BALLOT HARVESTING
WITHOUT A DOUBT, THIS PIECE BY JOHN SOLOMON IN JUST THE NEWS IS THE BEST ANALYSIS OF WHAT REALLY HAPPENED IN THE ELECTION, HOW IT WAS STOLEN AND WHY SO MANY AMERICANS ARE ANGRY AND FRUSTRATED.... WELL WORTH A READ AND REREAD. I AM DEEPLY GRATEFUL FOR CLEAR THINKING HEADS LIKE SOLOMON. AFTER A LITTLE WHILE, WE NEED TO GET TO WORK FOR THE LONG HAUL..
By JOHN SOLOMON
NOW THAT Democrats are poised to control the White House, Senate and
House, the traditional game of finger-pointing and recrimination will
begin inside the GOP.
The first instinct for politicians will be to assign blame, call
names and jockey for position. But the 2020 election wasn't just an
election, it was a political watershed in which the rules and strategy
for winning were rewritten.
The November election (and Tuesday’s Georgia curtain call) wasn't won
and lost by the tactics, spending, individual players and messaging in
the weeks before Nov. 3, according to interviews conducted with more
than three dozen frontline players.
Rather,
its outcome was cemented long before Labor Day 2020 by a Democratic
machinery of former Barack Obama proteges, like David Plouffe, John
Podesta, David Axelrod and Stacey Abrams, who worried far less about the
tactics of ads, travel (Joe Biden hardly did!) and fundraising and far
more about the strategy of how to control the narrative and the rules
that would shape the outcome.
They even told the Republicans and the public what they planned to
do. Just read Plouffe's book, "A Citizen's Guide to Beating Donald
Trump." They even boastfully predicted days before how the vote count
would roll out on election night and for several days later. Trump would
lead early, and Biden would surpass late, they said.
They were right. Why?
First and foremost, they usurped the powers of GOP -controlled state
legislatures in the five battleground states and rewrote the rules of
how votes would be cast and counted, using the pandemic as an excuse.
Mail ballots could be sent to everyone, even if they didn't ask for
one, and wide swaths of Americans could vote by mail. Voter ID
requirements could be suspended for those who felt homebound by COVID's
wrath. Mobile ballot boxes could be deployed. Spoiled ballots that
legally were supposed to be discarded could be "cured" by election
clerks. Legally required voter roll purges could be skipped. And a
single billionaire could donate $350 million directly to the election
clerks, judges and vote counters in the states, requiring them in some
cases to register voters, and create more poll locations in Democratic
strongholds.
And Republicans — who controlled the legislatures in Wisconsin,
Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia and Arizona and the constitutional right
to set the rules — hardly put up a fight. Instead, they urged their
voters not to take advantage of the loosened rules and to vote the
old-fashioned way. They, in the words of the Trump-loving Georgia
Democrat Vernon Jones, simply unilaterally disarmed.
Democrats understood that in a pandemic and in an America with
millions of new millennial, urban and minority voters, the easier you
make casting a ballot the more likely a low-propensity voter is to vote.
Send it to them, help them register, make easy drop-off locations or
the mailbox the final destination, and voters will vote a lot more
willingly.
In other words, the liberal brain trust engaged in cutting-edge
warfare, while Republicans tossed their comfortable set of horseshoes
from the 1980s, hoping the good old recipe of evangelical GOTV, direct
mail, talk radio and Fox News would deliver yet another election win as
it had done for decades.
It didn't.
To be fair, Donald Trump mustered — by a mile — the largest national
vote ever assembled by a Republican at 75 million-plus voters and
barnstormed the country, risking COVID and criticism without fear. Kevin
McCarthy picked an all-star slate of candidates and picked up seats.
Mitch McConnell raised a ton of money, and Ronna McDaniel put together
one of the most impressive get-out-the-vote efforts ever assembled.
But all that could not overcome the advantage of a rewired electoral
system in the five battlegrounds, as the Georgia runoffs showed Tuesday,
said Tom Price, a former congressman and Trump Cabinet secretary.
