Eric Holder was a big loser on election night. He was the guy raising tens of millions of dollars to make America safe for Democratic redistricting. A red wave turned Holder’s dreams into dust in state legislative races. State legislatures are where the redistricting action is, and the GOP flipped three chambers red, gaining 192 state house seats and 40 state senate seats nationwide.
Republicans now control both House and Senate chambers in 31 states. The country is a huge swath of red legislative control with Democrats largely confined to the cultural monoliths on the Pacific coast and urban Northeast.
The red wave extended to the United States House of Representatives, where for now, Republicans have gained nine seats.
But this wasn’t supposed to happen. The president isn’t supposed to lose when all the Republicans are winning.
Something’s fishy.
Indeed, something profoundly fishy happened in the 2020 election, but it wasn’t the Kraken or Venezuelan communists running remote software when they can’t even make the red lights work in their own country. Those shiny objects will play out with time and examination of evidence.
What happened in 2020 is something more fundamental and profound. What happened in 2020 is cultural and systemic, and sadly, generally legal. Until Republicans, and more importantly Trump supporters, understand what happened to them this year, it will happen again.
Two things happened in 2020. First, COVID led to a dismantling of state election integrity laws by everyone except the one body with the constitutional prerogative to change the rules of electing the president – the state legislatures.
Second, the Center for Technology and Civic Life happened.
If you are focused on goblins in the voting machines but don’t know anything about the CTCL and what they did to defeat Donald Trump, it’s time to up your game.
The Center for Technology and Civic Life and allied groups are responsible for building an urban get-out-the-vote-machine of the sort that Democrats could only dream up on a bender fueled by jugs of Merlot and all the legalized pot they could smoke.
The Capital Research Center has this deep dive into what the Center for Technology and Civil Life did in just Georgia. It starts with this:
This year, left-leaning donors Mark Zuckerberg and wife Priscilla Chan gave $350 million to an allegedly “nonpartisan” nonprofit, the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL), which in turn re-granted the funds to thousands of governmental election officials around the country to “help” them conduct the 2020 election.
“Help.” That’s a good one.
What these grants did was build structural bias into the 2020 election where structural bias matters most – in densely populated urban cores. It converted election offices in key jurisdictions with deep reservoirs of Biden votes into Formula One turnout machines. The hundreds of millions of dollars built systems, hired employees from activist groups, bought equipment and radio advertisements. It did everything that street activists could ever dream up to turn out Biden votes if only they had unlimited funding.
In 2020, they had unlimited funding because billionaires made cash payments to 501(c)(3) charities that in turn made cash payments to government election offices.
Flush with hundreds of millions in new cash, government election offices turned those donations into manpower, new equipment, and street muscle to turn often sluggish and incompetent urban election offices into massive Biden turnout machines across the country – in Madison, Milwaukee, Detroit, Lansing, Philadelphia, and Atlanta among dozens of others.
Philadelphia’s election office budget was normally $9.8 million. The CLTC gave Philadelphia $10 million, more than doubling the city budget.
Those millions were used to hire local activists as city employees to drive around and collect ballots. The millions bought new printers and scanners to accommodate mail ballots. Philadelphia established brand new satellite election offices across the most Biden-friendly neighborhoods in the entire Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. The millions bought scores of convenient drop boxes across the same neighborhoods where mail ballots could be conveniently dropped. Even though laws limited third parties from collecting and dropping off multiple ballots, people were photographed dropping off bundles of ballots at the boxes.
If voters couldn’t muster the initiative to travel a few blocks to the drop-off boxes or new satellite offices, the city went to them to collect their ballot.
CLTC dollars flowed through Philadelphia election officials to the pricey public relations firm Aloysius Butler & Clark. They designed billboards, posters, bus advertisements, and print ads. Radio advertisements and street marketing all added to the blitz.
In Philadelphia and the surrounding urban counties that received millions of dollars in CLTC grants, turnout exploded.
The plan worked.
In case you still don’t follow: Hundreds of millions of private charitable dollars flowed into key urban county election offices in battleground states. The same private philanthropic largess did not reach red counties. Urban counties were able to revolutionize government election offices into Joe Biden turnout machines.
Here’s the best part — All of this is legal. Do not allow your shock and confusion about what happened in 2020 lead you to mislabel all of this as “voter fraud” or “quasi-legal.” The Left excels at making the unprecedented real and the seemingly illegal, legal.
Yet none of this should be a surprise. Last April, I warned on these pages:
On one recent teleconference call, leaders of this effort even considered giving state election officials direct payments to do what the progressives want them to do. In other words, they are researching the possibility of privately funding state and local elections offices in such a way that it doesn’t appear to be a bribe. This could include paying for expansive vote-by-mail, providing ballot design, and manpower help to run the elections. It could include things that those of us in the real America probably couldn’t even make up.
The hundreds of millions poured into urban election offices by the CTLC and affiliated charities also explains how Trump dramatically increased his share of the black and Hispanic vote and still lost. Hadn’t we been told that if Trump could increase his share of the black vote by only a few percentage points that he would win? Well, he did, and he lost.
Even if Trump increased his share of the black and Hispanic vote, the opening of the urban turnout floodgates through private donations to government election offices easily swamped Trump statewide in Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Michigan.
It doesn’t matter if Trump has 15 percent of the black vote in Detroit if turnout there soared by 92,891 Detroit votes, which it did. It doesn’t matter if Trump has even 20 percent of the black vote in Atlanta if turnout in DeKalb soared by 54,550 votes, which it did.
This also explains how the GOP was so successful everywhere… except at the top of the ticket. A flood of blue votes gushing out of deep blue urban areas has a statewide effect only for statewide candidates. It doesn’t affect legislative races outside of the cities.
But what about fraud, you might wonder. Sure enough, fraud was a problem. There is a long list of things being reported as fraud that are not fraud that will need to wait for another day to address, but the singular fact is the rush to mail balloting created weaknesses all across the system.
Mail ballots went to dead people. Mail ballots went to abandoned mines in Nevada. Mail ballots went to vacant lots in Pittsburgh. Mail ballots went in the garbage. Mail ballots were voted by people other than the voter.
I successfully argued in court that Virginia election officials violated Virginia statute when they issued rules that ballots can arrive late and without a postmark. But sadly, that case was one of the few instances of success at blocking the Democrats’ frenzy to throw out election integrity laws. By and large, the Democrats succeeded in tossing out state laws related to absentee ballot verification, deadlines and a whole range of laws all in the name of COVID. By and large, GOP efforts in court failed. It was a courtroom bloodbath that created vulnerabilities across the system.
The important point to understand is that elections are messy, and in 2020 hundreds of millions of dollars thrown at lawsuits and at election officials made the 2020 elections the messiest ever. Elections are also complicated, and you don’t always need outright fraud or communist hackers to craft a scheme to defeat Donald Trump. Why take that risk when you can do it all mostly legally by simply fundamentally transforming the entire process?
There’s the word we need to think more about. Process. It’s what the Left has been doing better than us for decades.
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