THE NEW YORK TIMES NATIONALSATURDAY, OCTOBER 10, 2020 Y A
Election
When President Trump used
the prime-time debate last week
to urge his supporters to “go into
the polls and watch very care-
fully,” he wasn’t just issuing a call
for a grass-roots movement or
raising the prospect of intimida-
tion tactics at voting sites. He was
also nodding to an extensive be-
hind-the-scenes effort led by the
lawyers and operatives on his
campaign.
Over the summer, Mr. Trump
named a new campaign manager,
Bill Stepien, who was once a top
aide to former Gov. Chris Christie
of New Jersey before being fired
amid the “Bridgegate” scandal.
Mr. Stepien swiftly elevated a
group of lieutenants focused on
using aggressive electoral tactics,
moves that led Marc E. Elias, the
leading election lawyer for the
Democratic Party, to tweet that
Mr. Trump was “tripling down” on
“opposing voting rights.”
One of the main architects of the
effort is Justin Clark, whom Mr.
Stepien promoted to deputy cam-
paign manager. He has been
viewed with suspicion among
Democrats since he was recorded
last year saying, “Traditionally
it’s always been Republicans sup-
pressing votes in places,” and add-
ing that in 2020 the party would
“start playing offense a little bit.”
Other key figures in the cam-
paign include a senior aide who
once oversaw a right-wing infor-
mation-gathering operation for
the conservative Koch brothers;
an adviser who was involved in a
secretive vote-challenge opera-
tion for President George W.
Bush’s re-election campaign in
2004; and a campaign counsel
who is coordinating a series of
lawsuits aimed at preventing the
expansion of mail voting.
With polls showing Mr. Trump
trailing Joseph R. Biden Jr. nation-
ally and in most swing states, the
president has increasingly fo-
cused attention on the voting
process, declaring that the only
way he could lose is if the election
is rigged and refusing to commit
to a peaceful transfer of power.
With the election less than a
month away, his campaign has
moved the idea of voting irregu-
larities to the forefront of both its
ground operations and its legal
strategy.
The campaign is trying to shape
the voting process in many ways.
Following the president’s lead, it
has undertaken a legal and rheto-
rical assault on mail-in balloting,
claiming with no evidence that it
is rife with fraud. It is also pushing
the boundaries of traditional poll
monitoring in ways that many
Democrats believe amount to vot-
er intimidation. And it has put le-
gal pressure on states to ag-
gressively purge their voter rolls.
Campaign officials tried to
downplay Democratic anxiety
and insisted they wanted every-
one to vote who wants to do so.
“I think we need to just realize
that we’re in a political campaign
and all just follow the law,” Mr.
Clark said in an interview. “There
are laws everywhere about how
many feet you can stand outside of
a polling place and what you can
wear and what you can do.”
Few of the campaign’s practices
have prompted as much attention
as its extensive plans for poll
watching. While both parties have
trained official poll watchers for
decades, the president has stirred
alarm among Democrats and
some voting experts who fear he
is encouraging extralegal menac-
ing at polling sites by far-right
groups and even random Trump
supporters.
At the debate Mr. Trump said
that the Proud Boys, a far-right
extremist group, should “stand
by,” a comment some interpreted
as a call to arms in aiding his elec-
tion prospects in ways that could
intimidate voters.
Those fears were heightened by
an episode in Fairfax, Va., last
month, when Trump supporters
disrupted early voting, impeding
access to a polling site.
“These are not trained poll
workers, these aren’t people who
were recruited to do anything,”
Mr. Clark said. “There are —shocker — there’s going to be poli-
tics in a presidential race. And
people are going to wave flags and
show stuff and drive around and
hold mini-rallies and hold sign-
waving rallies and do things like
that, and it happens in a lot of
places.”
Mr. Clark and other campaign
officials have said they will put
50,000 poll watchers and electoral
observers on the ground, includ-
ing at least 1,600 in Philadelphia
alone. They are instructing them
to record minutiae like the timing
of paper jams at polling places,
but also pushing beyond the typi-
cal activity by monitoring people
picking up absentee ballots and
videotaping the drop boxes where
they deposit them. Mr. Trump has
even floated the idea of sending
sheriffs to the polls.
Republican administrations in
several states, including the bat-
tleground of Georgia, have ap-
pointed voter fraud task forces
they say are designed to root out
cheating, though Democrats view
the panels, stacked with Republi-
can prosecutors, as instruments
of voter suppression.
“These come out of somebody’s
Republican playbook,” said Cathy
Cox, a Democrat who served as
Georgia’s secretary of state. “Un-
fortunately the goal is to intimi-
date people and ultimately sup-
press votes.”One Trump campaign official
recently emailed party officials in
North Carolina and told them “to
not follow the procedures out-
lined” in a memo sent out by the
state Board of Elections. Republi-
can officials have also been tied to
efforts to aid third-party candi-
dates who could siphon votes from
Mr. Biden.
