Elections

WASHINGTON — Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s campaign was foundering before the first votes of 2020 had been cast, so Steve Ricchetti, Mr. Biden’s adviser and longtime friend, summoned a group of Democrats who felt swept aside by what then seemed the party’s populist wave — the big donors.“Look, I’ve been living with Biden for eight years. People like and respect him; that’s why he is ultimately going to win,” Mr. Ricchetti, a chipper former lobbyist, told 50 Democratic donors last January at Evercore, a Manhattan investment banking firm, according to a person in the room.That intervention was a critical moment in Mr. Biden’s then-struggling campaign: The $1.2 million raised that day was needed to bankroll the candidate’s travel, and it kept Mr. Biden in the fight long enough to overcome his early stumbles and win the Democratic nomination.Mr. Ricchetti, 63, has been a key player in Mr. Biden’s life since joining the vice president’s staff in 2012, but his dogged efforts on behalf of a candidate many viewed as past his prime ensured he would have a powerful, free-ranging role in the Biden White House.He is one of the president-elect’s most loyal advisers, and someone Mr. Biden will almost certainly turn to in times of crisis or in stressful moments. And Tuesday, in a widely anticipated move, Mr. Biden named Mr. Ricchetti his counselor, a position that typically confers relatively unrestricted access to the president.It is familiar, if elevated, turf for Mr. Ricchetti, who became Mr. Biden’s chief of staff after beginning his career as a legislative aide for President Bill Clinton, working with the fractious Senate Democratic conference.“They all basically wanted to come in and yell at you,” said John Podesta, Mr. Clinton’s former chief of staff, who hired him. “You had to sit there and take it. Steve was good at that.”But what sets Mr. Ricchetti apart from a dozen other Biden veterans in the president-elect’s inner circle is his Swiss Army-knife utility. In addition to his political and fund-raising portfolio, he has overseen many of Mr. Biden’s personal and financial decisions as well as his political ones, according to people close to both men.In the summer of 2016, Mr. Ricchetti and Mike Donilon were at the center of Mr. Biden’s agonizing deliberations over whether to run for president, drafting a memo urging him to challenge Hillary Clinton. Mr. Biden, still grieving from the death of his son Beau, rejected the advice, but their memo presaged the bedrock decency-and-moderation message that defined his 2020 campaign.Later that year, Mr. Ricchetti and a dozen advisers — including Mr. Biden’s sister Valerie and Mr. Donilon, a publicity-shy message specialist whose appointment as a senior adviser was also announced on Tuesday — organized a network of post-vice-presidency nonprofits to provide an outlet for Mr. Biden’s policy interests and a launching pad for one last presidential run.Mr. Ricchetti also served as Mr. Biden’s business manager, negotiating his seven-figure book deal and helping set up a $100-a-head book tour that helped the Bidens earn $15.6 million over the past three years, according to people with knowledge of his activities.The Presidential TransitionLatest UpdatesUpdated Nov. 17, 2020, 7:47 p.m. ETTrump fires Christopher Krebs, official who disputed his election fraud claims.A Michigan county certifies its election results, with Republicans changing course after accusations of partisanship.A congressman from New Orleans informed his constituents he was joining the Biden administration.Mr. Ricchetti’s goal was to ensure Mr. Biden’s financial security “in the cleanest way possible, without doing anything he would ever have to apologize for,” as Mr. Ricchetti told a friend this year.Mr. Ricchetti, a Cleveland-area native whose earthy, chatty demeanor mirrors Mr. Biden’s discursive regular-guy style, came to Washington straight out of college to work in the health insurance industry. He quickly showed an aptitude for fund-raising, which propelled him through a series of government and lobbying jobs.He wound up wealthy, running a lucrative lobbying firm with a roster of clients that included General Motors, Experian, the American Hospital Association, AT&T, Eli Lilly, Nextel, Novartis and Pfizer, which is developing a coronavirus vaccine, before joining Mr. Biden’s staff.The only public accounting of his income and assets, recorded in federal disclosure documents in 2012, revealed annual earnings of about $2 million from his firm, with assets, much of it in cash accounts, in the range of $3 million to $12 million.Mr. Ricchetti’s K Street and Clinton connections were initially too much for President Barack Obama’s advisers, including Jim Messina and David Plouffe, who tried to block Mr. Biden from hiring him, according to people close to the situation.A short, intense scrap ensued — ending only when Mr. Biden told Mr. Obama he had the “right” to pick his own top deputy, former aides recalled.A compromise was brokered in which Mr. Ricchetti would be hired on the condition he be excluded from participating in the political team’s strategy calls, according to four people in Mr. Biden’s orbit.There are no such preconditions on his hiring now. More

