++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Report: Anti-Israel Activist Heading to Biden State Dept
Matt Duss, central to the anti-Israel movement, may be headed to Foggy Bottom
Caroline Glick believes Biden is driving to war in The Middle East:
Meanwhile the biggest domestic threat to our nation is a conservative guy who makes pillows:
Or:
Was it this beautiful young girl?
https://freepressers.com/
Wow, talk about Cancel Culture and impeding Freedom of Speech.
The efforts by big tech and the Lame Street media to silence any
discussion of fraud in the 2020 election has never been more apparent than in
the efforts to silence Mike Lindell and his video called Absolute
Proof.
Patriot Mike put it together with his own resources and it's
loaded with facts the most diehard Trump-hater will find impossible to refute.
Watch it by clicking on the link below, but, beware, it's a
couple of hours long. But, none of it is wasted time.
Hopefully, there will be enough true get-off-their-butts
patriots that will push the various states' legislatures to fix their unfair
and broken voting rules and regulations so that the American voters can have
faith in our voting system.
And:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?
Finally: And I thought it was Biden:
Breaking: Biden Defends Excessive Amount of Executive Orders
++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Time Magazine comes clean? What's going on?
The
Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election
·
Molly Ball @mollyesque
The secret history of the shadow campaign that
saved the election
A weird thing
happened right after the Nov. 3 election: nothing.
The nation was braced for chaos. Liberal groups had vowed to
take to the streets, planning hundreds of protests across the country.
Right-wing militias were girding for battle. In a poll before Election Day, 75%
of Americans voiced concern about violence.
Instead, an eerie quiet descended. As President Trump refused
to concede, the response was not mass action but crickets. When media
organizations called the race for Joe Biden on Nov. 7, jubilation broke out
instead, as people thronged cities across the U.S. to celebrate the democratic
process that resulted in Trump’s ouster.
A second odd thing
happened amid Trump’s attempts to reverse the result: corporate America turned
on him. Hundreds of major business leaders, many of whom had backed Trump’s
candidacy and supported his policies, called on him to concede. To the
President, something felt amiss. “It was all very, very strange,” Trump said on
Dec. 2. “Within days after the election, we witnessed an orchestrated effort to
anoint the winner, even while many key states were still being counted.”
In a way, Trump was right.
There was a conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes, one that
both curtailed the protests and coordinated the resistance from CEOs. Both
surprises were the result of an informal alliance between left-wing activists
and business titans. The pact was formalized in a terse, little-noticed joint
statement of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and AFL-CIO published on Election
Day. Both sides would come to see it as a sort of implicit bargain–inspired by
the summer’s massive, sometimes destructive racial-justice protests–in which
the forces of labor came together with the forces of capital to keep the peace
and oppose Trump’s assault on democracy.
The handshake between business and labor was just one
component of a vast, cross-partisan campaign to protect the election–an
extraordinary shadow effort dedicated not to winning the vote but to ensuring
it would be free and fair, credible and uncorrupted. For more than a year, a
loosely organized coalition of operatives scrambled to shore up America’s
institutions as they came under simultaneous attack from a remorseless pandemic
and an autocratically inclined President. Though much of this activity took
place on the left, it was separate from the Biden campaign and crossed
ideological lines, with crucial contributions by nonpartisan and conservative
actors. The scenario the shadow campaigners were desperate to stop was not a
Trump victory. It was an election so calamitous that no result could be
discerned at all, a failure of the central act of democratic self-governance
that has been a hallmark of America since its founding.
Their work touched every aspect of the election. They got
states to change voting systems and laws and helped secure hundreds of millions
in public and private funding. They fended off voter-suppression lawsuits,
recruited armies 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
harder line against disinformation and used data-driven strategies to fight
viral smears. They executed national public-awareness campaigns that helped
Americans understand how the vote count would unfold over days or weeks,
preventing Trump’s conspiracy theories and false claims of victory from getting
more traction. After Election Day, they monitored every pressure point to
ensure that Trump could not overturn the result. “The untold story of the
election is the thousands of people of both parties who accomplished the
triumph of American democracy at its very foundation,” says Norm Eisen, a
prominent lawyer and former Obama Administration official who recruited
Republicans and Democrats to the board of the Voter Protection Program.
