On election night 2020, the centre of pro-Trump MAGA world was the rooftop terrace at 101 Constitution Avenue in Washington DC.
Once top Trump adviser, now podcaster Steve Bannon was in his element.
The United States Capitol building was lit up behind him, there was a chill in the air, and Bannon was kicking off what would wind up being an eight hour election-night broadcast.
He sat at the centre of a panel of guests from what he called the “alternative conservative media”. He had a panel, maps, an election data guy and everything.
Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon fronts an election night broadcast of his show War Room on the night of the 2020 election.
Around 100 of Donald Trump’s supporters were there on the rooftop with him, ready for a big night of partying.
Bannon’s show had all the elements of an election night broadcast. But it was a lot stranger than that.
In fact, on that same rooftop there were four different broadcasts happening at the same time.
There was Bannon’s show, there was another right wing TV network, a right-wing radio network, and a dissident Chinese broadcaster, GNews and GTV.
GNews and GTV were part of a massive billion dollar fraud being run by an exiled Chinese friend of Steve Bannon. They weren’t legitimate news organisations as much as a way to get money out of Chinese expats.
But even if your news organisation is an investment scam, covering an election takes planning.
Leaked audio of Steve Bannon reveals an election night plan
On October 31, 2020, the weekend before the election, Bannon met with staff from the Chinese outlets to explain how the election night would play out.
The audio of that meeting was leaked to the news outlet Mother Jones in 2022.
In it, Bannon told his broadcast partners that Trump would declare victory, early in the night.
“He’s gonna declare victory. But that doesn’t mean he’s a winner.”
Bannon knew something that would be key to Trump’s election denial-strategy: a basic piece of political science called the ‘blue shift’.
Basically, when vote counting begins on election night, things initially look very good for Republicans like Donald Trump, but then, as the night goes on, results shift towards the Democrats.
It happens because Republicans are clustered in small towns, which report results faster.
In that Halloween meeting, Bannon explained to his associates how this quirk in the electoral system would be used by Donald Trump to make people question the election results.
“They’re going to have a natural disadvantage and Trump’s going to take advantage of that.”
So, according to Bannon, on election night Donald Trump would declare victory before the Blue Shift happened. Before Democratic party votes in big cities and mail-in ballots are tallied and added to the vote counts.
“That’s our strategy — he’s going to declare himself a winner, so when you wake up Wednesday morning it’s going to be a firestorm.”
And he went further than that.
“If Trump is losing by 10 or 11 o’clock at night, it’s going to be even crazier,” Bannon said.
“He’s going to sit right there and say they stole it.
“If Biden’s winnin’, Trump is going to do some crazy shit.”
And of course, three days later, election night played out as Bannon had said.
Donald Trump fronted television cameras and, far from conceding defeat, called the election result a “fraud on the American public”.
“This is an embarrassment to our country. We were getting ready to win this election,” he said.
“Frankly, we did win this election. We did win this election.”
On election night 2020 the world watched on as president Donald Trump refused to concede. (AP: John Locher)
Earlier this month, more details of Donald Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election were revealed when a 165-page court filing was unsealed.
The filing cites previously unknown accounts by the former president’s closest aides, and alleges that Trump “laid the groundwork” for rejecting the election results before the contest was over.
He allegedly told advisers in the event he held an early lead, he would “declare victory before the ballots were counted and any winner was projected”.
The 64 days of chaos and conspiracy that followed
In 2020, the plan to deny the presidential election result didn’t get much more complex than what Steve Bannon outlined in that leaked Halloween planning meeting.
Over the months that followed, Donald Trump and his allies tried to improvise their way to victory in an election they knew they had lost.
You can trace the theories and strategies they used in the talking points amplified on Steve Bannon’s podcast.
Key to denying the legitimacy of the result itself was a conspiracy theory espoused by retired Air Force General Thomas McInerney.
“The Hammer is a surveillance tool … that the Obama administration, two weeks after they took over, put it into another location and started using it politically against their enemies, and then they modified it with this software package that changes the votes … the software package is called Scorecard.”
The Hammer and Scorecard. A government-run supercomputer and a secretive piece of software. Together they were supposedly used to flip votes in real time on election night, from red Trump votes to blue Biden ones.
