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Yang came onstage, bent his knees, and leaned back as he said, “Helloooooo South Carolina!” in full wrestler mode, while a small group of very excited supporters screamed his name over and over again in the type of chant that, under any other circumstances, would have seemed frighteningly cultish. Sanders took twice as much time speaking as he was allotted.

— Battle for the Soul by Edward-Isaac Dovere (Page 231)

When a staff member handed Sanders his T-shirt, he said he didn’t need it, grousing, “I’m not going to be a billboard for Clyburn.” When he came offstage, aides showed him tweets pointing out that he hadn’t worn it. “Fine,” he said. “Give me a shirt.”

— Battle for the Soul by Edward-Isaac Dovere (Page 230)

All the candidates were put in the same big holding room, with few staff allowed in, where they were presented with a pile of bright-blue Clyburn T-shirts they were asked to put on before going out to speak.

The four senators made a pact: either they’d all wear the shirt, or none would wear the shirt. No one wanted to engage in the high school acrobatics of slipping out of and into a shirt in public. Kirsten Gillibrand was in a dress, making for another layer of awkward. Then, at the last minute, Warren headed out to the stage with a shirt on. Damn it. They all pulled their shirts on.

— Battle for the Soul by Edward-Isaac Dovere (Page 230)

The Biden Burger was just a regular Deluxe Burger, except with American instead of aged white cheddar, and was featured on the menu for one day only at the gourmet fast-food spot in Dearborn where Biden went for lunch with his superfan, Detroit mayor Mike Duggan, and a few local Muslim leaders two weeks later. He’d overlooked it on the menu, and ordered just a regular cheeseburger.

— Battle for the Soul by Edward-Isaac Dovere (Page 224)

A few minutes later, the moderators paused for a commercial break. Biden leaned over to Buttigieg, at the podium to his right. They barely knew each other, but Biden was looking for someone to share the moment with.

“Well,” he said. “That was some fucking bullshit.”

— Battle for the Soul by Edward-Isaac Dovere (Page 218)

Andrew Yang kept running to the bathroom to throw up. The walls weren’t thick, and he was so loud that operatives on other campaigns started joking about “Yanging.” He’d been having a blast pretending to run for president, but this was the real thing, live, on national television, standing onstage a few podiums down from people who might actually be president, and he was sick and nervous. He’d had an IV in him earlier in the day, a massive nosebleed an hour before going onstage. “I was literally thinking, ‘Please don’t bleed on national TV,’” he said.

— Battle for the Soul by Edward-Isaac Dovere (Page 213)

Jason Miller, a Trump adviser who’d been stopped from joining the White House in 2016 because he had impregnated a younger Trump aide who wasn’t his wife and the mother of his other three children, gleefully welcomed Biden into the race.

— Battle for the Soul by Edward-Isaac Dovere (Page 208)

So they flew Warren to the town where she grew up in Oklahoma to make a video and to take a test. And even though they had carefully plotted the rollout, complete with a fully packaged production in The Boston Globe, they managed to screw it all up. They didn’t check in with any of the local tribal groups. They tried to hang some claim to her heritage on a test that revealed she had at most 3 percent Native American blood, and not long afterward they had to revise the percentage down.

— Battle for the Soul by Edward-Isaac Dovere (Page 124)

Biden is an empathetic person, a caring person, physical with both men and women. He has rubbed. He has nuzzled. He grabs hands, he hugs because he reaches out to people, and because people reach out to him, sensing that they can lay their pain on him, that he wants to take it from them. He may be the world’s most complete, purest extrovert, feeding off others’ energy, but not in the vampiric way of Bill Clinton. He draws actual personal happiness from making other people happy, like a human golden retriever.

Flores said she spoke up on her own, but Biden aides saw all these as attacks meant to turn Biden’s great strength into a vulnerability. They immediately began coming up with possible suspects. Harris, maybe. Her aides were certainly hoping that the incident would scare him out of running, to spare himself the pain. Sanders’s advisers panicked that the Biden campaign would see them behind

— Battle for the Soul by Edward-Isaac Dovere (Page 201)

So start with a health care proposal that at least seemed passable, even if it was never explained how it would be paid for, and that would make him look like a seasoned, reasonable legislator. Then try to get every senator who might run against him to sign on as a cosponsor. Theoretically, that would make the legislation stronger. Realistically, that would prevent his opponents from ever being able to attack what would likely be the central idea of his campaign. If Sanders introduced the bill on his own, which used to be his style when he was a lefty looney loner during his days in the House, then he’d be out on his own. But if he got his colleagues to back him up, he would be viewed as a thought leader insulated by the party he still wouldn’t join. And they knew the catch: if he did run, he would be the only one who would get the credit from the activists for backing Medicare for All. Everyone else would come off as followers, neither as pure nor as original. Once the other senators signed on, Sanders’s aides calculated, they had essentially signed with blood. Getting senators signed on would be self-reinforcing.

— Battle for the Soul by Edward-Isaac Dovere (Page 110)

Just a few months into her time in the Senate, Harris and her consultants were already looking at polling that showed that her best chance to build support in a presidential run was on the left, that if she was in a race with Sanders and Biden, she could pull more of Sanders’s voters than Biden’s.

Sign onto his bill first to get the credit for taking a bold stand, Harris thought, and make the announcement as a surprise at the end of August in a church back home in Oakland. Aides realized afterward that she had so thin a grasp of the policy that she’d said she was backing “Medicaid for All” in the church. Almost as soon as she finished, she was stressing about now being signed on to ending private insurance, kicking off a two-year-long hokeypokey that would help end her campaign.

— Battle for the Soul by Edward-Isaac Dovere (Page 111)

Obama remained skeptical about Biden’s chances. With decades of presidents winning by running against Washington, with the demographics of the Democratic Party shifting far away from the Biden memories of its old core in Scranton, and with the world a long way from those dinners around the kitchen table with his grandfather that Biden would always talk about, it seemed like a stretch. Obama knew Trump would try to turn a campaign against Biden into a run against his legacy, and he wasn’t keen on leaving that fight to Biden to handle.

His friend Deval Patrick, meanwhile, was the rare person whose political skills actually impressed Obama, and who seemed to him to be a possibly credible uniter of the country.

— Battle for the Soul by Edward-Isaac Dovere (Page 84)

By March, Gillibrand was already scrambling for a reset. Her staff came up with what they were convinced was a breakthrough idea: a launch in front of Trump Tower. Except they couldn’t get a permit because the building was on Fifth Avenue, surrounded by a constant police blanket. They settled for having the event in front of Trump World Tower, at the southwestern corner of Central Park. Except they couldn’t get the permit to put the stage in a place that would allow the actual building to be seen in the background, so they settled for having it off to the side.

— Battle for the Soul by Edward-Isaac Dovere (Page 165)

Her highest profile splash in presidential politics to that point had been, while working on the never-going-anywhere campaign of Martin O’Malley, beating Hillary Clinton to the one-toilet women’s room backstage during a commercial break at a debate in 2015, leaving Clinton to apologize with a wry smile when she made her way back on stage late.

— Battle for the Soul by Edward-Isaac Dovere (Page 172)

“We have a responsibility to prevent Trump’s bullying, aggressive behavior from becoming normalized in the eyes of Americans—especially the millions of young people who are watching and wondering, for example, if sexual assault is now a laughing matter. We have a responsibility to say that it is not normal for the KKK to celebrate the election of a president they view as their champion with a victory parade. They have one scheduled.”

“In other words,” Reid said, “we have a responsibility to lead.”

Schumer asked Reid to stop causing problems.

— Battle for the Soul by Edward-Isaac Dovere (Page 42)