For Trump and his allies were running their own campaign to
spoil the election. The President spent months insisting that mail ballots were
a Democratic plot and the election would be “rigged.” His henchmen at the state
level sought to block their use, while his lawyers brought dozens of spurious
suits to make it more difficult to vote–an intensification of the GOP’s legacy
of suppressive tactics. Before the election, Trump plotted to block a
legitimate vote count. And he spent the months following Nov. 3 trying to steal
the election he’d lost–with lawsuits and conspiracy theories, pressure on state
and local officials, and finally summoning his army of supporters to the Jan. 6
rally that ended in deadly violence at the Capitol.
The democracy campaigners watched with alarm. “Every week,
we felt like we were in a struggle to try to pull off this election without the
country going through a real dangerous moment of unraveling,” says former GOP
Representative Zach Wamp, a Trump supporter who helped coordinate a bipartisan
election-protection council. “We can look back and say this thing went pretty
well, but it was not at all clear in September and October that that was going
to be the case.”
This is the inside
story of the conspiracy to save the 2020 election, based on access to the
group’s inner workings, never-before-seen documents and interviews with dozens
of those involved from across the political spectrum. It is the story of an
unprecedented, creative and determined campaign whose success also reveals how
close the nation came to disaster. “Every attempt to interfere with the proper
outcome of the election was defeated,” says Ian Bassin, co-founder of Protect
Democracy, a nonpartisan rule-of-law advocacy group. “But it’s massively
important for the country to understand that it didn’t happen accidentally. The
system didn’t work magically. Democracy is not self-executing.”
That’s why the participants want the secret history of the
2020 election told, even though it sounds like a paranoid fever dream–a
well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies,
working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and
laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information. They were not
rigging the election; they were fortifying it. And they believe the public
needs to understand the system’s fragility in order to ensure that democracy in
America endures.
THE ARCHITECT
Sometime in the fall
of 2019, Mike Podhorzer became convinced the election was headed for
disaster–and determined to protect it.
This was not his usual purview. For nearly a
quarter-century, Podhorzer, senior adviser to the president of the AFL-CIO, the
nation’s largest union federation, has marshaled the latest tactics and data to
help its favored candidates win elections. Unassuming and professorial, he isn’t
the sort of hair-gelled “political strategist” who shows up on cable news.
Among Democratic insiders, he’s known as the wizard behind some of the biggest
advances in political technology in recent decades. A group of liberal
strategists he brought together in the early 2000s led to the creation of the
Analyst Institute, a secretive firm that applies scientific methods to
political campaigns. He was also involved in the founding of Catalist, the
flagship progressive data company.
The endless chatter in Washington about “political
strategy,” Podhorzer believes, has little to do with how change really gets
made. “My basic take on politics is that it’s all pretty obvious if you don’t
overthink it or swallow the prevailing frameworks whole,” he once wrote. “After
that, just relentlessly identify your assumptions and challenge them.”
Podhorzer applies that approach to everything: when he coached his now adult
son’s Little League team in the D.C. suburbs, he trained the boys not to swing
at most pitches–a tactic that infuriated both their and their opponents’
parents, but won the team a series of championships.
Trump’s election in 2016–credited in part to his unusual
strength among the sort of blue collar white voters who once dominated the
AFL-CIO–prompted Podhorzer to question his assumptions about voter behavior. He
began circulating weekly number-crunching memos to a small circle of allies and
hosting strategy sessions in D.C. But when he began to worry about the election
itself, he didn’t want to seem paranoid. It was only after months of research
that he introduced his concerns in his newsletter in October 2019. The usual
tools of data, analytics and polling would not be sufficient in a situation
where the President himself was trying to disrupt the election, he wrote. “Most
of our planning takes 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 (despite losing the popular
vote) by corrupting the voting process in key states. “We desperately need to
systematically ‘red-team’ this election so that we can anticipate and plan for
the worst we know will be coming our way.”
It turned out Podhorzer wasn’t the only one thinking in
these terms. He began to hear from others eager to join forces. The Fight Back
Table, a coalition of “resistance” organizations, had begun scenario-planning
around the potential for a contested election, gathering liberal activists at
the local and national level into what they called the Democracy Defense
Coalition. Voting-rights and civil rights organizations were raising alarms. A
group of former elected officials was researching emergency powers they feared
Trump might exploit. Protect Democracy was assembling a bipartisan
election-crisis task force. “It turned out that once you said it out loud,
people agreed,” Podhorzer says, “and it started building momentum.”
He spent months pondering scenarios and talking to experts.
