US Politics

Young voters blocked the ‘red wave’. Biden must deliver on student debt cancellationAstra TaylorBiden acknowledged that student debt relief helped motivate ‘historic’ turnout. But we have yet to see a penny of actual relief For years, advocates like myself have been saying that canceling student debt should be a political no-brainer. In addition to being economically smart and ethically just, it would energize voters – especially younger ones.Tuesday proved us right. Voters under the age of 29 broke for Democrats in overwhelming numbers, helping turn the much-feared Red Wave into a Red Trickle. In a speech on Wednesday night, President Biden acknowledged that student debt relief played a big role in motivating the “historic” turnout of young people, alongside the issues of climate change, abortion and gun violence.On Twitter, the White House chief of staff, Ron Klain, made a similar point, saying that President Biden “kept his promises to younger Americans (with action on climate change, student loans, marijuana reform, etc), and they responded with energy and enthusiasm”.The problem is that Klain’s comment isn’t totally accurate. Young people did indeed respond with energy and enthusiasm – to at least one promise that is, to date, unfulfilled. Almost three months after Biden’s cancellation program was announced, not a single person has seen a penny of relief.And now they may not ever see relief – unless Biden acts. On Thursday night, a Trump-appointed judge in Texas struck down the student loan cancellation program. This hyper-partisan decision will hold unless Biden fights back. Fortunately he has the legal tools to do so.The stakes are too high, and margins too tight, for the White House to not follow through on this essential commitment. On Tuesday, debt relief almost certainly played a decisive role in key races, including Senate races. Consider Pennsylvania, where cancellation champion John Fetterman beat back the reactionary Dr Oz. In Arizona, Mark Kelly, another proponent of cancellation, exceeded expectations. Not so for Ohio Democrat and Senate hopeful Tim Ryan, who strongly opposed Biden’s cancellation plan and lost to the Trump impersonator JD Vance. Likewise, in North Carolina, the Republican senator Ted Budd trounced Cheri Beasley, who waffled on debt cancellation and, it seems, paid a price.Ryan’s and Beasley’s cancellation-averse approach was the one many aspiring soothsayers recommended. Ever since Biden took office, professional pundits have vehemently insisted that canceling student debt would turn off middle-aged, middle-of-the road Democrats, when in fact it drew young people to the polls. (Political commentator David Frum, a man who has made his career being wrong about everything, at least admitted he was wrong about this: “I thought student debt relief was bad policy and bad politics. I still think it bad policy – but looking at the youth vote surge, hard to deny its political impact.”)Looking ahead, there’s no doubt student debt relief will play an outsized role in the 6 December Georgia runoff – a contest that may determine the balance of power in the Senate. Democratic incumbent Raphael Warnock has been a leader in the fight for cancellation, unwavering in his faith that delivering student debt relief is vital to winning the south. Republican challenger Herschel Walker, meanwhile, has denounced Warnock for wanting to help student debtors, who he claims spend their loan money on booze, vacations and video games.A recent government report shows the absurdity of Walker’s lie: many students only receive one financial aid disbursement per semester, often delivered into banking products with fees so high they are pushed into overdraft; students reported that this led to the need to fast, use candles for electricity, or forgo textbooks and gas. In addition, polling shows that 29% of student debtors will spend less on basic needs – food, housing, bills – should the pandemic student loan payment moratorium end.If Biden wanted to give Warnock a boost, he would cancel student debt tomorrow and let Walker deal with the fall out. Imagine the jubilation and appreciation unleashed when tens of millions of people see their balances reduced or entirely wiped out,1,506,100 Georgians among them. Young people might once again turn out in droves, and the Senate might be saved.Biden has the power to make this happen. As things stand, his debt relief plan is sabotaged by bad-faith litigation. While the president has rightly blasted the Republicans behind these lawsuits, the real story is more complicated. Biden could have directed the education secretary to cancel people’s debts using the “compromise and settlement” authority granted in the Higher Education Act of 1965, but instead his administration invoked a different and more limited legal authority. (It was this limited authority that the Texas judge formally took issue with.)They also chose to make borrowers apply for the program, instead of automatically issuing cancellation – a slow-moving process that bought their billionaire-backed opponents valuable time to cook up legal arguments, find plaintiffs, and line their cases up with sympathetic, Trump-appointed judges poised to toe the conservative line.The White House needs to learn from its mistakes and play hardball. Biden could knock the legs out from under these cynical lawsuits tomorrow by extinguishing all federal student loans immediately and permanently using compromise and settlement authority. Now that would generate some real “energy and enthusiasm” – the kind of energy and enthusiasm required to sustain and expand this week’s odds-defying electoral success.This longer view is what motivates Nailah Summers, co-director of Dream Defenders, a group that just successfully mobilized young Floridians to elect Maxwell Frost, who will be Generation Z’s first member of Congress.“Young people and Black folks in the US did what had to be done to keep the Democratic party from utter collapse in the midterms last night and it’s likely that the terrain in 2024 is going to be even harder,” Summers told me. “Crumbs and half measures won’t secure their place in the White House as life in the US gets harder. The party is going to have to take decisive action to make American lives better and they can start with canceling all remaining student loans.”This month, young people held up their end of the bargain. Now Biden must honor his.If Biden allows Republicans and billionaires to sabotage student debt cancellation without a fight, he risks breaking the fragile trust that has only just been built with younger voters. Student debt cancellation can be one of Biden’s signature victories, and a catalyst for a reinvigorated Democratic party, or a self-inflicted failure – an empty promise that risks demoralizing and demobilizing the demographic on which the future of the Democratic party, and arguably democracy itself, depends.
