BYÂ MOLLY BALLÂ
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 Trumpâs ouster.
A second odd thing happened amid Trumpâs attempts to reverse the result: corporate America turned on him. Hundreds of major business leaders, many of whom had backed Trumpâs candidacy and supported his policies, called on him to concede. To the President, something felt amiss. âIt was all very, very strange,â Trump said on Dec. 2. âWithin days after the election, we witnessed an orchestrated effort to anoint the winner, even while many key states were still being counted.â
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 bargainâinspired by the summerâs massive, sometimes destructive racial-justice protestsâin which the forces of labor came together with the forces of capital to keep the peace and oppose Trumpâs assault on democracy.
The handshake between business and labor was just one component of a vast, cross-partisan campaign to protect the electionâan 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 Americaâs 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 Trumpâs 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. âThe untold story of the election is the thousands of people of both parties who accomplished the triumph of American democracy at its very foundation,â 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 ârigged.â 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 voteâan intensification of the GOPâs 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 heâd lostâwith 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. âEvery 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,â says former GOP Representative Zach Wamp, a Trump supporter who helped coordinate a bipartisan election-protection council. âWe 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.â
This is the inside story of the conspiracy to save the 2020 election, based on access to the groupâs 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. âEvery attempt to interfere with the proper outcome of the election was defeated,â says Ian Bassin, co-founder of Protect Democracy, a nonpartisan rule-of-law advocacy group. âBut itâs massively important for the country to understand that it didnât happen accidentally. The system didnât work magically. Democracy is not self-executing.â
Thatâs why the participants want the secret history of the 2020 election told, even though it sounds like a paranoid fever dreamâa 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 systemâs 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 disasterâand 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 nationâs largest union federation, has marshaled the latest tactics and data to help its favored candidates win elections. Unassuming and professorial, he isnât the sort of hair-gelled âpolitical strategistâ who shows up on cable news. Among Democratic insiders, heâs 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 âpolitical strategy,â Podhorzer believes, has little to do with how change really gets made. âMy basic take on politics is that itâs all pretty obvious if you donât overthink it or swallow the prevailing frameworks whole,â he once wrote. âAfter that, just relentlessly identify your assumptions and challenge them.â Podhorzer applies that approach to everything: when he coached his now adult sonâs Little League team in the D.C. suburbs, he trained the boys not to swing at most pitchesâa tactic that infuriated both their and their opponentsâ parents, but won the team a series of championships.
Trumpâs election in 2016âcredited in part to his unusual strength among the sort of blue collar white voters who once dominated the AFL-CIOâprompted 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 didnât 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. âMost of our planning takes us through Election Day,â he noted. âBut, we are not prepared for the two most likely outcomesââTrump losing and refusing to concede, and Trump winning the Electoral College (despite losing the popular vote) by corrupting the voting process in key states. âWe desperately need to systematically âred-teamâ this election so that we can anticipate and plan for the worst we know will be coming our way.â
It turned out Podhorzer wasnât the only one thinking in these terms. He began to hear from others eager to join forces. The Fight Back Table, a coalition of âresistanceâ 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. âIt turned out that once you said it out loud, people agreed,â Podhorzer says, âand it started building momentum.â
He spent months pondering scenarios and talking to experts. It wasnât 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 Americaâs decentralized election system couldnât 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 âThreats to the 2020 Election.â âTrump has made it clear that this will not be a fair election, and that he will reject anything but his own re-election as âfakeâ and rigged,â he wrote. âOn 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.â The memo laid out four categories of challenges: attacks on voters, attacks on election administration, attacks on Trumpâs political opponents and âefforts to reverse the results of the election.â
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 Trumpâs 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 Milwaukeeâwhere Wisconsinâs heavily Democratic Black population is concentratedâleft 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 2Âœ-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. âAt the risk of talking trash about the left, thereâs not a lot of good information sharing,â says Anat Shenker-Osorio, a close Podhorzer friend whose poll-tested messaging guidance shaped the groupâs approach. âThereâs a lot of not-invented-here syndrome, where people wonât consider a good idea if they didnât come up with it.â
The meetings became the galactic center for a constellation of operatives across the left who shared overlapping goals but didnât usually work in concert. The group had no name, no leaders and no hierarchy, but it kept the disparate actors in sync. âPod played a critical behind-the-scenes role in keeping different pieces of the movement infrastructure in communication and aligned,â says Maurice Mitchell, national director of the Working Families Party. âYou have the litigation space, the organizing space, the political people just focused on the W, and their strategies arenât always aligned. He allowed this ecosystem to work together.â
Protecting the election would require an effort of unprecedented scale. As 2020 progressed, it stretched to Congress, Silicon Valley and the nationâs statehouses. It drew energy from the summerâs 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 Americaâs balky election infrastructureâin 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 absenteeâor, 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 didnât add to that number. It wasnât 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. âIt was a failure at the federal level that 2,500 local election officials were forced to apply for philanthropic grants to fill their needs,â says Amber McReynolds, a former Denver election official who heads the nonpartisan National Vote at Home Institute.
McReynoldsâ 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 Podhorzerâs group, McReynolds detailed the importance of absentee ballots for shortening lines at polling places and preventing an election crisis.
The instituteâs work helped 37 states and D.C. bolster mail voting. But it wouldnât be worth much if people didnât 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. âAll the work we have done for 17 years was built for this moment of bringing democracy to peopleâs doorsteps,â says Tom Lopach, the centerâs CEO.
