Eliana Willis

Before the dust had settled on Joe Biden’s presidential victory, a news cycle had begun, yet again, about how the Democratic party was in disarray. Representative Jim Clyburn, the juggernaut of South Carolina Democratic politics and a frequent emissary for the centrist wing of the party, began telling news reporters that he feared that the summer’s Black Lives Matter protests, and in particular the slogan “Defund the Police”, had dampened the Democrat’s chances of strengthening their majority in the House and retaking the US Senate.
On a tense conference call for the party’s House of Representatives caucus on Thursday, Abigail Spanberger, a Virginia congresswoman who narrowly won re-election on Tuesday, expressed the same concern. Meanwhile, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the standard bearer of the party’s progressive wing, gave an interview to the New York Times urging her party to adopt more modern voter engagement tactics and to view the left as allies, not obstacles. “I need my colleagues to understand that we are not the enemy,” she said. “And that their base is not the enemy. That the Movement for Black Lives is not the enemy, that Medicare for all is not the enemy.”
Democratic infighting is an old story, one that comes up perennially, sometimes ascribed to generational or regional differences: the younger, more city-dwelling Democrats want universal healthcare and demand racial justice; the older, suburbanite Democrats shush them, worrying they will scare off the white suburban swing voters whom centrists believe that Democrats need for a majority. The conflict is repeated ad nauseam, whether Democrats lose or whether they win.
But the truth is that the Democratic party is indeed a deeply divided one. The coalition that swept Joe Biden to victory was massive, diverse and profoundly self-contradictory. It contained older Black voters with religious convictions that are not dissimilar to those of the white evangelicals who power the American right, and it contained younger Black voters who believe fiercely in transgender civil rights and the dismantling of the police state. It contained white college-educated women who took offense at Trump’s crass language and it contained young Latino voters who feared for his threats to their citizenship. It is a coalition composed of the vast majority of all the Americans who are not white and a sizable minority of the Americans who are, of people who identify as socialists and people who see socialism as a serious threat to their way of life, people who desperately fear for abortion rights and people who deeply oppose them. The Democratic coalition, in other words, is huge – composed of people with competing, mutually exclusive goals, people who, in the end, probably would not always like each other.
How did the Democrats wind up here, with such a very big tent, with so many competing demands underneath it? In large part, the answer to how the Democratic party’s coalition became so huge and contradictory lies not with the Democrats, but with Republicans. Throughout the Trump era but also for decades before, stretching back to the Nixon administration, the Republican party has played an aggressive base politics, shaping its policy positions and public rhetoric around white racial grievance. As Americans of color have grown in numbers and the share of the white vote has decreased, Republicans have not adjusted their stance to be more welcoming to non-white voters, but instead have increasingly relied on gerrymandering, voter suppression and anti-democratic institutional advantages to secure their continued power even in the absence of majority support. The Republicans have abandoned the pretense of trying to convince a majority of voters to back their vision for the country, and instead have taken on an electoral strategy that is about power, not persuasion.
Republicans gerrymander congressional and state legislature districts to ensure Republican majorities in these bodies even when Democrats receive more votes, and they suppress the vote with archaic, burdensome and racially targeted state laws to ensure Republican victories even in races that would be competitive with a complete, free electorate. The result is that Democrats can often achieve only divided government at best even when, like in the 2020 election, they produce a massive majority of the votes. Republicans, meanwhile, can often secure united government even with a minority of votes. Faced with defeat, the anti-democracy Republican party need not even accept the results of an election that does not go in their favor, as we have seen over the past few days as the Trump campaign and Republican-controlled justice department sue in an attempt to have votes for Biden in many swing states declared illegal. Republican power relies heavily on these anti-democracy tactics, so heavily that in many instances the party no longer intends to persuade a majority of voters. They intend, instead, to secure minority rule.
