Elections

To the Editor:Re “Tensions on Rise as Trump Denies Election Result” (front page, Nov. 16):When President Trump won 304 electoral votes in 2016, he called it a “landslide,” even though he had three million fewer popular votes than Hillary Clinton. Mrs. Clinton conceded, because she’s gracious and she accepts how our democracy works.Now Joe Biden has won 306 electoral votes and five million more popular votes than Mr. Trump. Mr. Biden is not calling it a “landslide” because he is gracious. And Mr. Trump has refused to concede, perhaps because he does not know how to graciously acknowledge ever losing anything.It’s past time for the Republican leadership to step up, to stop this now. It’s a travesty and it demeans us, at home and abroad. Demand the transition of presidential power that our democracy is built on. Mr. Biden won. Actually in a “landslide,” according to Mr. Trump, 2016.Susan GreyColumbia, S.C.To the Editor:I have been a Republican for over 50 years. Lately I have become disillusioned by the party’s slide from conservatism to libertarianism, but the actions following the recent presidential election mark a more dramatic and totally unacceptable move toward fascism. I will take the following vow and call upon all patriotic Republicans to take it as well.If the Republican Party continues to refuse to accept the outcome of the election, I will never vote for another Republican at any level of government ever again.Perhaps we need a new party.Bruce PowellCresskill, N.J.To the Editor:The conventional wisdom is that most Republican senators are supporting President Trump’s refusal to concede the election because they want his support in the runoff in the two Senate races in Georgia on Jan. 5.I think the Republican senators still haven’t learned their lesson after four years. Mr. Trump will do whatever is best for him, not the Republican Party. I believe that he wants the Democrats to win in Georgia. If there is a Democratic Senate, it is more likely that it will pass legislation that is anathema to Mr. Trump and his base. That would permit him — or his designee, perhaps a member of his family — to run more successfully in 2024.A more balanced legislative program would not engage Republican voters the same way as a more progressive program that Mr. Trump railed against during the campaign. Mr. Trump will be willing to sacrifice the next four years in order to put himself in a stronger position in 2024.David M. DorsenWashingtonThe writer was assistant chief counsel of the Senate Watergate Committee in 1973-74.To the Editor:There is no good reason that President Trump should not contest voting procedures in court. Logically, he cannot both sue and concede the election, however inconvenient to Joe Biden and his team. Yes, we Democrats are certain that our candidate won. But the future peace will not be won by shouting down a large and deeply indoctrinated and now deeply disappointed segment of our population.Let them run out the string the law grants them. A semblance of unity could be reached sooner and with less societal disruption. We all have a stake in this.William AppelFriday Harbor, Wash.To the Editor:It is time that the Republicans select a group to visit the White House — similar to August 1974 when they persuaded Richard Nixon to resign — to get President Trump to concede and stop this childish behavior.Michael BognerBel Air, Md. More

In the 1941 Orson Welles epic “Citizen Kane,” newspapermen huddle near the printing press on election night as it becomes clear that the results won’t be good news for their boss, the publishing mogul Charles Foster Kane.One of them holds up a front page with the headline they had hoped for: “Kane Elected.” He then lowers his head and nods toward the version they have to go with instead. “Fraud at Polls!” it declares.[embedded content]Voter fraud is one of the oldest charges a politician can level in American elections — though no president in modern times has done so with such frequency, and so little evidence, as President Trump.As a news story, it is sensational and often irresistible. The Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law examined its enduring appeal in a 2007 report, observing that ballot fraud has “the feel of a bank heist caper: roundly condemned but technically fascinating, and sufficiently lurid to grab and hold headlines.”The subject’s prevalence in the conservative news media, where it is treated as a more widespread problem than the facts show, may help explain how Mr. Trump, a ravenous consumer of cable news, came to be so fixated.In reality, elections officials across the country, representing both parties, said there was no evidence that fraud had played any role in determining the election outcome this year. The most common claims of voter fraud — reports of ballots cast by someone voting twice, or by a dead person or someone who is otherwise ineligible — can almost always be traced back to a misunderstanding like a typo, a clerical error or a false assumption that two people with a common name are actually the same person, according to the Brennan Center.Still, the topic has been a staple of coverage on Fox News going back to the 2000s, when hosts like Bill O’Reilly spread exaggerated