The Election Night Phone Call That Changed Everything (For The Worse)

An attempt to warn the Trump campaign of what was afoot was ignored--and for the worst reason possible

Everyone remembers the gist of the events that went down on Election Night 2020. President Trump was in a commanding lead in the battleground states, more than enough to secure re-election. Suddenly, networks informed everyone that vote-counting was being shut down for the night, to reopen at the start of business on Wednesday morning. When that start of business arrived, Trump’s leads had been mysteriously erased, even though the counting was closed.

Over the next several weeks, everyone in corporate media and the Democratic Party assured us this was all perfectly normal. Everyone in the court system and among the Republican Party did backflips to avoid any real effort to investigate. Subsequent investigations—most notably the Arizona audit have vindicated those of us who believe something dirty went down in the wee hours of November 3-4.

But one question remained—why did this happen? And more specifically, where was the Trump campaign when the vote-counting was being suspended and a crucial window of time created to let the fraud go down?

I had watched the Election Night coverage done by Steve Bannon’s War Room. Bannon already had his audience on alert that there would be an attempt to steal the election in the middle of the night. As a result, there was never a point where I ever felt Trump had won. When I went to bed around midnight, I felt like a football team that was ahead 21-10 going into the fourth quarter, but facing an opponent that I knew would throw everything at us down the stretch.

But I was confident that if Bannon—the chief strategist for Trump’s victorious 2016 campaign and still well-connected to those in official campaign roles—was this aware of what the Democrats would try, then surely the President’s team would have people on the ground.

As it turned out, they didn’t. And the question remains—why?

During that Election Night coverage, I had been exceptionally impressed by the analysis of pollster Richard Baris. A young guy who can come across unpolished by corporate media standards, I found Baris to be refreshingly real and his knowledge of voting demographics, county-by-country around the nation was incredible.

He could be asked a question about any county and immediately respond with in-depth analysis of how their vote typically broke down. It reminded me of the way I rattle off the results of past sporting events at the drop of a hat. Which told me that this was someone who genuinely loved and was passionate about what he did.

Anyhow, in the aftermath of the election, I kept up with Baris and subsequently joined a group that he founded on the Locals platform. In the early part of 2021, the group was still small enough that he could hold private Zoom calls for his paid subscribers. I jumped on the call.

I had a question—Bannon would later say that Baris was the person who warned all of them around midnight on Election Night not to even think about going to bed. I wanted details. What did he, Baris, know, that others didn’t? So on the Zoom call, I asked him the question.

Baris replied that in a normal election, pollsters will call county offices to ask how much of the vote is still left to be counted. And that the county always gives them a reply with a very specific and tight numerical range.  But this time, Baris was getting very vague replies. As part of his answer to me, he said that anyone’s BS meter should have just been going off.

Baris communicated this to Bannon, who brought the young pollster into a three-way call with an official from the Trump campaign. The official in Baris’ words, did a lot of talking around the issue. The Trump campaign staff acknowledged that yes, it would get tighter, but that we’ll do “cutting and sifting” in the counting rooms. Whatever the heck that means.

Baris gave Bannon and the Trump campaign an unambiguous warning—“If you go to bed now, you will wake up to an entirely different picture.”

What did the Trump campaign have to say, you ask? The snide reply came back “We’re not listening to this amateur.” And off they went to bed.

So, if you ever wonder how the Democrats stole this last election, a big part of the answer is this—Trump’s campaign let them do it.

LESSONS TO TAKE AWAY FROM THIS

I want to make the case that this election night phone call is more than just an interesting—if maddening—story from behind the scenes in American presidential politics. It is one that can have some lessons that can apply to all of us…

*It’s long past time to give up on being taken in by the most polished person on the air or the person whose only credentials are how often they appear on corporate media. Baris had a track record, even before this, of producing accurate polling data. Just in the past year that I’ve been regularly following him, I’m amazed at how often he’s 2-3 months ahead of corporate media in terms of recognizing shifts in public opinion.

Yet the corporate airwaves are filled with people whose only track record is…well, that they fill the corporate airwaves. I feel confident that saying the Trump campaign official who went to bed would not have been quite as dismissive of a Karl Rove or anyone else who regularly appears on Fox News.

*We need tougher people in key positions. Let’s take this Trump campaign official. From what I’ve heard from other people I respect, he was as genuine loyalist. He was not some Mitt Romney or Liz Cheney type, out to undercut the President to protect the interests of multinational corporations or defense contractors. But there was a terrible naivete and, frankly, a lack of political toughness.

We’re in uncharted waters in American politics right now and if Trump is going to run again, he’s going to need, as Michael Corleone might have said in The Godfather, a wartime consigliere. The approach this Trump official took was understandable when you could trust that the other side wasn’t out to get you. That’s not the case now.

*Finally, a hard truth about Donald J. Trump—he makes lousy decisions on personnel. See the endorsement of Mitch McConnell for his Senate seat as Exhibit A. It was Trump’s campaign team that didn’t have lawyers on the ground in the battleground states that could have secured the necessary injunctions to prevent vote-counting from being stopped (the stoppage was illegal in its own right). And it was his campaign that quite literally went to sleep on the job when the election was being stolen.

President Trump is almost certainly going to run again. I’m good with that. While my top choice is Florida governor Ron DeSantis, Trump is the only other candidate who even remotely excites me. Trump was good at the job of being president of the United States and endured phony investigations into his life and that of his family unlike any other political figure I can recall. But he’s simply got to get better at picking his staff and putting the right team in place.

When you walk through the grocery store today and see bare shelves, or see that your price of gasoline has tripled in the last year or that U.S. troops are being positioned for war in Ukraine to protect the Biden Family’s business interests, an appropriate first response is to blame the Democrats. An appropriate and necessary second response is to blame the Republican-controlled state legislatures who certified electoral votes in the face of massive fraud.

But never forget that a third and final step of the blame goes right to the heart of the Trump campaign, who fell asleep on the job. All because they wouldn’t listen to someone from outside the establishment. It’s an ironically bitter way for the first Trump presidency to have ended. None of it had to happen. There were people who saw it coming.