Preface.
You may have followed the U.S. election for 3 whole months and read countless various arguments, whether they are from the so-called mainstream media or conspiracy theories from the self-published media, you must have read and listened to a vast amount of information. However, if you really want to know the truth about the 2020 U.S. election, it’s all in this article.
What I write and post may not be read by many people, because I am not interested in purely emotional catharsis, but want to explore the truth as much as possible, with very little power, but still hope to do my part. The Perception of our society is more interested in emotional cathartic words, not very popular for purely rational and sensible things. But it doesn’t matter, things come in groups, as long as there are still some readers willing to read what I write and post, I will try to persist. The power of the individual is limited, and I can not guarantee that I am right.
The Biden ascended to the throne, and all kinds of demons and monsters have shown their heads. Recently, the famous left media “Time” published a 20,000-word-long article, systematically introducing how anti-Trump people and organizations have been organizing, planning, and implementing for almost 2 years since 19 years in the name of maintaining election fairness, from the new crown Epidemic to social platform opinion control, from mail-in ballots to grassroots vote making, from voting machines to street campaigns, from Democrats to Republicans to independents, from From Wall Street to Silicon Valley, from the rich to the unions, how to strong coalition, layer by layer, step by step to build an anti-Trump political coalition of unprecedented strength. And the only purpose of this coalition is to ensure that Trump will not win the 2020 election.
Today, they won, so this kind of interference in the presidential election of the deviant, illegal and disorderly things, can actually be taken out in the name of the justice and greatness of saving the U.S. presidential election and saving American democracy.
So, election fraud is a conspiracy theory? Wrong, where is the conspiracy theory? It’s an outright conspiracy! It was the work of evil politicians, hypocritical elites, bottomless and unprincipled media, and greedy tech corporations. The sad Republican establishment has not only failed to resist, but has been reduced to an accomplice.
The latest Rasmussen poll shows that more than 30% of Democrats believe the election was fraudulent, more than 70% of Republicans believe the election was fraudulent, and on average more than half of Americans believe the election was fraudulent.
This morning I saw a short video about the famous Chinese story of Dou E: When Dou E was killed, she said, “God, if I’m wronged, let there be a three-year drought and snow in June. Afterwards, there was a three-year drought and the people were not able to survive. Later, Dou E’s father became a high-ranking official and returned to his hometown to retry Dou E’s case, killing the corrupt officials and giving Dou E a redress of her grievances. The local people asked Dou E’s father: We all know that she was wronged, but the corrupt officials are too powerful, we dare not say. But why should we bear the consequences of the three-year drought? Dou E’s father said: Knowing that Dou E was wronged but not saying anything, watching her being killed unjustly, is a banal evil. If you don’t bear the consequences, who will?
The vast majority of Americans, today and in the future, will pay the price for the evil of mediocrity. Unemployment, tax hikes, higher health insurance, worse social security, confusion over gender perceptions, the growing prevalence of black lives and Antifa, and so on. When an avalanche occurs, no snowflake is innocent.
So, this article is the leftist’s success in stealing the election and can’t resist showing off its unearthly achievements to the world. At the same time, it is also a confession, a shameless confession of the left, so that the world can also see the real face hidden behind the so-called fairness, justice, freedom and democracy!
This article is too long, I’ve been busy recently, and I’m in a hurry, so the translation and proofreading may not be very good. It should not affect the interpretation of the overall meaning. Sorry about that! I hope you have the patience to read the whole article, which is over 13,000 words. If you want to know the truth about the 2020 U.S. election, it’s all in this article!
Main article: The secret history of the shadow campaign to save the 2020 election
A strange thing happened right after the Nov. 3 election: nothing.
The nation was bracing for chaos. Liberal groups vowed to take to the streets, planning hundreds of protests across the country. Right-wing militias were also gaining momentum. In a poll taken before Election Day, 75 percent of Americans said they feared violence.
Instead, an eerie quiet has descended. As President Trump refused to budge, the response was not mass action but the sound of crickets. on Nov. 7, when media organizations announced Joe Biden’s candidacy, instead, jubilation broke out as people flocked to cities across the United States to celebrate the democratic process that led to Trump’s ouster.
SharePlay VideoA second strange thing happened as Trump tried to reverse the outcome: corporate America fell in line. Hundreds of major business leaders, many of whom had supported Trump’s candidacy, backed his policies and called on him to concede. Something doesn’t feel right for the president.” It’s all very, very strange,” Trump said on Dec. 2.” In the days after the election, we witnessed a carefully orchestrated effort to secure a winner, even as votes were still being counted in many key states.”
In a way, Trump was right.
