It All Started with the "Grytte!"

Edward-Isaac Dovere ’98 has interviewed noted politicians throughout his career.

Through the Red Doors to the campaign trails.

For those who knew him during his Browning tenure, it is no surprise that Edward-Isaac Dovere ’98 is an award-winning journalist. If you open a copy of the Grytte, Browning’s student-run newspaper, from the late ’90s, there is a good chance you will find an article written by him on the presidential election or an opinion piece on public policy.

Today, Dovere is a senior reporter for CNN and the bestselling author of Battle for the Soul: Inside the Democrats’ Campaign to Defeat Trump, published in May of 2021. A fascinating portrait of the Democratic Party, Dovere’s literary debut is masterfully crafted and extremely well-reported, drawing on more than 400 interviews with politicians, aides, operatives, and voters across the country. A behind-the-scenes look into the rebuilding of the Democratic Party following the 2016 election, Dovere penned the tome while covering the campaign trail across 29 states. The end result is a captivating look into the complicated, somewhat shocking road to Biden’s 2020 election.

“If you want to be a political reporter, you want to cover a presidential campaign,” he says, “If you want to cover a presidential campaign, you wanted to cover this one—even when that meant lying in a gravel road in the middle of a field in northeastern Iowa late one night, trying to figure out how to reattach part of the front bumper to a rental car.”

With more than 15 years of experience as a political journalist, Dovere’s years of on-the-ground reporting, his perspective on the Democratic Party, and his access to some of the key players were instrumental in the successful completion of a book of this magnitude. In fact, Dovere was with Joe Biden for his first interview in the Oval Office as President last February.

Dovere began his journalism career in New York, covering city and state politics as the founding editor and lead writer of City Hall, a twice-monthly newspaper, and The Capitol, a monthly paper. In 2011, he relocated to Washington, DC, to join Politico, and became a senior White House reporter covering Barack Obama’s second term as president, later becoming Politico’s chief Washington correspondent. During this time, Mr. Dovere received the White House Correspondents’ Association’s prestigious Merriman Smith Award for his coverage of Obama’s historic trip to Cuba in 2016. In 2018, he began working at The Atlantic, where he led coverage of the 2020 election, before moving to CNN in the fall of 2021.

In stark contrast to the roller-coaster 2020 election, we found an opinion piece Mr. Dovere penned for the Grytte entitled “Thoughts on the ’96 Elections,” where he wrote: “This campaign was not a very exciting one, but that does not make it unimportant. It was the second-to-last election of the 20th century, the last chance to select a leader who will prepare the country for the next millennium.”

While the same can certainly not be said about the 2020 election, it is clear that Mr. Dovere’s time behind the Red Doors inspired this budding reporter and helped lead him to become the acclaimed political journalist he is today.