US Politics

This article is made possible through Votebeat, a non-partisan reporting project covering local election integrity and voting access.
Americans shattered records for voting by mail in many states in the 2020 presidential election, a phenomenon that tested existing election laws, new pandemic-related regulations, postal service capacity, voter education efforts and voters’ own resolve.
Some states had more wiggle room in accepting the mail-in votes than others, allowing ballots that were postmarked by election day to come in later, anywhere from the following day to nearly three weeks after. These grace periods became a highly contentious and politicized aspect of the election. The Trump campaign and its allies challenged them all the way up to the US supreme court as part of an overall campaign questioning the legitimacy of mail-in voting.
Grace periods for mail-in ballots also became more significant as it became clear that the vote’s results would not be even close to final on election day and that the country would indeed experience the “big blue shift” that experts predicted.
But what are the implications of letting ballots arrive late? A state-by-state look at the turnout data shows that the numbers weren’t large but were substantial enough to potentially sway a local race or a tighter election. It also shows a messy national picture, with chaotic regulations and poor record-keeping.
Late-arriving ballots, by the numbers
Twenty-two states had grace periods for late-arriving ballots this election – some already had the provision written into their laws, some implemented special extensions just for the pandemic. Five states allowed ballots to arrive three days after election day (until 6 November) and five others allowed a full week (until 10 November). There is no uniform system in the United States for tracking data on ballots, and some of the data Votebeat collected are merely estimates.
Bar chart showing the number of days in states’ grace period.
In Pennsylvania, after a partisan legal battle, the US supreme court (Scotus) allowed election officials to keep accepting absentee ballots over a three-day extension. About 10,000 votes arrived in that period, according to the secretary of state’s office. Those ballots are still subject to a lawsuit pending at Scotus and are sequestered from official results. They made up about 0.4% of the total mail-in vote. In Massachusetts, which also had a three-day rule, 3,403 votes came in, or 0.2% of the mail-in vote, the secretary of state’s office told Votebeat. More

It’s unlikely that Joe Biden expected that, of all his cabinet nominees, his choice for US agriculture secretary would cause the most blowback. Yet that is exactly what happened.The former secretary Tom Vilsack, fresh off the revolving door, is a kind of all-in-one package of what frustrates so many about the Democratic party. His previous tenure leading the department was littered with failures, ranging from distorting data about Black farmers and discrimination to bowing to corporate conglomerates.Vilsack’s nomination has been roundly rejected by some of the exact people who helped Biden defeat Trump: organizations representing Black people, progressive rural organizations, family farmers and environmentalists. If the Biden team was looking for ways to unite the multi-racial working class, they have done so – in full-throated opposition to this pick.We remember when Vilsack toured agricultural communities, hearing devastating testimony of big ag’s criminal treatment of contract farmers. He went through the motions of expressing concern, but nothing came of it: the Department of Justice and the Department of Agriculture (USDA) kowtowed to agribusiness lobbyists and corporate interests, squandering a golden opportunity to rein in meat processing monopolies.We remember when Vilsack’s USDA foreclosed on Black farmers who had outstanding complaints about racial discrimination and whitewashed its own record on civil rights. That’s in addition to the ousting of Shirley Sherrod, a Black and female USDA official, when the far-right media published a doctored hit piece, forcing her resignation.We remember when Vilsack left his job at the USDA a week early to become a lobbyist as the chief executive of the US Dairy Export Council. He was paid a million-dollar salary to push the same failed policies of his USDA tenure, carrying out the wishes of dairy monopolies. Despite being nominated to lead the USDA again, he’s still collecting paychecks as a lobbyist.The president-elect should have righted these wrongs by charting a bold, new course for rural communities and farmers in America. Instead, Vilsack’s nomination signaled more of the same from Democratic leadership.