There was a conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes, one that both contained the protests and coordinated the CEOs’ resistance. Both surprises were the result of an informal alliance between left-wing activists and business titans. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the AFL-CIO issued a concise, little-known joint statement on Election Day formalizing the pact. Both sides will see it as an implicit bargain – inspired by the summer’s massive and sometimes destructive racial justice protests, the forces of labor and capital working together to keep the peace and oppose Trump’s assault on democracy.
The handshake between business and labor is just one component of a vast, cross-party movement to protect elections – an extraordinary shadow effort not to win the vote, but to ensure that it is free and fair, credible and free of corruption. For more than a year, a loosely organized coalition of operatives scrambled to prop up America’s institutions as they came under simultaneous attack by a relentless pandemic and an authoritarian-leaning president. While much of this activity took place on the left, it was separate from the Biden campaign and crossed ideological lines, with important contributions from nonpartisan and conservative operatives. The scenario that the shadow campaigners tried so hard to prevent was not a Trump victory, but a disastrous election. It was an election so disastrous that no result was visible at all, a failure of the central act of democratic self-government that has been the hallmark of the United States since its founding.
Their work touched every aspect of the election. They pushed states to change their voting systems and laws, and helped secure hundreds of millions of dollars in public and private funding. They fought off voter suppression lawsuits, recruited large numbers of poll workers, and got millions of people to vote by mail for the first time. They successfully pressured social media companies to take a tougher stand against disinformation and used data-driven tactics to counter viral smears. They executed a national public awareness campaign to help Americans understand how the vote count would unfold over days or weeks, preventing Trump’s conspiracy theories and false claims of victory from gaining more traction. After Election Day, they monitored every pressure point to make sure Trump couldn’t overturn the results.” The untold story of the election is that thousands of people in both parties built on their base to accomplish a victory for American democracy.” Norm Eisen, a prominent lawyer and former Obama administration official, said he had recruited Republicans and Democrats to the board of the voter protection program.
That’s because Trump and his allies are running their own campaigns to derail the election. The president spent months insisting that the mail-in ballots were a Democratic plot and that the election would be “rigged. His minions at the state level tried to block its use, while his lawyers filed dozens of sham lawsuits to make voting more difficult – a reinforcement of the Republican legacy of suppression tactics. Before the election, Trump conspired to prevent a legal vote count. And in the months after Nov. 3, he kept trying to steal an election he had already lost – through lawsuits and conspiracy theories, pressuring state and local officials, and finally rallying his army of supporters for a Jan. 6 rally that resulted in deadly violence at the Capitol.
Democratic activists watched in horror.” Every week, we feel like we’re struggling to get this election done without the country going through a really dangerous moment of unraveling,” said Zach Wamp, a Trump supporter and former GOP representative who helped coordinate the bipartisan Election Protection Commission.” We can look back and say this went well, but in September and October, it wasn’t clear at all.”
This is the inside story of the conspiracy to save the 2020 election, based on access to the inner workings of the organization, never-before-seen documents and interviews with dozens of participants from across the political spectrum. It is the story of an unprecedented, creative and determined campaign whose success also reveals how close the country came to disaster.” Every attempt to interfere with the normal outcome of the election was defeated,” said Ian Bassin, co-founder of the nonpartisan rule of law advocacy group Protect Democracy.” But it’s extremely important for the country to understand that this didn’t happen by accident. The system doesn’t work magically. Democracy is not self-enforcing.”
That’s why participants want to tell the secret history of the 2020 election, even though it sounds like a paranoid fever dream – a well-funded cabal, across industries and ideologies, working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, direct media coverage and control the flow of information. They’re not rigging elections, they’re strengthening them. And they believe that the public needs to understand the fragility of the system in order to ensure that American democracy will endure.
Sometime in the fall of 2019, Mike Podhorzer is convinced the election is headed for disaster – and is determined to protect it.
This is not his usual purview. For nearly a quarter century, Podhorzer, a senior adviser to the president of the AFL-CIO, the nation’s largest union federation, has been marshaling the latest strategies and data to help his favored candidates win elections. Unassuming and professorial, he’s not the kind of frazzled “political strategist” who appears on cable news. Among Democratic Party insiders, he is known as the wizard behind the greatest advances in political technology in recent decades. He brought together a group of liberal strategists in the early 2000s and led to the creation of the Analyst Institute, a secretive company that applies the scientific method to political campaigns. He also co-founded Catalist, the flagship company for progressive data.
Washington’s chatter about “political strategy” has little to do with how to actually effect change, according to Podholzer.” My basic view of politics is that it’s all pretty obvious if you don’t overthink it or swallow the current framework whole,” he once wrote.” After that, just ruthlessly identify your assumptions and challenge them.” Podholzer applied that approach to everything: When he coached his now-adult son’s Little League team in suburban Washington, he trained the kids not to swing at most pitches – a tactic that infuriated both them and the opposing Parents but won the team a series of championships.