The most visible Republican ef-
fort is in the courts. Matthew Mor-
gan, who was promoted to cam-
paign counsel this summer, had
been directing a flurry of election
litigation and challenging at-
tempts to expand mail-in voting.
Like Mr. Trump, he has dispar-
aged mail balloting, claiming
without evidence that “universal
vote by mail opens the door to cha-
os and fraud.”
Election Day operations are
now coordinated by Michael Ro-
man, a Philadelphia native who
once oversaw an operation for the
billionaires Charles G. and David
H. Koch that surveilled and gath-
ered information on liberal adver-
saries. He frequently airs baseless
claims that Democrats are plot-
ting to “steal the election.” Mr. Ro-
man also played a central role in
promoting a 2008 video of two
members of the New Black Pan-
ther Party outside of a Philadel-
phia polling place, one carrying a
baton; the video became a long
running flash point for the right-wing media’s claims of election in-
terference by Democrats.
“This is somebody who I think
has a reputation for hyping and
distorting incidents to make it ap-
pear as though Democrats are
cheating, and I think it adds to an
overall dangerous message about
election rigging,” said Richard L.
Hasen, a professor at the Univer-
sity of California, Irvine School of
Law who writes the widely read
Election Law Blog.
Mr. Roman declined to com-
ment for this article.
Other notable figures doing
work for the campaign include
Bob Paduchik, a senior campaign
adviser, who was involved in a se-
cretive operation during the 2004
Bush campaign dubbed the “Vot-
er Reg Fraud Strategy.” The effort
was aimed at challenging the le-
gitimacy of absentee voters, ac-
cording to emails released in a
lawsuit filed by the Democratic
National Committee.
Mr. Paduchik did not respond to
requests for comment.
Poll watching is regulated by
differing state laws. In official
training videos, Republicans in-
struct workers to be courteous to
Democrats, dress appropriately
and stay on their toes: “Do not
zone out.”
This year, for the first time in
more than three decades, the Re-
publican National Committee is
taking an active role in poll watch-
ing, after the courts in 2018 lifted a
consent decree that had barred
the R.N.C. from doing so. The ban
stemmed from the committee’s in-
volvement in an operation to in-
timidate New Jersey voters in
1981.
There are already signs that Re-
publicans, who have won only one
popular presidential vote since
1988, will be unusually ag-
gressive. In recent weeks, the
Trump campaign sent personnel
to attempt to enter satellite facili-
ties in Philadelphia where voters
could pick up and fill out mail-in
ballots — offices that are not re-
garded as polls. (In an interview,
Mr. Morgan pushed back on that
concept, saying: “They say this is
not a polling place. To us thissounds absurd, when you can reg-
ister, get your ballot and vote in
that location. So we don’t accept
that premise.”)
States led by Republicans are
also working to restrict access to
voting; in Texas, for instance, Gov.
Greg Abbott last week moved to
close many of the locations where
voters can drop off their ballots.
Campaign officials said they
had not been in contact with any
outside groups to encourage or
tacitly support unofficial poll
watching and protests at polling
sites, beyond the official poll
watching activity that typically
occurs. And they were confident
there would not be a repeat of the
kind of intimidation tactics that
led to the consent decree.
“That’s why we are recruiting
people,” Mr. Clark said. “We are
training them, we are working
with them to make sure that
they’re doing things the right
way.”
Still, Mr. Trump stirred alarm at
the debate last week by equivocat-
ing when asked to condemn the
Proud Boys; he only denounced
them later amid criticism after the
debate. When asked by The New
York Times, the campaign also de-
clined to renounce such groups.
Frank Figliuzzi, a former F.B.I.
assistant director of counterintel-
ligence, said the president’s re-
marks could be interpreted by vio-
lent right-wing groups as “a call to
action, a call to arms.” Mr. Figli-
uzzi said the organizations’ online
communications reveal they are
making plans to gather at polling
stations.
Such groups also point to curi-
ously timed and seemingly alarm-
ist announcements of voting fraud
investigations arising from small
incidents. The Justice Depart-
ment, for instance, announced it
was starting an inquiry after a
handful of ballots were found in a
garbage can in Pennsylvania, ap-
parently accidentally discarded
by a contract worker. It was a
highly unusual step, coming as
the Trump administration weak-
ened longstanding department
policy that discouraged making
voter fraud investigations public
before an election.Inside Trump Campaign’s Strategy to Make Voting a Tooth-and-Nail Fight
Bill Stepien, right, President Trump’s campaign manager, has
promoted deputies known for aggressive electoral tactics.DOUG MILLS/THE NEW YORK TIMESBy DANNY HAKIM
and STEPHANIE SAULSusan Beachy contributed re-
search.
briefed on the data said.