It wasn’t hard to find liberals who saw Trump as a dangerous dictator, but
Podhorzer was careful to steer clear of hysteria. What he wanted to know was
not how American democracy was dying but how it might be kept alive. The chief
difference between the U.S. and countries that lost their grip on democracy, he
concluded, was that America’s decentralized election system couldn’t be rigged
in one fell swoop. That presented an opportunity to shore it up.
THE ALLIANCE
On March 3, Podhorzer
drafted a three-page confidential memo titled “Threats to the 2020 Election.”
“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
Nov. 3, should the media report otherwise, he will use the right-wing
information system to establish his narrative and incite his supporters to
protest.” The memo laid out four categories of challenges: attacks on voters,
attacks on election administration, attacks on Trump’s political opponents and
“efforts to reverse the results of the election.”
Then COVID-19 erupted at the height of the primary-election
season. Normal methods of voting were no longer safe for voters or the mostly
elderly volunteers who normally staff polling places. But political
disagreements, intensified by Trump’s crusade against mail voting, prevented
some states from making it easier to vote absentee and for jurisdictions to
count those votes in a timely manner. Chaos ensued. Ohio shut down in-person
voting for its primary, leading to minuscule turnout. A poll-worker shortage in
Milwaukee–where Wisconsin’s heavily Democratic Black population is
concentrated–left just five open polling places, down from 182. In New York,
vote counting took more than a month.
Suddenly, the potential for a November meltdown was obvious.
In his apartment in the D.C. suburbs, Podhorzer began working from his laptop
at his kitchen table, holding back-to-back Zoom meetings for hours a day with
his network of contacts across the progressive universe: the labor movement;
the institutional left, like Planned Parenthood and Greenpeace; resistance
groups like Indivisible and MoveOn; progressive data geeks and strategists,
representatives of donors and foundations, state-level grassroots organizers,
racial-justice activists and others.
In April, Podhorzer began hosting a weekly 2½-hour Zoom. It
was structured around a series of rapid-fire five-minute presentations on
everything from which ads were working to messaging to legal strategy. The
invitation-only gatherings soon attracted hundreds, creating a rare shared base
of knowledge for the fractious progressive movement. “At the risk of talking
trash about the left, there’s not a lot of good information sharing,” says Anat
Shenker-Osorio, a close Podhorzer friend whose poll-tested messaging guidance
shaped the group’s approach. “There’s a lot of not-invented-here syndrome,
where people won’t consider a good idea if they didn’t come up with it.”
The meetings became the galactic center for a constellation
of operatives across the left who shared overlapping goals but didn’t usually
work in concert. The group had no name, no leaders and no hierarchy, but it
kept the disparate actors in sync. “Pod played a critical behind-the-scenes
role in keeping different pieces of the movement infrastructure in
communication and aligned,” says Maurice Mitchell, national director of the
Working Families Party. “You have the litigation space, the organizing space,
the political people just focused on the W, and their strategies aren’t always
aligned. He allowed this ecosystem to work together.”
Protecting the election would require an effort of
unprecedented scale. As 2020 progressed, it stretched to Congress, Silicon
Valley and the nation’s statehouses. It drew energy from the summer’s
racial-justice protests, many of whose leaders were a key part of the liberal
alliance. And eventually it reached across the aisle, into the world of
Trump-skeptical Republicans appalled by his attacks on democracy.
SECURING THE VOTE
The first task was
overhauling America’s balky election infrastructure–in the middle of a
pandemic. For the thousands of local, mostly nonpartisan officials who
administer elections, the most urgent need was money. They needed protective
equipment like masks, gloves and hand sanitizer. They needed to pay for
postcards letting people know they could vote absentee–or, in some states, to
mail ballots to every voter. They needed additional staff and scanners to
process ballots.
In March, activists appealed to Congress to steer COVID
relief money to 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. It was somewhat
successful: the CARES Act, passed later that month, contained $400 million in
grants to state election administrators. But the next tranche of relief funding
didn’t add to that number. It wasn’t going to be enough.
Private philanthropy stepped into the breach. An assortment
of foundations contributed tens of millions in election-administration funding.
The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative chipped in $300 million. “It was a failure at
the federal level that 2,500 local election officials were forced to apply for
philanthropic grants to fill their needs,” says 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 a nation struggling to adapt. The institute gave secretaries of state from
both parties technical advice on everything from which vendors to use to how to
locate drop boxes. Local officials are the most trusted sources of election
information, but few can afford a press secretary, so the institute distributed
communications tool kits. In a presentation to Podhorzer’s group, McReynolds
detailed the importance of absentee ballots for shortening lines at polling
places and preventing an election crisis.