Trump’s election in 2016 – thanks in part to his unusual strength among the kind of blue-collar white voters who once dominated the AFL-CIO – prompted Podhoretzer to question his assumptions about voter behavior. He began circulating weekly number-crunching memos to a small group of allies and hosting strategy sessions in Washington, D.C. But when he began to worry about the election itself, he didn’t want to appear paranoid. It took months of research before he presented his concerns in an October 2019 newsletter. He wrote that the usual tools of data, analysis and polling would not be enough in a situation where the president himself was trying to derail the election.” Most of our planning will get us through Election Day,” he noted.” But we are not prepared for the two most likely outcomes” – Trump losing and refusing to concede, and Trump winning the Electoral College by disrupting the voting process in key states (despite losing the popular vote).” We desperately need to systematically ‘red team’ this election so we can predict and plan for the worst-case scenario we know will happen to us.”
As it turns out, Podhoretzer wasn’t the only one thinking in these terms. He began to hear the voices of others eager to unite.” The Fightback Table, a coalition of “resistance” groups, has begun scenario planning around a possible contested election, bringing together liberal activists at the local and national levels in what they call a “coalition for the defense of democracy. Voting rights and civil rights organizations are sounding the alarm. A group of former elected officials is working on emergency powers they fear Trump may use. The group Protect Democracy is forming a bipartisan election crisis task force.” It turns out that once you say it out loud, people agree,” Podhorzer said, “and it starts to build momentum.”
He spent months thinking through the options and talking to experts. It wasn’t hard to find liberals who saw Trump as a dangerous dictator, but Podhorzer was careful to avoid hysteria. He wants to know not how American democracy is dying, but how to keep it alive. The main difference between the United States and those countries that have lost control of their democracy, he concludes, is that its decentralized electoral system cannot be rigged all at once. This provides an opportunity to consolidate democracy.
On March 3, Podholzer drafted a confidential three-page memo entitled “Threats to the 2020 Elections. “Trump has made it clear that this will not be a fair election and that he will reject anything but his own re-election as ‘fake’ and rigged,” he wrote.” On November 3, if the media reports are otherwise, he will use right-wing information systems to build his narrative and incite his supporters to protest.” The memo lists four categories of challenges: attacks on voters, attacks on election administration, attacks on Trump’s political opponents and “efforts to reverse the election results.”
COVID-19 then erupted at the height of the primary season. Normal voting methods were no longer safe for voters or the mostly elderly volunteers who usually work at the polls. But political divisions, coupled with Trump’s crusade against mail-in voting, prevented some states from making absentee voting easier and from allowing precincts to count those ballots in a timely manner. Chaos ensued. Ohio shut down in-person voting for the primary, resulting in a minuscule turnout. A shortage of poll workers in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, which has a high concentration of black Democrats, led to a reduction in open polling places from 182 to just five. In New York, the vote count took more than a month.
Suddenly, the possibility of a November meltdown was palpable. From his apartment in suburban Washington, D.C., Podhoretzer began working on his laptop at the kitchen table, holding back-to-back Zoom meetings for hours each day with his network of contacts in the progressive world: the labor movement; institutional leftists like Planned Parenthood and Greenpeace; resistance groups like Indivisible and MoveOn; progressive data geeks and strategists, donor and foundation representatives, state-level grassroots organizers, racial justice activists and others.
In April, Podhoretzer began hosting the weekly 2 1/2-hour Zoom, which is structured around a series of quick five-minute presentations on everything from the effectiveness of advertising to messaging to legal strategy. These invitation-only gatherings quickly attracted hundreds of people, creating a rare knowledge-sharing base for the strife-torn progressive movement.” At the risk of talking trash about the left, there wasn’t a lot of good information to share,” says Anat Shenker-Osorio, a close friend of Podhorzer whose poll-tested messages guided the formation of the organization’s methods.” There was a lot of uninvented syndrome, where people wouldn’t consider a good idea if they didn’t come up with it.”
The meetings became the galactic center of a whole galaxy of left-wing activists who had overlapping goals but didn’t usually work in concert. The organization had no name, no leader, and no hierarchy, but it kept the different actors in sync.” Pods play a key behind-the-scenes role in keeping the different parts of the movement’s infrastructure in communication and alignment,” says Maurice Mitchell, national director of the Working Families Party.” You have room for litigation, room for organizing, and political people just focused on the W. Their strategies aren’t always aligned. He allowed that ecosystem to work together.”
