FIFTEEN
Faiz Shakir, Sanders’s campaign manager, soon got a phone call from his old boss, former Senate majority leader Harry Reid of Nevada. Reid was endorsing Biden.
“Listen, Faiz,” Reid said. “I just hope you appreciate that I got a lot of pressure.”
Shakir called Sanders. “If Harry Reid is moving to Joe Biden,” Shakir said, “it means that there’s a lot of other movements occurring. Harry Reid doesn’t move alone.” Party leaders, donors, officials—they wanted this over.
Super Tuesday brought 10 more states for Biden, picking up wins from the South to the Midwest to New England, and winning in Texas. Michigan’s March 10 primary was critical, and Biden won there, too. It was not just the brass making a statement. It was voters.
That night, on a flight, Sanders motioned for Shakir to come over. It was time to call the Biden people.
“Just ask them if there’s a role for progressives to play in their campaign,” Sanders said, his voice low. “Just ask them that. Let’s see where they want to go with this.”
Unlike in 2016, when he and his allies warred with Clinton’s campaign all the way to the convention and viewed her as elitist and moderate, Sanders wanted to play ball and endorsed Biden. Maybe he could nudge Joe toward going big, toward transformation, toward an agenda that incorporated progressive ideas.
Biden would be spared a Democratic civil war. It was one of the most dramatic turnarounds in presidential campaign history.
Biden faced a new world: He was now effectively the Democratic presidential nominee. But the pandemic upended his campaign’s plans.
Biden suspended in-person campaigning in mid-March as the virus spread and governors across the map began to ban large gatherings. He focused on virtual events.
The shift was strange, from busy marathon days with flights and rallies to a life of seclusion, working from his home in Delaware surrounded by Secret Service. He spoke with aides and supporters throughout the day, by phone and video, in lieu of events. He did TV interviews. Trump made fun of Biden, calling him “Basement Biden.”
Even with Sanders in the fold, holding Democrats together was a priority. Biden needed to keep his onetime rivals close, to make sure the left felt welcome. To beat Trump, no one could stay on the sidelines.
Senator Elizabeth Warren’s older brother, Don Reed, died in late April 2020 from the coronavirus. He was an Air Force veteran who had seen action in Vietnam.
Warren, who had dropped out after Super Tuesday in March, fielded dozens of calls—paint-by-numbers condolences.
Then Joe Biden rang.
“This is just wrong. This is just goddamned wrong!” Biden told her.
Biden said he did not know Don Reed, but he said he was “quite sure he was fiercely proud” of her.
He told her brothers and sisters have special relationships. He talked about his sister, Valerie, and how they would ride bicycles together.
“These internal relationships that you form when you’re so little, last forever,” he said. He then laughed. “And here we all are in our seventies.
“But those things that tied us together as children, tie us together as human beings, even after death.”
Biden turned the conversation toward the pandemic and the economy. He said the country was on the precipice of a calamity on both unless significant action was taken.
Warren, a progressive who had built a campaign on “plans” for wholesale economic reform and an influx of federal spending, perked up. Was Biden signaling he was moving toward her?
“This is bad and we’re on the edge,” Biden told her. “And this guy,” Trump, “is trying to deny it.”
Biden said he was desperate to do something. Something that would have an impact.
Biden expressed thanks to her and others in the party for backing him. It meant a lot to see the Democrats come together. Warren could sense he was touched.
“I couldn’t be doing this without you, kid,” Biden told her. The conversation had lasted 30 minutes.
On April 27, 2020, Tony Fabrizio, a premier Republican pollster working for the president, sent an unvarnished and pointed three-page memo to Brad Parscale, then the Trump campaign manager. It was a document worthy of the political campaign hall of fame.
“We have seen the enemy and the enemy is us,” Fabrizio wrote. They were failing to define Biden and allowing him free rein over his own image.
The memo offered an ominous forecast to the Trump campaign: Trump was on the road to epic defeat.
At the outset, Fabrizio wrote, “you are probably tired of me sounding alarmist, but I think what I’ve laid out below makes a compelling case for us to immediately ramp up our efforts to define Biden.
“We are at a low point.… The collapse of optimism about the economy and the impact of the CV [coronavirus] overall and more specifically, how POTUS is perceived as handling it, have been a triple whammy on us. Conversely, Biden has been largely MIA and by going around to the national media and directly to local market media, he has steadily rehabilitated his image across the board.”
He added, “Absent a miraculous 2-month recovery for the economy or Biden literally imploding, there is little chance that we will find ourselves back in the position we were in February without a full-throated engagement of Biden.”
Fabrizio summarized the campaign’s polling and research to date in 10 points. He warned that Trump’s leadership on the pandemic was a handicap:
And while POTUS started off in a strong position on his handling of the [coronavirus], even though he continued to dominate the conversation and drew huge audiences with his daily briefings, the controversies and conflicts that came out of them were often the only take-aways for voters.
Fabrizio underscored his conclusion:
As we have seen many times before, it isn’t POTUS policies that cause the biggest problem, it is voters’ reactions to his temperament and behavior.
Fabrizio also dismissed the rumor that Democrats would replace Biden at their convention. That chatter had spread in right-wing media circles and drifted into the Oval Office. Trump brought it up constantly.
“I know POTUS tends to share this opinion,” Fabrizio wrote. But he said the idea was absurd.
“Short of an utter and complete implosion on his part,” Biden would be the nominee, Fabrizio wrote. In May, a “sustained attack of several weeks with meaningful weight to move numbers” was necessary.
Fabrizio did not expect Parscale to follow his advice. Parscale was close to Trump’s son-in-law and adviser, Jared Kushner, who Fabrizio believed routinely hid uncomfortable political truths from the president.
Fabrizio, stout with a gray beard, decided to deliver the bad news directly to Trump in the Oval Office.
“Mr. President, every day this race is about you, we’re losing,” he said. “Every day the race is about Joe Biden, we’re winning. And right now, Joe Biden’s not doing anything, so the race is constantly about you.”