The institute’s work helped 37 states and D.C. bolster mail
voting. But it wouldn’t be worth much if people didn’t take advantage. Part of
the challenge was logistical: each state has different rules for when and how
ballots should be requested and returned. The Voter Participation Center, which
in a normal year would have deployed canvassers door-to-door to get out the
vote, instead 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, 4.6 million of whom returned them. In
mailings and digital ads, the group urged people not to wait for Election Day.
“All the work we have done for 17 years was built for this moment of bringing
democracy to people’s doorsteps,” says Tom Lopach, the center’s CEO.
The effort had to overcome heightened skepticism in some
communities. Many Black voters preferred to exercise their franchise in person
or didn’t trust the mail. National civil rights groups worked with local
organizations to get the word out that this was the best way to ensure one’s
vote was counted. In Philadelphia, for example, advocates distributed “voting
safety kits” containing masks, hand sanitizer and informational brochures. “We
had to get the message out that this is safe, reliable, and you can trust it,”
says Hannah Fried of All Voting Is Local.
At the same time, Democratic lawyers battled a historic tide
of pre-election litigation. The pandemic intensified the parties’ usual
tangling in the courts. But the lawyers noticed something else as well. “The
litigation brought by the Trump campaign, of a piece with the broader campaign
to sow doubt about mail voting, was making novel claims and using theories no
court has ever accepted,” says Wendy Weiser, a voting-rights expert at the
Brennan Center for Justice at NYU. “They read more like lawsuits designed to
send a message rather than achieve a legal outcome.”
In the end, nearly half the electorate cast ballots by mail
in 2020, practically a revolution in how people vote. About a quarter voted
early in person. Only a quarter of voters cast their ballots the traditional
way: in person on Election Day.
THE DISINFORMATION DEFENSE
Bad actors spreading
false information is nothing new. For decades, campaigns have grappled with
everything from anonymous calls claiming the election has been rescheduled to
fliers spreading nasty smears about candidates’ families. But Trump’s lies and
conspiracy theories, the viral force of social media and the involvement of foreign
meddlers made disinformation a broader, deeper threat to the 2020 vote.
Laura Quinn, a veteran progressive operative who co-founded
Catalist, began studying this problem a few years ago. She piloted a nameless,
secret project, which she has never before publicly discussed, that tracked
disinformation online and tried to figure out how to combat it. One component
was tracking dangerous lies that might otherwise spread unnoticed. Researchers
then provided information to campaigners or the media to track down the sources
and expose them.
The most important takeaway from Quinn’s research, however,
was that engaging with toxic content only made it worse. “When you get
attacked, the instinct is to push back, call it out, say, ‘This isn’t true,'”
Quinn says. “But the more engagement something gets, the more the platforms
boost it. The algorithm reads that as, ‘Oh, this is popular; people want more
of it.'”
The solution, she concluded, was to pressure platforms to
enforce their rules, both by removing content or accounts that spread
disinformation and by more aggressively policing it in the first place. “The
platforms have policies against certain types of malign behavior, but they
haven’t been enforcing them,” she says.
Quinn’s research gave ammunition to advocates pushing social
media platforms to take a harder line. In November 2019, Mark Zuckerberg
invited nine civil rights leaders to dinner at his home, where they warned him
about the danger of the election-related falsehoods that were already spreading
unchecked. “It took pushing, urging, conversations, brainstorming, all of that
to get to a place where we ended up with more rigorous rules and enforcement,”
says Vanita Gupta, president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and
Human Rights, who attended the dinner and also met with Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey
and others. (Gupta has been nominated for Associate Attorney General by
President Biden.) “It was a struggle, but we got to the point where they
understood the problem. Was it enough? Probably not. Was it later than we
wanted? Yes. But it was really important, given the level of official
disinformation, that they had those rules in place and were tagging things and
taking them down.”
SPREADING THE WORD
Beyond battling bad
information, there was a need to explain a rapidly changing election process.
It was crucial for voters to understand that despite what Trump was saying,
mail-in votes weren’t susceptible to fraud and that it would be normal if some
states weren’t finished counting votes on election night.