“Democrats need to do something big for rural people to start supporting them again,” Francis Thicke, a family farmer in Fairfield, Iowa, told us recently. “The status quo won’t work, and that’s one reason why Vilsack is the wrong choice.”Following Trump’s win in 2017, the organization I direct, People’s Action, embarked on a massive listening project. We traveled across rural America – from family farms in Iowa, to the Driftless region of Wisconsin, up the Thumb of Michigan, to the hills of Appalachia – and had 10,000 conversations with rural Americans. When we asked the people we met the biggest barrier to their community getting what it needed, the top answer (81%) was a government captured by corporate power. The Vilsack pick does nothing to assuage these concerns.As Michael Stovall, founder of Independent Black Farmers, told Politico: “Vilsack is not good for the agriculture industry, period. When it comes to civil rights, the rights of people, he’s not for that.”Mike Callicrate, a rancher from Colorado Springs, was equally direct. “Vilsack assisted big agribusiness monopolies in preying upon and gutting rural America,” he told us, “greatly reducing opportunities for young people to return and remain on our farms and ranches. His policy led to catastrophic rural decline, followed by suicide rates not seen since the 1980s farm crisis.”Biden had a chance to finally right some wrongs. Sadly, he missed the mark on this one by a country mile.• George Goehl is the director of People’s Action More

Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, the two Republican Senate incumbents from Georgia facing runoff elections on 5 January, are trying to nationalize their respective races. They have spent much of their time saying that if their opponents win, thereby giving Democrats a narrow majority in the Senate, the country will be unrecognizably altered. They spin horror stories about a liberal dystopia, focusing particular ire on Loeffler’s Democratic challenger, a Black Atlanta pastor named the Rev Raphael Warnock, and mostly ignoring Perdue’s opponent, the white former investigative journalist Jon Ossoff. The incumbents have tried to mimic Donald Trump’s rhetoric, making poorly veiled racist overtures to the white grievance voters whose turnout they will need in order to keep their seats. Loeffler has gone on conservative media to scaremonger about Black Lives Matter; Perdue pulled a juvenile stunt at a Trump rally in which he pointedly and deliberately mispronounced Kamala Harris’s first name.The high stakes of their races, as well as these kinds of theatrics from Loeffler and Perdue, have functioned, maybe intentionally, to distract from their own conduct in office, which has raised questions and sparked investigations from the justice department, congressional ethics authorities and the US Securities and Exchange Commission. Loeffler and Perdue, two of the Senate’s richest members, have each been accused of using their office to get privileged information that they used to make advantageous stock trades. (The cases against Perdue and Loeffler were closed without charges this summer.)The investigation was centered on stock trades made after the senators attended a closed-door Senate briefing on the coronavirus in January 2020 – before the severity of the coronavirus and its economic repercussions were clear to most Americans. Both Loeffler and Perdue made windfalls in financial transactions, dumping stocks that were damaged by the pandemic and investing in stocks that later soared in value as a result of new restrictions.For Loeffler, the sheer size of the transactions are enormous. Loeffler, whose husband is the chairman of the New York stock exchange and who herself had a long career in finance, is nearly a billionaire, worth an estimated $800m with her husband. Following the briefing on 24 January, trades of individual stocks were made on their behalf. By mid-February, there had been 29 trades, and 27 of them had been sales, valued between $1,275,000 and $3.1m. One of the two stocks they bought was for Citrix Systems, a software company that offers teleworking technology. Loeffler has defended herself by saying her stocks are in a blind trust handled by third-party advisers, and that she does not direct their trades.Her Georgia Senate colleague, David Perdue, has a much longer history of conspicuous trading, but perhaps this can simply be attributed to the fact that he has been in office for longer. A former executive at companies like Dollar General and Reebok, Perdue has been a Georgia senator since 2015. In the wake of the 24 January briefing, he was even more prolific in his stock trades than Loeffler. In March, he made 112 stock transactions – about three times his usual rate of trade – buying $1.8m in stock and selling $825,000 worth of stock. Among the companies that Perdue invested in during this time was DuPont, which manufactures personal protective equipment. Before 2 March, Perdue had made 10 different purchases of DuPont stock. He also invested heavily in Netflix. On the other side of the ledger, he sold shares he held in Caesar Entertainment, a casino company. A spokesperson for Senator Perdue, John Burke, has said: “Senator Perdue has always followed the law.”But Perdue has been making eyebrow-raising stock transactions for much of his Senate term, beginning long before the coronavirus took hold over the nation. He traded in FireEye, a cybersecurity company, while serving on the Senate’s cyber security subcommittee. He bought shares of BWX Technologies, a navy contractor that supplies submarine components, a few weeks before joining the Senate’s seapower subcommittee. He traded in an Atlanta-based financial firm, First Data, while serving on the Senate’s banking committee. Often, according to the New York Times, these trades were made with conspicuously