Elections

It’s easy to imagine ways Joe Biden’s presidency might open very badly. Covid-19 may still be spiking. The economy could slip back into recession. Mitch McConnell might still control the Senate, blocking every major Biden proposal. Donald Trump will be unleashed as National Narrator blasting everything that happens.Things don’t get much better in the unlikely event Democrats capture both of Georgia’s Senate seats to achieve a 50-50 tie, broken by the Democratic vice president. Republicans, freed from all responsibility, will go into full opposition mode and nothing will pass when 60 votes are needed to overcome a filibuster. Democrats will try to govern with a razor-thin majority controlled by several relatively conservative Democrats. So Democrats will have ownership of the government without the means to deliver.How can Biden and team deal with this challenging circumstance?One way was proposed by Senator Elizabeth Warren in a Washington Post op-ed this week: Use executive orders. She suggested some obvious moves Biden absolutely should make on Day 1 — like re-entering the Paris climate accord — but also suggested some big and expensive unilateral policy changes: raising the minimum wage for federal contractors to $15, canceling billions of dollars in student debt.With all due respect to Warren, opening the Biden era by stiff-arming Congress and ordering all sorts of big policy changes by presidential diktat could knock the legs out from the Biden presidency.In the first place, Biden will have to get a Covid-19 relief package through Congress, which if done right doesn’t have to be an ideological showdown. Signaling that you’re going to insult the Constitution and govern by executive order doesn’t seem like an ideal way to win congressional support. Second, uniting the country and restoring its soul were at the core of the Biden campaign. His basic diagnosis is that partisan enmity has created a fundamental breakdown in our political culture. He has to at least try to fix that.A better approach starts with the understanding that Biden’s policies remain popular. Democrats underperformed in congressional races because voters hate political correctness, “defund the police” and “socialism.”A better approach would, next, be about finding policy measures that can win 60 Senate votes. This is actually not that hard. I spoke to Senator Mitt Romney this week and he ticked off a series of areas where he was optimistic the parties could work together: fix prescription drug pricing and end surprise billing; an immigration measure that helps the Dreamers and includes E-Verify; an expanded child tax credit; green energy measures.Isabel Sawhill, the long-term Democratic adviser now at the Brookings Institution, reeled off a few more: expanding national service, student debt forgiveness, a middle-class tax cut.Oren Cass of American Compass, which is Republican-leaning, pointed out that there were a lot of newly emerging issues that the two parties haven’t yet had time to get polarized about. Common action could be envisioned there: an infrastructure bank, reshoring American supply chains so we’re not so dependent on China, expanding non-college career pathways, industrial policy to benefit the Midwestern manufacturing base.Finding areas of agreement is easy. Getting them to the Senate floor for a vote under Leader McConnell would be harder. His priority has always been winning G.O.P. majorities, not necessarily governing. But a number of steps could be taken. First, Biden could try to persuade McConnell it’s in his interest to allow votes, at least in the first year. Republicans will be defending open Senate seats in places like Pennsylvania and North Carolina in 2022. It wouldn’t look great if they achieved absolutely nothing.Second, deal-making and moderate senators could form bipartisan gangs around specific issues and try to force McConnell’s hand. Re-elected senators like Susan Collins have potentially immense power in a closely divided body.Many senators of both parties are already frustrated by how many possibly successful bills simply get bottled up and never reach a vote. “I don’t know what the calculation is that goes on in the mind of the leaders about what to take to the floor, but we don’t vote on a lot of legislation,” Romney told me.At this point the threat of executive orders comes in handy. If the White House makes a good-faith effort to work in a bipartisan way, if senators come together to craft legislation, and still nothing passes, then Biden will have more justification for doing what Warren suggests.“If the Senate refuses to tackle the major issues, then the president will and he’ll just issue executive orders,” Romney said. “Just saying ‘no’ doesn’t enhance our power. It’s a way to cede power.”Given the likely division of power, Biden is not going to lead an F.D.R.-style New Deal administration. But there is a path for him to pass a series of important pieces of legislation that would help millions of Americans. More than that, he has a chance to take a dysfunctional system of government and turn it into a humane and functioning one. That in itself would be a miracle.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