Dick Gephardt, the Democratic former House leader turned
high-powered lobbyist, spearheaded one coalition. “We wanted to get a really
bipartisan group of former elected officials, Cabinet secretaries, military
leaders and so on, aimed mainly at messaging to the public but also speaking to
local officials–the secretaries of state, attorneys general, governors who
would be in the eye of the storm–to let them know we wanted to help,” says
Gephardt, who worked his contacts in the private sector to put $20 million
behind the effort.
Wamp, the former GOP Congressman, worked through the
nonpartisan reform group Issue One to rally Republicans. “We thought we should
bring some bipartisan element of unity around what constitutes a free and fair
election,” Wamp says. The 22 Democrats and 22 Republicans on the National
Council on Election Integrity met on Zoom at least once a week. They ran ads in
six states, made statements, wrote articles and alerted local officials to
potential problems. “We had rabid Trump supporters who agreed to serve on the
council based on the idea that this is honest,” Wamp says. This is going to be
just as important, he told them, to convince the liberals when Trump wins.
“Whichever way it cuts, we’re going to stick together.”
The Voting Rights Lab and IntoAction created state-specific
memes and graphics, spread by 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 issued reports and
held media briefings with high-profile experts across the political spectrum,
resulting in widespread coverage of potential election issues and fact-checking
of Trump’s false claims. The organization’s tracking polls found the message
was being heard: the percentage of the public that didn’t expect to know the
winner on election night gradually rose until by late October, it was over 70%.
A majority also believed that a prolonged count wasn’t a sign of problems. “We
knew exactly what Trump was going to do: he was going to try to use the fact
that Democrats voted by mail and Republicans voted in person to make it look
like he was ahead, claim victory, say the mail-in votes were fraudulent and try
to get them thrown out,” says Protect Democracy’s Bassin. Setting public
expectations ahead of time helped undercut those lies.
The alliance took a
common set of themes from the research Shenker-Osorio presented at Podhorzer’s
Zooms. Studies have shown that when people don’t think their vote will count or
fear casting it will be a hassle, they’re far less likely to participate.
Throughout election season, members of Podhorzer’s group minimized incidents of
voter intimidation and tamped down rising liberal hysteria about Trump’s
expected refusal to concede. They didn’t want to amplify false claims by
engaging them, or put people off voting by suggesting a rigged game. “When you
say, ‘These claims of fraud are spurious,’ what people hear is ‘fraud,'”
Shenker-Osorio says. “What we saw in our pre-election research was that
anything that reaffirmed Trump’s power or cast him as an authoritarian
diminished people’s desire to vote.”
Podhorzer, meanwhile, was warning everyone he knew that
polls were underestimating Trump’s support. The data he shared with media
organizations who would be calling the election was “tremendously useful” to
understand what was happening as the votes rolled in, according to a member of
a major network’s political unit who spoke with Podhorzer before Election Day.
Most analysts had recognized there would be a “blue shift” in key
battlegrounds– the surge of votes breaking toward Democrats, driven by tallies
of mail-in ballots– but they hadn’t comprehended how much better Trump was
likely to do on Election Day. “Being able to document how big the absentee wave
would be and the variance by state was essential,” the analyst says.
PEOPLE POWER
The racial-justice
uprising sparked by George Floyd’s killing in May was not primarily a political
movement. The organizers who helped lead it wanted to harness its momentum for
the election without allowing it to be co-opted by politicians. Many of those
organizers were part of Podhorzer’s network, from the activists in battleground
states who partnered with the Democracy Defense Coalition to organizations with
leading roles in the Movement for Black Lives.
The best way to ensure people’s voices were heard, they
decided, was to protect their ability to vote. “We started thinking about a
program that would complement the traditional election-protection area but also
didn’t rely on calling the police,” says Nelini Stamp, the Working Families
Party’s national organizing director. They created a force of “election defenders”
who, unlike traditional poll watchers, were trained in de-escalation
techniques. During early voting and on Election Day, they surrounded lines of
voters in urban areas with a “joy to the polls” effort that turned the act of
casting a ballot into a street party. Black organizers also recruited thousands
of poll workers to ensure polling places would stay open in their communities.
The summer uprising had shown that people power could have a
massive impact. Activists began preparing to reprise the demonstrations if
Trump tried to steal the election. “Americans plan widespread protests if Trump
interferes with election,” Reuters reported in October, one of many such
stories. More than 150 liberal groups, from the Women’s March to the Sierra
Club to Color of Change, from Democrats.com to the Democratic Socialists of
America, joined the “Protect the Results” coalition. The group’s now defunct
website had a map listing 400 planned postelection demonstrations, to be
activated via text message as soon as Nov. 4. To stop the coup they feared, the
left was ready to flood the streets.
