A peculiar phenomenon occurred right after the November 3 election: nothing. The nation had braced for chaos, with liberal groups planning hundreds of protests and right-wing militias preparing for conflict. A pre-election poll indicated that 75% of Americans were concerned about potential violence. Yet, an eerie calm prevailed. As President Trump refused to concede, the anticipated mass action did not materialize. When media organizations declared Joe Biden the winner on November 7, celebrations erupted across U.S. cities, marking the democratic process that led to Trump’s ouster.
Another unexpected development was corporate America’s reaction to Trump’s attempts to reverse the election results. Hundreds of business leaders, many of whom had supported Trump, called on him to concede. Trump found this strange, remarking on December 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 sense, Trump was correct. A behind-the-scenes conspiracy was unfolding, one that curtailed protests and coordinated resistance from CEOs. This was the result of an informal alliance between left-wing activists and business leaders, formalized in a joint statement by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and AFL-CIO on Election Day. This alliance aimed to maintain peace and oppose Trump’s assault on democracy.
This handshake between business and labor was part of a vast, cross-partisan campaign to protect the election. This extraordinary effort was dedicated not to winning the vote but to ensuring it was free, fair, credible, and uncorrupted. For over a year, a loosely organized coalition of operatives worked to shore up America’s institutions, which were under attack from a relentless pandemic and an autocratically inclined President. Though much of this activity took place on the left, it was separate from the Biden campaign and included contributions from nonpartisan and conservative actors.
The shadow campaigners were not trying to prevent a Trump victory but to avoid an election so chaotic that no result could be discerned. Their work touched every aspect of the election. They got states to change voting systems and laws, secured hundreds of millions in funding, fended off voter-suppression lawsuits, recruited poll workers, and encouraged millions to vote by mail. They pressured social media companies to combat disinformation and used data-driven strategies to counter viral smears. They executed public-awareness campaigns to help Americans understand the vote count process, preventing Trump’s conspiracy theories from gaining traction. After Election Day, they monitored every pressure point to ensure Trump could not overturn the result.
For Trump and his allies, the goal was to spoil the election. Trump spent months claiming that mail ballots were a Democratic plot and that the election would be “rigged.” His state-level allies sought to block mail voting, while his lawyers filed numerous lawsuits to make voting more difficult. After the election, Trump tried to steal the election he lost through lawsuits, conspiracy theories, and pressure on state and local officials, culminating in the January 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, documents, and interviews with dozens of those involved. It is the story of an unprecedented, creative, and determined campaign whose success 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. “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.”
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 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. They believe the public needs to understand the system’s fragility to ensure that democracy in America endures.
Sometime in the fall of 2019, Mike Podhorzer became convinced the election was headed for disaster and determined to protect it. For nearly a quarter-century, Podhorzer, senior adviser to the president of the AFL-CIO, has used the latest tactics and data to help favored candidates win elections. Known among Democratic insiders as the wizard behind some of the biggest advances in political technology, Podhorzer began circulating weekly memos and hosting strategy sessions in D.C. But when he began to worry about the election itself, he didn’t want to seem paranoid. After months of research, he introduced his concerns in his newsletter in October 2019.
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. 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. 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.
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 voting methods were no longer safe for voters or the mostly elderly volunteers who staff polling places. 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 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. Podhorzer began working from his laptop at his kitchen table, holding back-to-back Zoom meetings with his network of contacts across the progressive universe. In April, he began hosting a weekly 2½-hour Zoom, structured around rapid-fire 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.
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 required an unprecedented effort. As 2020 progressed, it stretched to Congress, Silicon Valley, and statehouses. It drew energy from the summer’s racial-justice protests, many of whose leaders were a key part of the liberal alliance. Eventually, it reached across the aisle, into the world of Trump-skeptical Republicans appalled by his attacks on democracy.
The first task was overhauling America’s election infrastructure in the middle of a pandemic. Local officials needed protective equipment, additional staff, and scanners to process ballots. Activists appealed to Congress for election funding, but private philanthropy stepped in when federal support fell short. The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative contributed $300 million. The National Vote at Home Institute became a clearinghouse for technical advice and communications tool kits.
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. The Voter Participation Center conducted focus groups and sent ballot applications to 15 million people in key states. National civil rights groups worked with local organizations to get the word out that mail voting was safe and reliable.
Democratic lawyers battled a historic tide of pre-election litigation. The Trump campaign’s lawsuits were seen as attempts to sow doubt about mail voting rather than achieve legal outcomes. In the end, nearly half the electorate cast ballots by mail, a quarter voted early in person, and only a quarter voted in person on Election Day.
Disinformation was another major challenge. Laura Quinn, a veteran progressive operative, piloted a project to track and combat disinformation online. The solution was to pressure platforms to enforce their rules more aggressively. Civil rights leaders met with social media CEOs to push for stricter enforcement.
Beyond battling disinformation, there was a need to explain the changing election process. Dick Gephardt spearheaded a coalition to get a bipartisan group of former officials to help with messaging. The Voting Rights Lab and IntoAction created state-specific memes and graphics urging that every vote be counted. Protect Democracy’s election task force issued reports and held media briefings to counter Trump’s false claims.
The alliance took a common set of themes from research presented at Podhorzer’s Zooms. Studies showed that when people don’t think their vote will count, they’re less likely to participate. Setting public expectations ahead of time helped undercut Trump’s lies.
Source: TIME, The New York Times, AP