Protecting elections will require an effort of unprecedented scale. As 2020 progresses, it extends to Congress, Silicon Valley and the nation’s state legislatures. It draws energy from the summer’s racial justice protests, many of whose leaders were a key part of the liberal coalition. And eventually, it reached across the aisle, into the world of skeptical Republicans alarmed by Trump’s attacks on democracy.
Securing the Vote
The first task was to overhaul America’s shaky election infrastructure – in the midst of a pandemic. For the thousands of local officials who manage elections, the most pressing need is money. They need protective equipment such as masks, gloves and hand sanitizer. They need to pay for postcards to let people know they can vote absentee, or in some states, mail ballots to every voter. They need extra staff and scanners to process the ballots.
In March, activists called on Congress to use COVID relief money for election administration. Led by the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, more than 150 organizations signed a letter to every member of Congress seeking $2 billion in election funding. This was somewhat successful: The CARES Act, passed later that month, included $400 million in grants to state election administrators. But the next tranche of relief funds did not increase to that figure. It wasn’t enough.
Private philanthropy stepped into the gap. Various foundations provided tens of millions of dollars for election administration. The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative donated $300 million.” It was a failure at the federal level, and 2,500 local election officials were forced to apply for charitable grants to fill their needs,” said Amber McReynolds, a former Denver election official who heads the nonpartisan National Vote at Home Institute.
McReynolds’ two-year-old organization became a clearinghouse for information on the state’s efforts to adapt. The institute provides technical advice to secretaries of state of both parties on everything from which vendor to use to how to find drop boxes. Local officials are the most trusted source of election information, but few can afford a press secretary, so the institute distributes communication kits. in a presentation to Podhorzer’s panel, McReynolds detailed the importance of absentee voting to shorten lines at the polls and prevent election crises.
The Institute’s work has helped strengthen vote-by-mail voting in 37 states and Washington, D.C. But vote-by-mail is of little value if people don’t take advantage of it. Part of the challenge is the logistics: Each state has different rules about when and how to request and return ballots. The Voter Participation Center (VPC), which normally deploys canvassers door-to-door to get out the vote, conducted focus groups in April and May to find out what would get people to vote by mail. In August and September, it sent ballot applications to 15 million people in key states, of which 4.6 million returned applications. In mailings and digital ads, the organization urged people not to wait for Election Day.” All the work we’ve done for 17 years has been built to bring democracy to this moment at people’s doorsteps,” said Tom Lopach, the center’s chief executive officer.
That effort had to overcome a high level of skepticism in some communities. Many black voters prefer to exercise their right to vote in person, or don’t trust the mail. National civil rights groups have worked with local organizations to promote the idea that this is the best way to ensure that a person’s vote is counted. In Philadelphia, for example, advocates distributed “voting security kits” with masks, hand sanitizer and informational brochures.” We have to send the message that this is safe, secure, and you can trust it.”” Hannah Freed of “All Vote is Local” said.
Meanwhile, Democratic lawyers battled a historic wave of lawsuits in the run-up to the election. The pandemic has intensified the usual tangle of parties in court. But lawyers have also noticed something else.” The lawsuits brought by the Trump campaign, along with a broader movement to sow doubt about mail ballots, are making novel claims and using theories never before accepted by the courts,” said Wendy Weiser, a voting rights expert at New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice.” They read more like lawsuits designed to convey information than to achieve a legal result.”
Finally, with nearly half of voters voting by mail in 2020, it’s effectively a revolution in how people vote. About a quarter voted early and in person. Only a quarter of voters vote in the traditional way: in person on Election Day.
Disinformation Defense
Bad actors spreading disinformation is nothing new. Campaigns have been grappling with everything from anonymous phone calls claiming the election has been rescheduled to flyers spreading nasty smears about candidates’ families for decades. But Trump’s lies and conspiracy theories, the viral power of social media and the involvement of foreign interlopers have made disinformation a broader and more profound threat to the 2020 vote.
Laura Quinn, a veteran progressive and co-founder of Catalist, began researching the issue a few years ago. She piloted an unnamed, secret project, which she has never before discussed publicly, that tracks disinformation online and tries to figure out how to combat it. One element was to track dangerous lies that might otherwise spread unknowingly. Researchers then provide information to campaigners or the media to track down sources and expose them.
The most important takeaway from Quinn’s research, however, is that exposure to toxic content only makes things worse.” When you’re under attack, the instinct is to fight back, to call it out, to say, ‘That’s not true,'” Quinn said.” But the more engaged something is, the more the platform can elevate it. The algorithm interprets that as, ‘Oh, this is popular; people want more of it.'”
The solution, she concluded, is to pressure platforms to enforce the rules, both by removing content or accounts that spread false information and by policing them more aggressively in the first place.” Platforms have policies in place for certain types of malicious behavior, but they haven’t been enforcing them,” she said.
