'Lucky'

“We don’t know for sure what we would’ve called the book had it gone the other way but the leading candidate on election day was battered and that just tells you that we understood that this was going to be a very close election and we thought that it was going to be closer than the public polling showed,” said Jonathan Allen, senior national politics reporter for NBC News and co-author/work partner with Amie Parnes, senior political correspondent for The Hill at a Zoom book celebration for Lucky:How Joe Biden Barely Won the Presidency hosted by The Hill’s Editor-at-Large Steve Clemons and Editor-in-Chief Bob Cusack. “I think we believed that it was going to be closer than the Biden campaign thought and you know, we really weren’t sure how it was going to turn out. And part of that is having in 2016 written a book about Hillary Clinton’s losing campaign before the election happened and having our editor call us and say, in like October of 2016, ‘You guys have a huge problem.’ We said, ‘What’s the problem. Why don’t we just see what happens on election day?’”

About the book: “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.” Penguin Random House