good timing. After selling his entire stake in First Data in November of 2018, Perdue repurchased stock in the company in late December 2018 – just three weeks before First Data announced a merger with the financial technology company Fiserv. Throughout his time in office, Perdue has made a staggering 2,596 stock trades. His transactions account for one third of the total stock trades made by all members of the Senate over the past six years.Loeffler and Perdue’s financial antics have underscored the degree to which the Republican party is part of the very swamp that Donald Trump decriesIt’s important to note that both Loeffler and Perdue have denied wrongdoing, and that a Senate ethics committee investigation into senators’ trades following the January coronavirus briefing ultimately cleared all senators save one – Republican Richard Burr, of North Carolina. Although it is unusual for senators to trade in individual stocks, it is not illegal for Loeffler and Perdue to do so. Both senators claim that they do not make decisions about stock trades on their own, but rely on their financial advisers to make trading decisions.Loeffler and Perdue are campaigning on a message that their opponents are culturally out of step with everyday Georgians, and political analysts say that Loeffler, in particular, was appointed by Kemp as part of a bargain to appeal to ordinary suburban women, voters who might be put off by Trump’s vulgarity and excess. But the senators’ obscene wealth and use of the stock market to gain even more money, coupled with a seeming indifference to the ways that their actions are perceived by Georgia voters, strains this premise past the point of credulity.Loeffler owns a private jet. Perdue lives in an island gated community. Both are trading vast sums of money in a financial market to which most Americans do not have anything like their access. These are not ordinary Georgians. If anything, Loeffler and Perdue’s financial antics have underscored the degree to which the Republican party is part of the very swamp that Donald Trump decries. The question now is whether voters will see them for what they really are. More

“Congress is not going to be the Grinch,” a senior Democratic senator said on Sunday, as lawmakers stood poised to vote on a $900bn coronavirus aid package made possible by a late-night compromise on one of the final hurdles, a dispute over Federal Reserve pandemic lending authorities.The package will be tied to a funding bill to avert a government shutdown.Speaking to reporters the day after reaching the compromise with Senate Republicans, Democratic leader Chuck Schumer said: “Barring a major mishap, the Senate and House will be able to vote on final legislation as early as tonight.”Republican senator Mitt Romney told CNN’s State of the Union: “I believe there is going to be a deal. There are always sticking points, but the big one was resolved last night … They’re working out some additional points but I think it’s going to get done. It’ll get done before Christmas.”Mark Warner, a Virginia Democrat, referred to a popular Dr Seuss character who “stole” Christmas when he told ABC’s This Week: “The great news is, Congress is not going to be the Grinch. We’re going to get this package done.”The coronavirus aid deal includes $600 direct payments to individuals and a $300 per week unemployment compensation supplement. The second-largest economic stimulus in US history, following the $2.3tn Cares Act passed in March, it will be tied to a $1.4tn spending bill that funds government programs through September 2021.The House was due to meet at noon on Sunday in order to take up the bill.“I do have optimism that it’ll pass,” House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy told Fox Business. “I am very hopeful that we get this done today.”Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the chamber’s top Democrat, told reporters she wanted to give members some time to review the package before calling a vote.“I think we’re close, we’re very close,” Pelosi said. “But we want to have members have enough time to review it all.”Donald Trump, whose administration has largely left negotiations to congressional leaders, used Twitter to complain.“Why isn’t Congress giving our people a Stimulus Bill? [The pandemic] wasn’t their fault, it was the fault of China,” Trump wrote. “GET IT DONE, and give them more money in direct payments.”Senator Pat Toomey, a Pennsylvania Republican, had insisted on language that would guarantee that the Fed could not revive emergency lending programs for small businesses and state and local governments after 31 December, when they expire under Cares Act relief legislation passed in March.Republicans said the programs represented unnecessary government interference and politicized the Fed. They accused Democrats of seeking to extend them as a way to provide unchecked funds for state and local governments controlled by their party. Democrats accused the Republicans of trying to limit President-elect Joe Biden’s options for boosting the economy after he takes office on 20 January.Toomey spokesman Steve Kelly said the senator’s agreement with Schumer “rescinds more than $429bn in unused Cares Act funds; definitively ends the Cares Act lending facilities by 31 December 2020; stops these facilities from being restarted; and forbids them from being duplicated without congressional approval.”A senior Democratic aide said Toomey had agreed to “drop the broad language in his proposal that would have prevented the Fed chair from establishing similar facilities in the future”.The Senate adjourned a rare Saturday session with a call from Republican leader Mitch McConnell to avoid last-minute disagreements.On Sunday, San Francisco Federal Reserve president Mary Daly told CBS’ Face the Nation the package would provide much-needed relief for the economy.