Astra Taylor is a writer, organiser and documentary maker
This article was amended 11 November 2022 to reflect legal developments shortly before publication
TopicsUS student debtOpinionJoe BidenUS politicsDemocratscommentReuse this content More

Rightwing group pushing US states for law blocking ‘political boycott’ of firmsLobbying group Alec wrote model legislation to protect oil companies, big ag and gunmakers from economic backlash A powerful rightwing pressure group, the American Legislative Exchange Council (Alec), is pushing states to adopt a new law shielding all US businesses from “political boycotts”.Although primarily aimed at protecting controversial industries such as fossil fuel companies, big agriculture and gun manufacturers, the proposed legislation is written to prevent boycotts by investors, banks and other companies of any US business.It comes amid rising consumer pressure on firms over whom they do business with, and follows the decision by major retail stores to stop selling MyPillow products after its chief executive allied himself with Donald Trump’s false claims of fraud in the 2020 presidential election.Lawsuit could force secretive network promoting rightwing laws into the openRead moreAlec, which is funded by major corporations, intends to press state legislators to adopt the readymade law, the eliminate political boycotts act, at its closed-door States and Nation Policy Summit in Washington DC at the end of this month.Some Republican-led states have passed hundreds of pieces of Alec’s model legislation almost word for word, including laws pushing the conservative agenda on immigration, voting suppression, the environment, guns and energy policy.The new model legislation requires every “governmental entity”, which covers a wide array of bodies from state government to local police departments and public universities, to include a clause in contracts requiring businesses to pledge they “will not engage in economic boycotts”.According to the text of the proposed law, which is written by Alec’s lawyers so that all a legislature has to do is fill in the name of its state, it is a response to banks, investment funds and corporations refusing to invest in or do business with industries that damage the environment or are aligned with oppressive laws.“Corporations are boycotting and sanctioning essential industries, such as fossil fuel and agriculture producers, by refusing to provide them with products or services or imposing undue burdens on them,” the proposed law says.“Banks are increasingly denying financing to creditworthy companies solely for the purpose of marketing their environmental or social justice credentials, to the detriment of their clients and shareholders.”The huge investment company BlackRock is among nearly 400 financial firms to have sold off shares in big oil companies over their failure to pursue sufficiently climate-friendly policies.Some corporations are increasingly concerned that consumer pressure will cause other companies to boycott them over their funding of rightwing politicians and causes, or social positions.The model legislation follows an Alec meeting in Atlanta in the summer at which participants launched a push against “woke capitalism”, claiming that boycotts may break financial laws.“The collusion of corporations, and institutions to boycott, divest from, or sanction any industry may violate existing antitrust and fiduciary laws and harms consumers, shareholders, and states,” the model legislation states.The readymade law gives state attorneys general the power to “examine under oath any person” in connection with a boycott, and to require them to file a report about their activities. The attorney general would also be able to “examine any record, book, document, account or paper as he may deem necessary” and to impound them.The eliminate political boycotts act has its roots in legislation already on the books in more than 30 states to block boycotts of Israel over its oppression of the Palestinians.For that reason the proposed new law does not extend to individuals after several states were forced to amend legislation when courts ruled that requiring individuals to sign pledges not to boycott Israel intruded on free speech rights.Kansas revised its law in 2018 after a Wichita teacher brought a federal lawsuit in response to being told to sign a pledge not to boycott Israel in order to keep her job. Similarly, Texas narrowed its law after a speech pathologist lost her contract with a school district.However, an Arkansas newspaper publisher has asked the supreme court to intervene after a federal appeals court upheld a 2017 state law that cost the publication advertising by the state university after it refused to sign the commitment not to boycott Israel.The latest model legislation expands on another law written by Alec, the Energy Discrimination Elimination Act, introduced since the beginning of the year and passed by several states to shield big oil from share selloffs and other measures to protest the fossil fuel industry’s role in the climate crisis.Legislation written by Alec has been introduced thousands of times in state legislatures across the country, and passed into law in hundreds of instances. Model laws are written by Alec “task forces”, usually jointly chaired by a state legislator and a representative of an interested industry.Alec was behind the proliferation of “stand your ground” laws in conservative states, permitting the use of deadly force by any person who feels threatened, which George Zimmerman used as a successful defense for shooting Trayvon Martin in Florida in 2012.TopicsAlec (American Legislative Exchange Council)RepublicansUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

Virginia’s Republican lieutenant-governor Winsome Sears said she could not support Donald Trump if he again ran for the White House, telling Fox Business Network in an interview that the former president has become a “liability” for the GOP:“A true leader understands when they have become a liability. A true leader understands that it’s time to step off the stage, and the voters have given us that very clear message… I could not support him.”—VA Lt. Gov. Winsome Sears (R) comes out against Trump’s 2024 candidacy pic.twitter.com/0g1plfHJmu— The Recount (@therecount) November 10, 2022
The comments are significant considering Sears did something last year that Trump hasn’t done in more than six: win an election. Voters in the Democratic-leaning state elected Sears as the running mate of Glenn Youngkin in his gubernatorial campaign, and she made history as the first woman and first person of color to serve as Virginia’s lieutenant governor.Her comments also underscore the tension among Republicans over Trump’s influence on the party, particularly since many candidates he backed did not fair well in Tuesday’s midterm elections. Voter turnout this year was the second highest of any midterm since 1940, according to the Washington Post, which analyzed AP and US Elections Project data. About 112.5m people – or about 47% of eligible voters – cast ballots in the midterms. In 2018, about 50% of eligible voters cast ballots, according to the Post.And according to researchers at Tufts University, about 27% of eligible voters 18-29 turned out:.css-knbk2a{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#C70000;}This 2022 youth turnout is likely the second-highest youth turnout rate for a midterm election in the past 30 years, behind only the historic 31% turnout in 2018. Votes cast by young people made up 12% of all votes in this election, nearly matching the 13% youth share of the vote from the 2014 and 2018 midterms, according to National Election Pool surveys.Joe Biden just spoke in Washington to thank Democratic volunteers for their work in securing the party a better-than-expected night in Tuesday’s midterm elections.He noted that several Republicans who embraced baseless fraud claims about his own election win in 2020 ended up conceding their races without much drama:President Biden says none of the 2020 election deniers contested the results of the 2022 midterm elections when they lost:“Tuesday was a good day … for democracy, and it was a strong night for Democrats.” pic.twitter.com/NZlZwNsyIL— The Recount (@therecount) November 10, 2022