The result is that the competition between the Republican and Democratic parties has become de facto not a competition between ideologies or policy positions, but a competition between pro-and anti-democracy forces. Though the Republicans sometimes make half-hearted, clumsy and comedically tone-deaf overtures towards men of color in an attempt to secure their votes – Donald Trump increased his share of the Latino male vote significantly in the 2020 election, and attempted to court Black male voters by staging a bizarre photo op with the New Orleans rapper Lil Wayne – their overall strategy has been to remain in power by making it as difficult as possible for people to vote, and by especially targeting the voting rights of Black Americans. The goal is to ensure that the votes which matter most belong to their white minority of supporters.
With one party committed to suppressing the vote, and only one other party remaining that considers itself accountable to voters, its no wonder that the Democratic party has assembled a coalition of so many disparate and conflicting constituencies. As the only pro-democracy party left in America, the Democrats have had to take as their mandate all the different democratic ambitions of a vast and diverse nation. Voters of different ideological stripes, ages and agendas have begun voting Democratic because the Republican party is repugnant to their principles in some cases, outright hostile to their citizenship in others. In other words, many voters have come under the Democratic tent because there is nowhere else for them to go.
What does such a large coalition mean for the Democrats? In one sense, it’s an advantage – it means overwhelming popular support. Democratic party surrogates never tire of reminding Americans that their party has won the popular vote in every election except one since 1992. Those popular vote majorities are sizable, too – Joe Biden’s popular vote lead over Donald Trump is set to surpass 5m, even bigger than Hillary Clinton’s 3m popular vote lead in 2016. Anti-democratic provisions in the American constitution mean that more votes do not always translate to more power – Republicans control the Senate, for instance, even though their Democratic colleagues in that body represent millions more constituents. But in the long term, it means that Democrats have popular opinion, and sheer numbers, on their side.
But the heft of the Democratic coalition also means that the party is swollen and overburdened, attempting to be all things to all its voters, attempting to please everyone at once. There is no coherent Democratic agenda, to speak of. The Biden campaign made little effort to draw attention to its policy proposals during the election season, relying instead on vague, broadly appealing rhetoric about the nation’s soul. Though the party has leaned heavily on the issue of healthcare, perhaps the one policy area that affects every single voter, the party’s healthcare agenda has been inconsistent across congressional districts, with Democrats calling for a single-payer system in blue areas and for a strengthened or merely maintained Affordable Care Act in purple ones. The issue is perhaps emblematic of the party’s problem in representing too many different groups: they can’t have one message, because there’s nothing that so many different people can all agree on.
Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

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Joe Biden’s team is pressing forward with preparations to take over the federal government when his term starts despite virtually no help from Donald Trump’s outgoing administration.
The president-elect faces choices that will either please or anger the bickering wings of his party as leftists and centrists vie to set the direction of the incoming Democratic administration. The process also sends a clear message to the Republican party and Trump: Biden won and will be sitting in the White House come January.
“The truth is the Trump administration can file whatever it wants to the federal register, can do whatever executive orders it wants until noon on January 20th, and at that moment they can no longer do it and the Biden people get to stop whatever they had in the pipeline and put whatever they want in their own pipeline,” said Tevi Troy, who helped run the transition to the second Bush-Cheney term in 2004. Troy also authored Fight House: Rivalries in the White House from Truman to Trump.
The Biden team, Troy added, “know the things they want to stop from happening and they’re just going to go do it”.

On Wednesday night Biden took his most significant step yet, naming Ron Klain, a longtime aide, as his chief of staff. The move underscored that even as Biden vows to fill out his administration with figures spanning all wings of the Democratic party, he also plans to include hands familiar with the conventional levers of Washington DC.
“He wants people who are super capable … part of what you want to do is restore faith in government, in public service and the way that career folks are treated,” said Lisa Brown, a former staff secretary for Barack Obama’s administration who worked on the 2008 presidential transition.
Brown noted that Biden’s team was focused on diversity. “A lot of what he wants to do if we don’t get the Senate back is going to be harder and so one of the things he’s got control over is the people that he wants to appoint. So you can show people you’re representing America even if you’re not able to get through Congress some of the initiatives.”
Klain’s appointment comes at a moment of high political tension in Washington. Despite losing the popular vote and electoral college, Trump has not conceded the race, and the General Services Administration, the federal agency in charge of supporting other agencies, has not yet given the Biden team the normal designation a victorious presidential campaign gets.
