02-05-2021, 03:26 PM
Part 2.
Quote: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...
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