“There was a conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes, one that both curtailed the protests and coordinated the resistance from CEOs. Both surprises were the result of an informal alliance between left-wing activists and business titans. 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 ... an extraordinary shadow effort ... For more than a year, a loosely organized coalition of operatives scrambled ... The scenario the shadow campaigners were desperate to stop ... Their work touched every aspect of the election. They got states to change voting systems and laws and helped secure hundreds of millions in public and private funding. They fended off voter-suppression lawsuits, recruited armies of poll workers and got millions of people to vote by mail ... ‘Every week, we felt like we were in a struggle to try to pull off this election without the country going through a real dangerous moment of unraveling,’ says former GOP Representative Zach Wamp ... This is the inside story of the conspiracy to save the 2020 election ... an unprecedented, creative and determined campaign whose success also reveals how close the nation came to disaster ... ‘ it’s massively important for the country to understand that it didn’t happen accidentally. The system didn’t work magically. Democracy is not self-executing’ ... 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. They were not rigging the election; they were fortifying it ... THE ARCHITECT ... Podhorzer, senior adviser to the president of the AFL-CIO, the nation’s largest union federation, has marshaled the latest tactics and data to help its favored candidates win elections ... Among Democratic insiders, he’s known as the wizard ... He began circulating weekly number-crunching memos to a small circle of allies and hosting strategy sessions in D.C. ... began to worry about the election ... The usual tools of data, analytics and polling would not be sufficient ... had begun scenario-planning ... gathering liberal activists at the local and national level ... It wasn’t hard to find liberals who saw Trump as a dangerous dictator ... Podhorzer began working from his laptop at his kitchen table, holding back-to-back Zoom meetings for hours a day with his network of contacts across the progressive universe: the labor movement; the institutional left, like Planned Parenthood and Greenpeace; resistance groups like Indivisible and MoveOn; progressive data geeks and strategists, representatives of donors and foundations, state-level grassroots organizers, racial-justice activists and others ... Podhorzer began hosting a weekly 2½-hour Zoom. It was structured around a series of rapid-fire five-minute presentations on everything ... The invitation-only gatherings soon attracted hundreds ... The meetings became the galactic center for a constellation of operatives across the left who shared overlapping goals but didn’t usually work in concert. The group had no name, no leaders and no hierarchy, but it kept the disparate actors in sync ... the election would require an effort of unprecedented scale ... As 2020 progressed, it stretched to Congress, Silicon Valley and the nation’s statehouses. It drew energy from the summer’s racial-justice protests, many of whose leaders were a key part of the liberal alliance. And eventually it reached across the aisle ... The first task was overhauling America’s balky election infrastructure ... the most urgent need was money ... needed additional staff and scanners to process ballots ... Private philanthropy stepped into the breach. An assortment of foundations contributed tens of millions in election-administration funding. The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative chipped in $300 million ... conducted focus groups in April and May to find out what would get people to vote by mail ... sent ballot applications to 15 million people in key states ... In mailings and digital ads, the group urged people not to wait for Election Day ... pressure platforms to enforce their rules, both by removing content or accounts ... In November 2019, Mark Zuckerberg invited nine civil rights leaders to dinner at his home, where they warned him about the danger of the election ... ‘ It took pushing, urging, conversations, brainstorming, all of that to get to a place where we ended up’ ... Vanita Gupta ... also met with Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and others. (Gupta has been nominated for Associate Attorney General by President Biden.) ... created state-specific memes and graphics, spread by email, text, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok ... held media briefings with high-profile experts across the political spectrum, resulting in widespread coverage of potential election issues and fact-checking ... Podhorzer, meanwhile, was warning everyone he knew that polls were underestimating Trump’s support ... The racial-justice uprising ... organizers who helped lead it wanted to harness its momentum for the election ... Many of those organizers were part of Podhorzer’s network ... they surrounded lines of voters in urban areas with a ‘joy to the polls’ effort that turned the act of casting a ballot into a street party. Black organizers also recruited thousands of poll workers to ensure polling places would stay open in their communities ... 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 ... 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 ... 400 planned postelection demonstrations, to be activated via text message as soon as Nov. 4 ... economy-disrupting civil disorder ... ‘ We wanted to be mindful of when was the right time to call for moving masses of people into the street’ ... As much as they were eager to mount a show of strength, mobilizing immediately could backfire ... rather than elevate Trump’s complaints by continuing to fight him, the alliance wanted to send the message that the people had spoken. So the word went out: stand down ... announced that it would ‘not be activating the entire national mobilization network today, but remains ready to activate if necessary’ ... ‘ We won by the skin of our teeth’ ... ‘ It’s astounding how close we came’”
https://time.com/5936036/secret-202...itics_2020-election&linkId=110717147

“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. They were not rigging the election; they were fortifying it.”