A sign-off from the administrator of the GSA is required for an incoming administration to get some essential transition resources – such as access to classified briefings – and take steps for background checks on cabinet appointees. In past elections, the GSA has recognized the results much faster. More

Donald Trump “promised an elixir for the racial anxiety” of “millions of Americans spooked by a black man in the White House”, Barack Obama writes in his eagerly awaited memoir.Those Americans, Obama writes, were prey to “the dark spirits that had long been lurking on the edges of the modern Republican party – xenophobia, anti-intellectualism, paranoid conspiracy theories, an antipathy toward black and brown folks”.In A Promised Land, which comes out on Tuesday, Obama continues: “It was as if my very presence in the White House had triggered a deep-seated panic, a sense that the natural order had been disrupted. Which is exactly what Donald Trump understood when he started peddling assertions that I had not been born in the United States and was thus an illegitimate president.”Penguin Random House reportedly paid the former president and his wife, Michelle Obama, $65m for books about their time in the White House. The former first lady’s memoir, Becoming, came out in 2018 to widespread acclaim.Excerpts of Obama’s book have run in the press – the remarks above were reported by CNN – and the former president is due to speak to CBS in two interviews on Sunday. The New York Times has also run a lengthy review. The 768-page volume is the first of two, covering Obama’s rise to the US Senate and then the White House as the 44th president, from 2009 to 2017. It has been a struggle to write.“I figured I could do all that in maybe 500 pages,” Obama wrote in an excerpt published by the Atlantic on Thursday. “I expected to be done in a year. It’s fair to say that the writing process didn’t go exactly as I’d planned.”Obama also says he is “painfully aware that a more gifted writer could have found a way to tell the same story with greater brevity (after all, my home office in the White House sat right next to the Lincoln Bedroom, where a signed copy of the 272-word Gettysburg Address rests inside a glass case)”.A Promised Land heads for the shelves as Trump refuses to concede a clear electoral defeat by Joe Biden, Obama’s vice-president, deepening dangerous political divides.Obama considers Trump’s rise, from reality TV host and political gadfly, champion of the “birther” lie which held that Obama was not born in the US, to outsider candidate, GOP nominee and norm-shattering president.Obama recalls his first presidential election and the storm over his healthcare reform, the Affordable Care Act (ACA), two years later. He echoes many observers in detecting the roots of Trumpism in the surprise rise of Sarah Palin, the Alaska governor who became John McCain’s running mate in 2008 and two years later fanned the flames of the Tea Party, the rightwing movement which railed against the ACA.“Through Palin,” Obama writes, “it seemed as if the dark spirits that had long been lurking on the edges of the modern Republican party – xenophobia, anti intellectualism, paranoid conspiracy theories, an antipathy toward black and brown folks – were finding their way to centre stage.”Obama wonders whether McCain would have picked Palin had he suspected that “her spectacular rise and her validation as a candidate would provide a template for future politicians, shifting his party’s center and the country’s politics overall in a direction he abhorred.“I’d like to think that given the chance to do it over again, he might have chosen differently. I believe he really did put his country first. We’re better than this.”Reviewing Trump’s rise to power, Obama considers how Trump seized on a growing inclination among Republicans to dispense with evidence and polite political convention, in the name of simply opposing the first black president.“In that sense,” Obama writes, “there wasn’t much difference between Trump and [House speaker John] Boehner or [Senate majority leader Mitch] McConnell. They, too, understood that it didn’t matter whether what they said was true … in fact, the only difference between Trump’s style of politics and theirs was Trump’s lack of inhibition.”As the Biden presidency approaches, Republicans seem likely to hold the Senate. Among Democrats, much hope of legislative progress rests with how the new president will be able to deal with the notoriously hardline Senate leader.Obama writes that he chose Biden as his emissary to McConnell in part because of his own “awareness that in McConnell’s mind, negotiations with the vice-president didn’t inflame the Republican base in quite the same way that any appearance of co-operation with (black, Muslim socialist) Obama was bound to do”.Obama discusses his famous roast of Trump at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner in 2011, on the same night a Navy Seal team was preparing to find and kill Osama bin Laden. He also details two surprising offers of help from Trump – to plug the Deepwater Horizon oil well, in 2010, and to build a pavilion on the White House lawn. Both were turned down.In the Atlantic excerpt, an adaptation of the preface to A Promised Land, the former president comments on the 2020 election, during which he campaigned for Biden.“I’m encouraged by the record-setting number of Americans who turned out to vote,” he writes, “and have an abiding trust in Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, in their character and capacity to do what is right.“But I also know that no single election will settle the matter. Our divisions run deep; our challenges are daunting.”But at the end of a year marked by national protests for racial justice, Obama’s thoughts and comments about race and his presidency will no doubt earn particular attention. At one point, CNN reported, he writes of watching television with his wife Michelle, and catching “a glimpse of a Tea Party rally”.“She seized the remote and turned off the set,” Obama writes, “her expression hovering somewhere between rage and resignation. ‘It’s a trip, isn’t it?’ she said … ‘That they’re scared of you. Scared of us.’” More

Donald Trump’s attacks on the credibility of Joe Biden’s election win through meritless lawsuits could undermine Americans’ trust in voting and could pose an immediate threat to the security and safety of the country, experts have warned.
