How the Establishment Saved Democracy

Feb 21, 2021 —

“It was all very, very strange,” said Trump a month after the election. “We witnessed an orchestrated effort to anoint the winner, even while many key states were still being counted.” Yes, some stray votes were still being counted, but not enough to flip any state’s outcome. Georgia’s recount, which changed nothing, had been certified more than a week earlier. And that was by far the closest state.

But Trump was right. Something strange and orchestrated was happening. There are still a lot of Americans who know what this country is about. From its impoverished start, half slave and half free, and with only a handful of the free allowed to vote, it has made enormous progress for 233 years. That’s been made possible by one document — the U.S. Constitution. And compliance with that document was now in clear and present danger.

Those who understood were not so different from the establishment figures who founded this country. And they decided not to see this great country destroyed by a petty tyrant who had never served his country and only cared about himself. This new and certainly less-impressive group was, like the originals, a scrappy lot full of disagreements. But unlike Trump and his base, they were true patriots. And they set out to preserve our democracy for at least four more years.

On election day, they issued a statement.

“… We call on the media, the candidates and the American people to exercise patience with the process and trust in our system, … “Although we may not always agree on desired outcomes up and down the ballot, we are united in our call for the American democratic process to proceed without violence, intimidation or any other tactic that makes us weaker as a nation.”

After months of effective, behind-the-scenes action, this was their signal to those counting the votes. So who was this group?

AFL-CIO President Richard L. Trumka
U.S. Chamber of Commerce CEO Thomas J. Donohue
National Association of Evangelicals President Walter Kim
National African American Clergy Network Co-Convener Dr. Barbara Williams-Skinner

And what had they been up to? According to Time Magazine,

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 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. 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.

This is a very partial account, but the full story is available here.

You may not like the establishment, but compare this group to Trump’s base, which is mainly anti-establishment, or to the openly-Marxist Democratic Socialist of America who refused to endorse Joe Biden in this most crucial hour.

So who was the organizer that pulled this group together? There were many, but the person who gets the most credit is Mike Podhorzer. Back in 2019, he became convinced the election was headed for disaster and decided to protect it. For nearly a quarter-century, Podhorzer, has been a senior adviser to the president of the AFL-CIO, the nation’s largest union federation. He’s known as the wizard behind some of the biggest advances in political technology in recent decades.

This is the kind of person who gets things done, not the grandstanding politicians that you’ll find in both parties.