WASHINGTON — President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. is delivering a message of cooperation and conciliation as he prepares to move into the White House.It is Mike Donilon’s message.A veteran Democratic strategist, pollster and media specialist, Mr. Donilon was Mr. Biden’s chief strategist during the 2020 campaign, helping the candidate develop the central theme that defeated President Trump: a fight for the soul of the nation.He helped Mr. Biden frame the race against Mr. Trump as one about the character of the candidates, focusing the campaign’s advertising and Mr. Biden’s speeches on the contrast with Mr. Trump’s erratic and abusive behavior during four years in the Oval Office.Now, as a senior adviser to Mr. Biden in the White House, Mr. Donilon will be the defender of the Biden brand. It will be his job to ensure that the new president weathers the crosscurrents in Washington as he battles Republicans in Congress and seeks to calm tensions between liberals and moderates in his own party.“My message is, ‘I will work with you,’” Mr. Biden said this week of his intention to find ways to compromise with Republicans, even if they have so far refused to accept his victory.That will be a challenge, especially after an election that has left the Senate almost evenly divided and reduced the Democratic majority in the House. But people close to Mr. Donilon say his long and close relationship with Mr. Biden makes him the perfect person to serve in that role.“Mike is a brilliant message strategist with a deep understanding of, and loyalty to, Joe Biden,” said David Axelrod, who served in a similar role for President Barack Obama. “His inspiration from the beginning about framing the race as one about character proved out. And he shepherded it with great skill, discipline and even poetry.”Mr. Axelrod said it was indispensable for someone like Mr. Donilon to have the trust of the president.“Mike has that with Biden,” he said. “He will be the keeper of the narrative.”In addition to being by Mr. Biden’s side for years, Mr. Donilon has been at the center of Democratic politics for decades. He has worked on six presidential campaigns, and transition officials said he was part of more than 25 winning campaigns for Senate, House, governor and mayor.He worked in the late 1980s to help L. Douglas Wilder of Virginia become the country’s first elected African-American governor, a history-making campaign that helped pave the way for Mr. Donilon’s career on the national stage.He was part of Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign in 1992, and was a key consultant on a series of Democratic campaigns for Senate and governor, including those of Gov. Jon Corzine of New Jersey, Senator Bill Nelson of Florida, Senator Christopher J. Dodd of Connecticut and Senator John Edwards of North Carolina.The Presidential TransitionLatest UpdatesUpdated Nov. 17, 2020, 7:47 p.m. ETTrump fires Christopher Krebs, official who disputed his election fraud claims.A Michigan county certifies its election results, with Republicans changing course after accusations of partisanship.A congressman from New Orleans informed his constituents he was joining the Biden administration.Mr. Donilon is also an ad-maker and message guru who worked for AKPD, the firm founded by Mr. Axelrod and three others, including David Plouffe, a key strategist for Mr. Obama. His creation of independent ads for former Senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri helped her win her seat.When Mr. Biden became vice president in 2009, Mr. Donilon became one of his top aides.A graduate of Georgetown University and Georgetown University Law Center, Mr. Donilon had been the managing director of the Biden Institute and an assistant professor at the University of Delaware. He is also one of three brothers who have spent years in the public eye.Tom Donilon, a veteran diplomat and national security expert, was a key confidant to Mr. Obama and served for several years as his national security adviser. He was also the chief of staff at the State Department and could join his brother in some role in the Biden administration.Terrence Donilon is the secretary for communications and public affairs — essentially the chief spokesman — for the Archdiocese of Boston. More

WASHINGTON — If there was a certain path to becoming President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s top lawyer in the West Wing, it was unlikely to have started with an apprenticeship to one of the most conservative jurists in the country.But Dana Remus, a Yale-educated lawyer who clerked for Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. — a rock-solid member of the Supreme Court’s conservative wing — has been named the White House counsel in Mr. Biden’s administration, where she will help guide the new president through politically charged legal fights with Republican lawmakers.An early member of Mr. Biden’s third bid for the presidency, Ms. Remus served as the campaign’s top lawyer and before that was a key legal adviser to President Barack Obama. She was the White House ethics lawyer for Mr. Obama and has represented the Obama Foundation since he left office in 2017.Now, Ms. Remus will lead the White House Counsel’s Office for Mr. Biden as he seeks to unwind President Trump’s legislative and regulatory legacy and pushes forward with an agenda of his own.People close to Ms. Remus said she will be a key part of that effort, in part because she understands the limitations — as well as the critical importance — of the law. Unlike some lawyers, they said, Ms. Remus understands that the law is just one part of a broader mix that includes politics, policy and communications.