"For an effective anti-Trump move to take place... the G.O.P. would have to display the sort of coördination that the moderate wing of the Democratic Party showed in 2020..."

"... after Bernie Sanders finished first in the New Hampshire primary. On that occasion, Congressman James Clyburn threw his support behind Joe Biden in South Carolina, and two of the moderate candidates—Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar—dropped out and endorsed Biden. Ayres didn’t go so far as to say that a Republican Party still dominated by Trump could engineer a similar feat...."

Writes John Cassidy in "Can Anybody Stop Donald Trump in the 2024 Republican Primary? Even as the former President has a commanding poll lead in a splintered field, one veteran G.O.P. consultant argues that it’s too early to coronate him" (The New Yorker).

Ayres = Whit Ayres, a consultant and pollster who isn't advising anyone at the moment but who has, in the past, has advised Marco Rubio, Lindsey Graham, and Ron DeSantis.

Exactly how did "the moderate wing of the Democratic Party" "engineer" that "feat"? They just had to stop Bernie.

ADDED: I searched the New Yorker archive to see if it had ever tried to answer my question how the Dems engineered that feat, and I found "Republican Officials Have Got to Start Telling Their Voters the Truth About the Election." (I laughed when I saw the publication date: November 16, 2020). Excerpt:

Clyburn’s decision, just ahead of the February 29th South Carolina primary, to endorse Biden and campaign for him, has been seen as transformative.

Oh? It was just "Clyburn's decision"? Wasn't it "engineered" by the Democratic moderates?

Biden won almost fifty per cent of the vote in the South Carolina primary, in what was then still a crowded field of seven major candidates; Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar promptly dropped out and endorsed him, just in time for Super Tuesday. 

“If it were not for you, I don’t think he would have gotten the nomination,” Jake Tapper, of CNN, told Clyburn. “And I have no idea whether—whether or not I’d be covering a Democratic President-elect.” 

Clyburn, in response, suggested that the real credit should go to an “elderly lady” he had encountered sitting in the front pew at a rural church, who had called him over and asked which candidate he was voting for. She added, “If you don’t want anybody else to hear, just lean down and whisper it in my ear.”

Oh! Mystery solved! No savvy moderate Dems engineering feats, but a little old lady in a rural church! We're supposed to believe that, but, good heavens, don't believe any of Trump's theories about what the Dems did to him. 

“And I did what she asked me to do,” Clyburn said. What persuaded him to do more, though, was “the way she looked in my face and told me, ‘I needed to hear that, and this community needs to hear from you.’ ”

The way she looked in his face... and that's why Joe Biden became President.

The moral of the story, as Clyburn saw it, is that his choices and his actions had “bubbled up” from those of the people he served...

It was of the people, bubbling up, not anything that came down from the moderate Democrats. 

... he had already decided that he would vote for Biden but wasn’t sure how vocal he would be about it until that woman looked him in the eye. And there is something worth contemplating in the idea that an elderly lady in a rural church might have had a part in changing history; it mattered not only that Clyburn endorsed Biden but that he did it so loudly and wholeheartedly, rallying voters....

It's worth contemplating the idea all right. I'm contemplating the idea that we're expected to believe it all happened organically.

Thanks for the laugh, New Yorker archive, but my question remains" Exactly how did "the moderate wing of the Democratic Party" "engineer" that "feat"? 

I mean, your point is that "the G.O.P. would have to display the sort of coördination" the Dems displayed in 2020. So what was the "coördination"? Does the GOP just need its own little old lady in a pew at a rural church?

AND: "... after Bernie Sanders finished first in the New Hampshire primary..." No mention of the strange dragged-out proceedings in the Iowa caucuses. Was that part of "the sort of coördination" the Democratic moderates pulled off in 2020?

It's a great word — "coördination." I especially like The New Yorker's diaeresis here. So distracting! But I won't be distracted! I want to say "coördination" is so much like that word they don't want us to say: collüsion.