Democrats "leap-frogged Republicans' process, strategy, technology
and tactics, and that is to the credit of folks on the Democratic side,"
Price told Just the News. "They have perfected harvesting, I believe it
is harvesting, of absentee ballots, and I think the numbers will show
in these runoff races, the same as they did in November, that
Republicans who lost by close margins won the vote on Election Day, won
on early voting in person and lost heavily in absentee ballots."
Secondly, liberals spent two decades building an alliance with the
mainstream media, the social giants and the search giants and the
permanent government bureaucracy until they could control the narrative,
even when it wasn't true. They had it perfected by the time Donald
Trump took office.
Those who objected were canceled and shamed. Intelligence and law
enforcement and private investigators were misused to create false
realities. True facts and legally protected speech were outright
censored long enough to create the narrative needed to win.
Trump colluded with Russia, and bribed Ukraine to investigate his
political opponents … though he didn't. The Hunter Biden corruption
story was Russian-fed conspiracy theory …. though it is really true, and
he was under criminal investigation the last two years ... American
towns could be burned to the ground and police defunded because a
Kenosha, Wisc., officer shot an unarmed man … who turned out to be
wanted by police and armed with a knife.
Owning the information superhighway of the 21st century, like the
rules of the election, was far more powerful than choosing where to run
ads, campaign in person or spend money.
Finally, the liberal oligarchs club — George Soros, Mark Zuckerberg,
Mike Bloomberg et al — spent more than ever to win. But they also
transformed the way political donations were spent by imposing corporate
governance and specific returns on investment.
Every recipient had to deliver very specific outcomes to keep getting
money, governed by lengthy contract-like documents. And the outcomes
and deliverables were mapped to the two larger goals of controlling the
narrative and the rules of the election.
That's what interviews with three dozen experts revealed.
So what do
those same experts advise Republicans do to change their fortunes?
Exactly what the Democrats did. Don't point fingers, change the rules, and own the narrative, they said.
Phill Kline, the former Kansas attorney general, led the Amistad
Project's efforts to challenge some of the Democrats rule changes. He
said the the GOP legislatures in the key battlegrounds must
reassert their constitutional right to set the rules of election.
Universal mail ballots can be ended, limited only to those who
absolutely need it. Voter IDs can be mandated. Exemptions and legal
settlements could, by law, be required to be approved by the
legislature. Setting the rules of the election are easy if there is a
will, Kline added.
"I think the discipline of the party should be all about de-powering
Washington and empowering the states, especially the state
legislatures," Kline told Just the News.
Secondly, conservatives need to build their own information ecosystem
that rivals what liberals have: a vibrant press that covers
conservatives honestly, and powerful delivery channels that can rival
YouTube, Twitter and Facebook.
New services like Rumble, Parler, Real America's Voice, Citizen Free
Press and CloutHub are incubating and attracting millions. They need to
be grown and spread to tens of millions along with trusted news sources
so conservatives have as big a bullhorn to the next generation of GenZ,
millennials and cable-cutters as they have had to Boomers, talk radio
and Fox News fans, the experts said.
"We are just playing to a draw," Price explained. "We are not
reaching a lot of folks. And we have to be creative about how we reach
them, and I think we've got to be able to control a lot of
that messaging, and right now we just don't."
Finally, conservative donors need to have a new approach, stolen from
the ROI model of the Soros and Bloomberg NGOs, so their millions don't
just enrich consultants but have measurable outcomes in setting the
rules and narratives that win the next elections. Everything from civic
education and empowerment for state legislators to media-platform
building needs to be funded, the experts said.
"Funding on the left seems much more strategic than funding on the
right, which is predominantly tactical," explained Steve Hantler, who
advises several high-net-worth conservative donors. "Liberal elites have
for decades controlled the levers of power in education, media and
entertainment and have used that power to indoctrinate generations of
Americans against America's founding values.
"Now is not the time for hand-wringing and finger-pointing. Now is the time for honest, critical self-evaluation."
