campaign operative said. “And ever since then, everyone sings ‘Happy Birthday’ on a big Biden night to Bob Bauer.”
In the weeks to come, Bauer’s birth would be serenaded again and again.