Quinn’s research has provided ammunition for advocates pushing social media platforms to take a tougher line. in November 2019, Mark Zuckerberg invited nine civil rights leaders to dinner at his home, where they warned him that election-related disinformation was already spreading unchecked and that it was dangerous.” It took a lot of pushing, urging, dialogue, brainstorming, all of it, before we got to a place where we ended up with stricter rules and enforcement.” Vanita Gupta, president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, said he attended the dinner and also met with Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and others. (Gupta has been nominated by President Biden to be deputy attorney general.)” It’s a struggle, but we’ve gotten to the point where they understand the problem. Will that be enough? It may not be enough. Is it later than we want it to be? Yes, but it’s really important. But given the extent of official disinformation, it’s really important that they have these rules in place and that they flag and remove these things.”
Spreading the word
In addition to fighting bad information, the fast-changing election process needs to be explained. Make voters understand that, despite what Trump says, mail-in ballots are not prone to fraud and that it’s normal if some states don’t finish counting on election night.
Dick Gephardt, a former Democratic House leader turned high-powered lobbyist, spearheaded a coalition.” We wanted to get a real bipartisan group of former elected officials, cabinet secretaries, military leaders, etc. The main purpose was to get the message out to the public, but also to speak to local officials – governors, attorneys general, governors – who would be in the eye of the storm and let them know we wanted to help them.” Gephardt said he used his contacts in the private sector to put $20 million behind the effort.
Wamp, a former GOP congressman, has rallied Republicans through Issue One, a nonpartisan reform group.” We think we should bring some element of bipartisan unity around what constitutes a free and fair election,” Wamp said. Twenty-two Democrats and 22 Republicans from the National Committee for Election Integrity meet at least once a week on Zoom. They ran ads in six states, issued statements, wrote articles and alerted local officials to potential problems.” We have rabid Trump supporters who have agreed to serve on the council based on the idea that it’s honest,” Wamp said. He told them it would be just as important to convince liberals when Trump wins.” Either way the cuts are made, we have to stick together.”
Voting Rights Lab and IntoAction created state-specific memes and graphics that went viral via email, text, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok, urging that every vote be counted. Together, they were viewed more than 1 billion times. Protect Democracy’s Election Task Force released reports and held media briefings with prominent experts across the political spectrum, resulting in extensive coverage of potential election issues and fact-checking Trump’s false claims. The group’s tracking poll found that people heard the message: the percentage of the public who did not expect to know the winner on election night gradually increased until late October, when it exceeded 70 percent. Most people also believe that a long vote count doesn’t mean there’s a problem.” We know exactly what Trump is going to do: he’s going to try to use the fact that Democrats voted by mail and Republicans voted in person to make it look like he’s ahead, claim victory, say the mail-in ballots are fake, and try to get them thrown out.” Protect Democracy’s Bassin said. Setting public expectations ahead of time helps undercut those lies.
The coalition drew a common set of themes from Shenker-Osorio’s study presented at Podhorzer’s Zooms. The research shows that when people believe their vote doesn’t count or are concerned that it will be a hassle, they are much less likely to participate in voting. Throughout the election season, Podholzer’s panelists minimized incidents of voter intimidation and suppressed a rise in liberal hysteria over Trump’s expected refusal to concede. They didn’t want to amplify false claims by engaging them, or discourage people from voting by suggesting rigged games.” When you say, ‘These fraud claims are false,’ what people hear is ‘fraud,'” Shenker-Osorio said.” What we’ve seen in our pre-election research is that any rhetoric that reaffirms Trump’s power or casts him as a dictator reduces people’s desire to vote.”
At the same time, Podholzer is warning everyone he knows that the polls underestimate Trump’s approval ratings. According to a member of a major network’s political arm who spoke with Podholzer before Election Day, the data he shared with the media outlets that will run the election is “very useful” for understanding how the votes are rolling in. Most analysts had recognized that there would be a “blue shift” in key battlegrounds – a rush of votes to the Democrats, driven by a right-handed vote count – but they failed to understand how well Trump might do on Election Day.” Being able to document how big the absentee wave will be and how it varies by state is critical,” the analyst said.
People Power
The racial justice uprising sparked by the murder of George Floyd in May was not primarily a political movement. The organizers who helped lead the uprising wanted to capitalize on its momentum in the election and not allow it to be used by politicians. Many of these organizers were part of Podholzer’s network, from activists in battleground states who worked with the Alliance for the Defense of Democracy to organizations that played leadership roles in the Black Lives Matter movement.