He also linked the surprising support many Democrats received to the party’s pledge to preserve abortion access:President Biden touts the overwhelming support for abortion rights during the 2022 midterms:“Women in America made their voices heard, man … Y’all showed up and beat the hell out of them.” pic.twitter.com/Kc2qZUAwu1— The Recount (@therecount) November 10, 2022
He closed by touting his own legislative accomplishments, including moves intended to lower the country’s fiscal deficit:President Biden: “I don’t wanna hear from Republicans calling Democrats big spenders. We’re the ones bringing down the deficit. They’re the ones that blew it up over four years.” pic.twitter.com/5N7j0ExfT0— The Recount (@therecount) November 10, 2022
The Guardian’s Maanvi Singh is now taking over the blog, and will cover the rest of today’s elections and politics news.The Senate’s Democratic leader Chuck Schumer isn’t banking on his party continuing to hold the chamber for another two years.Bloomberg Government reports that Schumer intends to prioritize confirming Joe Biden’s judges and other nominees before the year ends and the new Congress begins:🚨Scoop: Senate leader is preparing to pull the defense authorization bill off the floor and instead focus on federal nominees and judges and majority next year is still in limbo. Instead annual defense bill will materialize as an informal conference bill @business @BGOV #NDAA— Roxana Tiron (@rtiron) November 10, 2022
Democrats still have a path to keeping the Senate majority, particularly if Mark Kelly in Arizona and Catherine Cortez Masto in Nevada win their races. Counting is ongoing in both.Even as some Republicans blame him for their party’s struggles in Tuesday’s election, Morning Consult has new data out that confirms he remains the most-liked man in the GOP, though perhaps not as popular as he once was:2024 National Republican Primary:Trump 48% (+22)DeSantis 26%.@MorningConsult, 1,691 RV, 11/2-7https://t.co/AdYWBaSMK0 pic.twitter.com/PZ1AJdcudQ— Political Polls (@Politics_Polls) November 10, 2022
Trump’s most recent popularity peak came in August, after his actions had received scrutiny from the January 6 committee and his resort searched by the FBI as part of its investigation into potentially unlawful retention of government secrets.It may not be until Saturday that the outcomes of Nevada’s razor-thin Senate and governor races are known, The Nevada Independent reports.That’s based on comments made at a press conference by Joe Gloria, registrar of Nevada’s most-populous county Clark, where Las Vegas is located. The outcome of the two races is expected to hinge on votes from its residents, who tend to lean Democratic:Gloria on today’s numbers:He notes that Clark reported results from about 14k mail ballots last night.He says there are still more than 50k ballots that must be counted in Clark.”Majority of mail should be counted in Clark County by Saturday.”— Sean Golonka (@s_golonka) November 10, 2022
Yesterday, Gloria said Clark received 12.7k in mail on Wednesday, and in the afternoon, the county announced it received 56.9 from Election Day drop boxes.The 14k reported yesterday was apparently Monday drop off and Tues mail. But Gloria now says there are 50k uncounted.— Sean Golonka (@s_golonka) November 10, 2022
Meanwhile, NBC News reports a Trump adviser says the former president still plans to announce another run for the White House on Tuesday:A senior Trump adviser just confirmed Tues announcement & said “The media, the corporate elites, and political establishment has all moved in unison against Donald Trump at their own peril. It’s like they want to recreate 2015-2016. Let them. We are doing it again. Buckle up”— Marc Caputo (@MarcACaputo) November 10, 2022
Invites for Trump’s announcement should go out today.— Marc Caputo (@MarcACaputo) November 10, 2022
Virginia’s Republican lieutenant-governor Winsome Sears said she could not support Donald Trump if he again ran for the White House, telling Fox Business Network in an interview that the former president has become a “liability” for the GOP:“A true leader understands when they have become a liability. A true leader understands that it’s time to step off the stage, and the voters have given us that very clear message… I could not support him.”—VA Lt. Gov. Winsome Sears (R) comes out against Trump’s 2024 candidacy pic.twitter.com/0g1plfHJmu— The Recount (@therecount) November 10, 2022
The comments are significant considering Sears did something last year that Trump hasn’t done in more than six: win an election. Voters in the Democratic-leaning state elected Sears as the running mate of Glenn Youngkin in his gubernatorial campaign, and she made history as the first woman and first person of color to serve as Virginia’s lieutenant governor.Her comments also underscore the tension among Republicans over Trump’s influence on the party, particularly since many candidates he backed did not fair well in Tuesday’s midterm elections. Montana has become the latest state where voters said no to further abortion restrictions by rejecting a law that was meant to stop the killing outside the womb of babies who survive a failed abortion – which is already illegal.The so-called “born alive” law would have allowed medical providers to face criminal charges if they don’t take “all medically appropriate and reasonable actions to preserve the life” of infants, according to the AP.The defeat puts Montana among the ranks of Republican-leaning states where voters have rejected attempts to further tighten down on abortion access following the supreme court’s overturning of Roe v Wade in June.Here’s more on the failed law from the AP:.css-knbk2a{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#C70000;}Health care professionals and other opponents argued the proposal could rob parents of precious time with infants born with incurable medical issues if doctors are forced to attempt treatment.
“Today’s win sends a clear message to state leadership: Montanans demand our right to make private health care decisions for ourselves and our families with the help of our trusted medical teams — and without interference from politicians,” said a statement from Hillary-Anne Crosby, a spokesperson for an organization called Compassion for Montana Families that opposed the measure.
The outcome comes after a series of wins for abortion rights supporters in states around the country where abortion was directly on the ballot during the midterm elections. Voters enshrined abortion protections into state constitutions in Michigan, California and Vermont. They also voted down an anti-abortion constitutional amendment in conservative Kentucky, just as voters did in Kansas in August.
Supporters said the proposed Montana law was meant to prevent the killing of infants outside the womb in rare occurrence of a failed abortion, something that is already is illegal. Penalties for violating the proposed law would have included up to $50,000 in fines and up to 20 years in prison.
At least half of U.S. states have similar post-abortion born-alive laws in place, according to Americans United for Life, a Washington, D.C.-based organization that opposes abortion, aid in dying and infant stem cell research.
