Eliana Willis

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    'I won't be the last': Kamala Harris, first woman elected US vice-president, accepts place in history

    Kamala Harris accepted her place in history on Saturday night with a speech honoring the women who she said “paved the way for this moment tonight”, when the daughter of Jamaican and Indian immigrants would stand before the nation as the vice-president-elect of the United States.
    With her ascension to the nation’s second highest office, Harris, 56, will become the first woman and the first woman of color to be elected vice president, a reality that shaped her speech and brought tears to the eyes of many women and girls watching from the hoods of their cars that had gathered in the parking lot of a convention center in Wilmington, Delaware.
    Wearing an all-white pantsuit, in an apparent tribute to the suffragists who fought for a woman’s right to vote, Harris smiled, exultant, as she waved from the podium waiting for the blare of car horns and cheers to subside. Joe Biden, the president-elect, would speak next. But this was a moment all her own.
    She began her remarks with a tribute to the legacy of the late congressman and civil rights activist John Lewis.
    “Protecting our democracy takes struggle,” Harris said, speaking from a stage outside the Chase Center on the Riverfront in Wilmington. “It takes sacrifice. But there is joy in it. And there is progress. Because we, the people, have the power to build a better future.”

    With Harris poised to become the highest-ranking woman in the history of American government, this milestone marks the extraordinary arc of a political career that has broken racial and gender barriers at nearly every turn. As a prosecutor, she rose to become the first Black woman attorney general of California. When she was elected to the Senate in 2016, she became only the second Black woman in history to serve in the chamber.
    In her remarks, Harris paid tribute to the women across the country – and throughout history – who made this moment possible.
    “I reflect on their struggle, their determination and the strength of their vision, to see what can be, unburdened by what has been,” she said. “I stand on their shoulders.”
    She specifically honored the contributions of Black women to the struggle for suffrage, equality and civil rights – leaders who are “too often overlooked, but so often prove that they are the backbone of our democracy”.
    As a candidate for president, Harris spoke often of her childhood spent attending civil rights marches with her parents, who were students at the University of California, Berkeley. When protests erupted in the aftermath of the police killing of George Floyd this summer, Harris joined activists in the streets to demand an end to police brutality and racial injustice.
    As Biden searched for a running mate, pressure built to choose a Black woman in recognition not only of the role they played in salvaging his presidential campaign – which Biden acknowledged in his remarks on Saturday night – but of their significance to the party as a whole. Yet a narrative began to form that Harris was a somewhat conventional choice, a senator and one-time Democratic rival who brought generational, ideological and racial balance to the Democratic ticket. More

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    Trauma and triumph: the 10 moments that made Joe Biden

    Joe Biden was born on 20 November 1942, in Scranton, Pennsylvania. He was the oldest of four children in a Catholic family; his mother, Jean, had Irish roots. The family’s economic fortunes were up and down, with Biden’s father, Joseph, later becoming a successful car-tyre salesman. At school Biden was class president, although his grades were unremarkable.
    Childhood, stutter and early career More

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    Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez ends truce by warning ‘incompetent’ Democratic party

    Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has criticised the Democratic party for incompetence in a no-holds-barred, post-election interview with the New York Times, warning that if the Biden administration does not put progressives in top positions, the party would lose big in the 2022 midterm elections.
    Signaling that the internal moratorium in place while the Democrats worked to defeat Donald Trump was over, the leftwing New York representative sharply rejected the notion advanced by some Democrats that progressive messaging around the Movement for Black Lives and the Green New Deal led to the party’s loss of congressional seats in last week’s election.
    The real problem, said Ocasio-Cortez, was that the party lacked “core competencies” to run campaigns.
    “There’s a reason Barack Obama built an entire national campaign apparatus outside of the Democratic National Committee,” she told the Times’ Astead Herndon. “And there’s a reason that when he didn’t activate or continue that, we lost House majorities. Because the party – in and of itself – does not have the core competencies, and no amount of money is going to fix that.”
    Ocasio-Cortez, who defeated a longtime Democratic politician in 2018 and who won re-election in her Bronx district by more than 50 points, endorsed the Vermont senator, Bernie Sanders, over Joe Biden in the Democratic presidential primary.
    Since then, Ocasio-Cortez and her closest allies in Congress – a four-woman group known as “the squad” who all won reelection last week – toed the party line while calling on grassroots activists to boost Biden and Democrats down-ticket.
    The truce is over. The failure of the party to operate an online strategy “in a real way that exhibits competence”, Ocasio-Cortez told the Times, made it hypocritical for the party to advance criticism of progressive messaging.
    “If I lost my election, and I went out and I said: ‘This is moderates’ fault. This is because you didn’t let us have a floor vote on Medicare for all.’ And they opened the hood on my campaign, and they found that I only spent $5,000 on TV ads the week before the election?” Ocasio-Cortez said. “They would laugh. And that’s what they look like right now trying to blame the Movement for Black Lives for their loss.”
    Grassroots activism that produced large turnout in Detroit, Philadelphia and Georgia was crucial to Biden’s win, and if the Democratic party fails to recognise that and incorporate the grassroots, the party disintegrates at the ballot box, Ocasio-Cortez said.
    “It’s really hard for us to turn out nonvoters when they feel like nothing changes for them. When they feel like people don’t see them, or even acknowledge their turnout,” Ocasio-Cortez said.
    “If the party believes after 94% of Detroit went to Biden, after Black organisers just doubled and tripled turnout down in Georgia, after so many people organised Philadelphia, the signal from the Democratic party is the John Kasich won us this election? I mean, I can’t even describe how dangerous that is.”
    Kasich is a former Republican governor of Ohio who campaigned for Biden, endorsing him as a centrist that moderate Republicans could get behind. Such an appeal might have had traction in some places, such as northern Michigan and western Omaha. But Trump beat Biden in Ohio by eight points and half a million votes.
    The Ocasio-Cortez interview is full of frank impressions freely shared. Asked what her “macro takeaway” was from the election, she said: “Well, I think the central one is that we aren’t in a freefall to hell anymore.” Asked whether there was anything about the election that surprised her, she said: “The share of white support for Trump. I thought the polling was off, but just seeing it, there was that feeling of realising what work we have to do.”
    While there were concerns about the reliability of exit polls this year with so much voting happening over mail and the failure of polls generally, Trump appeared to have won white voters in 2020 by about as much as he did in 2016 – 15 points.
    The coming period of presidential transition and the Biden administration’s early days will be crucial to determining whether the Democratic party will incorporate in a permanent way its grassroots progressive engine – or veer off down a path toward defeat, Ocasio-Cortez said.
    “So 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. This isn’t even just about winning an argument. It’s that if they keep going after the wrong thing, I mean, they’re just setting up their own obsolescence.”
    Appearing on CNN later in the day, Ocasio-Cortez said: “Progressives have assets to offer the party that the party has not yet fully leaned into… Every single swing seat member that co-sponsored Medicare for All won their re-election, and so the conversation is a little bit deeper than saying anything progressive is toxic.” More

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    With humility and empathy, Biden speech seeks to make America sane again | David Smith's sketch

