3/16/2024 0 Comments Nytimes election coverage“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.įor Trump and his allies were running their own campaign to spoil the election. After Election Day, they monitored every pressure point to ensure that Trump could not overturn the result. 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. They successfully pressured social media companies to take a harder line against disinformation and used data-driven strategies to fight viral smears. 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 got states to change voting systems and laws and helped secure hundreds of millions in public and private funding. Their work touched every aspect of the election. 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 scenario the shadow campaigners were desperate to stop was not a Trump victory. 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. For more than a year, 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. The handshake between business and labor was just one component of a vast, cross-partisan campaign to protect the election–an extraordinary shadow effort dedicated not to winning the vote but to ensuring it would be free and fair, credible and uncorrupted. “Within days after the election, we witnessed an orchestrated effort to anoint the winner, even while many key states were still being counted.” “It was all very, very strange,” Trump said on Dec. Hundreds of major business leaders, many of whom had backed Trump’s candidacy and supported his policies, called on him to concede. to celebrate the democratic process that resulted in Trump’s ouster.Ī second odd thing happened amid Trump’s attempts to reverse the result: corporate America turned on him. 7, jubilation broke out instead, as people thronged cities across the U.S. When media organizations called the race for Joe Biden on Nov. As President Trump refused to concede, the response was not mass action but crickets. In a poll before Election Day, 75% of Americans voiced concern about violence. Right-wing militias were girding for battle. Liberal groups had vowed to take to the streets, planning hundreds of protests across the country. A weird thing happened right after the Nov.
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