“This initiative would have criminalized doctors, nurses and other health care workers for providing compassionate care for infants, and, in doing so, overridden the decision-making of Montana parents,” said a statement from Lauren Wilson of the Montana Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics.Adam Gabbatt has taken a look at the latest round in the long-running American political parlor game, ‘Has Rupert Murdoch Finally Dumped Trump?’:On election day, Donald Trump was clear about how his efforts to support Republican candidates should be seen.“Well, I think if they win, I should get all the credit,” Trump told NewsNation. “If they lose, I should not be blamed at all.”Unfortunately for Trump, he did not get what he hoped for. Instead the former president has seen conservative news outlets, the Rupert Murdoch-owned ones in particular, turn on him, in some cases with gleeful abandon.“Trumpty Dumpty” blared the front page of Thursday’s New York Post, the tabloid Murdoch has owned since 1976. Editors went so far as to mock up Trump as Humpty Dumpty, his enlarged orange head stuffed into a white shirt and a signature red tie.Next to the picture of Trump as an egg perching precariously on a brick wall, the text goaded: “Don (who couldn’t build a wall) had a great fall – can all the GOP’s men put the party back together again?”The Post cover offered the most visceral insight into Murdoch’s thinking, and its contempt was far from an outlier in the mogul’s news empire.“Trump Is the Republican Party’s Biggest Loser” was the verdict of the Wall Street Journal editorial board. A subheading added: “He has now flopped in 2018, 2020, 2021 and 2022.”The piece was just as scathing as the headline, running through nine races this November the paper said Trump had effectively tanked through his continued election denial, his various wars with more moderate Republican candidates and his general unpopularity nationwide.“Since his unlikely victory in 2016 against the widely disliked Hillary Clinton, Mr Trump has a perfect record of electoral defeat,” the editorial said.“The GOP was pounded in the 2018 midterms owing to his low approval rating. Mr Trump himself lost in 2020. He then sabotaged Georgia’s 2021 runoffs by blaming party leaders for not somehow overturning his defeat.”It added: “Now Mr Trump has botched the 2022 elections, and it could hand Democrats the Senate for two more years.”Has ‘Trumpty Dumpty’ taken a great fall from Rupert Murdoch’s grace?Read moreAlexandria Ocasio-Cortez is not happy about how Democrats performed in her state, New York, in the midterms – a series of House losses helping (probably) hand the chamber to Republicans, though Kathy Hochul, the governor, did fend off an unexpectedly strong challenge from her Trumpist opponent, Lee Zeldin.The New York City congresswoman popularly known as AOC told the Intercept: “New York, I think, is the glaring aberration in what we see in this map … what happened in New York really bucks a lot of the trends in what we saw nationwide.“… I think, in New York, the way that those campaigns were run were different than the way a lot of winning campaigns across the country were run. And I think the role of the state party had very strong national implications. If Democrats do not hang on to the House, I think that responsibility falls squarely in New York state.”Identifying key election themes in New York, Ocasio-Cortez said: “I think policing was a big one, I think the choice among certain Democrats to … amplify Republican narratives on crime and policing, running ads on it … validating these narratives actually ended up hurting them much more than a different approach. I think that what we saw in other races was that they were able to really effectively center either their narratives and the narratives that they wanted to run with, whether it was abortion rights, whether it was democracy, whether it was … other key and top priorities.“I think Democrats in New York, they did a couple of things. They ran ads around that were explicitly very anti-defund [the police], which only served to reinvoke the frame and only served to really reinforce what Republicans were saying. If we’re going to talk about public safety, you don’t talk about it in the frame of invoking defund or anti-defund, you really talk about it in the frame of what we’ve done on gun violence, what we’ve done to pass the first gun reform bill in 30 years. Our alternatives are actually effective, electorally, without having to lean into Republican narratives.“… And I think another prime mistake is that in New York state, [ex-governor Andrew] Cuomo may be gone, but … much of his infrastructure and much of the political machinery that he put in place is still there. And this is a machinery that is disorganised, it is sycophantic. It relies on lobbyists and big money. And it really undercuts the ability for there to be affirming grassroots and state-level organising across the state.“And so … you’re leaving a void for Republicans to walk into … it’s a testament to the corruption that has been allowed to continue in the New York state Democratic party.”Josh Hawley, the senator from Missouri who may or may not run for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024 but definitely did run from Capitol rioters on 6 January 2021, even after raising a fist to the mob, thinks Republicans did not do as well as they might’ve done on Tuesday night because they didn’t run on his populist, not to say Trumpist, principles.He tweets, in a message at least partially counter to the emerging consensus that Republicans suffered (if probably winning the House and maybe winning the Senate can be called suffering) because voters wanted to rebuke their Trumpist drift:Washington Republicanism lost big Tuesday night. When your “agenda” is cave to Big Pharma on insulin, cave to Schumer on gun control & Green New Deal (“infrastructure”), and tease changes to Social Security and Medicare, you lose— Josh Hawley (@HawleyMO) November 10, 2022
A refresher on how Hawley ran, as shown by the House January 6 committee, is here.Video of Josh Hawley running, meanwhile, is here:01:08 More

ExplainerWhy is the midterm vote count taking so long in some US states?Key races in Arizona, Nevada and Georgia – which could decide the makeup of Congress – are still undecided. Here’s why Two days after the US midterm elections, a sense of deja vu is descending over the country. In a replay of the excruciating events in 2020, when Joe Biden’s presidential victory was declared four days after the polls closed, Americans are yet again asking themselves why they have to wait so long for election results.US midterm elections 2022: Senate and House remain in balance as counting continues – liveRead moreLater in the week, it remained elusive which main party will control both chambers of Congress. In the Senate, Republicans hold 49 seats and the Democrats 48, with two states – Arizona and Nevada – not yet called, and Georgia headed to a runoff.In the House there are still more than 40 seats yet to be called, with at least a dozen of them highly competitive.So what is it about the US electoral system that makes counting votes apparently so tortuously slow?Where are counts still happening, and why?Responsibility for running fair and fast elections, like much of the way the country is governed, is devolved to each of the 50 states. How the count is done, and its speed, varies slightly between each state. (Election deniers have tried to imply that slow counts are somehow irregular or fraudulent. They are not.)The big picture here is that counts are taking extra time in races that are very close. News networks are hesitant to project winners because the margins between candidates are narrow and there are many ballots left to count – and so the need for patience may be justified.In this cycle, much of the heat is engulfing just three states: Arizona, Nevada and Georgia.What’s going on in Arizona?Several of the most consequential races are happening in the border state of Arizona. A US Senate contest between the Democratic incumbent Mark Kelly and Republican