News — 2020Elections

In the Before Times, Jody Kanikula and a half dozen fellow Democratic women activists would gather for drinks each Thursday after the weekly Kane County Democrats meeting in Geneva, Illinois. These days, they settle for Saturday morning Zoom calls to reimagine what their political organizing looks like now that their preferred tools of the trade—door knocking and mail drops—are off the table. I met Kanikula and her friends in October 2018, a high season of political activity. The group was trying to elect Democrat Lauren Underwood, then a 32-year-old nurse who’d guided the implementation of the Affordable Care Act, to...

Make Money. Maybe Not in That Order. On the night of the 2020 Iowa caucuses, Brad Parscale, President Trump’s campaign manager and technology guru, arrived at an elementary school on the outskirts of Des Moines. With attention focused on the hard-fought Democratic contest, Trump sought to steal a bit of the spotlight by displaying total dominance over his no-hope opponents. As part of the process, each GOP candidate had dispatched someone to caucus sites around the state’s largest city to speak on their behalf. For some 100 voters in suburban Urbandale, it was Parscale. A 6-foot-8-inch Texan with a red...