Trump’s campaign has unleashed a stream of lawsuits in states key to Biden’s electoral college win, none of which are expected to affect the outcome of the election.
The US attorney general, William Barr, has authorized the Department of Justice to investigate voting irregularities, in a highly unorthodox move, and Republican state representatives in Pennsylvania are calling for an audit of the election, though they have no evidence of fraud.
University of Southern California (USC) law professor Franita Tolson said she was concerned that these actions, which would not change the trajectory of the election, were meant to call into question the legitimacy of the result.
“What does that do to our democracy as we play out this process? What does it do to the belief in the system when 70 million people think the election was stolen,” Tolson said, referring to the popular vote total for Trump. “To me that’s the danger of this narrative, that’s the danger of this litigation.”
Top election officials in every state, representing both political parties, told the New York Times there was no evidence that fraud or other irregularities played a role in the outcome of the race. A coalition of hundreds of journalists from more than 150 newsrooms also found no major problems, in ProPublica’s collaborative election monitoring project Electionland.
“Legal people can say this litigation has no merit, but what do everyday Americans think?” Tolson said. “And they may actually think the president is being treated poorly and he won this election and the system is trying to take it from him.”
Only a few Republicans have publicly acknowledged Biden’s win, but behind the scenes, many Republicans have reportedly accepted the results. Some White House aides have told reporters anonymously that the president’s refusal to concede the election is an embarrassment.
Peter Feaver, who worked on national security in Republican George W Bush and Democrat Bill Clinton’s administrations, said that while the president is within his rights to ask for recounts and investigate reasonable allegations of misbehavior, leveling false charges of fraud without evidence has serious consequences.
“The messaging coming from the campaign, and particularly from the president himself, is far more extreme than that and it’s more reckless messaging and I think it does complicate America’s standing in the world,” said Feaver, a professor of political science and public policy at Duke University.
Feaver said it was also a risk for the president and his team to be focused on fighting a losing legal battle instead of responding to issues such as Covid-19 and the recession.
“Instead they’re distracting the president’s attention and the remaining energy of the administration in another direction,” Feaver said. “That’s what’s hurting the average American family.”
But the Trump campaign continues to bring new challenges.
In Michigan on Wednesday, the Trump campaign sought to block the election results from being certified in the state, where Biden is ahead of Trump by about 148,000 votes.
The campaign also has eyes on Georgia, where young, Black voters appear to have helped flip the state for the Democrats, though the race has not been called. Georgia’s top election official announced on Wednesday there would be a hand recount of the 5 million ballots cast.
Brad Raffensperger, the Republican secretary of state, made the announcement after Trump’s campaign demanded the recount, but insisted he was not bowing to pressure.
“This will help build confidence. It will be an audit, a recount and a recanvass, all at once,” Raffensperger said on Wednesday. “It will be a heavy lift. But we will work with the counties to get this done in time for our state certification.”
Recounts rarely change the outcome and Trump has a large margin to overcome – Biden leads by 14,000 votes in the state.