“President Obama finished his eight years in office without any scandal, and that’s largely a credit to Dana,” said Eric Schultz, who has served as a spokesman for Mr. Obama since 2011. “It’s why he asked her to help manage his post-presidency transition, and it’s why it’s no surprise Joe Biden would ask her to help restore ethics and integrity to the White House.”Ms. Remus was brought into Mr. Biden’s orbit by Bob Bauer, a veteran Democratic lawyer who served as chief counsel for Mr. Obama and has been a legal fixture for Democratic presidents and candidates for decades.In 2018, she married Brett Holmgren, who served as a national security aide in the Obama White House. Guests at the wedding in Washington were surprised when the officiant turned out to be none other than the former president himself.Her closeness to Mr. Obama, and now Mr. Biden, has made Ms. Remus a rising star in the Democratic legal world. But she has remained willing to engage with conservatives as well.In 2013, Ms. Remus defended Justice Alito against a column that accused the jurist of visibly mocking his colleague Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg during a court session.The column, by Dana Milbank of The Washington Post, said that Justice Alito, “seated immediately to Ginsburg’s left, shook his head from side to side in disagreement, rolled his eyes and looked at the ceiling” while Justice Ginsburg was talking. In a letter to the editor, Ms. Remus wrote that Justice Alito did not have “some deep and abiding disrespect for women.”“Those of us who have been fortunate to work closely with Justice Alito know that he is a good man who serves every day with humility, dedication and incredible intelligence and insight,” she wrote.In the summer of 2019, Ms. Remus taught a class at Duke Law School with Senator Mike Lee, Republican of Utah, one of the more conservative voices in the Senate. The class, for the school’s D.C. Summer Institute on Law and Policy, was aimed at undergraduates or working professionals who were considering attending law school. Ms. Remus was already the chief counsel for Mr. Biden’s campaign.Next year, when Mr. Biden takes office, Mr. Lee and other Republican senators will be on the other side of legal and political fights. It will be up to Ms. Remus to help guide the new president through them. More

Jennifer O’Malley Dillon had barely started the job when she shut it all down.Just two days after Ms. O’Malley Dillon was named President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s campaign manager, her operation went entirely remote, an early concession to a virus that would come to define the entire election.Ms. O’Malley Dillon, 44, found herself taking on tasks never before handled by a campaign, like setting up testing protocols to keep her staff and a 77-year-old candidate safe from a deadly virus, while also trying to win a race that her party viewed as an existential battle for the future of the country. Her campaign battle cry, according to friends and former staff members: “We can do hard things.”Ms. O’Malley Dillon will now tackle another difficult job when she assumes the role of deputy chief of staff in the new Biden administration. A stalwart of Democratic politics, she has never worked in the White House and is a rare new admission into Mr. Biden’s tight circle of trusted aides. Expected to be charged with managing White House operations — a job that has traditionally included logistics, administration and making sure the place runs on time — Ms. O’Malley Dillon will join an administration facing a raging pandemic, economic instability and a fiercely divided country.“She’s a fixer,” says Christina Reynolds, an old friend of Ms. O’Malley Dillon and a vice president of Emily’s List, a leading Democratic women’s group. “She deals with the situation that you live in, not the situation you wish you had.”The daughter of a school superintendent and an elementary-school teacher, Ms. O’Malley Dillon spent more than two decades winding her way through Democratic Party politics. In 2003, she worked on Senator John Edwards’s first presidential campaign, where she met her husband, Patrick Dillon. (Their first date: the classic political stomping ground of the Iowa State Fair.)In 2008, she ran the battleground-states operation for Barack Obama’s presidential effort and became the executive director of the Democratic National Committee after the election. Four years later, she was the deputy manager of Mr. Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign before starting a public relations firm. Her clients include Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada and Stacey Abrams, a former minority leader of the Georgia House who was briefly considered as a running mate for Mr. Biden.Considered one of the top organizing talents in her party, Ms. O’Malley Dillon was sought out for advice by various Democratic primary candidates before joining the campaign of former Representative Beto O’Rourke of Texas.When Mr. O’Rourke quit the race, Anita Dunn, a longtime Biden ally, asked Ms. O’Malley Dillon to transform what was then a shoestring Biden primary campaign into what became a general election juggernaut. Though she had little of a relationship with Mr. Biden, the two found common ground in their Irish Catholic roots. He’s my people, one of Ms. O’Malley Dillon’s friends recalled her saying of Mr. Biden.During the campaign, she ignored the complaints within her party over Mr. Biden’s light travel schedule during the pandemic, but also charted a conventional approach to winning back the White House by focusing on the traditionally Democratic states that eluded the party in 2016 — Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.Working from her suburban Washington home, Ms. O’Malley Dillon conducted late-night meetings from the seat of her Peloton bike and prepared her staff for the rollout of the vice-presidential pick with her 8-year-old twin girls and 3-year-old son just offscreen.With Mr. Biden’s victory, Ms. O’Malley Dillon became the first woman to manage a victorious Democratic presidential campaign. The only other woman to manage a winning presidential campaign was Kellyanne Conway, who spent three months at the head of Donald J. Trump’s operation in 2016.“Not only did Jen win a campaign against an incumbent president, which has only happened a handful of times over the last 200-plus years, she secured the highest popular vote ever in the midst of a global pandemic,” said Stephanie Cutter, a Democratic strategist and co-founder of Ms. O’Malley Dillon’s firm. “That’s a feat that will go down in the history books.” More

So how do I feel two weeks after our election? Awed and terrified. I am in awe at the expression of democracy that took place in America. It was our most impressive election since 1864 and maybe our most important since 1800. And yet, I am still terrified that, but for a few thousand votes in key states, how easily it could have been our last election.To put my feelings in image form: It’s like Lady Liberty was walking across Fifth Avenue on Nov. 3 when out of nowhere a crazy guy driving a bus ran the red light. Lady Liberty leapt out of the way barely in time, and she’s now sitting on the curb, her heart pounding, just glad to be alive. But she knows — she knows — how narrowly she escaped, that this reckless driver never stops at red lights and is still out there, and, oh my God, lots of his passengers are still applauding the thrilling ride, even though deep down many know he’s a menace to the whole city.Let’s unpack all of this. Stop for a second and think about how awesome this election was. In the middle of an accelerating pandemic substantially more Americans voted than ever before in our history — Republicans, Democrats and independents. And it was their fellow citizens who operated the polling stations and conducted the count — many of them older Americans who volunteered for that duty knowing they could contract the coronavirus, as some did.That’s why this was our greatest expression of American democratic vitality since Abraham Lincoln defeated Gen. George B. McClellan in 1864 — in the midst of a civil war. And that’s why Donald Trump’s efforts to soil this election, with his fraudulent claims of voting fraud, are so vile.If Trump and his enablers had resisted for only a day or two, OK, no big deal. But the fact that they continue to do so, flailing for ways to overturn the will of the people, egged on by their media toadies — Lou Dobbs actually said on Fox Business that the G.O.P. should refuse to accept the election results that deny Trump “what is rightfully his” — raises this question:How do you trust this version of the Republican Party to ever hold the White House again?Its members have sat mute while Trump, rather than using the federal bureaucracy to launch a war against our surging pandemic, has launched a war against his perceived enemies inside that federal bureaucracy — including the defense secretary, the head of the National Nuclear Security Administration and, on Tuesday, the most senior cybersecurity official responsible for securing the presidential election — weakening it when we need it most.Engineering Trump’s internal purge is 30-year-old Johnny McEntee, “a former college quarterback who was hustled out of the White House two years ago after a security clearance check turned up a prolific habit for online gambling,” but Trump later welcomed him back and installed him as personnel director for the entire U.S. government, The Washington Post reported.A political party that will not speak up against such a reckless leader is not a party any longer. It is some kind of populist cult of personality.That’s been obvious ever since this G.O.P. was the first party to conclude its presidential nominating convention without offering any platform. It declared that its platform was whatever its Dear Leader said it was. That is cultlike.Are we just supposed to forget this G.O.P.’s behavior as soon as Trump leaves and let its leaders say: “Hey fellow Americans, Trump tried to overturn the election with baseless claims — and we went along for the ride — but he’s gone now, so you can trust us to do the right things again.”That is why we are so very lucky that this election broke for Joe Biden. If this is how this Republican Party behaves