They decided that the best way to make sure people’s voices were heard was to protect their ability to vote.” We started thinking about a program that would complement the traditional election protection field, but not rely on calling the police,” said Nelini Stamp, national organizing director of the Working Families Party. They created a team of “election defenders” who, unlike traditional poll watchers, are trained in de-escalation techniques. During early voting and on Election Day, they surrounded voter lines in urban areas with “happy votes,” turning the act of voting into a street party. Black organizers also recruited thousands of poll workers to ensure that polling places in their communities remained open.
The summer uprisings have shown that people power can have a huge impact. Activists began preparing for a resurgence of demonstrations if Trump tried to steal the election. Reuters reported in October that “Americans plan widespread protests if Trump interferes with the election.” It was one of many such reports. More than 150 liberal groups, from the Women’s March to the Sierra Club to the Color of Change, from Democrats.org to the Democratic Socialists of America, have joined the Protect the Results coalition. The group’s now-defunct Web site includes a map of 400 planned post-election demonstrations that could be launched via text message as soon as Nov. 4. To stop what they fear will be a coup, the left is ready to flood the streets.
About a week before Election Day, Podhoretzer received an unexpected message: the U.S. Chamber of Commerce wanted to talk.
The AFL-CIO and the Chamber of Commerce have a long history of antagonism. While neither organization is explicitly partisan, the influential business lobby has poured hundreds of millions of dollars into Republican campaigns, just as the nation’s unions have sent hundreds of millions of dollars to the Democratic Party. Labor, on one side, and management, on the other, are locked in an eternal battle for power and resources.
But behind the scenes, the business community was also engaged in its own anxious discussions about how the election and its aftermath might unfold. The summer’s racial justice protests also sent a signal to business owners that there could be civil unrest that could devastate the economy.” With tensions running high, there is a lot of concern about unrest around the election or a break in the normal way we handle contested elections,” said Neil Bradley, executive vice president and chief policy officer of the chamber. Those concerns had led the chamber, along with the Washington-based CEO group Business Roundtable and the Manufacturers, Wholesalers and Retailers Association, to issue a pre-election statement calling for patience and confidence as votes are counted.
But Bradley wanted to send a broader, more bipartisan message. He contacted Podhoretzer through an intermediary both men preferred to remain anonymous. They agreed that their unlikely coalition would be strong, and they began discussing a joint statement pledging their organizations’ shared commitment to fair and peaceful elections. They carefully chose their wording and timed the release of the statement to have the greatest impact. The impact of the statement was further amplified when Christian leaders expressed interest in joining as the statement was being finalized.
The statement was released on Election Day in the names of Thomas Donohue, CEO of the Chamber of Commerce, Richard Trumka, president of the AFL-CIO, and the heads of the National Association of Evangelicals and the National African American Clergy Network.” It is imperative that election officials be given the space and time to count each vote in accordance with applicable law,” he said.” We call on the media, candidates and the American people to be patient with the process and trust our system, even if it takes more time than usual.” The groups added, “While we may not always agree on the ideal outcome up or down the ballot, we stand united in our call for the American democratic process to proceed without violence, intimidation or any other tactics that make us weaker as a nation.”
Election night began with despair for many Democrats. Trump was well ahead in pre-election polls, easily winning Florida, Ohio and Texas, and making Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania too close to call. But when I spoke with him that night, Podholzer was unfazed: the returns were exactly in line with his model. He had been warning for weeks that turnout among Trump voters was surging. As the numbers trickled in, he could see that Trump would lose as soon as all the votes were counted.
The liberal coalition gathered for an 11 p.m. Zoom call. Hundreds of people joined; many were horrified.” It was really important for me and the team at that moment to help ground people in what we already knew to be true,” said Angela Peoples, director of the Alliance for the Defense of Democracy. Podhoretzer presented the data to show everyone that victory was in the air.
As he spoke, Fox News took everyone by surprise, calling Arizona Biden’s world. The public awareness campaign paid off. Television anchors were at pains to advise caution and to count the votes accurately. The question then became what to do next.
The next conversation was a difficult one, led by the activists in charge of protest strategy.” We wanted to be mindful of when is the right time to call for moving large numbers of people into the streets,” Peoples said. As much as they want to show strength, immediate mobilization could backfire and put people at risk. Protests that turn violent would give Trump an excuse to send in federal agents or troops, as he did over the summer. And rather than elevate Trump’s complaints by continuing to confront him, the coalition wanted to send the message that the people had spoken.
So the message went out: back off. Protect the Results announced that “the entire national mobilization network will not be activated today, but remains prepared to do so if necessary.” On Twitter, angry progressives wanted to know what was happening. Why isn’t anyone trying to stop Trump’s coup? Where are all the protests?