    Joe Biden ran jauntily on to the stage, wearing a black face mask but suddenly looking several years younger. Looking, in fact, like millions of Americans felt, with burdens to bear but a spring in his step.
    The new US president-elect offered a Saturday night speech that did not brag or name call, did not demonise immigrants and people of colour, did not send TV networks and social media into meltdown and did not murder the English language.
    After the mental and moral exhaustion of the past four years, Biden made America sane again in 15 minutes. It was an exorcism of sorts, from American carnage to American renewal.
    Donald Trump’s performative populism revealed a Biden-shaped hole that America never knew it had. It has been widely noted that the unthinkable losses he endured in his long life made him the right person at the right time for a grieving, coronavirus-ravaged America.
    But his political setbacks also strike a chord as a model of perseverance, an everyman who had shrugged off life’s disappointments and kept smiling. His runs for president in 1988 and 2008 crashed and burned, and when Barack Obama failed to encourage him to try again in 2016, that appeared to be the end of the road.
    Instead he came back for one final act that rendered him the hero of his own story, not a supporting player in someone else’s. Biden proved not to be a Salieri to Obama’s Mozart. It was a victory for solid, unspectacular strivers everywhere. Such humility is essential at this moment of division. It produces magnanimity rather than crowing over the losing side.
    “For all those of you who voted for President Trump, I understand the disappointment tonight. I’ve lost a couple of times myself,” he said wryly. “But now, let’s give each other a chance.
    “It’s time to put away the harsh rhetoric, lower the temperature, see each other again. Listen to each other again. And to make progress, we have to stop treating our opponents as our enemies. They are not our enemies. They are Americans. They’re Americans.
    “The Bible tells us to everything there is a season, a time to build, a time to reap, and a time to sow. And a time to heal. This is the time to heal in America.” More

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    'This is the time to heal': Joe Biden addresses Americans in election victory speech

    President-elect Joe Biden declared victory in the US presidential race on Saturday and called for Americans to come together after years of partisan rancor.
    “The people of this nation have spoken. They’ve delivered us a convincing victory. A clear victory,” Biden told the crowd of supporters in his hometown of Wilmington, Delaware.
    Biden became the president-elect after several days of vote counting when major news outlets called Pennsylvania and its 20 electoral votes for the former vice-president. Soon after the Pennsylvania call, media outlets announced Biden had also defeated Donald Trump in Arizona and Nevada, giving him a total of 290 electoral votes. Echoing the introductory speech by his running-mate, Vice-President-Elect Kamala Harris, Biden in his speech pledged to be a president for all Americans, including the 70 million who voted to re-elect Trump.“I pledge to be a president who seeks not to divide but to unify,” Biden said.
    The incoming 46th president acknowledged the current era of hyper-partisan politics and tense race relations across the country. “Let this grim era of demonization in America begin to end – here and now,” he said.
    “It’s time to put away the harsh rhetoric. To lower the temperature. To see each other again. To listen to each other again,” Biden added.
    “To make progress, we must stop treating our opponents as our enemy. We are not enemies. We are Americans. The Bible tells us that to everything there is a season — a time to build, a time to reap, a time to sow. And a time to heal. This is the time to heal in America,” Biden said.
    And he acknowledged the historic nature of his campaign, and the supporters that buoyed it even when it struggled to stay afloat.

    “To all those who supported us: I am proud of the campaign we built and ran. I am proud of the coalition we put together, the broadest and most diverse in history. Democrats, Republicans and independents,” Biden said. “Progressives, moderates and conservatives. Young and old. Urban, suburban and rural. Gay, straight, transgender. White. Latino. Asian. Native American. And especially for those moments when this campaign was at its lowest – the African American community stood up again for me. They always have my back, and I’ll have yours.”
    Cars at the Chase Center convention venue honked and supporters cheered throughout the address.
    Biden’s speech was as much a celebration as it was an acknowledgement of the momentous tasks his incoming administration faces. The US confirmed 126,480 new coronavirus cases on Friday, a record number for a third day in a row. Millions of Americans are still losing their jobs each month, and the climate crisis is worsening.
    Biden is likely to enter his first term as president with a divided Congress, where Democratscontrol the House of Representatives but Republicans hold a majority in the Senate.
    Biden on Saturday formally announced a new taskforce to plan federal efforts to curb the virus. “On Monday, I will name a group of leading scientists and experts as transition advisers to help take the Biden-Harris Covid plan and convert it into an action blueprint that starts on January 20 2021,” Biden said. “That plan will be built on a bedrock of science. It will be constructed out of compassion, empathy, and concern. I will spare no effort – or commitment – to turn this pandemic around.”