stories about immigrants who were voting illegally, campaigns that paid people for their votes and community groups like ACORN whose employees had submitted fraudulent voter registrations. (The ACORN employees, who were also the subject of an attack ad that John McCain’s campaign ran against Barack Obama in 2008, did not appear to be attempting to influence voting, but rather to get paid for voter registration work they hadn’t actually done.)Claims of voter fraud have often involved absurd and far-fetched scenarios — dead people, dogs, busloads of people of color — which is another way they live on in the public imagination. In recent years, conservative activists have pushed unverified reports that buses full of illegal voters showed up at polling places from California to Wisconsin.Famously, there was the story that Senator Christopher S. Bond, Republican of Missouri, told in 2000 about a 13-year-old springer spaniel that was registered to vote in St. Louis. Mr. Bond was making a case that more anti-fraud protections, like requiring identification, were needed after his colleague, Senator John Ashcroft, lost his seat when more Missourians voted for a dead man: Gov. Mel Carnahan, who had been killed in a plane crash several weeks before the election but remained on the ballot. Mr. Ashcroft did not challenge the results.The fantasy of a stolen election has elements that Mr. Trump has long incorporated into his narrative about himself. There are clear perpetrators (undocumented immigrants, big-city Democratic political machines) and a victim (him) — and usually enough ambiguity so he can float outlandish but unsubstantiated rumors.He has been laying the groundwork for refusing to concede for some time. Speaking in September to Mark Levin, the talk radio and Fox News host, Mr. Trump suggested that some voters were receiving multiple ballots in the mail. He said: “People are saying, ‘Hey, what’s going on? I just got a whole batch of ballots.’” More

One thing we have learned from this election is just how crazy our democratic system is. Many crucial victories came down to slim margins in swing states and the idiosyncrasies of the electoral college.
Moving forward, progressives need to rally around serious democracy reform. Every issue we care about, from heathcare to climate justice, flows from that. Without a major intervention – and even with radical candidates winning office here and there – our political system is becoming less and less representative and responsive.
We need to start thinking about voting rights as operating on multiple levels. One is access to the ballot box: are you able to vote? Two: is your vote counted? Then there’s a third – does your vote have consequences? In other words, is your vote impactful politically? Does it lead to the ability for your chosen candidate to govern? That is where we are now. Even after our votes are counted and Joe Biden has sealed the deal to become president-elect, we’re being told that it will be impossible for him to accomplish anything given that the Republicans will likely control the Senate.
We have to challenge that logic as much as we can. The fact that the Democrats didn’t sweep Congress – that Biden may be dealing with a divided government – is extremely disappointing. But there’s actually a lot that a president can do with a divided or weak Congress if they have a spine. For example, Biden can use the same tactics that Trump used to fill various high-power positions without having them confirmed, by using the Vacancies Act and making recess appointments. Biden can also use executive power in bold ways, including to cancel all federal student loan debt using a legal authority called “compromise and settlement”. We must remind the incoming administration of the power it possesses, even if the circumstances are less than ideal. More

Will President-elect Joe Biden’s victory force America’s Christian nationalists to rethink the unholy alliance that powered Donald Trump’s four-year tour as one of the nation’s most dangerous presidents? Don’t count on it.The 2020 election is proof that religious authoritarianism is here to stay, and the early signs now indicate that the movement seems determined to reinterpret defeat at the top of the ticket as evidence of persecution and of its own righteousness. With or without Mr. Trump, they will remain committed to the illiberal politics that the president has so ably embodied.As it did in 2016, the early analysis of the 2020 election results often circled around the racial, urban-rural, and income and education divides. But the religion divide tells an equally compelling story. According to preliminary exit polls from Edison Research (the data is necessarily rough at this stage), 28 percent of voters identified as either white evangelical or white born-again Christian, and of these, 76 percent voted for Mr. Trump. If these numbers hold (some other polls put the religious share at a lower number; others put the support for Mr. Trump at a higher number), these results indicate a continuation of support for Mr. Trump from this group.The core of Mr. Trump’s voting bloc, to be clear, does not come from white evangelicals as such, but from an overlapping group of not necessarily