Podhoretzer thinks the activists are restrained.” They spent so much time preparing to take to the streets on Wednesday. But they did,” he said.” From Wednesday to Friday, there wasn’t a single Antifa and Proud Boys event like everyone was expecting. And when that didn’t happen, I don’t think the Trump campaign had a backup plan.”
Activists repositioned the “Protect the Results” protest as a weekend of celebration.” Counter their disinformation with our confidence & get ready to celebrate,” wrote Shenker-Osorio in a message guide submitted to the liberal coalition on Friday, Nov. 6.” Declare and consolidate our victory. Atmosphere: confident, forward-looking, unified – not passive and anxious.” The voters, not the candidates, will be the story.
The planned day of celebration coincided with the announcement of the election on Nov. 7. Activists dancing in the streets of Philadelphia blasted Beyoncé over Trump’s attempted campaign press conference; it’s no coincidence that the Trumps’ next encounter is scheduled for the Four Seasons’ General Theater outside downtown, activists believe.” The people of Philadelphia own the streets of Philadelphia,” crowed Mitchell of the Working Families Party.” We contrasted our joyful celebration of democracy with their clown show and made them look ridiculous.”
The votes have been counted. Trump lost. But the fight isn’t over.
Five steps to victory
In Podhoretzer’s speech, winning the vote is only the first step in winning an election. After that comes winning the count, winning certification, winning the Electoral College and winning the transition – steps that are often pro forma but that he knows Trump will see as opportunities to undermine. Nowhere will that be more evident than in Michigan, where Trump’s pressure on local Republicans came close to working – where liberal and conservative Democratic forces united to fight back.
It was around 10 p.m. on election night in Detroit when a flurry of text messages lit up Art Reyes III’s phone. A busload of Republican election observers had arrived at the TCF Center, where ballots were being counted. They crowded the counting tables, refused to wear masks and heckled the mostly black staff. Reyes, a Flint native who leads the group We the People Michigan, had expected this. For months, conservative groups have been sowing suspicion of urban voter fraud.” The language was, ‘They’re going to steal the election, there’s going to be fraud in Detroit,’ long before any votes were cast,” Reyes said.
He went to the arena and sent a message to his network. within 45 minutes, dozens of reinforcements arrived. As they entered the arena to provide balance to the GOP observers inside, Reyes took down their cell phone numbers and added them to a giant text message chain. Racial justice activists from Detroit Will Breathe worked with suburban women and local elected officials from Women for Democrats. Reyes left at 3 a.m. to hand off the text message chain to a disabled activist.
As they mapped out the steps in the election certification process, activists identified a strategy of highlighting the people’s right to decide, demanding that their voices be heard and calling attention to the racial impact of disenfranchising black Detroiters. They flooded the Wayne County Canvassing Board’s certification meeting on Nov. 17 with rhetorical testimony; despite a tweet from Trump, Republican board members certified Detroit’s ballot.
The election commission was one pressure point; the other was the Republican-controlled legislature, which Trump believes could have invalidated the election and appointed his own voters. So the president invited the GOP leaders of the Michigan legislature, House Speaker Lee Chatfield and Senate Majority Leader Mike Shirky, to Washington on Nov. 20.
It was a dangerous moment. If Chatfield and Shirkey agree to do Trump’s bidding, Republicans in other states could be subjected to similar bullying.” I’m worried things are going to get weird,” said Jeff Timmer, a former Michigan GOP executive director turned anti-Trump activist. Norm Eisen described it as “the scariest moment” of the entire election.
Democracy defenders launched a full-court press. Defend Democracy’s local contacts researched the personal and political motivations of the lawmakers. The first issue ran a television ad in Lansing. Bradley of the Chamber of Commerce followed the process closely. Wamp, a former Republican congressman, called his former colleague, Mike Rogers, who wrote an op-ed for a Detroit newspaper urging officials to respect the will of the voters. Three former Michigan governors – Republicans John Engler and Rick Snyder and Democrat Jennifer Granholm – joined forces to call for a Michigan election vote free of pressure from the White House. Engler, the former head of the Business Roundtable, made calls to influential donors and fellow GOP veteran governors who can privately pressure lawmakers.
Democratic forces face a Trumpified Michigan GOP controlled by allies of Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel and former Education Secretary and billionaire Family member Betsy DeVos, a GOP donor. in a Nov. 18 call with his team, Bassin spouted that the pressure on his side is no better than what Trump can offer.” He certainly tried to offer them something.” Bassin recalled thinking.” The head of the space force! The ambassador there! We can’t compete with that by offering a carrot. We need a stick.”