STRANGE BEDFELLOWS
About a week before
Election Day, Podhorzer received an unexpected message: the U.S. Chamber of
Commerce wanted to talk.
The AFL-CIO and the Chamber have a long history of
antagonism. Though 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 funnel hundreds of millions to
Democrats. On one side is labor, on the other management, locked in an eternal
struggle for power and resources.
But behind the scenes, the business community was engaged in
its own anxious discussions about how the election and its aftermath might
unfold. The summer’s racial-justice protests had sent a signal to business
owners too: the potential for economy-disrupting civil disorder. “With tensions
running high, there was a lot of concern about unrest around the election, or a
breakdown in our normal way we handle contentious elections,” says Neil
Bradley, the Chamber’s executive vice president and chief policy officer. These
worries had led the Chamber to release a pre-election statement with the
Business Roundtable, a Washington-based CEOs’ group, as well as associations of
manufacturers, wholesalers and retailers, calling for patience and confidence
as votes were counted.
But Bradley wanted to send a broader, more bipartisan
message. He reached out to Podhorzer, through an intermediary both men declined
to name. Agreeing that their unlikely alliance would be powerful, they began to
discuss a joint statement pledging their organizations’ shared commitment to a
fair and peaceful election. They chose their words carefully and scheduled the
statement’s release for maximum impact. As it was being finalized, Christian
leaders signaled their interest in joining, further broadening its reach.
The statement was released on Election Day, under the names
of Chamber CEO Thomas Donohue, AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka, 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 every vote in accordance with applicable laws,” it stated.
“We call on the media, the candidates and the American people to exercise
patience with the process and trust in our system, even if it requires more
time than usual.” The groups added, “Although we may not always agree on
desired outcomes up and down the ballot, we are united in our call for the
American democratic process to proceed without violence, intimidation or any
other tactic that makes us weaker as a nation.”
SHOWING UP, STANDING DOWN
Election night began
with many Democrats despairing. Trump was running ahead of pre-election polling,
winning Florida, Ohio and Texas easily and keeping Michigan, Wisconsin and
Pennsylvania too close to call. But Podhorzer was unperturbed when I spoke to
him that night: the returns were exactly in line with his modeling. He had been
warning for weeks that Trump voters’ turnout was surging. As the numbers
dribbled out, he could tell that as long as all the votes were counted, Trump
would lose.
The liberal alliance gathered for an 11 p.m. Zoom call.
Hundreds joined; many were freaking out. “It was really important for me and
the team in that moment to help ground people in what we had already known was
true,” says Angela Peoples, director for the Democracy Defense Coalition.
Podhorzer presented data to show the group that victory was in hand.
While he was talking, Fox News surprised everyone by calling
Arizona for Biden. The public-awareness campaign had worked: TV anchors were
bending over backward to counsel caution and frame the vote count accurately.
The question then became what to do next.
The conversation that followed was a difficult one, led by
the activists charged with the protest strategy. “We wanted to be mindful of
when was the right time to call for moving masses of people into the street,”
Peoples says. As much as they were eager to mount a show of strength,
mobilizing immediately could backfire and put people at risk. Protests that
devolved into violent clashes would give Trump a pretext to send in federal
agents or troops as he had over the summer. And rather than elevate Trump’s
complaints by continuing to fight him, the alliance wanted to send the message
that the people had spoken.
So the word went out: stand down. Protect the Results
announced that it would “not be activating the entire national mobilization
network today, but remains ready to activate if necessary.” On Twitter,
outraged progressives wondered what was going on. Why wasn’t anyone trying to
stop Trump’s coup? Where were all the protests?
Podhorzer credits the activists for their restraint. “They
had spent so much time getting ready to hit the streets on Wednesday. But they
did it,” he says. “Wednesday through Friday, there was not a single Antifa vs.
Proud Boys incident like everyone was expecting. And when that didn’t
materialize, I don’t think the Trump campaign had a backup plan.”
Activists reoriented the Protect the Results protests toward
a weekend of celebration. “Counter their disinfo with our confidence & get
ready to celebrate,” read the messaging guidance Shenker-Osorio presented to
the liberal alliance on Friday, Nov. 6. “Declare and fortify our win. Vibe:
confident, forward-looking, unified–NOT passive, anxious.” The voters, not the
candidates, would be the protagonists of the story.