In the days after the election, this is the theory that spread through the MAGA media ecosystem that Steve Bannon was part of.
It became the ‘big lie’ underpinning a widespread push to deny the election result.
The Hammer and Scorecard conspiracy debunked
The Hammer and Scorecard lie was one that fit in well with the reality of the ‘blue shift’.
None of it was true. Not only did Democrats not hack the election, there’s no evidence that the Hammer and Scorecard exist.
Things have not turned out well for anyone involved in pushing the Hammer and Scorecard theory.
Former White House strategist Steve Bannon is due to get out of jail the week before the election this November. (AP: Alex Brandon, file)
Steve Bannon is in jail for contempt of congress, awaiting release five days before the election. Bannon’s Chinese business partner is in jail for fraud. His Chinese news network, which was part of that fraud, is gone.
But that’s the case with all the theories used to deny the 2020 election result. None of the theories about election fraud have been proven true, but that doesn’t really matter. Millions believe it.
The danger of this misinformation was evident when thousands of Donald Trump’s supporters stormed the US Capitol building on January 6, 2021, looking to stop what they saw as fraudulent certification of the election result.
A mob of supporters of US president Donald Trump storm the US Capitol Building in Washington DC on January 6, 2021. (Reuters: Leah Millis)
Almost 70 per cent of Republicans now say they believe the election was stolen.
Many of Donald Trump’s supporters have spent the last four years believing this, and it’s played a key part in his bid to win back the White House.
Making the vote ‘Too big to rig’
Denial of the 2020 election result has factored heavily into Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign for the presidency.
In a frequent cry at his political rallies he implores his supporters to make the result this November “too big to rig” — the implication being that the slim 2020 loss in key swing states was the result of fraud.
It shows the tightrope Donald Trump must walk to get his MAGA supporters to cast a ballot.
People who believe the 2020 vote was “rigged” need a reason to bother trying again.
Donald Trump often rouses crowds with chants of ‘too big to rig’ at rallies. (Reuters: Tom Brenner)
Donald Trump has confused the matter in recent months, angering some supporters by saying in interviews and at rallies that he “lost by a whisker”.
But in his September debate with Democratic nominee Kamala Harris he walked the comment back, claiming it was said with sarcasm.
And in a rally this month in the swing state of Michigan, Trump was back to repeating false claims that he had won the 2020 election.
“We have to be too big to rig, you know that … turn out and vote in record numbers.
“You know, last time, last election, we did great in 2016, a lot of people don’t know, we did much better in 2020.
“We won. We won. We did win. It was a rigged election. It was a rigged election.”
“You have to tell Kamala Harris, that’s why I’m doing it again. If I thought I’d lost, I wouldn’t be doing this again.”
Will Donald Trump accept a close result this time?
In 2022 retired judge J. Michael Luttig gave evidence to US Congress about the events of January 6.
Michael Luttig, seated next to Greg Jacob, testifies at the House select committee investigating the January 6 attack on the US Capitol. (ABC News: Cameron Schwarz)
He told the committee that Donald Trump and his allies are a clear and present danger to American democracy.
“That’s not because of what happened on January 6th,” Judge Luttig said.
“It’s because to this very day, the former president, his allies and supporters pledged that in the presidential election of 2024, if the former president … were to lose that election, that they would attempt to overturn [it] in the same way that they attempted to overturn the 2020 election but succeed in 2024 where they failed in 2020.”
Judge Luttig said the former president and his allies were executing their blueprint for 2024 “in open and plain view of the American public”.
That blueprint draws heavily on the failed attempt to deny the 2020 election result.
But while the denial of that election was orchestrated on the fly, Donald Trump’s response to a close loss this time will benefit from four years of planning from his team and his supporters.
Donald Trump’s campaign sells merchandise featuring his mug shot. (Reuters: Alyssa Pointer)
Many who believe the 2020 election was “stolen” by Trump’s opponents have themselves become involved in the political system, seeking local roles that involve certifying the election result.
Given the rhetoric of his campaign, it’s unlikely a close result will see Donald Trump concede on election night.
And if Donald Trump wins the election fair and square, we’ll hear a lot more about the stolen 2020 election, not less, as he uses the office of the president to make sure nothing like that ever happens again.
