Trump is ahead, but will it even matter?

It's worth remembering how the 2020 election was gamed by progressive activists

With less than 6 months to go before the 2024 presidential election, the prospects of Donald Trump returning to the White House look surprisingly positive. Despite the lawfare being waged by local elected Democrats and the Biden DOJ against him - and perhaps even because of it - Trump’s poll numbers seem to get better and better. In the 5 swing states that flipped for Biden in 2020 - Arizona, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Georgia - Trump is polling ahead in all but Wisconsin, by an average of 3.6%. He’s also 7 points ahead in Nevada, which he lost in both 2016 and 2020. The New York Times laments that Trump is polling at greater than 20% among blacks and is tied with Biden among 18-29 year olds, numbers that, if reflected in the actual election, would be devastating to Biden’s re-election prospects.

But before anyone gets either too excited or despondent about the polls (depending on your own political inclinations), it is worth remembering the story about how a secret group of “shadow campaigners” successfully gamed the 2020 election to prevent Trump’s re-election, because the same groups are almost certainly at it again. And no, I am not talking about Rudy Giuliani’s and Sydney Powell’s theories of stuffed ballot boxes and dead people voting. I am talking about Time magazine reporter Molly Ball’s hagiographic account of the people who were so proud of how they manipulated the 2020 election process that they couldn’t bear the thought of keeping it a secret.

Naturally, Ball frames it as a story about a bi-partisan group of heroic defenders of democracy, people who simply wanted to “save the 2020 election” from the chaos that would result from an election “so calamitous that no result could be discerned at all.” But if one dispenses with the gratuitously congratulatory adjectives and heroic framing, the article reveals a collection of nearly exclusively progressive-left individuals and groups, with a few never-Trump Republicans added for effect, whose conception of “saving the election” was - by definition - a Trump defeat, conspiring to do everything they could, fair and foul, to achieve it. Even Ball, whose article was a celebration of the effort, called it a “conspiracy” and briefly acknowledged that:

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.

But, she quickly averred, “They were not rigging the election; they were fortifying it.” Because, of course, “fortifying” an election against the possibility that one candidate might win is completely different from “rigging” it.

The linchpin of this effort to “secure” and “fortify” the election was, in Ball’s framing, “overhauling America’s balky election infrastructure.” Reading on, however, we discover that what that really meant was working to make what has long and widely been understood to be the most insecure method of voting - mail-in voting - as widely used as possible. With the backdrop of covid-inspired fear mongering, leftist Amber McReynolds and her self-declared “non partisan” organization National Vote at Home became the primary driver of the effort to both legally and illegally “change rules and laws”, working with local election offices to facilitate mass mail-in voting, including advising them “how to locate drop boxes.” How to locate drop boxes? No chance for partisan manipulation in that “advice”!

Meanwhile the equally “non-partisan” Voter Participation Center, “sent ballot applications to 15 million people in key states”. Key states? Key to what, exactly? Ball just leaves that mystery hanging in the air like a fart in a crowded elevator, but why in the world would a “non partisan” group ostensibly seeking to simply bolster voter participation across the country focus its efforts on particular “key states”? And how exactly was it determining which people in these “key states” to send ballot applications to? Ball doesn’t tell us, but perhaps there is a clue in the fact that the ostensibly “non-partisan” VPC’s president, Tom Lopach, has a nearly uninterrupted 25 year career as a Democratic operative, beginning as an executive director at the Committee for a Democratic Majority and ending as chief of staff for both Jon Tester and Steve Bullock, each Democrats. Might the “15 million people in key states” actually refer to Democratic strongholds in swing states? Well, follow the money.

Because of course all of this election “fortifying” costs money, and Ball reported that the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative provided over $300 million in private donations to “election-administration funding”. She provided virtually no information at all on where this money actually went or how it was actually spent, but others have. It turns out that these “Zuck Bucks” were laundered through an organization called the Center for Tech and Civic Life. The CTCL is yet another self-proclaimed “non-partisan” organization that was founded and run by yet another progressive activist, Tiana Epps-Johnson, alumnus of the New Organizing Institute which was once characterized in the Washington Post as “the Democratic party’s Hogwarts for digital wizardry”. In 2020, the CTCL sprinkled these Zuck Bucks out to counties across the nation, ostensibly to help them “safely” administer their elections during the covid pandemic, including facilitating and promoting mail-in balloting. But, according to the Capital Research Center, in the 5 swing states that Biden flipped in 2020, counties that voted for Biden received 5 times more funding per capita than counties that voted for Trump. That is a pretty good indication of what it was exactly that they were rigging “fortifying” the election against.