The planned day of celebration happened to coincide with the
election being called on Nov. 7. Activists dancing in the streets of
Philadelphia blasted Beyoncé over an attempted Trump campaign press conference;
the Trumpers’ next confab was scheduled for Four Seasons Total Landscaping
outside the city center, which activists believe was not a coincidence. “The
people of Philadelphia owned the streets of Philadelphia,” crows the Working
Families Party’s Mitchell. “We made them look ridiculous by contrasting our
joyous celebration of democracy with their clown show.”
The votes had been counted. Trump had lost. But the battle
wasn’t over.
THE FIVE STEPS TO VICTORY
In Podhorzer’s
presentations, winning the vote was only the first step to winning the
election. After that came winning the count, winning the certification, winning
the Electoral College and winning the transition–steps that are normally
formalities but that he knew Trump would see as opportunities for disruption.
Nowhere would that be more evident than in Michigan, where Trump’s pressure on
local Republicans came perilously close to working–and where liberal and
conservative pro-democracy forces joined to counter it.
It was around 10 p.m. on election night in Detroit when a
flurry of texts lit up the phone of Art Reyes III. A busload of Republican
election observers had arrived at the TCF Center, where votes were being
tallied. They were crowding the vote-counting tables, refusing to wear masks,
heckling the mostly Black workers. Reyes, a Flint native who leads We the
People Michigan, was expecting this. For months, conservative groups had been
sowing suspicion about urban vote fraud. “The language was, ‘They’re going to
steal the election; there will be fraud in Detroit,’ long before any vote was
cast,” Reyes says.
He made his way to
the arena and sent word to his network. Within 45 minutes, dozens of
reinforcements had arrived. As they entered the arena to provide a
counterweight to the GOP observers inside, Reyes took down their cell-phone
numbers and added them to a massive text chain. Racial-justice activists from
Detroit Will Breathe worked alongside suburban women from Fems for Dems and
local elected officials. Reyes left at 3 a.m., handing the text chain over to a
disability activist.
As they mapped out the steps in the election-certification
process, activists settled on a strategy of foregrounding the people’s right to
decide, demanding their voices be heard and calling attention to the racial
implications of disenfranchising Black Detroiters. They flooded the Wayne
County canvassing board’s Nov. 17 certification meeting with on-message
testimony; despite a Trump tweet, the Republican board members certified
Detroit’s votes.
Election boards were one pressure point; another was
GOP-controlled legislatures, who Trump believed could declare the election void
and appoint their own electors. And so the President invited the GOP leaders of
the Michigan legislature, House Speaker Lee Chatfield and Senate majority
leader Mike Shirkey, to Washington on Nov. 20.
It was a perilous moment. If Chatfield and Shirkey agreed to
do Trump’s bidding, Republicans in other states might be similarly bullied. “I
was concerned things were going to get weird,” says Jeff Timmer, a former
Michigan GOP chair turned anti-Trump activist. Norm Eisen describes it as “the
scariest moment” of the entire election.
The democracy defenders launched a full-court press. Protect
Democracy’s local contacts researched the lawmakers’ personal and political
motives. Issue One ran television ads in Lansing. The Chamber’s Bradley kept
close tabs on the process. Wamp, the former Republican Congressman, called his
former colleague Mike Rogers, who wrote an op-ed for the Detroit newspapers
urging officials to honor the will of the voters. Three former Michigan governors–Republicans
John Engler and Rick Snyder and Democrat Jennifer Granholm–jointly called for
Michigan’s electoral votes to be cast free of pressure from the White House.
Engler, a former head of the Business Roundtable, made phone calls to
influential donors and fellow GOP elder statesmen who could press the lawmakers
privately.
The pro-democracy forces were up against a Trumpified
Michigan GOP controlled by allies of Ronna McDaniel, the Republican National
Committee chair, and Betsy DeVos, the former Education Secretary and a member
of a billionaire family of GOP donors. On a call with his team on Nov. 18,
Bassin vented that his side’s pressure was no match for what Trump could offer.
“Of course he’s going to try to offer them something,” Bassin recalls thinking.
“Head of the Space Force! Ambassador to wherever! We can’t compete with that by
offering carrots. We need a stick.”
