Elections

When Joe Biden is inaugurated, he will immediately be confronted with an unprecedented challenge — and I don’t mean the pandemic, although Covid-19 will almost surely be killing thousands of Americans every day. I mean, instead, that he’ll be the first modern U.S. president trying to govern in the face of an opposition that refuses to accept his legitimacy. And no, Democrats never said Donald Trump was illegitimate, just that he was incompetent and dangerous.It goes without saying that Donald Trump, whose conspiracy theories are getting wilder and wilder, will never concede, and that millions of his followers will always believe — or at least say they believe — that the election was stolen.Most Republicans in Congress certainly know this is a lie, although even on Capitol Hill there are a lot more crazy than we’d like to imagine. But it doesn’t matter; they still won’t accept that Biden has any legitimacy, even though he won the popular vote by a large margin.And this won’t simply be because they fear a backlash from the base if they admit that Trump lost fair and square. At a fundamental level — and completely separate from the Trump factor — today’s G.O.P. doesn’t believe that Democrats ever have the right to govern, no matter how many votes they receive.After all, in recent years we’ve seen what happens when a state with a Republican legislature elects a Democratic governor: Legislators quickly try to strip away the governor’s powers. So does anyone doubt that Republicans will do all they can to hobble and sabotage Biden’s presidency?The only real questions are how much harm the G.O.P. can do, and how Biden will respond.The answer to the first question depends a lot on what happens in the Jan. 5 Georgia Senate runoffs. If Democrats win both seats, they’ll have effective though narrow control of both houses of Congress. If they don’t, Mitch McConnell will have enormous powers of obstruction — and anyone who doubts that he’ll use those powers to undermine Biden at every turn is living in a fantasy world.But how much damage would obstructionism inflict? In terms of economic policy — which is all I’ll talk about in this column — the near future can be divided into two eras, pre- and post-vaccine (or more accurately, after wide dissemination of a vaccine).For the next few months, as the pandemic continues to run wild, tens of millions of Americans will be in desperate straits unless the federal government steps up to help. Unfortunately, Republicans may be in a position to block this help.The good news about the very near future, such as it is, is that Americans will probably (and correctly) blame Donald Trump, not Joe Biden, for the misery they’re experiencing — and this very fact may make Republicans willing to cough up at least some money.What about the post-vaccine economy? Here again there’s potentially some good news: Once a vaccine becomes widely available, we’ll probably see a spontaneous economic recovery, one that won’t depend on Republican cooperation. And there will also be a vast national sense of relief.So Biden might do OK for a while even in the face of scorched-earth Republican opposition. But we can’t be sure of that. Republicans might refuse to confirm anyone for key economic positions. There’s always the possibility of another financial crisis — and outgoing Trump officials have been systematically undermining the incoming administration’s ability to deal with such a crisis if it happens. And America desperately needs action on issues from infrastructure, to climate change, to tax enforcement that won’t happen if Republicans retain blocking power.So what can Biden do?First, he needs to start talking about immediate policy actions to help ordinary Americans, if only to make it clear to Georgia voters how much damage will be done if they don’t elect Democrats to those two Senate seats.If Democrats don’t get those seats, Biden will need to use executive action to accomplish as much as possible despite Republican obstruction — although I worry that the Trump-stacked Supreme Court will try to block him when he does.Finally, although Biden is still talking in a comforting way about unity and reaching across the aisle, at some point he’ll need to stop reassuring us that he’s nothing like Trump and start making Republicans pay a political price for their attempts to prevent him from governing.Now, I don’t mean that he should sound like Trump, demanding retribution against his enemies — although the Justice Department should be allowed to do its job and prosecute whatever Trump-era crimes it finds.No, what Biden needs to do is what Harry Truman did in 1948, when he built political support by running against “do-nothing” Republicans. And he’ll have a better case than Truman ever did, because today’s Republicans are infinitely more corrupt and less patriotic than the Republicans Truman faced.The results of this year’s election, with a solid Biden win but Republicans doing well down-ballot, tells us that American voters don’t fully understand what the modern G.O.P. is really about. Biden needs to get that point across, and make Republicans pay for the sabotage we all know is coming.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected] The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

President Trump on Monday morning inaccurately described Georgia’s vote counting process and implausibly urged the state’s Republican governor to “overrule” its Republican secretary of state.Why won’t Governor @BrianKempGA, the hapless Governor of Georgia, use his emergency powers, which can be easily done, to overrule his obstinate Secretary of State, and do a match of signatures on envelopes. It will be a “goldmine” of fraud, and we will easily WIN the state….— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 30, 2020