Nowhere has Mr. Trump
harmed himself and his party
more than across the Sun Belt,
where the electoral coalition that
secured a generation of Republi-
can dominance is in danger of
coming apart.
“There are limits to what people
can take with the irresponsibility,
the untruthfulness, just the whole
persona,” said Jeff Flake, the for-
mer Republican senator from Ari-
zona. Mr. Flake is crossing party
lines to support Mr. Biden, who
made his first visit of the general
election here Thursday.
Many of the Sun Belt states
seemingly within Mr. Biden’s
reach resisted the most stringent
public-health policies to battle the
coronavirus. As a result, states
like Arizona, Georgia and Texas
faced a powerful wave of infec-
tions for much of the summer, set-
ting back efforts to revive com-
mercial activity.
In Arizona, a low-tax, regula-
tion-resistant state, the focus on
reviving business helped drive
the unemployment rate down to
5.9 percent in August, with some
of that apparent improvement
coming from people leaving the la-
bor force in a state with a large
hospitality sector that has suf-
fered in the pandemic.
Still, Arizona continues to face a
long climb to return to its pre-pan-
demic economy. Twice as many
Arizona residents filed new
claims for unemployment benefits
at the end of September than they
did at the previous time last year,
the Labor Department reports.
Mr. Biden is mounting an as-
sertive campaign and facing ris-
ing pressure to do more in the his-
torically Republican region. He is
buttressed by a fund-raising
gusher for Democratic candi-
dates, overwhelming support
from people of color and defec-
tions from the G.O.P. among col-
lege-educated whites in and
around cities like Atlanta, Hous-
ton and Phoenix.
“Cities in states like Arizona
and Texas are attracting young
people, highly-educated people,
and people of color — all groups
that the national Republican
Party has walked away from the
last four years,” said the Okla-
homa City mayor, David F. Holt, a
Republican. “This losing demo-
graphic bet against big cities and
their residents is putting Sun Belt
states in play.”
Gov. Doug Ducey of Arizona, a
Republican who like Mr. Holt has
won in increasingly forbidding
environments, said his party
needed to recognize an enduring
verity about politics: “It’s a game
of addition.”
Some of the states that appear
effectively tied today, such as
North Carolina and Georgia,
could still prove difficult for Mr.
Biden to carry. Few Democratic
nominees have proven able to
forge coalitions to tip these states
and the president’s appeal among
working-class whites in the South
will at least keep him competi-
tive.
Even in South Carolina, Repub-
licans have grown deeply con-
cerned about Senator Lindsey
Graham’s re-election campaign,
and Senator Mitch McConnell,
the majority leader, has had sev-
eral sobering conversations with
Mr. Graham, according to Repub-
licans familiar with the discus-
sions.
The Senate Republican cam-
paign arm has also intervened in
Mr. Graham’s imperiled cam-
paign, with a handful of senior
aides at the committee taking a
more hands-on role.
On Thursday, in a conference
call with a group of lobbyists, Mr.
McConnell vented that the par-
ty’s Senate candidates are being
financially overwhelmed because
of small-dollar contributions to
ActBlue, the online liberal fund-
raising hub.
In some ways, the shifts in the
Sun Belt have accelerated since
Mr. Trump’s nomination four
years ago.
Even as he stunned Hillary
Clinton in three crucial Great
Lakes states, he lost Colorado,
Nevada and New Mexico and
fared worse in Arizona, Texas and
Georgia than Mitt Romney had
four years earlier.
Two years later, Democrats
performed even better in a series
of high-profile races across the re-
gion with college-educated white
voters and people of color.
Now Republicans are at risk of
that wave cresting again, and
even higher.
“Racism and misogyny and
demagoguery and being just
hateful and cruel and intolerant
are not things in the Southwest
that play very well,” said Gov. Mi-
chelle Lujan Grisham of New
Mexico, a Democrat. She said Re-
publicans had left a wide space
for her party in her region by
clinging to “messaging that’s 40
years old” on issues like immigra-
tion and climate.
If Mr. Biden wins by simply
flipping back the Democratic-
leaning Great Lakes states, Mr.
Trump and his allies can pin the
blame on the virus. But if Mr.
Trump loses across the South andWest, it would force a much
deeper introspection on the right
about Trump and Trumpism —
and their electoral future in the
fastest-growing and most diverse
part of the country.
“The Southern strategy has
been flipped on its head,” said
Representative Darren Soto of
Florida, a Democrat, alluding to
the Nixon-era tactic of expanding
the Republican coalition by win-
ning in once-Democratic
strongholds of the South.