Hi. Welcome to On Politics, your guide to the day in national politics. I’m Lisa Lerer, your host.Sign up here to get On Politics in your inbox every weekday.We have spent a lot of time writing, thinking and talking about politics in this newsletter over the past 26 months. (A lot of time: This is our 995th edition since starting this little project on Sept. 10, 2018!)No one could have predicted how this election would go: a deadly pandemic. National protests over police brutality. An economic nosedive. A hard-fought, contentious campaign. (OK, we definitely predicted that last one.)With the election finally over, I thought it might be nice to share the stage. We asked how you were feeling after the tumultuous political season. And did you ever answer!We got so many thought-provoking responses about the future of our country and its politics that I couldn’t resist sharing some.For Joe Massaua, a high school senior in Villanova, Pa., the election made him feel excited about what the future could bring …We have pressing problems to solve now: Covid-19, a recession, racial justice and climate change. America is on a path to be more unified than before; we need to see it through, with actions from our local leaders and those on the national stage. We are one diverse American community. I sincerely hope those on both sides will put politics aside to work for the good of the American people.… but Drew Currie, writing from Colorado, says there may be no way to patch up the country’s differences.It’s time to find a way to split officially into two nations. Let’s avoid civil war. Let’s use words to find our way through a peaceful division.Kate Landry of Hickory, N.C., worries about President Trump’s lasting impact …It seems like Trump has ripped the Band-Aid off a festering wound of racism, ignorance and all-around anger and hatefulness. I’m sad and discouraged.… while Martin Sherlock of Naples, Fla., blames the news media.I have listened to the media bad-mouth and call the president all kinds of names for well over four years. I am waiting to see how you bad-mouth the next president! The media does not have any conservative reporter or staff, which I consider a big problem of division. Mr. Trump is positively correct when he says that it is all fake news.Lee Cross of Fort Smith, Ark., just wants to get back to not thinking about politics …I am looking forward to getting off this political roller coaster that we’ve been on for the past week and getting back to the ever-growing stack of must-read journals and want-to-read books. And since the Christmas holidays will be very much subdued this year it is my fervent hope that for once we can observe the season of Advent the way it should be observed. All of us need time for peaceful reflection and — no matter what our beliefs — hopes and prayers for the Biden-Harris administration.… but Tom Levy of Oakland, Calif., says the fight is far from over …For those of us who wrote postcards and letters, and phone- and text-banked to voters in Wisconsin, Michigan, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Arizona and Georgia to get out the vote — the election is decidedly NOT over. That’s because two Senate seats in Georgia are still up for grabs in runoff elections scheduled for Jan. 5. Take a break. Sleep in. And rest up. Because those of us determined to do our best to help elect Democrats to the Senate in Georgia are about to jump in across the country.… and Richie Feathers of Boston is already worried about the race after the runoffs.Instead of basking in the victory for longer than a day, I’m already worried about 2022, which, if history is any indication, will now skew red. This anticipated rebuke of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris will be especially frustrating because voters will claim not enough got done, but turn in their votes for Republican senators who ensure not enough will get done.Sam Fisher, of Katy, Texas, sees some hope for political dialogue close to home …I’m looking forward to the knot hopefully disappearing from my stomach and my hair ceasing to fall out! I’m hopeful because my oh-so-dear friend and my oh-so-dear cousin have polar opposite views from mine, politically speaking, and through all of this, we are working hard to listen to one another, learn from one another, respect one another, love one another and find common ground. And dadgum it, if we can do it, the whole nation should be able to!… and Darrell Sabin, of Moraga, Calif., sees the healthy functioning of a two-party system.I look at this election and feel more comfortable than ever that our form of government will last the test of time. This election showed that we have two healthy parties. The Republicans and the Democrats set records in voter turnout. Our country fortunately has both Republicans and Democrats. Neither party has all the answers. Both parties are wrong and both parties are right “some of the time.” One party corrects the other party. Messy — but healthy.But Jo Baxter of Palm City, Fla., sees hopeless divisions …I don’t see much hope in this divided, mean environment, when both sides can’t even agree on the facts of a given situation. I am thrilled about Biden’s election, but scared by the sheer numbers of Trump’s support. Trump may eventually move out of the White House, but he has sullied the Oval Office forever.