    Biden was introduced by Kamala Harris, the California senator who is now the vice-president elect. She noted the historical aspect of her ascension to the vice-presidency, becoming the the first woman of color to inhabit the office. She thanked Biden for helping break “one of the most substantial barriers” and picking a woman as his vice-president. She vowed to be a vice-president for all Americans.
    It was a theme the ticket would return to repeatedly. Biden stressed the need for unity in addressing the challenges the country faces going forward, and he reached out to supporters of Donald Trump – one of the only times he and Harris directly name-checked the president in their remarks.
    “And to those who voted for President Trump, I understand your disappointment tonight. I’ve lost a couple of elections myself,” Biden said. “But now, let’s give each other a chance.”
    It’s unclear whether Trump will continue the traditions past presidents have kept when leaving office, both because of term limits and electoral defeat.
    Trump has not conceded the race and he and some of his advisers say that the election results are laced with fraud. Those claims are unfounded. After the race was called for Biden, Trump sent out several angry tweets, baselessly alleging vote count irregularities.
    The White House signaled that it would have no more public events on Saturday. The 45th president went golfing earlier in the day.
    During Biden’s speech, Trump was in the executive residence of the White House with the first lady, Melania Trump. It is unclear if he watched Biden’s remarks. As of Saturday, Trump had not extended an invitation to meet with Biden, as presidents normally do with their successors.
    After Biden’s speech, the campaign shot out fireworks as the incoming first and second families watched together on stage. The fireworks included the Biden campaign logo and the words “president-elect” and “vice-president-elect.” More

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    'It's not over': Trump supporters protest Biden victory in swing states

    As word came on Saturday that the election had been called for Joe Biden, hundreds of supporters of the defeated president began amassing at Pennsylvania’s state capitol building in Harrisburg to protest.It was a split-screen simulcast of America’s intensified political division, as Donald Trump’s defeat was jubilantly celebrated 130 miles east in Philadelphia, and in cities around the country.And just as Trump has refused to accept the outcome, so too have many of the around 70m people who voted for him, claiming instead that his loss was the result of ballot fraud – a baseless assertion promoted by the White House – and media manipulation. “We need to make sure every legal vote is found and to make sure this election is fair,” the Yorktown state representative Mike Jones told a cheering crowd. “If we allow this country to succumb to socialism, it will not because the left overpowered us, it will be because good men and women did nothing.”Many here repeated a belief that the media and big tech had been against Trump since the start, with Biden as something of a ride-along.“The election has been called by the media. The government has not certified the votes, so anything could still happen,” said Mary Wallace, a Harrisburg resident, adding: “I want nothing more than for Donald Trump to have four more years.”Wallace’s words echoed those of the president on Saturday morning, when he said his opponent “has not been certified as the winner of any states, let alone any of the highly contested states headed for mandatory recounts, or states where our campaign has valid and legitimate legal challenges that could determine the ultimate victor.” More

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    'We must restore the soul of America': Joe Biden's victory speech in full – video

    President-elect Joe Biden promised to ‘restore the soul of America’ as he declared victory in front of a crowd of supporters on Saturday night in his home town of Wilmington. ‘I pledge to be a president who seeks not to divide but unify, who doesn’t see red states or blue states but who only sees the United States.’
    Addressing Trump supporters, Biden said he understood their disappointment because he had lost before. But now, ‘let’s give each other a chance’, he said. Biden and Kamala Harris hardly mentioned Donald Trump directly in their speeches – instead, they focused on the challenges ahead, including tackling the coronavirus pandemic
    Full report: Biden wins US election after four tumultuous years of Trump
    The path to Joe Biden’s victory: five days in five minutes – video highlights More

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    Biden is the projected election winner. Can Trump still stand in his way?