The tweet was the latest of Mr. Trump’s continuing assault on election results in Georgia and its top Republican officials, which has ignited an intraparty feud in the state.Governor Brian Kemp of Georgia does not have the authority to do what Mr. Trump is suggesting. Moreover, signature verification is already part of the vote counting process.When absentee ballots are received, Georgia’s election officials verify the signature on the envelopes. The ballots and envelopes are then separated to protect privacy, so rechecking the envelopes during a recount would be meaningless.“Georgia law prohibits the governor from interfering in elections. The secretary of state, who is an elected constitutional officer, has oversight over elections that cannot be overridden by executive order,” a spokesman for Mr. Kemp told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.The notion that “the governor has inherent executive authority to suspend or investigate or somehow interfere with this process — that’s just not true,” said Anthony Michael Kreis, a constitutional law professor at Georgia State University. “There is no plausible case here whatsoever.”Unlike the federal government, Georgia does not have a unitary executive and its governor and secretary of state have separate duties. Even the governor’s emergency powers are limited.Mr. Kreis said that Georgia’s code was “very clear” on the kinds of things a governor can do in a state of emergency. Mr. Kemp can move resources and funds and enact temporary measures, Mr. Kreis said, but “he does not have the authority to expressly interfere with elections.”Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, continued to push back on Mr. Trump’s and his allies’ baseless claims of mass voter fraud in a news conference on Monday.“The truth matters, especially around election administration,” Mr. Raffensperger said. “There are those who exploit the emotions of many Trump supporters with fantastic claims, half-truths, misinformation and frankly, they’re misleading the president as well, apparently.” More

Donald Trump has been losing Twitter followers since he lost the presidential election to Joe Biden – while the Democratic president-elect has been adding them.According to Factbase, a website dedicated to tracking Trump’s public utterances, the president has lost 133,902 followers since 17 November while the president-elect has gained 1,156,610.In a Sunday tweet, CNN host and media reporter Brian Stelter said that while Twitter followers were “surely not the most important metric in the world”, it was “still worth noting: for the first time since 2015, Trump is consistently losing followers”.Factbase, he pointed out, had “measured small declines for 11 days in a row”.Trump has 88.8 million followers, to whom he continues to tweet baseless claims of electoral fraud and all-out conspiracy theories surrounding his loss to Biden.His most recent message at the time of writing accompanied video of a crowd at a rally and said: “NO WAY WE LOST THIS ELECTION!”Trump has complained about his treatment by Twitter, alleging it is biased against conservatives. Many observers expect that once he leaves office, the site will stop giving him the benefit of the doubt regarding his false and inflammatory messages.Biden has 20.2 million followers.On Monday morning, his most recent message read: “It’s time to put away the harsh rhetoric, lower the temperature, and listen to each other again. To make progress, we must stop treating our opponents as our enemy. We are not enemies. We are Americans.” More

Donald Trump and his allies are “undermining democracy” with evidence-free claims of fraud and conspiracy, the former head of US election security said on Sunday, discussing the effort he led before he was fired by the president.“What I saw was an apparent attempt to undermine confidence in the election, to confuse people, to scare people,” Chris Krebs told CBS 60 Minutes.Trump called the interview “ridiculous, one-sided [and] an international joke”, as he continued to tweet conspiracy theories and baseless claims of electoral malpractice.Trump lost the electoral college to Joe Biden by 306-232, the result he said was a landslide when it was in his favour over Hillary Clinton in 2016. Biden is more than 6m ahead in the popular vote and won the support of more than 80m Americans, the most of any presidential candidate.Trump belatedly allowed the transition to proceed but has not conceded defeat, despite his team having won one election-related lawsuit and lost 39.Relaying baseless claims to reporters over the Thanksgiving holiday, the president did say he will leave the White House if the electoral college is confirmed for Biden. It votes on 14 December, a result certified on 6 January. Inauguration day is 20 January.Krebs, 43, was fired as head of the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (Cisa) two weeks after election day. Two days after that, at Republican National Committee headquarters in Washington, Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani gave a press conference in which he and then team member Sidney Powell pushed Trump’s false claims.“It was upsetting,” Krebs told CBS.“It’s not me, it’s not just Cisa. It’s the tens of thousands of election workers out there that had been working nonstop, 18-hour days, for months. They’re getting death threats for trying to carry out one of our core democratic institutions, an election. And that was, again, to me, a press conference that … didn’t make sense. What it was actively doing was undermining democracy. And that’s dangerous.”Trump tweeted in response, part of a stream of Sunday night messages.