challenger Blake Masters could determine which party controls the Senate.There are also consequential state races, including for governor and secretary of state, in which prominent election deniers endorsed by Donald Trump have a shot at winning. So far only 70% of the Arizona vote has been counted.To understand why that is, you have to zoom in to Maricopa county, which covers the state capital, Phoenix. It contains 60% of all votes in Arizona and is the second largest voting jurisdiction in the nation.The number of people who vote early has increased dramatically since the pandemic. This year Maricopa county also saw a surge in the number of early ballots that were dropped off on election day – they are known as “late earlies” – rising to 290,000, the largest number in the state’s history and 100,000 more than in 2020.Each early ballot has to be verified to check that the voter’s signature matches the signature in the voter rolls, and after that is done it is sent to a bipartisan panel for approval and processing. That all takes time, as we are witnessing.Many people have drawn a comparison of Arizona’s vote count with that of Florida, which called its results within hours of polls closing on Tuesday. That state’s system allows election officials to begin counting mail-in ballots as soon as they are received; mail-in ballots have to be requested and must be received by an election supervisor no later than 7pm on election day. But the main reason why Ron DeSantis won his re-election race so quickly on Tuesday was because it was a blowout, with the incumbent Republican governor garnering 59% of the vote while his challenger, Charlie Crist, received only 40%.Had the candidates we are watching in Arizona or elsewhere had such a convincing lead, we would probably not still be waiting for their races to be called. Nonetheless, there are questions that Arizona is going to have to face in future elections.Stephen Richer, who is the recorder of Maricopa county, said that after the dust settles “we will likely want to have a policy conversation about which we value more: convenience of dropping off early ballots on election day or higher percentage of returns with 24 hours of election night”.What about Nevada?Nevada is going a bit faster than Arizona, with 83% of the votes counted, but this year the count could last through Sunday. But like in Phoenix, there are still large numbers of ballots yet to be processed in the big urban areas of Las Vegas and Reno.The state runs its elections largely through mail-in ballots, and that in itself bakes in time. For a mail-in ballot to be counted it has to be postmarked by election day, but the state now allows until four days after election day – 12 November – for the physical envelope to arrive.There is a debate to be had about the merits of such a system. Many election officials stress that it is more important to have a system that is convenient, accurate and accessible than one that is fast.The count in Nevada also has a lot riding on it. That includes a very close race between the sitting US senator Catherine Cortez Masto and Republican challenger Adam Laxalt; three tight contests for US House seats; and a battle involving one of the most visceral election deniers, Jim Marchant, who is running for the job of top election official.And Georgia?Georgia has completed its returns for its critical US Senate race, with the Democratic incumbent Raphael Warnock squeaking ahead of the Trump-endorsed former football star Herschel Walker. But this state runs a system whereby if neither candidate marshals more than 50% of the vote – which neither did – there has to be a runoff election. That feels like groundhog day too – we had to wait until the January after the 2020 election for two Georgia runoff contests to be called before we knew that the Democrats would control the Senate. At least Georgia has speeded up the process: the new voting law SB 202 has significantly shortened the period for this runoff, which will take place on 6 December.TopicsUS midterm elections 2022Postal votingArizonaNevadaGeorgiaUS politicsexplainersReuse this content More

Joe Biden indicates he’ll run in 2024, following Democrats’ midterms winsPresident says he’ll announce decision in early 2023, while two-thirds of midterm voters said they wouldn’t like to see him run To those who do not want to see the US president run for re-election, Joe Biden has a message: “Watch me.”A self-assured Biden, riding high from Democrats’ history-defying showing in this year’s midterm elections, said at a post-election press conference that he intends to seek another term, but that it was ultimately a “family decision”.US midterm elections 2022: Senate and House remain in balance as counting continues – liveRead more“I think everybody wants me to run, but we’re going to have discussions about it,” Biden told reporters, indicating that he would sit down with his family over the holidays and announce his decision “early next year”.01:27A full accounting of the election results will take several more days, or possibly weeks, to know as key states continue counting and a Senate race in Georgia heads to a runoff that could determine control of the chamber.Though Republicans hold the edge in the district-by-district battle for the House, Biden and his party managed to avoid the “giant red wave” that many Democrats had braced for in a political environment shaped by widespread economic discontent and the president’s low approval ratings. Control of the Senate also remains within reach for Democrats.Despite the unexpectedly strong showing Biden, approaching his 80th birthday this month, could still face strong headwinds in 2024. Two-thirds of midterm voters said they would not like to see Biden seek re-election in 2024, according to exit polling conducted by Edison Research. That includes more than 40% of Democrats and 90% of Republicans, the poll showed.But the surprising, mixed results on Tuesday may serve to bolster Biden’s case for seeking re-election and perhaps even quell concerns among those in his party who hope the party elects another standard-bearer in 2024.“Our intention is to run again,” Biden said. “That’s been our intention regardless of what the outcome of this election was.In the months before the election, vulnerable Democrats were peppered with questions about whether they would support Biden in 2024. And Democratic leaders have mostly delicately sidestepped questions about whether he should run again.For now, Democrats’ successes have shifted the attention to Donald Trump, who hoped a wave of Republican victories would propel the launch of his third presidential bid, expected as soon as next week.But many of Trump’s hand-picked candidates lost on Tuesday night, among them Mehmet Oz, the celebrity doctor, who lost a marquee Senate race in Pennsylvania to John Fetterman. The underwhelming results have raised questions about the former president’s political strength, with some openly warning that he is a drag on the party.Meanwhile, Trump’s chief Republican rival, the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, cruised to re-election on Tuesday. Following DeSantis’s strong performance on Tuesday, in which he expanded his support among Hispanic voters and turned the increasingly Republican state even redder, many conservatives are already pushing him as a promising alternative to Trump. The conservative New York Post anointed DeSantis as “DeFuture”.Biden welcomed the Republican competition. “It would be fun to watch them take each other on,” he said.Even before the president makes a decision, his team has started to lay the groundwork for a potential campaign.