The Shadow Campaign:
Norm Eisen and the Voter Protection Program

The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That “Saved the 2020 Election”: Where Are They Now?
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Norm Eisen and the Voter Protection Program | Voter Participation Center

Norm Eisen and the Voter Protection Program

Mentioned twice in the Time article, Norm Eisen and his Voter Protection Program were clearly involved in “saving” the 2020 election, but the report never goes into detail on what their role was. Eisen, for his part, was considered an expert lawyer with a specialty in litigating against Republicans. He joined the left-leaning Brookings Institution in 2014 and in 2019, just before the election, he was the lead author on a Brookings report titled The Democracy Playbook: Preventing and Reversing Democratic Backsliding.

This 100-page playbook laid out a strategy for the 2020 election that included a whole chapter on how “international actors” could get involved in the U.S. election through nongovernmental organizations dedicated to countering “disinformation” and promoting democracy. This report was probably highly influential within the “shadow campaign” and may even have inspired a large portion of the campaign. Coincidently, John Allen, the president of Brookings, resigned in 2022 amid an FBI probe into alleged illegal foreign lobbying by Brookings on behalf of the government of Qatar. Eisen has also taken a job as a legal commentator for CNN, offering all sorts of opinions, most of them critical of Donald Trump in the various legal proceedings targeting Trump.

Outside of his election-related work for Brookings, which is not mentioned in the Time article, Eisen is also credited with recruiting “Republicans and Democrats” to the board of the Voter Protection Program. In 2024, the organization no longer exists under that name, instead becoming known as the States United Democracy Center. Its main job remains promoting left-of-center election policies. The group raised $14.5 million in 2022 and has shifted its focus to the 2024 election, creating a database of “election deniers” in office and publishing a playbook for the 2024 election. Eisen himself, meanwhile, has kept busy by sitting in on every minute of Trump’s trial in New York and testifying about the trial to the House judiciary committee. Eisen has also been hosting weekly calls briefing reporters and left-wing commentators about Trump’s various legal troubles.

The Working Families Party

The Working Families Party (WFP), the favored activist group of the far Left, played a big role in the 2020 Time article. Two senior WFP officials were quoted, each describing a different part of the group’s 2020 election activism. Maurice Mitchell, national director of the Working Families Party, credited Michael Podhorzer with excellent work keeping communications strategies aligned between the coalition before the election. Nelini Stamp, national organizing director, described how WFP created an election protection team of poll watchers that turned urban polling places into block parties during the election. Finally, Mitchell was quoted bragging about the WFP’s activists drowning out a Trump campaign press conference with loudspeakers in the streets of Philadelphia after the election.

Mitchell and Stamp both remain in their roles at WFP, and WFP has grown much bigger thanks to some new large donors. The WFP has a complex structure composed on several PACs and nonprofits, but the two main entities—Working Families Organization, a 501(c)(4), and WFP National PAC, a political action committee—have become much larger. The pair raised just over $35 million in 2020, and their 2022 revenues climbed to over $73 million, largely thanks to a surge of donations routed through the Tides Foundation and Tides Advocacy, its 501(c)(4) sister. The 2024 disclosures for Working Families Organization are not yet available, but WFP National PAC has already raised $12 million in the 2023–2024 cycle; a generous haul for a group on the extreme fringe of the Left.

WFP’s website says the group is now active in 14 states, where they are operating mostly to the left of President Biden and the Democratic Party establishment, particularly on the issue of Israel’s conflict in Gaza—the subject of several WFP-hosted protests. However, since Biden’s withdrawal from the election, WFP has fallen in line behind Kamala Harris, endorsing her just days after Biden withdrew, although the tone of the endorsement was reluctant to say the least.

Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights and Vanita Gupta

The Time article mentions that the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights (LCCHR) formed a coalition of over 150 organizations that signed a letter demanding $2 billion in federal funding for election administration as part of the CARES Act. The CARES Act ultimately distributed $400 million in funding to state election offices. Another revealing anecdote from the article says that LCCHR CEO Vanita Gupta was invited to and attended a dinner at the home of Mark Zuckerberg with eight other “civil rights leaders,” where she seemingly made the case for increased social media censorship. “It took pushing, urging, conversations, brainstorming, all of that to get to a place where we ended up with more rigorous rules and enforcement,” Gupta told Ball. Gupta also met with Twitter’s then-CEO Jack Dorsey, presumably to discuss similar things. and, Gupta said that the platforms were eventually cajoled into creating methods for “tagging things and taking them down.”

Gupta was apparently rewarded for her effective advocacy of censorship with a nomination as associate attorney general in the Biden Department of Justice. During her tenure, Gupta sued the State of Texas over its redistricting process, its installation of floating barriers along the southern border, and its enforcement of SB 4, authorized state and local police to arrest illegal immigrants.

On January 31, 2024, Gupta suddenly returned to her previous role as CEO of LCCHR. Back in her old office, Gupta will no doubt focus the organization on “election fortification” in the upcoming election.

So far, the group has not said much publicly about 2024. One report, published by the group in 2023, graded various federal agencies on their compliance with controversial Executive Order 14019, which directed agencies to find ways to use their resources to register new voters, turning federal agencies into get-out-the-vote machines. The executive order has been pejoratively named “Biden bucks.” The report, among other things, blasted the U.S. Department of Education for not incorporating voter registration into the application for federal student loan aid assistance. Coincidentally, in February 2024 the Department of Education released a toolkit advising schools on how to encourage civic engagement and voter registration, a move that LCCHR praised. LCCHR seems to be a powerful force in directing the flow of “Biden bucks,” which could play a major role and create a great deal of controversy in the 2024 election.

Amber McReynolds and the National Vote at Home Institute

One of the leading advocates for the nationwide sea change in the election rules in 2020 was Amber McReynolds and her National Vote at Home Institute. In 2020, McReynolds spearheaded a national policy shift toward no excuse vote by mail as her organization’s funding increased eightfold. The organization became so involved in the “shadow campaign” that a National Vote at Home Institute staffer became the “de facto elections administrator” of the city of Green Bay as part of the organization’s work as “grant mentors” for the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL). Today, with many of the rule changes from the 2020 election now made permanent, McReynolds and the National Vote at Home Institute are taking a victory lap. McReynolds was nominated and confirmed for a spot on the U.S. Postal Service board of governors, while the National Vote at Home Institute has returned to the sidelines, still engaged in the same work, but far less prolifically than in 2020.

In the next installment, Voter Participation Center is researching new ways to register Democratic voters.