THE CENTER HOLDS:

But first . . . Biden needed a little help. It was January 2020. Sanders was surging in the Democratic presidential primary and the former vice president was sputtering, holding out hope the South Carolina primary on February 29 would salvage his third White House bid and save him from an embarrassing hat trick. Team Trump was rallying for "Crazy Bernie," trying to give the socialist Vermont senator a boost in a bid to extinguish the one viable, mortal threat to the incumbent's reelection.

In fact, if Democrats were serious about electability, they'd nominate the guy who actually won primary contests and proved he can play David to Goliath in key places four short years ago. Sanders bested Clinton in 22 states in 2016, including battlegrounds such as Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota, while earning more than 13 million votes and 1,800 delegates.

Their meddling gave Longwell a germ of an idea. If Team Trump could interfere in the Democratic primary, so could she--but on behalf of Biden, who stood a better chance against the president in the general election. Or, to be more precise, stood any chance. Tim Miller, the veteran Republican consultant turned outspoken Never Trump political operative, helped transform Longwell's idea into an executable game plan. Miller, who is gay, spent what seemed like a lifetime in Republican politics in Washington as a pithy, slice-and-dice communications strategist with a sharp eye for narrative: spokesman for the Republican National Committee; spokesman for former Utah governor Jon Huntsman's 2012 presidential campaign; spokesman for former Florida governor Jeb Bush's 2016 presidential campaign; original cofounder of America Rising, a Republican super PAC that concentrates on digging up, and weaponizing, opposition research against the Democrats. After Bush's White House dreams faded, Miller pivoted to Our Principles PAC, possibly the first of the anti-Trump groups, in a bid to block the Republican front-runner from the nomination. Miller, then, was more than a Never Trump gun for hire; he was a true believer.

Skip ahead four years. Miller had left Washington and decamped to the Bay Area of Northern California. With the first votes of the 2020 presidential primaries about to begin, Miller and his like-minded circle of Republican expatriates were talking about what they were going to do. They weren't voting for Trump--obviously. But with a remotely viable GOP challenger failing to emerge to give them another Republican option, what to do? Should they vote in the Democratic primary? Could they? If they wanted to, and if they could, how would that work, logistically?

All of that got Miller thinking that there might be a lot of Republican voters, or independents who regularly participated in Republican primaries in states with open nominating contests, who were like him and his friends: contemplating voting Democrat for the first time in their lives but with no idea how to go about it.

Together, through Center Action Now, a political nonprofit they founded, Longwell and Miller married the ideas of giving Biden a leg up in the Democratic primary by playing in states that allowed non-Democrats to participate, boosting the participation of disaffected Republicans and center-right independents. The plan was to generate votes for Biden by encouraging registered Republicans, conservative independents, and swing voters opposed to Trump to support a so-called moderate alternative to Sanders--and educating them how to do so. Longwell and Miller had a pretty good idea of who these voters might be, too.

Between the approximately three hundred thousand people who had signed up to support Republicans for the Rule of Law, the group Longwell and Kristol started to support the Russia investigation, plus subscribers to the Bulwark, she had amassed a decent list of prospective voters, many of them living in the suburbs, who identified as moderates, Republican-leaning independents, and soft Republicans who tended to be unhappy with Trump's leadership and open to supporting his 2020 Democratic challenger. With the purchase of additional voter lists and bolstered by knowledge of the electorate gained through her focus group work, Longwell and Miller ran a very robust but very under-the-radar digital campaign, text messaging and the like, targeting these voters. It wasn't a persuasion advertising campaign. Center Action Now was not specifically advocating for Biden. It was simple electioneering: show up and vote. Longwell and Miller figured if their target audience participated in the Democratic primary, they were more likely to punch the chad for Biden; former South Bend, Indiana, mayor Pete Buttigieg; or Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar than they were for Sanders (and by extension, über progressive Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren). And that was good enough.

In New Hampshire, where the effort started, Sanders still won. But Buttigieg and Klobuchar finished a close second and third. In South Carolina, where Longwell went next, Biden resurrected his campaign with a resounding victory. There, she focused on turning out voters in suburban Greenville, in the upstate region. Next, Longwell took her turnout game to suburban Dallas and Houston, in Texas, as well as Virginia. Both Super Tuesday states helped Biden solidify what was then a growing lead in nominating delegates. This effort was the progenitor of Republican Voters Against Trump, the group Longwell and Miller would unveil next to elect Biden, the eventual Democratic nominee who they had a hand in boosting at a critical time.

As much as Longwell and Miller despised Trump, they learned something along the way that some of his detractors, especially the Democrats among them, couldn't come to terms with. He had won in 2016 because so many Republican voters who would never countenance a racist, or an authoritarian, or a crook, didn't think he was any of that. Was Trump the dictionary definition of "moral rectitude"? Obviously not. Personally offensive and given to hyperbole? Obviously yes. But the country was broken and maybe this pragmatic businessman provocateur could fix it. And that was the thing--in the swing states that matter in presidential elections, a majority of voters didn't see Trump as particularly ideologically threatening. This image, and pure, unadulterated distrust in and distaste for Clinton, helped the 2016 Republican nominee hold on to traditional Republican voters while expanding the GOP tent by adding a bunch of white working-class Democrats and former Democrats. This crucial community of traditional Republican voters was not tiring of Trump because of the record number of conservative judges he appointed to the federal bench, or because he moved the U.S. embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, or because he championed a historic $1.3 trillion overhaul of the federal tax code.

No, what gave them pause was his conduct (the frothing, impolitic tweets and public utterances): the chaos in Washington that he fomented, that he thrived on, of which the most troubling aspect was his seeming lack of command over the government response to the coronavirus and his penchant for spraying gasoline on the fire of racial unrest that gripped the country in the aftermath of George Floyd's death. Longwell and Miller figured out how to reach those voters, and where they could make a difference--states like Arizona, North Carolina, Pennsylvania. (Biden won two out of three.) They listened to disappointed Trump voters in focus groups and tested advertising. Mean spots that hit voters smack in the face with the litany of Trump's supposed failures, the stuff the Lincoln Project was peddling, were a turn-off. This is the sort of politics Trump practiced that they were, theoretically, trying to get away from. So instead, they asked Republican voters who pulled the lever for Trump the first time but wouldn't do so again in 2020 to record testimonials and send them in to Republican Voters Against Trump. These became the ads the group ran in major advertising campaigns in key swing states, raising and spending more than $10 million from July to November. The clips commissioned by Longwell and Miller even showed up at the virtual Democratic convention that nominated Biden as a part of the former vice president's strategy to appeal to disaffected Republican voters.

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