structural beneft to them,” says Brian Ballard, a Re-
publican lobbyist with close ties to Trump. But they
allowed the campaign to “utilize the crowds that not
only go, but the crowds that registered to go, and
sometimes that number is fve times the amount of
folks that actually show up.”
Trump’s campaign also kept up its feld- organizing
program through the summer, while Biden’s team hung
back out of safety concerns. The joint feld program
between the RNC and the Trump campaign boasted
2.6 million volunteers, according to fgures provided
by the RNC. They made more than 182 million voter
contacts—more than fve times what they did in 2016—
and added nearly 174,000 new GOP voters to the rolls.
Early voter- registration fgures in Florida, North Car-
olina and other states showed that Republicans had
“essentially neutralized what had been a Democrat
advantage” by mobilizing new voters, says John Po-
desta, who ran Clinton’s failed 2016 presidential bid.
Democrats underestimated the Trump tribe’s
breadth to their detriment. “I think you miss some
of the Trump quotient [in polls] because these folks
come out of the woodwork, and they’re out of the
woods and waters of South Carolina,” says former GOP
Representative Mark Sanford, a Trump critic whose
Charleston- area district Republicans took back on
No v. 3. Despite putting more than $100 million behind
Senate candidate Jaime Harrison, Democrats fell short
of defeating Senator Lindsey Graham by double dig-
its. “These Trump rallies and Trump parades and all
those kinds of things, they don’t strike me as the type
that would be answering a polling call,” Sanford says.
Having made the decision to forgo traditional
feld organizing, Biden’s campaign manager, Jen
O’Malley Dillon instead turned the Biden campaign
into what may be the largest digital-organizing ma-
chine in American political history. “Jen O’Malley
Dillon took a risk in investing as much in digital ac-
quisition as she did,” says Patrick Stevenson, chief
mobilization officer at the Democratic National Com-
mittee. “You’re putting down $1 million in April that
you’re expecting to show back up as $5 million in
August.” By September, the digital operation was
printing money. Digital organizers recruited more
than 200,000 volunteers and deployed them on hun-
dreds of millions of text messages and phone calls.
But the result raises questions about whether this
virtual juggernaut could really substitute for old-
fashioned face-to-face campaigning.
What comes next is anybody’s guess. There are
2½ months until the next Inauguration. A lame-duck
President with the world’s biggest platform, an even
larger ego, and millions of supporters who internal-
ized his rhetoric about election “rigging” could stir
a lot of trouble on his way out of town. So much,
including the odds of violence erupting, depends
on Trump’s rhetoric in the days and weeks to come.
President donald trumP com-
manded an early lead in Michigan on
No v. 3, only for Joe Biden to gain the ad-
vantage the next morning. The opposite
was true in Ohio: Biden appeared ahead
right after the polls closed on Election
Night, only for Trump to overtake his lead
around 10 p.m. What gives?
While the President raged about the
disparities on Twitter, baselessly insin-
uating that the whiplash was the result
of fraud or malfeasance, the real answer
is simple: mail-in ballots are counted at
different times, and at different rates, in
different states. In Michigan, Trump ap-
peared to be ahead among ballots cast
in person, but when mail ballots were tal-
lied, that lead evaporated. In Ohio, Biden
appeared to be ahead among mail ballots,
but when in-person votes were chalked
up, that lead vanished.
This election cycle, Democrats were
much more likely than Republicans to
vote by mail. That’s largely due to Trump,
who spent months bashing mail-in voting
and urging supporters to vote in person
instead. Many appear to have listened:
67% of Republicans said they planned
to vote in person on Election Day, ac-
cording to a Marquette University Law
School poll, compared with just 27% of
Democrats.
Voting by mail is a safe and secure way
to cast a ballot, but counting those bal-
lots does tend to take longer than tallying
votes cast in person. In most states, elec-
tion officials must remove each mailed
ballot from its outer envelope and secrecy
sleeve, verify the voter’s registration and
signature, and then feed that ballot into a
NATION
ROLLER-
COASTER
COUNT
What produced whipsaw turns
in the vote tallies of key states?
Following the letter of the law
BY ABBY VESOULIS
ELECTION
2020