when Trump loses, imagine how willing to tolerate his excesses it would have been had he won? Trump wouldn’t have stopped at any red lights ever again.And the people who understood that best were democrats all over the world — particularly in Europe. Because they’ve watched Trump-like, right-wing populists in Turkey, Hungary, Poland, Russia and Belarus, as well as the Philippines, get themselves elected and then take control of their courts, media, internet and security institutions and use them to try to cripple their opponents and lock themselves into office indefinitely.Democrats abroad feared that this same political virus would overtake America if Trump were re-elected and have a devastating effect.They feared that the core democratic concept that America gifted to the world in 1800 — when John Adams lost his election to Thomas Jefferson and peacefully handed over the reins of power — was going to wither, undermining democracy movements across the globe. Every autocrat would have been emboldened to ignore red lights.Seeing an American president actually try to undermine the results of a free and fair election “is a warning to democrats all over the world: Don’t play lightly with populists, they will not leave power easily the way Adams did when he lost to Jefferson,” the French foreign policy expert Dominique Moïsi remarked to me.That is why Biden’s mission — and the mission of all decent conservatives — is not just to repair America. It is to marginalize this Trumpian version of the G.O.P. and help to nurture a healthy conservative party — one that brings conservative approaches to economic growth, infrastructure, social policy, education, regulation and climate change, but also cares about governing and therefore accepts compromises.Democrats can’t summon a principled conservative party. That requires courageous conservatives. But Democrats do need to ask themselves why Trump remains so strong among white working-class voters without college degrees, and, in this last election, drew greater support from Black, Latino and white women voters.There is a warning light flashing for Democrats from this election: They can’t rely on demographics. They need to make sure that every voter believes that the Democratic Party is a “both/and” party, not an “either/or” party. And they need to do it before a smarter, less crude Trump comes along to advance Trumpism.They need every American to believe that Democrats are for BOTH redividing the pie AND growing the pie, for both reforming police departments and strengthening law and order, for both saving lives in a pandemic and saving jobs, for both demanding equity in education and demanding excellence, for both strengthening safety nets and strengthening capitalism, for both celebrating diversity and celebrating patriotism, for both making college cheaper and making the work of noncollege-educated Americans more respected, for both building a high border wall and incorporating a big gate, for both high-fiving the people who start companies and supporting the people who regulate them.And they need to demand less political correctness and offer more tolerance for those who want to change with the times but need to get there their own ways — without feeling shamed into it.We need our next presidential election to be fought between a principled center-right Republican Party and a “both/and” Democratic Party. Great countries are led from a healthy center. Weak countries don’t have one.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

In 2016, Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina praised the integrity of the nation’s elections system, criticizing claims by Donald J. Trump that the vote was “rigged.”“Like most Americans, I have confidence in our democracy and our election system,” Mr. Graham said in a statement on Twitter. “If he loses, it will not be because the system is ‘rigged’ but because he failed as a candidate.”What a difference four years makes.Mr. Graham, who has transformed during that time to become one of Mr. Trump’s most loyal allies, now seems determined to reverse the election’s outcome on the president’s behalf. On Friday, he phoned Brad Raffensperger, the secretary of state of Georgia and a fellow Republican, wondering about the possibility of a slight tinkering with the state’s elections outcome.What if, Mr. Graham suggested on the call, according to Mr. Raffensperger, he had the power to toss out all of the mail-in votes from counties with high rates of questionable signatures on ballots?In an interview with The Washington Post, Mr. Raffensperger said he was stunned that Mr. Graham had appeared to suggest that he find a way to toss legally cast ballots.“It sure looked like he was wanting to go down that road,” Mr. Raffensperger said of the call from Mr. Graham, the chairman of the powerful Senate Judiciary Committee.Mr. Graham seems bent on making every attempt to engineer a second term for Mr. Trump, despite President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s clear victory. The senator has suggested that this year’s vote represents the Republican Party’s last gasp, unless something is done to reverse the current state of election operations — the same system he praised in 2016.