… and Jeanne-Marie Lane of Everett, Wash., sees an uphill battle ahead.I am not actually looking for stupendous, noteworthy moments for the next four years. I am hoping for a return to communication and actions resulting from willingness to compromise on both sides of issues, because Trump won’t be in the middle causing continual conflict and mistrust.It may take the next four years for all of us to recover, even slightly. To return to respect for each other. We’ve been in a war zone and it may take more than years to feel better about ourselves and each other and recover.Ginny Swart, of Cape Town, simply wonders whether the nearly $14 billion spent on the election could have been put to better use …The mind boggles. They could have fixed climate change for that. Fixed Iran. Fixed the health service. All that money wasted.… and Lynn Alvey of Milwaukee speaks for all of us — especially those of us at On Politics.Has it really been a week since the election? Why does it seem like years?Readers’ responses were edited and condensed. Thanks, as always, to my colleague Isabella Grullón Paz for her help.Drop us a line!We want to hear from our readers. Have a question? We’ll try to answer it. Have a comment? We’re all ears. Email us at [email protected] Opinion: Trump’s loss and refusal to concedeWill President Trump eventually concede the election to President-elect Joe Biden? Or is his refusal the next act in an unending showman’s routine?The Times columnist Thomas Edsall argues that Mr. Trump’s “refusal to concede, and the support he is getting from his fellow Republicans, is part and parcel of the sustained drive by the right, especially since Barack Obama won a majority in 2008, to constrain and limit political participation by minorities by every available means.”Election 2020 More

This article is part of the Debatable newsletter. You can sign up here to receive it on Tuesdays and Thursdays.The 2020 presidential election always promised to be a “historic” one, and there’s no question it delivered: More than 66 percent of the voting-eligible population cast a ballot, according to projections from The Washington Post, the highest level of voter turnout since 1900.As with the 2016 election, the consensus around what this mass expression of popular will says about the country is likely to be debated for years to come, but here are some lessons that journalists, data analysts and politicians are already taking away.Support for Trump has become stronger, not weakerThe Democratic Party’s goal for this election was a wholesale repudiation of President Trump and his style of politics. But as the Times columnist Jamelle Bouie noted, that repudiation never came. In fact, the president expanded his base in 2020, earning nearly 10 million more votes than he did in 2016 and over six million more than Hillary Clinton.“Even without policy to match the populist persona — the Trump administration has been as generous to the wealthy and connected as it has been stingy with the poor and the working class — Trumpism appeals to tens of millions of voters, from the large majority of white Americans to many people in traditionally Democratic constituencies,” Mr. Bouie writes. “That, if anything, is the surprise of this election.”In a political climate as polarized as ours, much of Mr. Trump’s gains can be chalked up to pure “negative partisanship.” But for people without strong party affiliations, Mr. Trump’s handling of the economy, which voters consistently rank as their top issue, may have played a role: Approval ratings of Mr. Trump’s economic performance remained high throughout his presidency, which coincided with the country’s longest economic expansion. And in September, a majority of Americans told Gallup they were better off than they were four years ago, which was not the case in 2012 and 2004.Of course, Mr. Trump also presided over the sharpest downturn since the Great Depression. But as Annie Lowrey explains in The Atlantic, many Americans seemed not to blame Mr. Trump for the pandemic-induced recession, and the election occurred as the economy was already bouncing back. Because of the trillions in stimulus Congress passed in March, many in the middle class are actually faring better financially than they were before. (Those most devastated by the recession were likely to vote Democratic anyway.)Racial and ethnic polarization seems to be decreasingWhite voters, who made up roughly two-thirds of the electorate, continue to be the only racial group from which Mr. Trump commanded majority support. Exit polls — which, it bears reminding, are preliminary estimates — show that his advantage increased slightly among white women from 2016, but he lost support among white men both with and without college degrees.At the same time, President-elect Joe Biden underperformed Hillary Clinton among other racial and ethnic groups. Mr. Trump expanded his appeal among Black