“There is no foreign power that is flipping votes,” Krebs said. “There’s no domestic actor flipping votes. I did it right. We did it right. This was a secure election.”Claims by Trump lawyers of interference from Venezuela or China were “farcical”, he said, adding: “The American people should have 100% confidence in their vote.”Polling, however, shows a majority of Republicans believe the president. Krebs defended state officials who Trump, and subsequently his supporters, have targeted.“It’s in my view a travesty what’s happening right now with all these death threats to election officials, to secretaries of state,” Krebs said.“I want everybody to look at Secretary [Kathy] Boockvar in Pennsylvania, Secretary [Jocelyn] Benson in Michigan, Secretary [Barbara] Cegavske in Nevada, Secretary [Katie] Hobbs in Arizona. All strong women that are standing up, that are under attack from all sides, and they’re defending democracy. They’re doing their jobs.“Look Secretary [Brad] Raffensperger in Georgia. Lifelong Republican. He put country before party in his holding a free and fair election in that state. There are some real heroes out there. There are some real patriots.” More

The big question for the US president-elect, Joe Biden, who has taken “build back better” as his motto, is whether this will mean genuine renovation or mere restoration. Americans desperately need a pivot after the madness of Donald Trump. And when Biden takes the reins of power from his predecessor, there is no doubt that a big reset will come. But the risk of complacent restoration is nowhere greater than in US foreign policy – especially since it is a domain in which the office of president has so much authority, even in the midst of legislative gridlock.“Everything must change so that everything can remain the same,” says the aristocratic hero of Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s novel The Leopard (1958). It seems to be the motto of current elites eager to bracket the Trump years in the name of the status quo ante.Since the shock of 2016, Washington foreign policy elites, both mainstream Democrats out of power and their Never Trump Republican allies, have developed a just-so story about their benevolent role in the world. It goes like this: the US was once isolationist, but then committed after the second world war to leading a “rules-based international order”, a phrase that is increasingly hard to avoid in assessments of the presidential transition. In this story, Trump’s election represented atavism and immorality, the return of rightly repressed nationalism and nativism at home and abroad. In response, the agenda has to be to restore US credibility and leadership as the “indispensable nation” by embracing internationalism again.Trump’s boorish attack on traditional pieties understandably makes Washington traditions seem like comfort food after a hangover. The darker truth this response conceals is that generations of foreign policy mistakes both preceded and precipitated Trump – who often went on to continue them anyway. The record of Washington’s “wise men”, who coddled dictators, militarised the globe, and entrenched economic unfairness at home and abroad, opened an extraordinary opportunity for any Trump-like demagogue – making his ascendancy less a matter of atavism than another form of the blowback to mistakes that America perpetually made abroad. If his presence shamed US foreign policy elites, it was because they helped make him possible.There is no doubt that Trump altered national security policy in a host of ways. But the idea that the old international order was actually rules-based is a fiction that is impossible to sustain – especially regarding the US, which bent or broke the rules across the world throughout the cold war, fearful of its Soviet adversary. After September 11, the US crafted its own version of international law, shaped in its own interests – under both George W Bush and Barack Obama, and against much resistance from others across the world.In economic matters since 1945, it is not so much that the US either forged or ruptured a rules-based order, but rather that it pivoted from one set of rules to a radically new one. For decades after the second world war, the system allowed other governments considerable room for manoeuvre in their economic policies. But then the US helped to impose a draconian neoliberal order that persists to the present day, including through international financial institutions it dominated.Trump’s attitudes towards war and peace were paradoxical. He beat his Republican rivals in 2016 by shockingly condemning the Iraq war, falsely claiming to have been on the right side of history all along, before going on to prevail against Clinton by appealing to veterans and other Americans fatigued by their country’s fruitless global interventionism. As a result, Biden himself ran on “ending endless wars” because Trump helped to make it an obligatory gesture. More

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It is not clear yet whether US democracy “survived” the 2020 presidential election unscathed.
If Donald Trump’s playbook of seeking to undermine a legitimate election becomes standard Republican practice for future elections – refuse to concede, make false claims of fraud, fan the flames of conspiracy, sue everywhere and refuse to certify any win by the other side – then American democracy might already have sustained a fatal wound.
But Trump has not succeeded in stealing the 2020 election, despite his historic attempt to do so, in what analysts call the most dangerous frontal assault on US democracy since the civil war era. The two states upon which Trump’s plot most hinged, Pennsylvania and Michigan, certified their results in Joe Biden’s favor earlier this week. The presidential transition is at last under way.