“If Republicans don’t challenge and change the U.S. election system, there will never be another Republican president elected again,” Mr. Graham said on Sunday on Fox News.The phone call to Mr. Raffensperger was one in a string of episodes in which Mr. Graham, who won his own re-election bid this month, has tried to cast doubt on the presidential election’s outcome, demanding that Mr. Trump not concede the race to Mr. Biden despite the Democrat’s decisive Electoral College victory — 306 to 232 electoral votes.Legal experts said it was doubtful that Mr. Graham’s actions, which were open to interpretation, could lead to criminal charges or that they represented a violation of Senate ethics. Still, it appeared that Mr. Graham had stepped over an ethical line.Noah Bookbinder, executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a watchdog group, called Mr. Graham’s overtures to state officials “deeply shocking and anti-democratic.”“This was Senator Graham as a partisan supporter of President Trump trying to drum up votes for him, but using his position to do that,” Mr. Bookbinder said. “It does seem both unusual and deeply improper.”A longtime advocate of states’ rights, Mr. Graham had interjected his Senate voice into a role historically delegated to states — administering elections.In an appearance last week on Fox News, Mr. Graham claimed that Nevada’s vote-counting system had failed to verify signatures because the software was turned off, an accusation that had been refuted.In Clark County, for example, a signature verification machine processes about 30 percent of the mail ballots and the rest were hand-checked by elections workers, according to Dan Kulin, a spokesman for Clark County, the state’s largest.The Nevada Supreme Court had also rejected allegations by Republican lawyers who filed a variety of vague claims asserting that observers did not have sufficient access to view the vote counting process.On Tuesday, Mr. Graham’s office said he had raised concerns about vote counting in Georgia as well as in Arizona and Nevada “as a United States senator who is worried about the integrity of the election process nationally, when it comes to vote by mail.”Mr. Graham said on Tuesday that in addition to calling Mr. Raffensperger, he had also contacted Gov. Doug Ducey of Arizona, also a Republican, to discuss election issues. Mr. Graham said he could not remember whom he had spoken to in Nevada.The vote was close in all three states but finally came down in Mr. Biden’s favor. And in all three, Republicans, picking up on Mr. Trump’s repeated false claims that elections are “rigged,” have raised various questions about election operations, in some cases even before the results arrived.In Georgia, where Mr. Biden now leads by about 13,000 votes, Mr. Raffensperger’s office ordered an unusual statewide hand recount of the more than 4.9 million votes cast after a request from the Trump campaign. Final results of that recount are expected on Wednesday.Georgia has also become a focal point of national politics, with two incumbent Republican senators facing runoff elections in January that will decide control of the Senate.For his part, Mr. Graham has said the allegations that he tried to interfere in Georgia’s election process are “ridiculous.”“What I’m trying to find out was, how do you verify signatures on mail-in ballots in these states that are the center of attention?” he said on Monday on CNN. “So, like, when you mail in a ballot, you’ve got to have some way to verify that the signature on the envelope actually matches the person who requested the ballot. It seems to me that Georgia has some protections that maybe other states don’t have, where you go into the portal to get your ballot. But I thought it was a good conversation. I’m surprised to hear him characterize it that way.”Gabriel Sterling, a deputy to Mr. Raffensperger who sat in on part of the call with Mr. Graham, told CNN that the conversation involved a discussion of absentee ballots and whether “if there was a percentage of signatures that weren’t really truly matching, is there some point we could get to — we could say, somebody went to a courtroom could say, ‘Well, let’s throw all these ballots because we have no way of knowing because the ballots were separated.’”Mr. Graham’s suggestion seemed to be based on the fact that, in the continuing recount, it is impossible to reverify the signatures submitted with absentee ballots.Under Georgia’s absentee ballot procedure, which is similar to the one used in many other states, the signatures on absentee ballot envelopes are verified when they are received by election officials. Then the ballots and envelopes are separated to protect the privacy of the voter’s choice.Those envelopes are retained for two years, but there is no way to rematch them with the ballots they contained.An official with the Georgia secretary of state’s office said that ballots that are rejected because signatures do not match generally make up less than two-tenths of a percent of the total votes. By law, voters are contacted and notified of the problem so that they may take steps to resolve it. More

Democrats and political observers were quick to condemn the Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, after it was reported that he pressured Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, to exclude ballots in the state’s presidential recount.
