Time.Com Tells You How The Election Steal Succeeded. The True Conspiracy.

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Part 3.

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...'

Time.Com:

"Democracy won in the end" -By Preventing Democracy.