But while the election exposed key areas where American democracy is failing, it also highlighted structural features that make national elections in the United States hard to steal, no matter how determined the would-be despot or how complicit his party colleagues.
Here is a select list of those features:
1 Decentralization
No central authority oversees US elections. National elections are broken down by 50 states and the District of Columbia. Elections within each state are run in turn by counties and by precincts within counties. People vote locally, in thousands of jurisdictions; ballots are tallied locally; and the results are reported locally, and then added up in the public eye. The sheer number of people involved defies both coordination and conspiracy.
On election night, the tributaries of local results become streams, and then flow together to form rivers, and then become a flood. No president or any other figure has the power to stop the result. While every national election is stained by voter suppression measures and strained by human error and voting irregularities, the totality of the vote, and the transparency of its accumulation, constitutes an overwhelming force.
2 Turnout
A persistent symptom of weakness in US democracy has been low voter turnout. Less voter participation means less representative government. But turnout was a bright spot in 2020. Before this November’s election, no presidential ticket had ever notched 70m votes – Barack Obama got 69.5m in 2008. In 2020, Trump’s tally was building toward 74m – while Biden had surpassed the incredible total of 80m, with many ballots from the majority-Democrat New York state yet to be reported.
The previous benchmark for total votes cast for the two major parties in a presidential election was about 130m. Astoundingly, the 2020 election is on track to record almost 20% more votes than that for the Republican and Democratic tickets. As a uniquely polarizing and inescapable figure in politics, Trump appears to have been a huge driver of turnout, both for and against.
3 Integrity and transparency
Despite Trump’s false assertions, US presidential elections are not subject to widespread fraud, miscounts or other significant irregularities. This is in part thanks to the tireless work of activists and no thanks to routine attempts at voter suppression.
No significant instances of fraud emerged from the 2020 election, conducted over more than a month with an unprecedented number of mail-in ballots cast amid a pandemic. No Trump lawyer dared impute election fraud in court, despite the lies filling Trump’s Twitter feed.
A hand recount of about 5m ballots in Georgia inconsequentially moved the overall result by about 1,200 votes – a typically small recount result. A recount is also under way in Wisconsin, which Biden won by more than 20,000 votes. State officials reported no significant changes in the overall tally after a fourth day of recounting.
4 The courts
From melting hair dye to Four Seasons Total Landscaping, Trump’s legal team has been much-derided. But in key states, the campaign also hired top-flight lawyers from firms such as Jones Day and Porter Wright Morris & Arthur. On the whole these lawyers have fared miserably, winning only one minor case out of 43 in six states, while losing 35 cases so far, according to a running tally maintained by the Democratic lawyer Marc Elias.
The judges who threw out Trump campaign cases include Trump appointees. Judge Steven Grimberg in the northern district of Georgia booted a complaint by a Trump elector seeking to block certification of the state’s vote. “I didn’t hear any justification for why the plaintiff delayed bringing this claim until two weeks after this election and on the cusp of these election results being certified,” Grimberg wrote.
Before the election, another Trump appointee, Judge J Nicholas Ranjan, threw out a Trump complaint in Pennsylvania challenging mail-in ballots. And district judge Matthew Brann of Pennsylvania, a former Republican party official and Federalist Society member, sternly jettisoned a separate Trump campaign challenge filed after the election.
“This Court has been presented with strained legal arguments without merit and speculative accusations, unpled in the operative complaint and unsupported by evidence,” Brann wrote. “In the United States of America, this cannot justify the disenfranchisement of a single voter, let alone all the voters of its sixth most populated state. Our people, laws, and institutions demand more.”
5 The media
Apart from Congress, the media is one of the least-loved institutions in the United States, abused with glee from the White House on down. And the American media has been terribly crippled by the loss over the last decade of countless local outlets that offered irreplaceable, knowledgable coverage of local events. Pseudo-media propaganda services such as Breitbart, One America News, Newsmax and Parler, financed by conservative billionaires, represent ominous new entries on the media landscape given invaluable support by Trump.
But strong and independent media, afforded powerful protections by the first amendment, remain a vital feature of US democracy. With no central authority over US elections, it falls to the media to project a winner. Where the intimidation of voters or poll workers is reported, it falls to the media to shine a light. Where false accusations about election fraud are spread by the president, it falls to the media to investigate and explain what is true and what is false.