“This support is unequivocally beneficial,” Daly said.In the 11 months since the first coronavirus cases were documented in the US, Covid-19 has killed around 316,000, by far the most in the world, and put millions out of work. Economists say growth will likely remain sluggish until vaccines are widely available in mid- or late 2021.On Sunday, Warner told ABC: “I was with Senator Schumer last night in his office until about 11pm. I was glad to see that Senator Toomey accepted Senator Schumer’s offer on a compromise … We did not think tying the hands of a future Fed or treasury made any sense.“…I’m very proud that in many ways this package only came about because a bipartisan group of senators spent a month working hard, showing the American people that we can actually do things when we have such an amazing need.“So folks who are going to run out of unemployment the day after Christmas, or potentially get kicked out of their apartment, or those long lines at the food banks: help is on the way.” More

Fox News has taken a further step back from Donald Trump’s baseless allegations of election fraud with a bizarre apparent legal retraction aired during shows hosted by some of the president’s most fervent supporters.First broadcast on Fox Business on Friday, on Lou Dobbs Tonight, and repeated over the weekend on shows hosted by Maria Bartiromo and Jeanine Pirro, the segment was presented as a news interview with election technology expert Eddie Perez.In the three-minute video, described as “a closer look at claims about Smartmatic”, Perez answers questions posed by an unidentified interviewer about a Florida company that provided voting systems for the November election.Perez is asked questions such as “Have you seen any evidence that Smartmatic software was used to flip votes anywhere in the US in this election?” and “Have you seen any evidence of Smartmatic sending US votes to be tabulated in foreign countries?”He says he has not seen any such evidence.Earlier this week, Antonio Mugica, chief executive of Smartmatic, sent legal notices to Fox News and two other networks promoted by Trump, One America News Network (OANN) and Newsmax, assailing them for spreading “false and defamatory claims” in a “disinformation campaign”.“They have no evidence to support their attacks on Smartmatic because there is no evidence,” Mugica said in a statement. “This campaign was designed to defame Smartmatic and undermine legitimately conducted elections.”Trump lost the election to Joe Biden by 306-232 in the electoral college and trails by more than 7m ballots in the popular vote. But his false claims of voter fraud and irregularities in voting systems and technology have received sympathetic hearings on the three rightwing networks.The Fox News interview with Perez was described by a network source as “a fact-checking segment aired in the same format” as original reporting about Smartmatic.Speaking to CNN, Perez said: “My reaction was to observe, as many others have, how kind of strange and unique that particular way at presenting the facts was.“There was nothing in any of the preliminary conversations that I had with Fox News that gave me any indication that Smartmatic would be a matter of conversation. It was never mentioned that this was going to be a discussion about Smartmatic or even claims about private vendors. I was anticipating a broader discussion about the debate around the election [and] election integrity.”Perez said Fox News’ coverage of the election was “speculative and not based in fact” and conspiracy theories peddled by hosts were “harmful to enhancing public confidence in the legitimacy of election outcomes”.“I am not accustomed to seeing Lou Dobbs air very straightforward factual evidence,” he said.A Fox News spokesperson declined comment. Earlier, the network referred CNN back to the video.Erik Connolly, an attorney for Smartmatic, said the company would not comment “due to potential litigation”.In a statement to CNN, Newsmax denied making direct claims of impropriety against Smartmatic and said questions about the company and its software were based on “legal documents or previously published reports”.“As any major media outlet,” Newsmax said, “we provide a forum for public concerns and discussion. In the past we have welcomed Smartmatic and its representatives to counter such claims they believe to be inaccurate and will continue to do so.” More

Austin Sarat writes powerfully about the Trump administration’s rush to execute federal prisoners (Trump is spending the last days of his presidency on a literal killing spree, 15 December). In the past weeks, it was Brandon Bernard and Alfred Bourgeois. Next in line are Lisa Montgomery, Corey Johnson and Dustin Higgs.