evangelical, and not necessarily white, people who identify at least loosely with Christian nationalism: the idea that the United States is and ought to be a Christian nation governed under a reactionary understanding of Christian values. Unfortunately, data on that cohort is harder to find except in deeply researched work by sociologists like Andrew Whitehead and Samuel Perry.Most pollsters shoehorn complex religious identities into necessarily broad labels, so they fail to separate out the different strands of Mr. Trump’s support. There are indications that the president in fact expanded his appeal among nonwhite evangelical and born-again Christians of color, particularly among Latinos. Mr. Biden, on the other hand, who made faith outreach a key feature of his campaign, appears to have done well among moderate and progressive voters of all faiths.Conservative voters of faith “came in massive numbers, seven and a half million more above the 2016 baseline, which was itself a record,” Ralph Reed, head of the Faith and Freedom Coalition and a longtime religious right activist, said at a postelection press briefing. “We believe they’re the reason why Republicans are going to hold the Senate.”In their responses to the election outcome, some prominent religious right leaders have enabled or remained true to the false Trumpian line of election fraud. Michele Bachmann, the former Minnesota congresswoman and 2012 presidential candidate, said, “Smash the delusion, Father, of Joe Biden is our president. He is not.” In Crisis Magazine, a conservative Catholic publication, Richard C. Antall likened media reporting on the Biden-Harris ticket’s victory to a “coup d’état.” Mat Staver, chairman and founder of Liberty Counsel, added, “What we are witnessing only happens in communist or repressive regimes. We must not allow this fraud to happen in America.”Even as prominent Republican figures like George W. Bush and Mitt Romney slowly tried to nudge Mr. Trump toward the exit, leaders of the religious right continued to man the barricades. The conservative speaker and Falkirk Center fellow David Harris, Jr. put it this way:If you’re a believer, and you believe God appointed Donald J. Trump to run this country, to lead this country, and you believe as I do that he will be re-elected the President of the United States, then friends, you’ve got to guard your heart, you’ve got to guard your peace. Right now we are at war.Others stopped short of endorsing Mr. Trump’s wilder allegations of election fraud, but backed his right to challenge the results. Mr. Reed told the Religion News Service, “This election will be over when those recounts are complete and those legal challenges are resolved.” The Rev. Franklin Graham tweeted that the courts will “determine who wins the presidency.” The conservative pastor Robert Jeffress, who gave a sermon before Mr. Trump’s inaugural ceremony in 2017, noted that a Biden win was “the most likely outcome.”After processing their disappointment, Christian nationalists may come around to the reality of Joe Biden’s victory. There is no indication, however, that this will temper their apocalyptic vision, according to which one side of the American political divide represents unmitigated evil. During a Nov. 11 virtual prayer gathering organized by the Family Research Council, one of the key speakers cast the election as the consequence of “the whole godless ideology that’s wanted to swallow our homes, destroy our marriages, throw our children into rivers of confusion.” Jim Garlow, an evangelical pastor whose Well Versed Ministry has as its stated goal, “Bringing biblical principles of governance to governmental leaders,” asserted that Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris are at the helm of an “ideology” that is “anti-Christ, anti-Biblical to its core.”The comments pouring in from these and other figures may be forgotten when Mr. Biden takes office. But they are worth paying attention to now for what they say about the character of the movement. While many outsiders continue to think of Christian nationalism as a social movement that arises from the ground up, it in fact a political movement that operates mostly from the top down. The rank-and-file of the movement is diverse and comes to its churches with an infinite variety of motivations and concerns, but the leaders are far more unified.They collaborate in a densely interconnected network of think-tanks, policy groups, activist organizations, legal advocacy groups and conservative pastoral networks. What holds them together is not any centralized command structure, but a radical political ideology that is profoundly hostile to democracy and pluralism, and a certain political style that seeks to provoke moral panic, rewards the paranoid and views every partisan conflict as a conflagration, the end of the world. Partisan politics is the lifeblood of their movement.If one considers the movement from the perspective of its leaders, it is easier to see why it is unlikely to change in the new political circumstances we find ourselves in. The power of the leadership is the function of at least three underlying structural realities in America’s political and economic life, and those realities are not going to