In a tweet, Minnesota congresswoman Ilhan Omar called the alleged approach “insane and illegal”.
Hakeem Jeffries, a US representative from New York, asked: “Did Lindsey Graham illegally pressure the Georgia secretary of state to rig the election after the fact? The justice department should find out.”
Noah Bookbinder, executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics, said: “For the chairman of the Senate committee charged with oversight of our legal system to have reportedly suggested that an election official toss out large numbers of legal ballots from American voters is appalling.”
Graham, from South Carolina, should resign his role as chair of the judiciary committee, Bookbinder said.
Joe Biden beat Donald Trump in Georgia by just under 15,000 votes, the first time the state had gone for a Democrat since 1996. A hand recount was ordered, and is expected to be completed by 20 November.
It is unlikely to change the result. If it did, the state’s 16 votes would not change the overall result in the electoral college, which Biden won 306-232. The threshold for victory is 270.
Nonetheless, Trump refuses to concede defeat and continues to peddle debunked conspiracy theories regarding voter fraud and electoral irregularities which election officials from both parties have dismissed as baseless.
Raffensperger told the Washington Post Graham had indicated he should find ways to toss out legal mail-in ballots.
“It sure looked like he was wanting to go down that road,” he said.
Counties administer elections in Georgia, making Raffensperger powerless to do what Graham apparently wanted.
“It was just an implication of, ‘Look hard and see how many ballots you could throw out,’” Raffensperger told CNN.
Graham told the Hill the claim was “just ridiculous” and that “if he [felt] threatened by that conversation, he’s got a problem.
“I actually thought it was a good conversation,” the senator said, adding that he was “surprised to hear [Raffensperger] characterized it that way”.
On Tuesday, Graham said he had spoken to election officials in several battleground states, where a dwindling group of Trump allies continue to push his baseless claims.
“Yeah, I talked to Arizona, I talked to Nevada,” Graham told reporters on Capitol Hill.
He was forced to clarify that he had spoken to the Republican governor of Arizona, Doug Ducey, not Katie Hobbs, the secretary of state, after she said she had not spoken to Graham.
Raffensperger has faced mounting criticism from his own party for defending the state’s electoral process. He told the Post he had received threatening messages from “people on [his] side of the aisle”, demanding that he “better not botch” the recount.
Georgia’s two senators, David Perdue and Kelley Loeffler, have called for his resignation. Both face tight run-off elections.
Graham’s alleged approach to Raffensperger prompted widespread criticism in the mainstream media.
Writing for the Post, the conservative columnist Jennifer Rubin asked why Graham “would need to know this information and decide directly to contact Raffensperger.
“Federal and/or state law enforcement should get to the bottom of this, requiring both parties to the conversation, and any witnesses, to preserve evidence. Graham’s actions have called into question his willingness to uphold the sanctity of elections.” More

After four years of Donald Trump’s presidency, many voters who typically vote Republican turned against him.