“We are engaged in some planning for the simple reason that if we weren’t engaged in planning in November of this year, we should be in the political malpractice Hall of Fame,” said Anita Dunn, senior White House adviser, during an Axios event last week.Biden’s approval rating stands at 43% among registered voters, according to a Washington Post-ABC poll released ahead of election day. But he remains popular among Democrats, with eight in 10 giving him positive ratings compared with nine in 10 Republicans who disapprove of his job performance. Slightly fewer than four in 10 independent voters say they approve of his performance.There appears to be little appetite among elected Democrats to challenge Biden in a primary. The Vermont senator Bernie Sanders, a leading progressive, has ruled out a run against Biden.Should Biden choose not to run, it’s unclear who would step forward to seek the nomination.As vice-president, Kamala Harris is seen as an heir apparent, and would probably emerge as the frontrunner. Harris, who campaigned across the country for Democrats this cycle, was credited with spotlighting the issue of abortion and reproductive rights, which proved decisive in key races. But she, like Biden, also suffers from low approval ratings.Other Democrats have attracted 2024 speculation. The Minnesota senator Amy Klobuchar and the transportation secretary, Pete Buttigieg, both of whom ran in 2020, traveled to several states this cycle to campaign for Democrats.California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, who easily won re-election on Tuesday a year after defeating a recall attempt, has sought to build a national profile by publicly challenging DeSantis. And Michigan’s governor, Gretchen Whitmer, who stormed to re-election in a battleground state, is seen as a rising star.David Shor, a top Democratic data analyst, said the midterm results underscored the power of incumbency, as many of the party’s endangered members held on to their seats despite a challenging political environment. Rallying behind an incumbent also avoids a messy primary, he said.“There’s definitely a case that it would make sense to avoid a bruising, trillion-dollar primary where all of the smartest minds in the Democratic party devote themselves to driving the favorables down of all of our favorite candidates,” Shor said in an interview on the Guardian’s Politics Weekly America.But the bigger variable, Shor argued, could be the economy.“The traditional pattern of American politics was that there was this really strong relationship between economic conditions and presidential approval. That was true for Clinton, it was true for Bush but it stopped being true for Barack Obama and for Donald Trump. But it’s come back for Joe Biden,” he said. “And so I think ultimately, the question of 2024 is really just what the economy ends up being.”TopicsJoe BidenUS elections 2024DemocratsUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

Trump urged to delay announcement on 2024 run until after Georgia runoff Trump cautioned to wait until after crucial Senate race as candidates he endorsed were defeated in midterm elections Donald Trump, reeling from another electoral setback, is facing pressure to delay his announcement of a new bid for the White House until after a crucial Senate race next month.Democrats are breathing a sigh of relief. But their troubles are far from overRead moreTrump-endorsed candidates slumped to defeat in Tuesday’s midterm elections, leaving the former president at arguably his weakest standing in the party since the riot at the US Capitol last year.Trump looks set to announce a third consecutive run for president next Tuesday but some in his inner circle are cautioning him to wait until after the Senate runoff in Georgia on 6 December.Trump-backed Herschel Walker and the Democratic incumbent, Raphael Warnock, will face off after neither passed 50% of the vote on Tuesday. The race could decide control of the Senate, depending on results in Arizona and Nevada.Jason Miller, a senior Trump adviser, told the rightwing network Newsmax: “Everything comes down to Herschel Walker and Georgia. And if we can pull that off, we might get … Chuck Schumer packing from the [Senate] majority leader’s office.“I’m advising the president to hold off until after the Georgia race, after Herschel Walker … This is bigger than anything else in the country.”Miller also said Trump should deploy campaign funds to help Walker, a controversial former football star.12:55Republicans had expected widespread success in the midterms but though the House looked set to change hands, the Senate remained on a knife-edge after a high-profile Trump-endorsed candidate, the TV doctor Mehmet Oz, fell to embarrassing defeat in Pennsylvania. Many are pointing the finger at Trump.Tara Setmayer, a senior adviser to the anti-Trump group the Lincoln Project, said: “He is wounded and that’s evidenced by the rightwing media ecosystem putting out collective rebukes in the wake of a disappointing midterm result because Donald Trump was at the centre once again.“He cost them a much larger victory in the midterms. He is the albatross around the Republican party’s electoral neck and will continue to be as long as he is alive and breathing.”Trump is holding an event at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida next week where he is expected to announce his run. He has taken shots at Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor widely seen as his chief rival. But DeSantis enjoyed a strong night on Tuesday, winning a landslide, his victory speech greeted by chants of “two more years”. Worryingly for Trump, allies including the Rupert Murdoch-owned New York Post have come out strongly for DeSantis.A column on the Fox News website proclaimed: “Ron DeSantis is the new Republican party leader. Republicans are ready to move on without Donald Trump.”But Setmayer, a former Republican communications director on Capitol Hill, cautioned: “I’m not holding my breath that this posture will remain. We saw this before after the election in 2020 and it lasted as long as the ratings started to crash.“When they started losing ratings to Newsmax and other media outlets, they went right back to the fawning coverage of Donald Trump. Are they willing to remain steadfast this time around because they think now that Ron DeSantis is the heir apparent? We’ll see how long that lasts.”On Wednesday, Fox News reported that Trump would not delay his announcement. On Thursday, Trump launched a tirade on his Truth Social platform.“For those many people that are being fed the fake narrative from the corrupt media that I am angry about the midterms, don’t believe it,” he wrote. “I am not at all angry, did a great job (I wasn’t the one running!), and am very busy looking into the future. Remember, I am a ‘Stable Genius’.”Trump also criticised reports that he blamed his wife, Melania, and friend, Fox News host Sean Hannity, for talking him into backing Oz in Pennsylvania.“I’d like to apologise to Melania and Sean Hannity for all of the Fake News and fictional stories (made up out of thin air, with no sources despite them claiming there are!)” wrote Trump, whose attacks on the media often prove unfounded.It is not a foregone conclusion that Trump will express robust support for Walker. Trump has attacked Mitch McConnell, the Republican Senate leader. He is also widely held to have contributed to the loss of the Senate in 2021. Then, Warnock and Jon Ossoff won Georgia runoffs as Trump persisted in his lie that his defeat by Joe Biden was the result of electoral fraud, potentially depressing Republican turnout.01:56Nationally, Republican hand-wringing continued. Chris Christie, a former New Jersey governor and a longtime Trump ally, told the Associated Press: “We lost in ’18. We lost in ’20. We lost in ’21 in Georgia. And now in ’22 we’re going to net lose governorships, we’re not going to pick up the number of seats in the House that we thought and we may not win the Senate despite a president who has a 40% job approval.“There’s only one person to blame for that and that’s Donald Trump … The only animating factor in determining an endorsement is, ‘Do you believe the 2020 election was stolen or don’t you?’”John Fetterman’s rise from small-town mayor to Pennsylvania senatorRead moreThe Republican strategist David Urban, a former Trump adviser, told the AP: “How do people feel in America? I think people feel not great about the Trump brand right now. It’s bad.”Commentators, however, noted that Trump has been written off before but still holds sway over the Republican base, as evidenced by rallies that draw fiercely loyal crowds.Joe Walsh, a podcast host and former Republican congressman from Illinois, said: “We’ve seen this movie before. He led a fucking insurrection and the party still bowed to him. So will the dam finally break with this one? No, I don’t think it will. I still think it’s his party.“This whole DeSantis thing is overrated. Trump knows that … I still expect him to come out this month and announce he’s running and I don’t expect many Republicans to have the balls to say, ‘Donald, you suck.’”TopicsDonald TrumpRepublicansUS politicsUS midterm elections 2022US elections 2024newsReuse this content More