    News organizations have called the presidential race for Joe Biden and he is now the president-elect of the United States. But Donald Trump refuses to concede. While a concession is not a legal requirement, it does create some uncertainty around what happens between now and the presidential inauguration on 20 January, when the constitution is clear the president’s term ends.
    Here’s what you need to know about challenges to the vote totals over the next few weeks.
    Joe Biden is projected to defeat Donald Trump. Is the election really over?
    Media outlets have called Biden the winner based on their assessment of all of the counting and outstanding votes. They have made the assessment that Biden has a significant enough lead in enough states to get the 270 electoral college votes he needs to be president and that there’s no path forward for Trump.
    The organizations that make these determinations, such as the Associated Press, rely on experts to make these projections and are often extremely cautious because they don’t want to get them wrong. Once a candidate is projected as the president-elect, it is highly unlikely the organization behind that projection would withdraw it.
    As a matter of law, however, state results are not official until they go through a statewide certification process. Each state sets its own deadline for finishing that process. On 14 December, the electors chosen by their respective parties will all meet and cast their votes for president. The electors are chosen based on the certified winner of the popular vote.
    Trump’s campaign is already filing lawsuits challenging votes. Can he change the results of the vote before results are certified and the electoral college meets?
    It’s very unlikely.
    Joe Biden holds a lead of tens of thousands of votes in key states where he needs the electoral college vote, and by about 4m in the overall popular vote. To overturn those margins, the Trump campaign would need to convince judges that those ballots had been cast illegally.
    But election officials closely track mail-in ballots and the ballot counting process, and voter fraud is extremely rare in the US. It will be very hard for Trump to convince judges otherwise.
    So far, Trump’s efforts do not look promising. The handful of lawsuits he has filed are legally shaky, experts say, and even if they had any merit, they would not be sufficient to overturn Biden’s leads. At least two of the suits have already been dismissed.
    Trump has already said he’s going to seek recounts. What does that mean and will that change anything?
    Recounts are a normal process in elections and many states have laws that specifically outline the process under which they occur. In Wisconsin, a candidate is entitled to a recount if the margin is less than 1 percentage point (Biden currently leads Trump there by about 0.7 points). In Georgia, a candidate can request a recount if the margin is less than 0.5% of votes cast (Biden currently leads by about 0.2 points). In Pennsylvania, there is an automatic statewide recount if the margin between the candidates is less than 0.5% of votes cast.
    A recount doesn’t mean there was anything wrong with the initial count – it’s a way of checking the results in a close race. Recounts rarely change the results of a race.
    Between 2000 and 2019, there were 5,778 statewide elections and 31 statewide recounts, according to FairVote, a voting reform group. Three of those recounts resulted in a reversal of the results. FairVote found that margin shifts are usually smaller in recounts with a high number of votes cast and presidential elections usually have the highest turnout.
    Even Scott Walker, the former Republican governor of Wisconsin, has acknowledged Trump is unlikely to overcome Biden’s 20,000-vote lead in the state with a recount.

    But what about the US supreme court? Conservatives have a powerful 6-3 majority there. Can’t Trump ask them to step in and determine the outcome of the election?
    It’s true that the US supreme court is very conservative, but the justices are unlikely to determine the outcome of this election for a few reasons.
    Much of Trump’s focus in challenging the election result has been focused on the fact that election officials are counting mail-in ballots after election day. But even though the ballots are tabulated after election day, all of them were cast on or before it.
    Trump has offered little evidence of any, let alone widespread, ballots that were cast illegally.
    There is currently only one pending case regarding the election in front of the US supreme court. It’s a dispute over whether Pennsylvania ballots that were postmarked by election day but arrive in the days after should be counted. Even though three justices on the court have suggested those ballots should be thrown out, it does not appear that there are enough of those late-arriving ballots to swing the election in Pennsylvania. Even if there were, legal experts have also voiced skepticism over whether the justices would reject the ballots because voters who cast those late-arriving ballots relied on instructions from government officials to believe they would be counted.
    The US supreme court also wants to be seen as above politics and unlikely to get involved in an election where it would have to overturn the results in a number of states. In the 2000 election, the supreme court got involved in one state, Florida. But 2020 is dramatically different. Biden is projected to win a number of key swing states and the court is likely to be very hesitant to get involved. That sets a high bar for Trump and his lawyers: they have to show clear evidence of wrongdoing that would change the results in those places. More