voters, for example, though Black support for Democrats remained so high that the increase in turnout cost Mr. Trump dearly in states such as Michigan and Georgia.Most significant were Mr. Trump’s inroads with Latino voters in the battleground states of Florida and Texas, which helped keep them in Republican hands. In Texas, especially, Mr. Trump’s handling of the economy, combined with the lack of Democratic messaging and outreach, appeared key to his success.But the losses in Latino support Mr. Biden suffered in those states were offset by gains made in others, in part because of grass-roots organizing that preceded this election cycle. In Arizona, for example, the nativist tenure of Joe Arpaio, the former Maricopa County sheriff, galvanized the children of immigrants a decade ago to build political power, which contributed to Mr. Biden’s and Senator-elect Mark Kelly’s victories there.[Related: “Democrats Underperformed Among Voters of Color — Except in Arizona. Here’s Why.”]If the diversity of the so-called Latino vote has befuddled the political class, it’s because “it doesn’t exist, nor do ‘Latino issues,’” my colleague Isvett Verde writes. “Latinos, like all Americans, are motivated by the issues that affect them directly. Those can vary depending on factors like our religion, where we grew up, whether we are first generation or our ancestors lived in North America long before the United States existed.”What’s true for Latinos is also true for Asian-Americans, whose support for Democrats is traditionally strong, but appeared weaker this year, and has never been uniform. About half of Vietnamese-Americans support Mr. Trump, for example, compared with one-fifth of Chinese-Americans, according to one survey.To Jay Caspian Kang, a writer at large for The New York Times Magazine, the lesson for both parties, and especially Democrats, is to start treating voters who belong to extremely broad racial and ethnic groups less like electoral tokens and more like political agents whose interests are contingent on their class position, education, ideology, immigration status, specific cultural background, age and location.As he said on the podcast “Time to Say Goodbye”: “You have to stop insulting people by believing that, you know, just by saying ‘We’re less racist’ that they’re going to vote for you.”The suburbs are trending blueIn 2018, voters in increasingly diverse and highly educated suburbs helped flip the House blue. That support only increased in 2020: On average, Mr. Biden improved on Hillary Clinton’s performance in suburban counties around the country by about 4.6 percentage points, The Times reports, which was crucial to Mr. Biden’s win.The implications of the shift, Neal Rothschild and Stef W. Kight write at Axios, are clear: “The suburbs are growing and racially and ethnically diverse. They’re becoming new immigrant hubs. The trends could benefit Democrats for the long-term unless Republicans change their playbook.”The red-blue economic divide is wideningAccording to exit polls, Mr. Biden did better than Mr. Trump with voters whose family income falls below $100,000 per year. But relatively well-off metro areas also show a stark partisan divide: Regions with higher education levels, fewer manufacturing jobs and brighter long-term economic prospects swung more toward Mr. Biden, while regions with lower job growth and a larger share of jobs at risk of automation swung more toward Mr. Trump.“Despite some demographic realignments, the economies of red and blue places drifted further apart,” Jed Kelko writes in The Times. “And as these gaps widen, it gets ever more challenging for America to have a shared view of the state of the economy and of the policies most urgently needed.”Support for progressive policies was all over the mapAs Emily Peck reports for HuffPost, voters supported a number of progressive policies last week — and not only in the places one might expect:In Florida, a state Mr. Trump won handily, people voted to increase the state’s minimum hourly wage to $15 by a margin of about 22 percentage points.Arizona passed a 3.5 percent income tax hike on the state’s highest earners, which is estimated to raise nearly $940 billion annually for education programs.Colorado passed a measure guaranteeing 12 weeks of paid family and medical leave.Four states — Arizona, Montana, New Jersey and South Dakota — legalized marijuana for recreational use. Oregon also voted to decriminalize the possession of small amounts of hard drugs, the first state to do so, and fund addiction treatment programs. (The state also legalized psilocybin, the active compound in psychedelic mushrooms, for therapeutic use.) “One of America’s greatest mistakes over the last century was the war on drugs,” the Times columnist Nick Kristof writes, “so it’s thrilling to see voters in red and blue states alike moving to unwind it.”At the same time, progressive priorities suffered major setbacks, and in Democratic strongholds, no less. In Illinois, voters rejected a measure to raise taxes on the rich, the same sort of policy that enjoys broad support nationally. And in California, voters passed Prop 22, a ballot measure that overturned legislation that forced companies like Uber and DoorDash to treat their contract workers as employees with guaranteed wages and benefits.