Michelle Obama can predict the future. Well, she can shape it anyway. 

Back in 2012, she stood before the assembled throng at the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, North Carolina, and said words that are still shaping elections a decade later. “Let’s be clear,” Michelle said, “elections aren’t just about who votes but who doesn’t vote.” 

Today, we finally understand what she meant.

Here’s what happened: just a few weeks after Biden moved out of his basement and into the Oval Office, he was handed a piece of paper to sign – a paper that set in motion an extremely clever scheme designed by the Obamas and their Biden-managing team. The paper is Executive Order 14019, and it was signed on March 7, 2021. Within its flowery language is something without precedent in our history. Specifically, it deputized every single federal agency and office across the nation to identify eligible voters, get them registered, and help them vote. 

In crafting this order, the so-called “elites” had a very specific mission in mind. They already had a sense that Democrats would suffer a bloodbath in the 2022 midterm elections. Their party’s notional leader was Joe Biden for goodness sake, and election watchers were already predicting a “red wave” for the GOP. They also understood that if Republicans regained majorities in Congress, the radical Obama-Biden agenda would be stopped dead in its tracks. 

That needed to be prevented at all costs – even if the price to be paid was the integrity of America’s elections. So, the elites put Michelle’s words into motion. Enter Executive Order 14019.

For the first time ever, the federal government dove directly into the election process, with officials identifying and contacting federal benefits recipients who might be inclined to vote for Democrats. Food stamp recipients, job training participants, and farm workers were among the millions contacted and assisted. True, many of them may not have planned to vote in the midterms or even known who the candidates were, but no matter. As soon as the officials (who happened to be the source of the benefits they received) urged them to register and fill out ballots, many of them did exactly that. 

This isn’t conjecture – it’s documented. For example, the Labor Department sent a memo to state and local officials who administer the huge sums of federal cash that fund their programs. The memo advised officials to use the nation’s nearly 2,400 American Job Centers (AJCs) not solely for job training and employment services. That’s so pre-Biden! Instead, Labor called on them to be used as voter registration agencies, where job training participants would register to vote – with the officials’ help, of course. What to do with all those ballots? Simple – the Labor memo also authorized job training centers to engage in “collecting and transporting voter registration forms.” Factual, documented, and flat-out wrong.

Congress and election watchdogs found out about this and filed multiple Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to get to the bottom of it. At no point, however, have their FOIA requests ever received a fulsome response, and an Obama-appointed judge blocked disclosure. Even when ordered to come clean, Merrick Garland’s highly partisan Department of Justice only issued heavily redacted documents that hid the real story.

Meanwhile, ballot harvesting occurred on an unprecedented scale. As Biden actually boasted on video, “We have put together I think the most extensive and inclusive voter fraud organization in the history of American politics.” (That’s not a typo – he actually said it!) In a report perversely named “Strengthening Democracy,” 14019’s backers estimated that it “could collectively generate an additional 3.5 million voter registration applications per year.”

As for the 2022 and 2023 elections, I’ve examined the data and reached my own conclusion: the “red wave” of 2022 and the strong GOP showing of 2023 that nearly every pollster anticipated did in fact happen. Americans of all types have told pollsters they are sick and tired of the damage being done by the Obama-Biden regime and are ready for a new direction. 

So, why didn’t Republicans regain the Senate in 2022 and win key races in 2023? Executive Order 14019 is why. In 2022, for example, a red wave did roar across America, as over 3,000,000 more votes were cast for Republicans than Democrats. But it ran smack into what I call the blue wall.

Or to be precise, Michelle’s blue wall.

Nor am I the only one to note this. My friend Jason Chaffetz recently wrote about the 14019 scheme. And legendary election watcher, Charlie Cook, observed, “Clearly something or someone intervened, affecting the outcome of the election in the places that mattered.” You don’t say…

Ashley Hayek (@AshleyHayek) is Executive Director of America First Works, Chief Engagement Officer of America First Policy Institute, and the author of Beat the Elites!: 5 Steps to Stop the Elites and Save America.

 The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of The Daily Caller.