Tensions are especially high in the state because it has two runoff elections on 5 January which will determine which party controls the Senate. Republican senators Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, who are facing runoff votes, called for Raffensperger’s resignation on Tuesday.
In a press briefing with Feaver, Bruce Jentleson, who worked on Barack Obama and Al Gore’s presidential campaigns, blamed the disquiet on the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell.
“Part of their strategy, what’s going on right now is positioning for 2024, who might inherit the Trump constituency, and positioning for the two Georgia runoffs,” said Jentleson, a professor of public policy and political science at Duke.
Jentleson said: “It is politics but there’s a point at which it’s deeply irresponsible for Mitch McConnell to be doing what he’s doing and setting a tone for the other Republican senators.” More

Joe Biden has named Ron Klain, who served as the “Ebola tsar” during the Obama administration, as his chief of staff.Klain, 59, has been a vocal critic of Donald Trump’s pandemic response. He first worked with Biden in the 1980s.In a statement sharing the news, the president-elect praised Klain’s “deep, varied experience”.“Ron has been invaluable to me over the many years that we have worked together, including as we rescued the American economy from one of the worst downturns in our history in 2009 and later overcame a daunting public health emergency in 2014,” said Biden. “His deep, varied experience and capacity to work with people all across the political spectrum is precisely what I need in a White House chief of staff as we confront this moment of crisis and bring our country together again.”Klain said: “It’s the honor of a lifetime to serve President-elect Biden in this role, and I am humbled by his confidence.”Klain has had a long career in government. He served as the chief of staff to the former vice-president Al Gore, and the staff director of the Senate Democratic leadership committee. He has worked with several Democratic presidential campaigns, including Biden’s 1988 and 2008 presidential campaigns. He was also the lead Democratic lawyer for Gore during the 2000 presidential election recount.From 2008 to 2011, he served as then-vice-president Biden’s chief of staff and helped oversee the $787bn stimulus package that Barack Obama signed in response to the Great Recession.Klain’s experience in a global health pandemic and a recession have been cited as among his top qualifications to help Biden in this moment. The president-elect made the coronavirus pandemic and the economic recession it has triggered central to his presidential campaign, promising to help lead Americans out of the crisis.When Klain was named the Ebola response coordinator in 2014, his appointment was initially criticized because he lacked public health experience. The Obama administration at the time noted he was chosen for his “extensive management experience”.Among those to congratulate Klain was Elizabeth Warren, the progressive Massachusetts senator who ran against Biden in the 2020 primaries. Warren said Klain is a “superb choice for chief of staff. He understands the magnitude of the health and economic crisis and he has the experience to lead this next administration through it.” Ilhan Omar and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, members of the so-called “squad” of progressive congresswoman, also offered congratulations.Waleed Shahid, the communications director for the progressive political action committee Justice Democrats, said Klain “understands the Democratic ​party has moved in a more progressive direction”.Progressives and moderates came together to help elect Joe Biden. But post-election, the two camps have already begun to spar over the party’s future, with progressives saying that Biden should embrace more ambitious policy on the climate crisis, policing and healthcare. More

Democratic senator Bernie Sanders says members of the Republican party are afraid to stand up to Donald Trump as he continues his refusal to concede the result of last week’s presidential election. Speaking on CNN, Sanders said his Senate colleagues on the Republican side are not ‘idiots’, but there’s an intimidation factor from Trump that is preventing members from speaking up. ‘They understand Trump has lost,’ Sanders said. ‘But one of the other things we should all be nervous about and fearful about is the degree to which Trump intimidates and scares the hell out of Republican members of Congress. They are afraid to stand up to him’
Trump under growing pressure to accept election defeat – US politics live More

Donald Trump stepped out of the White House for his first official appearance in six days as he laid a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier to mark Veterans Day.
This was Trump’s first outing, other than to play golf, since Joe Biden was declared president-elect over the weekend. Trump has declined to concede the election to Biden.
‘It must be made to fail’: Trump’s desperate bid to cling to power
Pressure builds on Trump to concede as Biden pushes ahead with transition plan More