For example, in Winnebago county, Wisconsin, about 72% of voters cast their ballot for the Republican House candidate – either Glenn Grothman or Mike Gallagher, depending on where they live. But just 52% cast their vote for Trump.
This happened in county after county: Trump performed worse than other Republicans on the ballot. Here’s how Trump performed in each county compared with the Republican House candidate on the same ballot:
House v Trump 2020 map
This is why Trump lost the election, but why Republicans gained seats in the House.
To be clear, Trump also underperformed other Republicans in 2016. But since the last election, the gap between Trump and other Republicans grew in all kinds of communities in the US. In other words, the election wasn’t just about Democrats rejecting Trump by turning out in record numbers. It was also about Republicans and independents who preferred the Republican party – but just without Donald Trump.
White Republican counties turned away from Trump
Trump’s appeal in 2016 was especially salient in very white counties, where he actually outperformed Republican House candidates.
But this time around, Trump underperformed in these areas – and he did even worse everywhere else.
Race chart
For example in Christian county, Illinois, where about 95% of the population is white, Trump won about 73% of the votes. But the Republican house candidate, Rodney Davis, did 10 percentage points better.
Meanwhile, Trump severely underperformed Republican House candidates in places with more people of color, which tend to be metropolitan areas. But these places aren’t a monolith. In fact, in a few areas with more people of color, Trump actually outperformed the House candidate.
For example, in Zapata county, Texas, a predominantly Hispanic area near the southern border, Trump won with 53% of the votes. But the Republican House candidate, Sandra Whitten, lost by nearly 20 points.
We can see that distribution in this chart showing how Trump did in every county:

Still, the overarching takeaway is that even the Republican base in racially homogeneous parts of white America moved away from Trump this election.
Trump lost ground with Republicans in metropolitan areas
Metropolitan areas tend to skew Democratic, but there are still a huge number of Republicans. In those areas, Trump underperformed the House candidate with those voters by four points in 2016. This time around, he underperformed by more than 12 points.
urban/rural chart
This tracks with the data on how Biden won the 2020 presidential election. Democrats made huge gains in the suburbs of big cities, like Philadelphia and Milwaukee. But not only did they get big turnout there; many Republicans also didn’t vote for Trump.
Meanwhile, in rural areas Trump actually performed better than he did in 2020.

But if Republicans are doing electoral math here, just 8 million presidential voters live in what this analysis categorizes as rural counties. Even though Trump won those areas by 3.5 million votes, it’s only a fraction of the amount by which Trump underperformed in more populous areas.
Trump did far worse than Republicans down-ballot in areas with more college degrees
One of the biggest determinants of how an area voted was the portion of the population that has a college degree.
In places with more degrees, Trump largely kept up with ballot Republicans in 2016. In 2020, that gap widened.
Education chart
For example in Madison county, Mississippi – a Jackson suburb where nearly half the residents over 25 have college degrees – Trump won 58% of the vote. But the Republican House candidates in the county got 73% of the vote.
Meanwhile, in the parts of America with the lowest rate of college degrees, Trump did quite well compared with the Republican House candidate. In fact, in the majority of these counties, which tend to be more rural, Trump actually outperformed down-ballot Republicans.

One caveat of this analysis is that it uses county-level data, which means some of the nuances in larger counties are left unexplored. These metropolitan areas are categorized as having more college degrees. But these areas also have high levels of inequality, which means there are also a lot of people who don’t have high-school diplomas.
Trump may have less appeal – but Trumpism isn’t gone
This data hardly means Trumpism is fading away in the party.
After all, Trump is trying to stage a coup by insisting he won an election that he clearly lost – and many Republicans officials are staying silent or parroting his argument. In addition, 70% of Republicans agree with Trump and they say the election was not “free and fair” despite no evidence backing up this claim.
Still, what this means is that four years of Trump pushed away a significant swath of Republican and independent voters.
So how do Republicans perform without Trump on the ballot? The first test will be in the Georgia special elections in January which will determine the balance of the US Senate. Even though Trump lost Georgia by a few thousand votes, both House and Senate Republicans outperformed Trump – and could do so by even bigger margins in the special election without Trump weighing them down. More