This is part of the case that for-
mer Representative Beto
O’Rourke of Texas is making to
Mr. Biden’s campaign.
Polls show the presidential race
in Texas is effectively tied, and
congressional polling for both par-
ties has found Mr. Biden running
up significant leads across the
state’s once-red suburbs. A Biden
victory there could be transforma-
tional, providing Democrats an
opportunity to enlarge their
House majority, shape redistrict-
ing and deliver a devastating psy-
chological blow to Republicans.
“Texas is really Biden’s to lose if
he invests now, and that must in-
clude his time and presence in the
state,” Mr. O’Rourke said in an in-
terview. “He can not only win our
38 electoral votes but really help
down ballot Democrats, lock in
our maps for 10 years, deny
Trump the chance to declare vic-
tory illegally and send Trumpism
on the run.”Mr. O’Rourke said Mr. Biden
heard him out and promised “full
consideration.” For now, Mr. Bi-
den’s campaign is increasing its
ad spending in the state and dis-
patching his wife, Jill, there next
week. Kamala Harris, Mr. Biden’s
running mate, is expected to go to
Texas in the coming days, accord-
ing to Democrats familiar with the
planning.
Texas’s growth has been explo-
sive: Over 1.5 million new voters
have registered since 2016, a third
of them in the diverse, transplant-
filled counties that include San
Antonio, Houston and Austin. The
anger toward Mr. Trump has em-
boldened Democratic candidates
to run more audacious cam-
paigns.
In a Dallas-area House district
held by a Republican who’s retir-
ing, the Democratic Party is send-
ing mailers telling voters that
their nominee will “stand up to
President Trump.” Senator John
Cornyn, running for re-election,
has lamented privately that Mr.
Trump is stuck in the low 40s in
polling, holding back other Re-
publicans, people familiar with his
comments said.
Mr. Trump is at even greater
risk in the next-largest red state in
the South: Georgia. In the latest
Republican polling, Mr. Trump
has fallen several points behind
Mr. Biden in the state, where 16
Electoral College votes, two Sen-
ate seats and several competitiveHouse races are on the ballot.
“It feels like after the debate
there was a real shift,” said State
Senator Jennifer Jordan, a Demo-
crat from suburban Atlanta.
Ms. Jordan’s district is exactly
the kind of area that has swung
away from Republicans in the
Trump era. She said she believed
Mr. Trump still had more ground
to lose with the professional class
and that his bout with the corona-
virus was not helping.
“The fact that he has it is kind of
a living example of how he has
mismanaged and misjudged this
virus,” she said, adding, “The
Chamber of Commerce Republi-
cans, business Republicans, who
may have been on the fence, I
think they’re breaking now for Bi-
den.”
The Trump campaign appears
sensitive to that risk. Mr. Trump
recently visited the state to unveil
an economic plan for Black Amer-
icans, while Vice President Mike
Pence addressed an evangelical
political conference.
Brian Robinson, a Republican
strategist, said his party was con-
fronting a “demographic bubble”
that had accelerated with the
flight of white women.
“The G.O.P. has to stop that
bleeding,” Mr. Robinson said.
In the House, the Sun Belt ap-
pears to represent the area of
greatest peril for the G.O.P., as
Democrats make inroads not only
in the suburbs but in outer-ringcommunities that are typically
whiter, older and more conserva-
tive.
That was evident, quite literally,
from the Glendale, Ariz., home of
Hiral Tipirneni, an emergency
room doctor who is challenging a
Republican incumbent in an exur-
ban district that Mr. Trump car-
ried by 10 points.
Sitting in her outdoor courtyard
with a view of the stucco sprawl
enveloping greater Phoenix, Ms.
Tipirneni made the case for why
the daughter of Indian immi-
grants could win a seat long held
by white Republican men.
“Our county is a good micro-
cosm of our state and I think the
state is becoming a good reflec-
tion of our whole country,” she
said of Maricopa County, which is
now the fourth-largest county by
population in the country.
After winning it by about three
points in 2016, roughly the same
as his statewide margin, Mr.
Trump is now trailing in Maricopa
by nine points, according to a New
York Times/Siena College poll.
If the election here unfolds like
many Arizona Republicans are
dreading it might, they will in two
years have lost the presidential
race, both Senate seats, both
chambers of the state legislature
and watched as voters approved a
ballot measure levying a surtax
on the wealthy for increased edu-
cation funding.Suddenly, the Sun Belt
Looks a Little Less Red
In 2016, President Trump fared worse in Texas than the Republican presidential candidate, Mitt Romney, did four years earlier.TAMIR KALIFA FOR THE NEW YORK TIMESFrom Page AJim Tankersley contributed re-
porting from Washington.