change anytime soon.The first is the growing economic inequality that has produced spectacular fortunes for the few, while too many ordinary families struggle to get by. Leaders of the movement get much of the support for their well-funded operations from a cadre of super-wealthy individuals and extended families who are as committed to free-market fundamentalism as they are to reactionary religion. The donors in turn need the so-called values voters in order to lock down their economic agenda of low taxation for the wealthy and minimal regulation. These donors include, among many others, the Prince-DeVos family, the fracking billionaire Wilks brothers, and members of the Green family, whose Hobby Lobby fortune helped build the Museum of the Bible. The movement gets another big chunk of its funding from the large mass of people who are often in the middle rungs of the economic spectrum and whose arduously cultivated resentments toward those below them have been turned into a fund-raising bonanza.The second structural reality to consider is that Christian nationalism is a creation of a uniquely isolated messaging sphere. Many members of the rank and file get their main political information not just from messaging platforms that keep their audiences in a world that is divorced from reality, but also from dedicated religious networks and reactionary faith leaders. The fact that Mr. Trump was able to hold on to a high percentage of the vote in the face of such overwhelming evidence of malfeasance is proof enough that the religious-nationalist end of the right-wing information bubble has gotten more, not less, resistant over time.The third critical factor is a political system that gives disproportionate power to an immensely organized, engaged and loyal minority. One of the most reliable strategies for producing that unshakable cohort has been to get them to agree that abortion is the easy answer to every difficult political policy question. Recently, religious right leaders have shifted their focus more to a specious understanding of what they call “religious freedom” or “religious liberty,” but the underlying strategy is the same: make individuals see their partisan vote as the primary way to protect their cultural and religious identity.Republicans have long known that the judiciary is one of the most effective instruments of minority rule. Mr. Trump’s success in packing the federal judiciary — as of this writing, 220 federal judges, including three Supreme Court justices — will be one of his most devastating legacies. The prospect of further entrenching minority rule in the coming years will keep the alliance between Republicans and the religious right alive.Perhaps the most troubling aspect of the Christian nationalist response to the 2020 election is that we’ve seen this movie before. The “stolen election” meme won’t bring Mr. Trump back into the Oval Office. But then, the birther narrative never took President Barack Obama out of office, either. The point of conspiratorial narratives and apocalyptic rhetoric is to lay the groundwork for a politics of total obstruction, in preparation for the return of a “legitimate” ruler. The best guess is that religious authoritarianism of the next four years will look a lot like it did in the last four years. We ignore the political implications for our democracy at our peril.Katherine Stewart (@kathsstewart) is the author of “The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism.”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

Dr Anthony Fauci, the US’s top infectious diseases official and a member of the White House taskforce, has joined the call to allow transition talks to begin amid a surge in coronavirus cases. Asked by CNN’s Jake Tapper if a normal transition would be to the benefit of public health, he replied: ‘Of course, that’s obvious. Of course it would be better if we could starting working with them.’ The president himself has been virtually silent on the public health disaster swirling around him. According to Fauci, Trump has not attended a meeting of the coronavirus taskforce for ‘several months’
Trump faces growing pressure to start transition as Covid surges across US
Trump insists ‘I concede nothing’ after tweeting that Biden ‘won’ – as it happened More

Donald Trump lost the election. He knows it. But he won’t admit it.He still hopes and believes that there is a way for the courts to erase enough votes to tip the election in his favor. This will not happen.His legal challenges in swing states across the country are largely being met with defeat and setback. In court, you have to provide evidence. Lies, accusations and conspiracy theory don’t cut it. Trump has spent his life gaming the system. It is unfathomable to him that this system can’t be gamed.In the end, Trump hopes to push his case to the Supreme Court, where he has seated three conservative justices. That is also not likely to be a winning strategy.Trump believes he can use the judiciary as a weapon against the American people. The judiciary is not likely to allow itself to be used.Barring that, he is committed to destroying faith in the electoral process itself. If he didn’t win, he insists he must have been cheated because, in his