Did Democrats just have the best midterms by a president’s party in years?Osita NwanevuBiden’s approval rating stands at about 41%, yet the Democrats performed far better than many had expected Leave the rest of the numbers aside for a moment and consider these figures. The party of the sitting president has lost seats in the US House of Representatives in all but two midterms since 1946. The average loss is 27 seats. According to one analysis, presidents with approval ratings above 50% have seen their parties lose an average of 14 seats since 1946. Presidents with approval ratings below 50% have seen their parties lose an average of 37 seats.Polls suggest Joe Biden’s current approval rating stands at about 41%. Republicans needed to take five seats to win the chamber. It remains likely that they’ll get them in the hours and days ahead. But the fact that they haven’t already ⁠– and that Democrats have a non-trivial chance of actually keeping the chamber ⁠– is highly significant. The Democrats may have had the best midterm a president’s party has experienced in 20 years ⁠– since 9/11 brought Republicans to slight, trend-bucking gains in the House and Senate in 2002.US midterm election results 2022: liveRead moreOf course, much of the relief and exuberance Democratic leaders and candidates are feeling this morning will dissipate if and when the Republican majority, whatever its final size, is secured. While it’s preferable to lose the House by a little rather than a lot, losing it by any margin guarantees that toxicity and inanity will grip Washington again for a minimum of two years ⁠– irrespective of the outcome in the Senate.Biden cannot expect cooperation from Republicans on major issues in divided government – it’s unclear, in fact, whether Congress will even manage to raise the debt ceiling again if Democrats don’t figure out a way to settle the issue, and avert a crisis that’s been gestating for over a decade now, before January.It is clear, though, that House Republicans would use their majority to harass the administration and Democrats with investigations, hearings, cant and conspiracy theories in the run-up to 2024. The main character of Biden’s Congress thus far has been Joe Manchin; there’s a decent chance that he’ll be turning the spotlight over to Marjorie Taylor Greene.Political science and political history suggest there was little Democrats might have done to fully avoid that possibility. The party’s House majority was incredibly narrow and presidents have consistently lost seats under a wide variety of conditions. The rate of inflation, the subject of most of the last year’s punditry and predictions, is poorly correlated with midterm outcomes, as is employment growth.Income growth is a more reliable indicator, but as best as those who’ve studied midterms can tell, the factors that reliably hobble the party holding the White House may be more elemental. Voters that just won the presidency are more likely to blow off the midterms, voters that just lost it are more likely to angrily show up, and some voters ⁠– in keeping with messaging and norms impressed upon them by the press, political elites and grade school civics teachers ⁠– vote against the party in power just to bring more partisan balance to Washington.The key candidates who threaten democracy in the 2022 US midtermsRead moreDespite all that, Democrats managed to significantly outperform expectations. Republicans and centrist commentators widely predicted voters would sharply recoil at the scale of Biden’s policy agenda and the inflation it contributed to. They didn’t. Over the last few weeks, many of the same voices insisted that the Democratic closing argument on democracy wouldn’t matter or resonate. Perhaps it did. And over the last few months, we were told repeatedly that anxieties about rising crime would boost Republicans across the country ⁠– even in New York, where it was supposed that Republican Lee Zeldin had a real shot at winning the governor’s race.That didn’t happen – suggesting that the electorate was more troubled by other anxieties that hurt the right, including worries about reproductive freedom. In the aftermath of the Dobbs decision, voters in deeply conservative Kansas surprised many by rejecting an abortion ban. Last night, voters in Kentucky ⁠– a state Donald Trump won by double digits ⁠– rejected another anti-abortion measure while California, Michigan and Vermont voted to codify abortion rights in their state constitutions.As loudly as many pundits argued that Democrats would be crushed on Tuesday absent deeper moderation on abortion and other issues, it should be plain now that the burden of moderation, as far as much of the electorate is concerned, falls primarily upon the Republican party: the Democrats’ shocking overperformance amounts to a shocking underperformance on its part.Republicans’ substantive radicalism on abortion policy and elsewhere aside, it should also be plain that they’ve been burdened by their outre personalities, including the man at Mar-a-Lago and candidates who spent much of the last several months regurgitating his nonsense about the 2020 campaign to weary general election voters. Some of them are still at it. The Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake, for instance, narrowly behind in her race at time of writing, alluded to conspiracy theories about voter fraud in her election night speech.Meanwhile, according to a number of reports, some Republican insiders and elites are privately wising up to realities already obvious to those who’ve studied the current political landscape closely. Donald Trump is a political amateur who narrowly won an electoral college victory in an unusual election six years ago. He’s a deeply polarizing and unpopular figure; most of the electorate reviles his political style and his policy ideas, to the extent that he has them.The structural advantages that the federal system affords the most conservative parts of the country have prevented the Republican party from fully bearing the costs of Trump’s rise and presidency – and they may well bring him to victory again in the next election. But Trump has been costly, and we can expect a cadre of Republican power-brokers and money men to pursue alternative candidates with more urgency now.That ought to trigger a shift in messaging from Democrats. Throughout this election and the last, Biden and other party figures and candidates labored to give voters the impression Trumpism is a passing fad on the right; the dream of a redeemable Republican party is still alive in the rhetoric of Democratic leaders, if not genuinely in their hearts. But it’s substantively untrue and strategically unwise to maintain that the right’s threats to equality and the democratic process are contained fully in Trump’s person and the figures who’ve tethered themselves closely to him.Over the last quarter century in particular, our politics have been coarsened and destabilized not by a narrow faction of Super-Ultra-Extra-Mega-Magnum-Maga Republicans, but by the Republican party and the wider conservative movement as a whole. It’s long past time for Democrats to make that case to the public plainly and unapologetically.If they don’t ⁠– and the Republicans do, in fact, take part or all of Congress ⁠– gridlock in Washington, invented scandals and boredom with Biden may encourage a pivotal share of voters to give Republican governance another chance in 2024.