If Trump were to offer something in exchange for a personal
favor, that would likely constitute bribery, Bassin reasoned. He phoned Richard
Primus, a law professor at the University of Michigan, to see if Primus agreed
and would make the argument publicly. Primus said he thought the meeting itself
was inappropriate, and got to work on an op-ed for Politico warning that the
state attorney general–a Democrat–would have no choice but to investigate. When
the piece posted on Nov. 19, the attorney general’s communications director
tweeted it. Protect Democracy soon got word that the lawmakers planned to bring
lawyers to the meeting with Trump the next day.
Reyes’ activists scanned flight schedules and flocked to the
airports on both ends of Shirkey’s journey to D.C., to underscore that the
lawmakers were being scrutinized. After the meeting, the pair announced they’d
pressed the President to deliver COVID relief for their constituents and
informed him they saw no role in the election process. Then they went for a
drink at the Trump hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue. A street artist projected
their images onto the outside of the building along with the words THE WORLD IS
WATCHING.
That left one last step: the state canvassing board, made up
of two Democrats and two Republicans. One Republican, a Trumper employed by the
DeVos family’s political nonprofit, was not expected to vote for certification.
The other Republican on the board was a little-known lawyer named Aaron Van
Langevelde. He sent no signals about what he planned to do, leaving everyone on
edge.
When the meeting began, Reyes’s activists flooded the
livestream and filled Twitter with their hashtag, #alleyesonmi. A board
accustomed to attendance in the single digits suddenly faced an audience of
thousands. In hours of testimony, the activists emphasized their message of
respecting voters’ wishes and affirming democracy rather than scolding the officials.
Van Langevelde quickly signaled he would follow precedent. The vote was 3-0 to
certify; the other Republican abstained.
After that, the dominoes fell. Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and
the rest of the states certified their electors. Republican officials in
Arizona and Georgia stood up to Trump’s bullying. And the Electoral College
voted on schedule on Dec. 14.
HOW CLOSE WE CAME
There was one last
milestone on Podhorzer’s mind: Jan. 6. On the day Congress would meet to tally
the electoral count, Trump summoned his supporters to D.C. for a rally.
Much to their surprise, the thousands who answered his call
were met by virtually no counterdemonstrators. To preserve safety and ensure
they couldn’t be blamed for any mayhem, the activist left was “strenuously
discouraging counter activity,” Podhorzer texted me the morning of Jan. 6, with
a crossed-fingers 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 sacked 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 final attack on democracy, and once again, it
failed. By standing down, the democracy campaigners outfoxed their foes. “We
won by the skin of our teeth, honestly, and that’s an important point for folks
to sit with,” says the Democracy Defense Coalition’s Peoples. “There’s an
impulse for some to say voters decided and democracy won. But it’s a mistake to
think that this election cycle was a show of strength for democracy. It shows
how vulnerable democracy is.”
The members of the alliance to protect the election have
gone their separate ways. The Democracy Defense Coalition has been disbanded,
though the Fight Back Table lives on. Protect Democracy and the good-government
advocates have turned their attention to pressing reforms in Congress.
Left-wing activists are pressuring the newly empowered Democrats to remember
the voters who put them there, while civil rights groups are on guard against
further attacks on voting. Business leaders denounced the Jan. 6 attack, and
some say they will no longer donate to lawmakers who refused to certify Biden’s
victory. Podhorzer and his allies are still holding their Zoom strategy
sessions, gauging voters’ views and developing new messages. And Trump is in
Florida, facing his second impeachment, deprived of the Twitter and Facebook
accounts he used to push the nation to its breaking point.
As I was reporting this article in November and December, I
heard different claims about who should get the credit for thwarting Trump’s
plot. Liberals argued the role of bottom-up people power shouldn’t be
overlooked, particularly the contributions of people of color and local
grassroots activists. Others stressed the heroism of GOP officials like Van
Langevelde and Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger, who stood up to
Trump at considerable cost. The truth is that neither likely could have
succeeded without the other. “It’s astounding how close we came, how fragile
all this really is,” says Timmer, the former Michigan GOP chair. “It’s like
when Wile E. Coyote runs off the cliff–if you don’t look down, you don’t fall.
Our democracy only survives if we all believe and don’t look down.”
Democracy won in the end. The will of the people prevailed.
But it’s crazy, in retrospect, that this is what it took to put on an election
in the United States of America.
–With reporting by LESLIE DICKSTEIN, MARIAH ESPADA and
SIMMONE SHAH
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Pelosi getting more paranoid thinking republicans want her dead.
She is the best thing Republicans have going for them.
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