mind, failure is not a possibility.Like he has done for the entirety of his presidency, he is lying, concocting a narrative detached from reality.His Twitter feed since the election — he has made precious few appearances or official statements during this time — has been an unprecedented attack on election integrity and the voting franchise as a whole.He keeps complaining that the election was rigged, that it was stolen from him, that computer software switched millions of votes from him to Joe Biden.On Sunday, in reference to Biden, he tweeted: “He only won in the eyes of the FAKE NEWS MEDIA. I concede NOTHING! We have a long way to go. This was a RIGGED ELECTION!”But Trump has gone further, appearing to attack the voters who cast their ballots for Biden. He retweeted a post by a Richmond, Va. television station that read: “Virginia Wesleyan University business professor and dean Paul Ewell wrote that anyone who chose Biden for president is ‘ignorant, anti-American and anti-Christian.’ ” To that tweet, Trump appended, “Progress!”Donald Trump will no longer be president on Jan. 20. That is a hard fact, an unmovable date. Biden will be sworn in and will become the president.But Trump is not going to allow this transition to be smooth. He rose in spectacle and he will flame out in it. We should put nothing beyond him. He will do everything he can do not to assume the posture of the defeated. He will do everything to secure a future for himself and his family that is comfortable and secure. He will do everything with the last bits of power from his presidency.His attack on the election system is doing damage to our democracy. So is his refusal to concede. So is his sulking. But, of course, Trump doesn’t care about our democracy. He doesn’t care about democracy, period. He cares about money and power. He cares about managing the mob. He cares about adoration.Election Disinformation More

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Barack Obama would not take a position in Joe Biden’s cabinet if the president-elect offered it – because if he did, he fears, Michelle Obama would leave him.
The 44th president made the remark in an interview with CBS Sunday Morning, two days ahead of publication of his memoir, A Promised Land. He was due to speak to CBS again, for 60 Minutes, on Sunday night.
Biden, Obama’s vice-president from 2009 to 2017, is preparing to become the 46th president in January, having defeated Donald Trump at the polls.
Asked how he will help Biden, Obama said: “He doesn’t need my advice, and I will help him in any ways that I can. Now, I’m not planning to suddenly work on the White House staff or something.”
Susan Rice and Michelle Flournoy are among Obama administration veterans reportedly being considered for key posts under Biden.
Asked if he would consider a cabinet position, Obama said: “There are some things I would not be doing because Michelle would leave me. She’d be like, what? You’re doing what?”
The Obamas have enough to occupy their time as it is, not least through establishing a charitable foundation and fulfilling a production deal with Netflix.
In his book, Obama considers what his meteoric rise to the US Senate and then the White House meant for his marriage to Michelle and family life with their daughters, Sasha and Malia.
“My career in politics, with its prolonged absences, had made it even tougher” for his wife to pursue her own law career, he writes. “More than once Michelle had decided not to pursue an opportunity that excited her but would have demanded too much time away from the girls.
“… With my election [as president] she’d been forced to give up a job with real impact for a role [as first lady] that – in its original design, at least – was far too small for her gifts.”
The Obamas’ literary gifts have at least paid off. A Promised Land is part of a reported $65m deal with Penguin Random House that also covered Becoming, Michelle Obama’s memoir, released in 2018, and which has sold more than 10m copies. The former president is expected to produce a second volume.
He also discussed the first with Oprah Winfrey, for Apple TV in an interview scheduled to broadcast in full on Tuesday.
In a released clip, Obama told Winfrey he and Michelle “went through our rough patches in the White House, as she’s written about, she’s talked about. But I tell you that the thing that I think we were good about was talking stuff through, never losing fundamental love and respect for each other, and prioritising our kids.”
Though Trump shows no sign of willingly giving up power, his memoirs are already the subject of speculation – and a rumoured $100m price tag.
Another passage of Obama’s CBS interview might have had resonance for the current president, had he been watching.
Obama discussed what it is like to have the luxurious trappings of office, in this instance the presidential motorcade, inevitably taken away.
“I’m driving along,” Obama said, laughing. “I’m still not driving, but [I’m] in the car. I’m in the car in the backseat and I’m looking at my iPad or something. And suddenly, we stop and I’m like, ‘What’s going on?’ There’s a red light. There’s a car right next to us. Some kids are eating a burrito or something in the backseat.
“Back to life.” More