And the “fortifying” didn’t stop there. Remember that Ball told us that they also managed to “steer media coverage and control the flow of information”. She introduced us to Laura Quinn, former Deputy Chief of Staff for VP Al Gore (D), and former staffer for US Senators Jay Rockefeller (D), Carl Levin (D), and Joe Biden (D). (Are you noticing a pattern?) Quinn had founded a company called Catalist which, according to Ball, tracks “disinformation” and during 2020 worked 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.” A quick read of Catalist’s website, however, reveals an unabashedly “progressive” organization that doesn’t even bother with the lie that it is “non-partisan”, and which provides its data “only to Democrats and progressives”. Gee, I wonder what kind of “disinformation” Catalist was pressuring social media to eliminate?

Vanita Gupta, was also part of this secret effort to “control the flow of information” on social media platforms, meeting with both Facebook CEO Zuckerberg and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, convincing them to censor information. What information? Ball never specified anything, but the most infamous example of the suppression of information during the 2020 election was the Hunter Biden laptop story, which was in fact a perfectly true story. It turns out that the biggest disinformation campaign of the 2020 election was the left’s successful attempt to label true stories as “disinformation”. Gupta, naturally, was rewarded for her censoring efforts with a position in the Biden DOJ.

The architect of all of this election “fortifying” was, according to Ball, Mike Pordhorzer, yet another long-time Democratic operative, who she says “became convinced the election was headed for disaster–and determined to protect it”. So in 2019 he drafted a memo listing what he claimed were “Threats to the 2020 Election”. Ostensibly a list of evils that Trump could be expected to perpetrate on the integrity of our democracy, in retrospect it looks like a classic case of leftist projection. Podhorzer asserted that Trump “will reject anything but his own re-election as ‘fake’ and rigged”. And yet, Podhorzer himself did precisely that, premising his plans on the notion that a Trump victory could only occur by “corrupting the voting process in key states”. And so while he worried about Trump corrupting the voting process in key states, that is precisely what Podhorzer set out to do by promoting mass mail-in voting in those very same "key states”. He also predicted that, “On Nov. 3, should the media report [a loss for Trump], he will use the right-wing information system to establish his narrative and incite his supporters to protest.” Yet we find out later that is precisely what Podhorzer had planned on doing should the media report a Trump win. Ball excitedly reveals that progressive activists had been charged with “moving masses of people into the streets” to challenge any reported victory for Trump. On the day after the election, those activists were told to “stand down” only because the results were still up in the air and they didn’t want to call the process into question if it ultimately went Biden’s way.

The Ball article is worth reading in full again and was really quite astonishing in its revelations, particularly during a time in which, you may recall, people were still getting banned from platforms like Youtube and Twitter for even whispering that the 2020 election might not have been “the most secure in American history”, a mantra that was trotted out literally within days of the election. The obvious impossibility of actually knowing the truth of the matter so quickly in a country where election fraud can take years to uncover and litigate indicates that it was nothing more than propaganda which itself could have easily originated, and most probably did originate, with the cabal about which Ball was writing. Still, Ball showed that even in 2021 one could explain how the 2020 election was in fact rigged, as long as it was couched as “securing” and “fortifying” the election for the correct side.

In any event, I rehash all of this only to point out that perhaps we shouldn’t be paying too much attention to pre-election polls. As Ball’s article demonstrates, there can be a lot of behind-the-scenes chicanery designed to both change and game the election rules, distort information, and alter public perceptions. Especially with the advent of mass mail-in voting, the opportunities for ballot harvesting are immense, and indeed successful ballot harvesting among key demographics in swing states is likely to be all but necessary to win presidential elections going forward. The days of political party operatives working neighborhoods simply to “get out the vote” on election day are over. Elections now will be less about convincing loyal voters to get out to the polls on the now-anachronistic “election day”, and more about harvesting mail-in ballots in the weeks and months preceding it. Biden may be desperately behind in the polls, but as progressive activists demonstrated in 2020, they are well positioned to exploit and game the very changes in voting laws that they have been championing for years. Whether the R’s can catch up, only time will tell. But if the past is any indication, expect them to be behind the curve once again.