The conspiracy to elect Biden is not what you think it is
Smoking nones.
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Conservatives and Trump supporters have been told they are crazy to believe that a secretive cabal of elites conspired to swing the 2020 election in President Joe Biden’s favor.
But the elites did exactly that, according to a new Time magazine expose. It just didn’t happen the way former President Donald Trump and his cohort say it did.
Votes were not rigged, according to the report. Lawmakers were not bought. There was no funny business when it came to voting machines. Rather, the Time story explains, business CEOs and left-wing activists coordinated closely to lobby news media, state lawmakers, social media companies, and voters with targeted messaging campaigns, get-out-the-vote efforts, and protests. They also recruited scores of poll workers.
The Right likewise has its own network of political activists and influential advocacy groups, including the American Legislative Exchange Council, the American Conservative Union, the Federalist Society, and the National Right to Life Committee, to name just a few, which similarly whip state legislators and voters on behalf of conservative policies and candidates. The Left simply did a superior job in 2020 of coalition-building. And there’s nothing nefarious about that.
Indeed, if there was illegal activity in the vote-counting process or anything even untoward about left-wing activists working hand in hand with business titans, it is not outlined in the Time article. Put more simply, if you’re looking for confirmation that a secretive group of anti-Trump operatives was successful in getting voting laws illegally or unconstitutionally amended in key swing states such as Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, prepare to be disappointed. The Time report, titled "The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election," makes no such claim and includes no such details.
“There was a conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes,” reads the article’s opening paragraphs, “one that … coordinated the resistance from CEOs. An informal alliance between left-wing activists and business titans.”
It adds, “The pact was formalized in a terse, little-noticed joint statement of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and AFL-CIO published on Election Day. Both sides would come to see it as a sort of implicit bargain – inspired by the summer’s massive, sometimes destructive racial-justice protests – in which the forces of labor came together with the forces of capital to keep the peace and oppose Trump’s assault on democracy.”
Those who participated in the secretive alliance, by the way, are very proud that they did. It is why the Time report, which is based on “never-before-seen documents and interviews with dozens of those involved from across the political spectrum,” exists. The participants in the far-reaching conspiracy to defeat Trump want their story told.
“For more than a year,” the report reads, “a loosely organized coalition of operatives scrambled to shore up America’s institutions as they came under simultaneous attack from a remorseless pandemic and an autocratically inclined President.”
It adds, “Though much of this activity took place on the left, it was separate from the Biden campaign and crossed ideological lines, with crucial contributions by nonpartisan and conservative actors. The scenario the shadow campaigners were desperate to stop was not a Trump victory. It was an election so calamitous that no result could be discerned at all, a failure of the central act of democratic self-governance that has been a hallmark of America since its founding.”
The alliance concerned essentially “every aspect of the election,” Time notes.
“They got states to change voting systems and laws and helped secure hundreds of millions in public and private funding,” the report reads.
It goes on to detail those efforts, including that the cabal lobbied states to streamline the mail voting process. The coalition also raised cash for polling centers and workers and pressed Congress to steer COVID-19 relief cash to election administration.
“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,” the report reads.
It adds, “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.”
Again, conservatives and Trump supporters have been told they are paranoid to believe that an alliance of powerful elites could work together quietly to influence the outcome of a presidential election.
But that is exactly what happened in 2020.
“A well-funded cabal of powerful people,” Time notes, “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.”
The report adds, “And they believe the public needs to understand the system’s fragility in order to ensure that democracy in America endures.”
The temptation here is to believe that something illegal, illegitimate, or even unethical occurred during the election, that the powerful “rigged” or “stole” the presidency from Republicans. However, the report suggests no such thing. No laws were illegally amended; no laws were subverted; no votes were switched by third-party shenanigans. Powerful, like-minded groups banded together to lobby tech companies, news media, and voters directly. They banded together to monitor vote-counting, as did Republicans. They banded together to protest the former president’s efforts to dispute the outcome of the election. They also banded together to confront lawmakers who they feared would be sympathetic to the president’s claim that the election was stolen.
None of this amounts to “rigging” or “stealing” the election. It would be if Republicans were denied the same opportunities and methods. But they’re not. Republicans are free to coordinate similar efforts, as they do regularly for state and national elections. The Right organizes, the Right lobbies, the Right raises mountains of cash, and the Right mounts nationwide messaging campaigns. The Republican Party even recruited its own "army" of poll watchers ahead of the 2020 election.
If the main contention here is that it is somehow unfair that the Left should be able to marshal such power and influence, well, that is not the same thing as claiming the election was "stolen." It is just as wrong to say that the 2020 election was "stolen" because anti-Trump activists efficiently and skillfully pooled their collective efforts and resources as it is to say that the 2012 election was “rigged” because the Obama coalition easily outperformed the GOP’s disastrous Project ORCA initiative. Let’s not mistake political advocacy and competent ground game for a widespread conspiracy of criminal or corrupt behavior.
In fact, the closest the Time story comes to singling out potential wrongdoing by the left-wing cabal appears in the following passage:
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.
One can make the argument that threats of civil unrest are tantamount to voter intimidation, especially if said threats are issued before the election, but, as Time story itself says, the anti-Trump coalition made no such threat. The post-election left-wing protests never even happened.
Indeed, as jarring as the Time expose may seem, it isn’t evidence of widespread misconduct, at least not according to anything in the report. Rather, it’s a reminder that Republicans are up against some of the most powerful and wealthy forces in the United States. It’s a reminder that the Right has an uphill battle insofar as major elections are concerned. And there is nothing insidious about that. That’s just the nature of the political and cultural struggle in which the nation now finds itself. There’s nothing insidious about targeted protests. There’s nothing insidious about lobbying tech companies to crack down on supposed disinformation. There’s nothing insidious about coordinating with state officials to update mail voting. There’s nothing insidious about confronting lawmakers. There’s nothing insidious about get-out-the-vote campaigns. Republicans are as free to do what the anti-Trump cabal of CEOs and left-wing activists did in 2020. Everyone, Left, Right, and center, is free to organize and politick as they please.
After all, free association is not a crime. Not yet, at least.