Trump grew enraged when Fox News called the state of Arizona for Biden early on Wednesday after the election. But in doing so, the network – in its election-calling operations, at least – demonstrated its independence and investment in the truth. The Associated Press worked for years to maintain and upgrade its elections operations while committing to unprecedented transparency in 2020 in explaining how its elections reporting worked. Other media outlets demonstrated similar will and resolve in waiting to call states until the result was plain but then calling them definitively when it was. More

How different is the Biden-Harris administration’s Africa policy going to be from Donald Trump’s, or even Barack Obama’s? Many African people, as well as the continent’s strongman leaders, are now gingerly asking – is Biden going to be Obama 2.0, or Trump-lite?For the sake of black lives mattering everywhere in these turbulent times, I hope Biden will chart a bold new course, diametrically away from not only Trump but also Obama’s Africa policy.I welcomed the Biden presidency with a deep sigh of relief. Yet I am still worried about his Africa strategy. Relations between president-elect Biden and African people will kick off with tensions and apprehensions – understandably so.For the past 60 years, Democrat and Republican presidents have approached Africa primarily for access to, and control of, our extractive industries and, at certain points, for counter-terrorism operations. This approach, under the influence of the cold war, translated into the US supporting Africa’s strongmen, leaving vulnerable people struggling to survive their ruthlessness, while China cheered from the sidelines.The most prominent of these strongmen, including but not limited to Equatorial Guinea’s Teodoro Obiang Nguema, in power since 1979; Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni, head of state since 1986; Djibouti’s Ismail Omar Guelleh, in post since 1999; Rwanda’s Paul Kagame, ruling since 1994, and Eritrea’s Isaias Afwerki, in power since 1993. The human cost of US support for these men has been jarring for even the most cynical observers.By my calculation Africa’s strongmen have been responsible for more than 22 million deaths on the continent since independence in 1960. That is almost twice as many people as historians say were forcibly transported from Africa during the transatlantic slave trade. Yet it seems no US president has found this troubling.The bloodiestkilling field has been the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where brutal US-backed strongmen killed more than 5.4 million Congolese people over access and control of minerals between 1998 and 2008, and sparked outbreaks of disease, famine and the use of rape as a weapon of war. With Trump out of the picture, our biggest fear is a repeat of Obama’s Africa doctrine – and for many black people this is the single biggest concern about the Biden-Harris administration.As we all know, President Obama promised Africa one thing in Ghana in 2009: to support strong institutions instead of strongmen. That simple pledge – repeated, in one form or another – felt very personal to many of us fighting for peace and change.During the Obama presidency, 11 African strongmen clung to power, killing thousands of their citizensBut Obama delivered almost nothing meaningful; not because of a Russian or Chinese veto at the UN security council but because in the first few years of his presidency some in his team sought to protect people such as Joseph Kabila, former president of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, whose security forces were linked to killings and torture, and Paul Kagame, whose tight grip on the Rwanda presidency has earned him the tag of “benevolent dictator”.The result? Tragic. During the Obama presidency, 11 African strongmen clung to power, killing thousands of their citizens and displacing millions more. Yet almost not a single one of them faced a serious tit-for-tat consequences from the US – and this has been a colossal disaster for democratic forces across the continent.Trump, too, turned a blind eye to atrocities in Africa. During his presidency, President Biya’s troops in Cameroon have killed 4,000 civilians. In Ivory Coast, Allassane Ouattara “won” a third unconstitutional term with 94% of the vote. Many civilians were killed in election-linked violence. The list may very well go on.For the sake of black lives mattering everywhere, will the Biden-Harris administration end the US’s longstanding but shortsighted and destructive support for Africa’s strongmen? How may President Biden respond to #EndSars, a movement against police brutality in Nigeria, or #CongoIsBleeding, a campaign against exploitation in the mines of the DRC? What will he do to de-escalate growing tensions inside Ethiopia or in Eritrea?Many of us are wondering, too, whether or not Biden will refocus US policy and push for peace in Somalia, Libya, Cameroon or Mozambique? Will he support the creation of an international criminal tribunal for Congo to end the continuing killings and use of rape as a weapon of war and, simultaneously, jump-start development in Africa’s great lakes – a region that seems pitifully prone to strongmen and mass killing?Answers to these questions are unclear. But I am hopeful about Biden. His career and some of his pitch-perfect public statements – think of his 1986 statement against apartheid South Africa or his commitment to black lives mattering during the campaign trail – reveal instincts, even a moral commitment, to supporting Africa and black people. More