Republicans may be holding a losing hand this November as the Democratic Party uses the advantages it gained during and after the 2020 election cycle.
While former President Donald Trump appears to be cruising toward the GOP nomination, and with a polling lead over incumbent President Joe Biden in key swing states, Republicans will likely face a much steeper climb in the general election than they realize.
Fundamental changes in state election laws, coupled with an alliance of left-wing federal, corporate, financial, and nonprofit entities, have handed the Democratic Party advantages that the GOP may be unable to overcome.
In the decades before 2020, the Republican National Committee (RNC) and Democratic National Committee (DNC) machines each had their own unique strengths: The RNC had the money and the DNC had the troops.
As noted in the book “The Victory Lab,” an analysis by political journalist Sasha Issenberg, Republicans excelled at fundraising and spent heavily on messaging through paid television, radio, and online ads. The DNC, with its voters often concentrated in urban centers, called on its foot soldiers, most notably students and union leaders, to go door-to-door and stir up support.
In 2020, the landscape shifted in the wake of two events: The COVID-19 pandemic and the death of George Floyd in police custody. A narrative emerged that existing state voting laws were hazardous to public health and racist and that they had to change.
The 2020 ‘Shadow Campaign’
In a laudatory 2021 article in Time titled “The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election,” author Molly Ball detailed 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.”
While praising the effort, Ms. Ball said that the actors “were not rigging the election; they were fortifying it.”
The “conspiracy,” as Ms. Ball described it, included DNC operatives, union leaders, tech and social-media companies, Wall Street bankers, and a network of nonprofit donor funds that pooled hundreds of millions of dollars to finance “armies of poll workers and got millions of people to vote by mail for the first time.”
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