“Prop 22 is great for employers, but it’s a huge loss for workers,” Robert Reich, a University of California, Berkeley, professor of public policy and former U.S. secretary of labor, told The Times. “This will encourage other companies to reclassify their work force as independent contractors, and once they do, over a century of labor protections vanishes overnight.”If there is any electoral lesson to decode from these results, it’s not clear that ideology offers the right interpretive key. “At a time when great masses of voters support obvious contradictions like raising the minimum wage and viciously anti-worker state legislatures,” writes Alex Pareene in The New Republic, “it’s hard to believe anyone, at least in the short term, has a compelling or even plausible strategy for consistently winning elections.”Do you have a point of view we missed? Email us at [email protected]. Please note your name, age and location in your response, which may be included in the next newsletter.MORE ON THE VOTE BREAKDOWN“White people, yet again, showed up for Donald Trump” [Vox]“How Democrats Missed Trump’s Appeal to Latino Voters” [The New York Times]“The Three Progressive Policies Voters Seem to Love” [Slate]“This Election, a Divided America Stands United on One Topic” [The New York Times]“We’ve Seen a Youthquake” [Time] More

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

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

In looking for reasons behind the misinformation that is casting doubt about last week’s election Joseph R. Biden Jr., some researchers are drawing a link to the growing distrust of the news media among conservatives.Research from Oxford University’s Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism has found a long and steady decline in trust in traditional media among more conservative Americans. In its place, they are increasingly relying on right-wing media outlets like Breitbart News and One America News and conservative pundits with a history of spreading falsehoods.From 2015 to 2020, trust in media fell from 25 percent to 13 percent among conservative-leaning respondents, according to the institute’s annual poll on news habits. Among left-leaning respondents, trust grew slightly, to 39 percent from 35 percent, according to the latest results, which were published in June.The declining trust in news has been years in the making and coincides with rising use of social media as a main source of information. In 2020, social media was a source of news for 48 percent of the public, up from 27 percent in 2013, according to the Reuters Institute.The divide has created an environment where even basic facts are not agreed upon, making it easier for President Trump and others to spread falsehoods about the election results, said Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, director of the institute. He said right-wing media outlets did not have the same fact-checking rigor and instead served as an echo chamber, helping nurture the belief that the election was rigged despite lack of credible evidence.This week, Politico published a poll finding that 70 percent of Republicans do not believe the election was free and fair.“People on the right have lost faith in the news media,” Mr. Nielsen said in an interview. “It has created an environment where a significant part of the American public feels alienated from established news media, but they still want information and seek it out.”He said the situation in the United States stood out from other Western democracies because the media had become increasingly polarized, particularly on the right, and Republican political leaders were more willing to spread falsehoods. Any attempt at regulation or intervention by internet platforms, Mr. Nielsen said, will be seen as “an attempt to stifle their voices and marginalize them from public life.”Leticia Bode, an associate professor at Georgetown University who studies interventions against misinformation, said election-related misinformation was particularly hard to counter because it “taps into political identities, which in this era are very strong and very salient.”“That makes it hard to change anyone’s mind,” she said. More

When Joe Biden is sworn in on Inauguration Day, he will be 78, the oldest president to take the oath of office since the birth of our Republic. No shortage of observers on both the left and the right have written about this historic curiosity, as often with frustration (the left) and contempt (the right) as they have with awe.I can’t be bothered with the despicable Sleepy-Joe canard that the right is peddling, except to say that if this is what dementia looks like, I don’t know what to call my own flashes of forgetfulness, in which words, keys and hair scrunchies regularly desert me. As for those on the left who are disappointed that the Democratic Party, a diverse coalition of young and old, Black and white, male and female, has resorted to an older white man to give another older white man the boot: It’s true. Biden is hardly the face of change.But … may I tilt the prism and suggest we look at this from another angle?Can we also, perhaps, celebrate the idea that after 46 years of public service and three exhausting presidential runs, someone nearing the ninth decade of his life actually got the brass ring?And maybe even think of this as inspiring?Or possibly even proof that we, as a culture, still choose wisdom and experience from time to time?I am not saying that it’s unusual for older white men to win elections in American politics. It happens with dreary, rather irritating frequency. Ronald Reagan was 69 when he was sworn into the White House; Donald Trump was 70; and the U.S. Senate, for better or for worse, is a great place to grow old. (By my count, there are 29 sitting senators who are 70 or older.)But we also make a fetish of youth in modern politics. You can trace this obsession back to the dawn of the television age and the president who rang it in: J.F.K., inaugurated at 43, who promised to restore this country’s youthful “vigor.” Democrats have been on a quest to find his likeness ever since, whether it was Bill Clinton, sworn in at 46, or Barack Obama, sworn in at 47. (It has, come to think of it, been a long while since we’ve had a Democratic president who was particularly old: Jimmy Carter was 52 on Inauguration Day, and L.B.J. was 55 on Nov. 22, 1963.)More subtly: There’s a difference between sending a 70-year-old to the White House and sending a 78-year-old. Those aren’t a trivial eight years. Biden will be older when he enters the building than Reagan was when he left it. We’ve elected a man who’ll be in his eighties during his first term.It’s astonishing, if you stop and think about it. The Democratic primary started with a field of 27 candidates.It’s only more astonishing — and more poignant — when you consider how little the marketplace seems to value experience and expertise. According to a joint analysis conducted in 2018 by ProPublica and the Urban Institute, more than half of older American workers with stable jobs are forced out of them before they choose to retire — and once they’re out of a job, data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show they struggle for far longer with joblessness. (An unemployed 54-year-old, for instance, will search for a job for almost a year.)In his thoughtful — if depressingly headlined — story for The Atlantic last year, “Your Professional Decline is Coming (Much) Sooner Than You Think,” Arthur C. Brooks noted that while most people’s happiness increases between the ages of 50 and 70 in wealthier countries, all bets are off after that, especially if you’re male: Both depression and suicide rates go up in men after 75.The story also noted that peaking early in life, as Biden did — he was first elected to the Senate at 29 — can often set unrealistic expectations for old age, and the inevitable decline in our ability to reason and solve novel problems, “or fluid intelligence,” can be a recipe for utter devastation.But here, to me, was the real takeaway from Mr. Brooks’s piece: If our fluid intelligence declines as we age, our “crystallized intelligence,” or the ability to use what we know, increases. And what better profession is there to make use of what you know than politics?On some level, voters intuited as much. They decided to replace a savage clown and chaos-sowing novice with a man defined by decency and nearly half a century of public service. After briefly (and disastrously) defining competency down, they defined it back up.They also chose someone who is capable of change and admitting error, two qualities one associates with wisdom. During the second and final debate, Biden not once but twice confessed he’d made big mistakes in public office — in not persuading Congress to pass comprehensive immigration reform during the Obama years, and in supporting the 1994 crime bill during the Clinton ones.Compare that with “I don’t take any responsibility at all.”Age has tempered and humbled Biden. We see precious little, now, of the strutting and gasbaggery we saw from him in his youth. Whereas Trump has remained ever the same since he was an insipid real estate developer whose businesses filed serially for bankruptcy. Time and experience have not shaped him. His misshapen personality does not permit it. A disordered psychology renders him immune.The next government will be a veritable gerontocracy, with an 80-year-old speaker of the House and perhaps a 78-year-old Senate majority leader. I sympathize with those who say this arrangement is less than ideal. It’d be wonderful if our government could be more representative of the United States in every respect.But right now, we have a president who won’t concede defeat, much less allow the victor into the building. Thank God we’ve elected someone who can build a cabinet in his sleep. Who knows the future players in Congress and in many statehouses. And best yet, knows the country. His bones may be a tad more brittle, but he’s got a body of knowledge rivaled by few.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. 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