Joe Biden proposes to introduce legislation to abolish the federal death penalty. This will take time and its success is not guaranteed. But there is something he could do as soon as he takes office. This is to use his clemency power to spare the lives of the 50 or so individuals who will remain on federal death row. I estimate that it would take him four minutes to sign the required notices of commutation. This would ensure that the trail of bodies Sarat describes could not grow any longer.
Is it too much to hope that Biden will set aside the time to do this during his first 100 days? It would be a magnificent gesture. Prof Ian O’Donnell School of Law, University College Dublin
• When my friend, Brandon Bernard, was executed this month, he was a different man from the 18-year-old accessory to a double-murder (Trump administration puts Brandon Bernard to death amid rushed series of executions, 11 December). Spending two decades in solitary confinement changed him. Brandon never had a single infraction on death row. He did church youth outreach to help teens make better choices in life.
He taught me many life lessons. To be open-hearted yet level-headed. To remain calm and patient. To be respectful and thoughtful and an attentive listener. To be kind. To live with a sense of optimism like one I’ve never witnessed. I want to hate the sin, but forgive the sinner after a horrible mistake and two decades of regret and reform. Martin Luther King Jr said “violence begets violence” and that holds true when the violence is committed by the government. Brandon became a beautiful person. When we killed Brandon, we killed the belief that one can change. Jen Wasserstein Washington DC, US
• It has long been my view that any country that condones judicial murder in the name of justice cannot be deemed civilised. Suellen Pedley Stanford in the Vale, Oxfordshire More

As president-elect Joe Biden weighed options to punish Russia for its suspected hacking of US government agencies and companies, one leading Republican accused Moscow of “acting with impunity” and others called for retaliatory strikes.Biden’s choices once he assumes office on 20 January range from financial sanctions to revenge cyberattacks on Russian interests, according to transition team sources. Donald Trump, meanwhile, maintains the hacking could be the work of China, despite the certainty of his own secretary of state, Mike Pompeo that Russia was behind the attacks.On Sunday, Republican senator Mitt Romney – a frequent Trump critic – said Vladimir Putin’s government had effectively invaded America.“What this invasion underscores is that Russia acted with impunity,” Romney told NBC’s Meet the Press. “They didn’t fear what we would be able to do from a cyber capacity. They didn’t think that our defence systems were particularly adequate. And they apparently didn’t think that we would respond in a very aggressive way.“This demands a response, and the response you’d expect to occur would be a cyber response. I don’t know if we have the capacity to do that in a way that would be of the same scale or even greater scale than what Russia has applied to us, but this is something we have to address as soon as possible.”John Barasso, a Republican senator from Wyoming, told Fox News Sunday the US had been “blindsided”.“Six different agencies have been attacked in our government and this has been going on since March,” he said. “We need to have a forceful, effective punishing response so people pay a price for this and think twice about doing it again.”Any response is unlikely to come in Trump’s 31 remaining days in the White House. Other than a critical tweet on Saturday, Trump has kept silent regarding the hack.“I think we’ve come to recognise that the president has a blind spot when it comes to Russia,” Romney, a member of the Senate homeland security committee, told CNN’s State of the Union. “But I think that the president-elect is a clear-eyed, intelligent individual and he’s going to assess Russia and their capabilities in an appropriate way.”Mark Warner of Virginia, the leading Democrat on the Senate intelligence committee, told ABC’s This Week: “When the president of the United States tries to deflect or is not willing to call out the adversary as we make that attribution, he is not making our country safer.“I sometimes think we disproportionately spend on tanks, ships and guns when we should be better protecting on cyber. And there are international implications of this attack as well. We need to be very clear with an affirmative cyber doctrine that says [if] you do this kind of broad-based, indiscriminate attack, you will bear the consequences.”A Biden source told Reuters the new president could step up counter cyber-espionage, with the goal of deterrence and diminishing the potency of Russian cyber spying. But Biden’s team will need better intelligence. Access to presidential briefings was delayed until about three weeks ago as Trump disputed election results.On Sunday, incoming White House chief of staff Ron Klain told CBS’s Face the Nation: “We should be hearing a clear and unambiguous allocation of responsibility from the White House, from the intelligence community. They’re the people in charge. They’re the ones who should be making those messages and delivering the ascertainment of responsibility.