paranoid fever dream funded cabal of powerful people ranging

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.   https://time.com/5936036/secret-2020-election-campaign/  https://time.com/5936036/secret-2020-election-campaign/  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."    

 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.   div style="text-align:center   bTHE 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.   div style="text-align:justify   bTHE 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.   div style="text-align:center   bSECURING 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.   div style="text-align:center   bTHE 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."   div style="text-align:center   bSPREADING 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.  Amber McReynolds  Zach Wamp and Maurice Mitchell Rachel Woolf for TIME; Erik Schelzig—AP/Shutterstock; Holly Pickett—The New York Times/Redux  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.   bPEOPLE 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.   div style="text-align:center   bSTRANGE 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."   div style="text-align:center   bSHOWING 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.    bTHE 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.  Trump supporters seek to disrupt the vote count at Detroit's TCF Center on Nov. 4 Elaine Cromie 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 executive director 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.  divReyes' 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    div style="text-align:center      div style="text-align:center  THE  bWORLD IS WATCHING.   div style="text-align:center     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.   div style="text-align:center   bHOW 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.  Incited by the President  Trump Supporters Violently Storm the Capitol  SharePlay Video  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.   https://time.com/5936036/secret-2020-election-campaign/  https://time.com/5936036/secret-2020-election-campaign/   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 executive director. "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."   https://time.com/5936036/secret-2020-election-campaign/  https://time.com/5936036/secret-2020-election-campaign/   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  Correction appended  Feb. 5 The original version of this story misstated the name of Norm Eisen's organization. It is the Voter Protection Program  not the Voter Protection Project. The original version of this story also misstated Jeff Timmer's former position with the Michigan Republican Party. He was the executive director  not the chairman. This appears in the February 15  2021 issue of TIME.  ==============================  La storia segreta della campagna ombra che ha salvato le elezioni del 2020  Illustrazione di Ryan Olbrysh per TIME  DI MOLLY BALL  4 FEBBRAIO 2021 05:40 EST  Una cosa strana è successa subito dopo le elezioni del 3 novembre niente.  La nazione era pronta per il caos. I gruppi liberali avevano giurato di scendere in piazza  pianificando centinaia di proteste in tutto il paese. Le milizie di destra si stavano cingendo per la battaglia. In un sondaggio prima del giorno delle elezioni  il 75% degli americani ha espresso preoccupazione per la violenza. Invece  calò un silenzio inquietante. Poiché il presidente Trump si è rifiutato di ammettere  la risposta non è stata un'azione di massa  ma i grilli. Quando le organizzazioni dei media hanno indetto la corsa per Joe Biden il 7 novembre  è scoppiato invece il giubilo  mentre le persone affollavano le città degli Stati Uniti per celebrare il processo democratico che ha portato alla cacciata di Trump.  essa  ed ora ha lottizzato tutte le istituzioni  e questo è anticostituzionale  così gli artigiani finiranno di essere soffocati a morte dai parassiti dello Stato