It did not occur to Bertha Lewis to be afraid.

She was watching the final presidential debate of 2008, and John McCain had just said something insane. We need to know the full extent of Senator Obamas relationship with ACORN, who is now on the verge of maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history in this country, maybe destroying the fabric of democracy, the Arizona Republican proclaimed.

Lewis had been leading ACORN the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now for about five months. ACORN advocated for the poor. In addition to helping families navigate federal aid programs, the group ran campaigns to improve city sanitation, protested against predatory lenders and registered people to vote. The nations top Republican politician had just declared this body of work tantamount to stealing an election.

It was absurd, Lewis said in a recent interview. Those words had no meaning.

If anything, Lewis reasoned, the attack was probably good news. Republicans had always loathed ACORN, in no small part because poor voters tend to vote Democrat, but open, inflammatory denunciations of the group were generally confined to the talk radio fringe.

Lewis had been bogged down in a top-to-bottom overhaul of ACORNs financial and managerial structure ever since she accepted her promotion. If GOP leaders were escalating things in October, she figured it meant she was running a solid voter registration operation despite all the paperwork shed been buried in.

McCains debate paranoia wasnt an isolated outburst. It became the Republican Party s closing pitch for the 2008 election, amplified in political media. U.S. newspapers published over 1,700 stories on ACORN during October more than 10 times the average monthly total so far that year. More than three-fourths of these stories were devoted to allegations of voter fraud.

The illegal voting accusations never panned out. But within 18 months, Lewis would be forced to close ACORNs doors exhausted, short-staffed, out of money and, most important, out of allies.

ACORN had survived for more than 40 years. Its sudden collapse was a defining moment in 21st century American politics. The explosive cocktail of racism, dishonesty, incompetence and cowardice that brought down the organization reveals as much about Washington Democrats as it does about the conservative movement. It marked the Republican Partys full transition from the coded winks and nods of Richard Nixons Southern strategy to the bellicose white nativism that defines Donald Trump , and it exposed a Democratic Party establishment unprepared for dirty tricks in the Digital Age and unwilling to defend many of the black voters and activists it claimed to represent.