“Instead, what we’ve heard is one message from the secretary of state, a different message from the White House, a different message from the president’s Twitter feed. We have been briefed on this. But again, I think in terms of publicly communicating the position of our government that has to come from the current government and it should be coming in a clear and unambiguous voice.”Romney likened Russia’s suspected attack to the US assault on Baghdad during the Iraq war in 2003.“You saw the videos of the rockets going across the city and slamming into various buildings and the places they attacked, of course, were the communication centers and the utility centers,” he told NBC. “You can bring a country to its knees if people don’t have electricity, don’t have water and can’t communicate.“Basically what Russia appears to have done [is] put themselves in those systems in our country. They don’t need rockets to take those things out. They potentially have the capability to take out all of those things remotely at very small cost.”Christopher Krebs, fired by Trump last month as director of the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (Cisa) for publicly debunking the president’s false claims of election fraud, agreed that the hack was likely the work of the Russian foreign intelligence service SVR. But he doubted Romney’s assessment about what Russia might do with the harvested data.“The [SVR] are intelligence collectors,” Krebs told CNN. “They’re looking for policy decisions, they’re looking for diplomatic negotiations in federal agencies. They’re typically not the ones to run the destructive types of attacks, and they typically don’t work with the other parts of the Russian government.“That doesn’t mean they can’t hand off access, but for now I think this is more of a intelligence collection operation. The thing that really concerns me about this particular campaign by the Russians was the indiscriminate nature of the supply chain targeting, the fact that they have potentially compromised 18,000 companies. That to me is outside of the bounds of what we’ve seen recently of espionage activities.”Klain echoed Krebs’ caution about what Russia might be hoping to achieve, but added: “In terms of the measures that a Biden administration would take in response to an attack like this, I want to be very clear. It’s not just sanctions. It’s also steps and things we could do to degrade the capacity of foreign actors to repeat this sort of attack.” More

When they were both in the Senate, Joe Biden and Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, maintained a strong working relationship that survived some of the most partisan legislative fights in decades.That relationship will now face a new test when Biden is sworn in as president of the United States and McConnell will be the highest-ranking Republican in the country.It’s a setup familiar to Biden: when he was vice-president, Barack Obama had to battle with an adversarial McConnell, who at one point said the top priority of Senate Republicans was to make Obama a “one-term president”.The difference between the beginning of that matchup – between a Democratic president who spent a just few years in the Senate and a Republican minority leader – and now is significant. McConnell, unlike at the beginning of the Obama administration, may command a slim Republican majority in his chamber when Biden takes office.Last week, McConnell finally gave a speech on the Senate floor in which he congratulated Biden on becoming president-elect, effectively putting another nail in the coffin of Donald Trump’s repeated baseless claims of widespread fraud and attempts to overturn the results. Later that day Biden publicly said he had spoken with McConnell by phone.“I had a great conversation with Mitch McConnell today,” Biden said on Tuesday. “I called him to thank him for the congratulations. I told him that while we disagree on a lot of things there are things we can work together on. We agreed to get together sooner than later. And I’m looking forward to working with him.”More significantly, the two have a history of working together through their decades in Congress. Biden was first elected as a senator for Delaware in 1972; McConnell was first elected to the Senate for Kentucky in 1984.Since then, they have been co-sponsors on 318 bills, according to a Guardian tally. During a contentious debt limit fight in 2011, Biden was the preferred Obama administration liaison for McConnell. Biden has long prided himself about his deep bipartisan ties in the Senate.