If Trump was offering something in exchange for a personal favor, Bassin reasoned, it would likely constitute a bribe. He called Richard Primus, a law professor at the University of Michigan, to see if Primus agreed and would make that argument publicly. Primus said he thought the meeting itself was inappropriate and began writing an op-ed for Politico warning that the state attorney general – a Democrat – would have no choice but to investigate. on Nov. 19, when the article was published, the attorney general’s communications director tweeted about it. Protect Democracy soon got word that lawmakers planned to bring their lawyers to a meeting with Trump the next day.
Reyes’ activists scanned flight schedules and flocked to the airports at both ends of Shirky’s trip to Washington to highlight the scrutiny the lawmakers were receiving. After the meeting, the two announced they had pressed the president to provide COVID relief for their constituents and informed him they saw no role in the election process. Then they went to the Trump Hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue for drinks. A street artist projected their images onto the exterior of the building, along with the words the world is watching.
One last step remains: the state canvassing board, made up of two Democrats and two Republicans. One Republican, a Trump hired by the DeVos family’s political nonprofit, is not expected to vote for certification. The other Republican on the board is a little-known attorney named Aaron Van Langeveld. He gave no signal about what he intended to do, keeping everyone on edge.
When the meeting began, Reyes’ activists flooded the live stream and flooded Twitter with their hashtag, #alleyesonmi. The board, accustomed to attending in single digits, was suddenly faced with an audience of thousands. In hours of testimony, activists stressed their message of respecting the will of voters and affirming democracy, rather than blaming officials. Van Langeveld was quick to say he would follow precedent. The vote was certified 3-0; another Republican abstained.
After that, the dominoes fell. Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and other states certified their electors. Republican officials in Arizona and Georgia stood up to Trump’s bullying. on Dec. 14, the Electoral College voted as scheduled.
Podhoretzer had one last milestone in mind. on Jan. 6, the day Congress would meet to count the electors, Trump called his supporters to a rally in Washington.
To their surprise, the thousands who responded to his call were barely met by counter-protesters. To maintain safety and ensure that they would not be blamed for any confusion, activists on the left “strongly discouraged counter-events,” Podhoretzer texted me on the morning of Jan. 6, with a finger-crossed emoji.
Trump addressed the crowd that afternoon, peddling the lie that lawmakers or Vice President Mike Pence could reject states’ electoral votes. He told them to go to the Capitol and “fight like hell.” Then he returned to the White House as they ransacked the building. As lawmakers fled for their lives and his own supporters were shot and trampled, Trump praised the rioters as “very special.
It was his last attack on democracy, and it failed once again. By standing down, democracy campaigners defeated their enemies.” Honestly, we won by the skin of our teeth, and that’s important for people to sit still.” The people of the Alliance for the Defense of Democracy said.” Some people have an impulse to say that the voters decided and democracy won. But it would be a mistake to think that this election cycle is a demonstration of the power of democracy. It shows how fragile democracy is.”
Members of the coalition that protected the election have parted ways. The Alliance for the Preservation of Democracy has disbanded, but the “fightback table” continues. Advocates for democracy protection and good governance have turned their attention to urgent reforms in Congress. Left-wing activists are pressuring newly empowered Democrats to remember the voters who put them in office, while civil rights groups are wary of further attacks on the vote. Business leaders decried the Jan. 6 attacks, and some said they would no longer donate to lawmakers who refuse to certify Biden’s victory. Podhoretzer and his allies are still holding their Zoom strategy meetings, gauging voter opinion and developing new messages. And Trump is in Florida, facing a second impeachment, stripped of the Twitter and Facebook accounts he used to drive the country to collapse.
When I covered this article in November and December, I heard differing accounts of who should get credit for foiling Trump’s conspiracy. Liberals argued that the role of bottom-up people power, especially the contributions of people of color and local grassroots activists, should not be overlooked. Others emphasize the heroism of government officials like Van Langeveld and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who stood up to Trump at considerable cost. The truth is that neither could have succeeded without the other.” It’s shocking how close we are and how fragile it all really is,” said Timmer, former executive director of the Michigan GOP.” It’s like Wile E. Coyote running off a cliff – if you don’t look down, you won’t fall. Our democracy can only survive if we all believe in not looking down.”
Democracy ultimately won. The will of the people triumphed. But in retrospect, it’s crazy that that’s what makes an election in America.
-By LESLIE DICKSTEIN, MARIAH ESPADA and SIMMONE SHAH
Additional correction, Feb. 5: The original version of this story misstated the name of Norm Eisen’s organization, which is the Voter Protection Project, not the Voter Protection Project. It is the “Voter Protection Project,” not the “Voter Protection Project. The original version of this story also misstated Jeff Timmer’s former position with the Michigan Republican Party. He was the executive director, not the chairman.
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