News Analysis
While former President Donald Trump appears to be cruising toward the GOP nomination with a polling lead over incumbent President Joe Biden in key swing states, Republicans will likely face a much steeper climb in the general election than they realize.
Fundamental changes in state election laws, coupled with an alliance of left-wing federal, corporate, financial, and nonprofit entities, have handed the Democratic Party advantages that the GOP may be unable to overcome.
In the decades before 2020, the Republican National Committee (RNC) and Democratic National Committee (DNC) machines each had their own unique strengths: The RNC had the money and the DNC had the troops.
As noted in the book "The Victory Lab," an analysis by political journalist Sasha Issenberg, Republicans excelled at fundraising and spent heavily on messaging through paid television, radio, and online ads. The DNC, with its voters often concentrated in urban centers, called on its foot soldiers, most notably students and union leaders, to go door-to-door and stir up support.
In 2020, the landscape shifted in the wake of two events: The COVID-19 pandemic and the death of George Floyd in police custody. A narrative emerged that existing state voting laws had to change because they were racist and hazardous to public health. The 2020 'Shadow Campaign'
In a laudatory 2021 article in Time titled "The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election," author Molly Ball detailed 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."
While praising the effort, Ms. Ball said that the actors "were not rigging the election; they were fortifying it."
The "conspiracy," as Ms. Ball described it, included DNC operatives, union leaders, tech and social-media companies, Wall Street bankers, and a network of nonprofit donor funds that pooled hundreds of millions of dollars to finance "armies of poll workers and got millions of people to vote by mail for the first time."
While the coalition's purpose, ostensibly, was "saving democracy," the overriding goal was to keep President Trump from winning a second term.
And the "well-funded cabal" appears to be gearing up for a repeat performance in 2024, with a few new twists.
The DNC and groups allied with them rely on a five-part strategy to ensure that President Trump didn't then and will not now get a second term.
That strategy includes intense legal pressure on state election officials to loosen voter integrity laws, a data nerve center that contains personal profiles of voters to predict how they will vote, an alliance of left-wing foot soldiers to bring out Democratic votes in key swing states, a collection of groups capable of bringing violence and mass unrest to cities and towns if called upon, and a network of financing vehicles to fund it all.
The first order of business, once the "well-funded cabal" was assembled, was to change state election laws.
Rewriting Election Rules
Following the mantra to "never let a crisis go to waste," a nationwide campaign of DNC-sponsored lawsuits forced many states, even some with Republican governors, to drop what had once been standard voter integrity practices.
"That effort involved voiding basic security protocols on election procedures, including absentee ballots, and pushing for the equivalent of all-mail elections, which would give their activists a free hand in pressuring, coercing, and influencing voters in their homes in ways they are unable to do in polling places," political analysts John Fund and Hans von Spakovsky wrote in their 2021 book titled "Our Broken Elections."
"To force these changes, they ended up filing more election-related lawsuits than had ever been filed in an election year in U.S. history," the authors said.
Perhaps the most enticing of all the electoral opportunities presented by the pandemic and civil unrest was the advent of universal, unsolicited mail-in ballots, which are still in use in some states.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 43 percent of American voters cast their ballot by mail in 2020, compared to 21 percent who did so in 2016.
In their book, Mr. Fund and Mr. von Spakovsky wrote that "the flood of millions of mail-in ballots opened the system to unprecedented confusion and largely untraceable fraud."
"There's a reason that a bipartisan commission co-chaired by former President Jimmy Carter in 2005 called mail-in absentee ballots the 'largest source of potential voter fraud' and that most countries in the European Union have banned 'postal voting' over the same concerns," they wrote.
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