“I on a number of occasions couldn’t get things done on my own and that’s when I would call in Joe Biden,” Harry Reid, the former Democratic Senate leader, said in an interview with the Guardian. “The reason that I would call upon Joe Biden in a time of my personal crisis because I couldn’t get things done on my own was he was trusted very much by Republicans, that was the way it was with all my Senate colleagues. Joe Biden had been there a long long time. He’d built up a lot of chits with a lot of people.”Biden and McConnell appear to be polar opposites. Biden is known for his effusive friendliness and loquacious public demeanor. McConnell is more reserved and careful with his words. Yet the two will both either say they can work together or say nothing at all.They’re not going to call each other names because they’ve known each other so long“They’re both civil,” the former senator Max Baucus of Montana said in an interview. “They’re not going to call each other names because they’ve known each other so long and if you’ve known someone that long you tend not to want to call them names.”McConnell and Biden made a joint appearance at the eponymously named McConnell Center at the University of Louisville in 2011. In introducing Biden, then vice president, the Senate Republican said “Now that he’s moved to the other end of Pennsylvania avenue I’m happy to say that our working relationship is still strong.”Biden at that same event described McConnell as someone he understood and a good example of the then vice-president’s deep connections in the Senate.“The relationship between Senator McConnell and President-elect Biden has been professional, enabling them (and, importantly, their staffs) to negotiate in good faith,” said Jon Kyl, a former senator from Arizona who served in Republican Senate leadership. “In any government, certain things must get done; as professionals, these two know how to achieve necessary results.”McConnell was also the single Republican senator to attend the funeral of Beau Biden, the president-elect’s son, in 2015.Run-inThere’s a residual level of mutual bitterness between McConnell and his community of former and current staffers and that of Obama and his former staff. In Obama’s recent book he recounts and interaction between Biden and McConnell.“Joe told me of one run-in he’d had on the Senate floor after the Republican leader blocked a bill Joe was sponsoring; when Joe tried to explain the bill’s merits, McConnell raised his hand like a traffic cop and said, ‘You must be under the mistaken impression that I care,’” Obama wrote. “But what McConnell lacked in charisma or interest in policy he more than made up for in discipline, shrewdness, and shamelessness – all of which he employed in the single-minded and dispassionate pursuit of power.”But less so when it comes to Biden and McConnell. That may partially be because McConnell and Biden will have to deal with each other going forward. The two have been in something of a detente. McConnell hasn’t spoken particularly ill of Biden and vice versa.Baucus said if Biden sets out with some kind of initiative attractive to Republicans, that could extend a honeymoon phase between him and McConnell.“If Joe proposes and starts off with an infrastructure bill that’ll help because that’s bipartisan,” Baucus said.Baucus added that McConnell “will want to work with Joe as best he can because they know each other”. But the former Montana senator also noted that McConnell’s motivations include staying majority leader and protecting his caucus, interests that don’t naturally align with a Democratic president.That silence can only last so long. In either the case where the Senate is split 50/50 between Republicans and Democrats with Kamala Harris as the tie-breaking vote or where Republicans have a small majority the president and Republican Senate leader will have to work with each other.Asked if Biden and McConnell will be able to work together in harmony, Reid said: “I think we’re going to know pretty quickly because President-elect Biden, when he becomes president he’s going to have to move on certain things very quickly.“He has a portfolio that’s loaded with stuff that he has to do and he’s going to have to pick and choose what he has to move on and I would hope that there are enough Republicans to help,” Reid added.Asked about their different personalities and whether they will be able to work together, Kyl said in an email: “Yes, they are very different personalities, but have found they can trust each other. And, again, much of it depends on their staffs also working with each other. If they don’t have the same kind of staff they did, say in 2010-12, it would not work as well.” More