Osita Nwanevu is a Guardian US columnist
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AnalysisHas ‘Trumpty Dumpty’ taken a great fall from Rupert Murdoch’s grace?Adam Gabbatt in New YorkMurdoch-owned media have not held back against the former president in the wake of Republicans’ disappointing midterms On election day, Donald Trump was clear about how his efforts to support Republican candidates should be seen.“Well, I think if they win, I should get all the credit,” Trump told NewsNation. “If they lose, I should not be blamed at all.”Jared Kushner: I stopped Trump attacking Murdoch in 2015Read moreUnfortunately for Trump, he did not get what he hoped for. Instead the former president has seen conservative news outlets, the Rupert Murdoch-owned ones in particular, turn on him, in some cases with gleeful abandon.“Trumpty Dumpty” blared the front page of Thursday’s New York Post, the tabloid Murdoch has owned since 1976. Editors went so far as to mock up Trump as Humpty Dumpty, his enlarged orange head stuffed into a white shirt and a signature red tie.Today’s cover: Here’s how Donald Trump sabotaged the Republican midterms https://t.co/YUtDosSGfp pic.twitter.com/vpI94nKuBh— New York Post (@nypost) November 10, 2022
Next to the picture of Trump as an egg perching precariously on a brick wall, the text goaded: “Don (who couldn’t build a wall) had a great fall – can all the GOP’s men put the party back together again?”The Post cover offered the most visceral insight into Murdoch’s thinking, and its contempt was far from an outlier in the mogul’s news empire.“Trump Is the Republican Party’s Biggest Loser” was the verdict of the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board. A subheading added: “He has now flopped in 2018, 2020, 2021 and 2022.”The piece was just as scathing as the headline, running through nine races this November the paper said Trump had effectively tanked through his continued election denial, his various wars with more moderate Republican candidates and his general unpopularity nationwide.“Since his unlikely victory in 2016 against the widely disliked Hillary Clinton, Mr Trump has a perfect record of electoral defeat,” the editorial said.“The GOP was pounded in the 2018 midterms owing to his low approval rating. Mr Trump himself lost in 2020. He then sabotaged Georgia’s 2021 runoffs by blaming party leaders for not somehow overturning his defeat.”It added: “Now Mr Trump has botched the 2022 elections, and it could hand Democrats the Senate for two more years.”Trump-backed candidates lost in several key states on Tuesday, including Pennsylvania, where Mehmet Oz, a celebrity doctor running for Senate, and Doug Mastriano, an election-denying extremist running for governor, were both thwarted.What was most crushing for Trump were the states where candidates he endorsed were outperformed by those he hadn’t.In New Hampshire, Trump-backed Don Bolduc lost decisively to his Democratic opponent, incumbent US senator Maggie Hassan. Chris Sununu, the Republican governor who did not receive Trump’s endorsement, won re-election easily, by more than 15 points.Herschel Walker, the retired football star endorsed by Trump in Georgia for the Senate, will head to a runoff against Raphael Warnock, the Democratic incumbent, after neither man won more than 50% of the vote. Brian Kemp, the unendorsed Republican, cruised to victory in the governor’s race against Stacey Abrams, his Democratic opponent.Murdoch had his doubts about Trump before the businessman and reality TV star ran for president in 2016. Even when Trump won, Murdoch was unconvinced, reportedly privately calling him a “fucking idiot” following one conversation about immigration.Some Murdoch outlets, including Fox News, notably backed away from Trump over the summer, giving him less airtime. In her book Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America, Maggie Haberman, a reporter for the New York Times, said Murdoch had been keen to wash his hands of Trump after the 2020 election.“‘We should throw this guy over,’ Murdoch said of Trump, exhausted by Trump’s refusal to concede and his almost manic speech on election night,” Haberman wrote.But the speed and comprehensiveness of this week’s step-away still came as a surprise. There was a sense it was preplanned, that Murdoch subordinates decided in advance not just that Trump was done, but also on the identity of their new man.The day before Trump was presented as an egg on legs in the New York Post, the paper celebrated the re-election of Ron DeSantis, the Trump-esque Florida governor rumored to be planning a presidential run, with a front page which declared him “DeFuture”.Even Fox News, once Trump’s safe space, the TV network where he would often just call in for a chat, seems to have officially moved on.The channel offered scant defense of Trump in its analysis of election night, while on the Fox News website, the article leading the opinion page on Thursday was headlined: “Ron DeSantis is the new Republican party leader.”“The biggest winner of the midterm elections was Ron DeSantis. The biggest loser was Donald Trump,” the piece said. “Many will conclude, on the basis of the midterm 2022 results, that the Republican party is ready to move on, without Donald Trump as its leader.”It seems Rupert Murdoch already has.TopicsDonald TrumpRupert MurdochRepublicansUS politicsRon DeSantisanalysisReuse this content More