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      Is Joe Biden's win a turning point in a hard year of bad news? | Candice Carty-Williams

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      I’d describe myself as a realist. In the past, friends have described me as a pessimist, probably because I tend to err on the side of the very worst thing happening. When it’s come to 2020, my realism has been working very hard, and my friends have joined me in that. They don’t call me a pessimist any more, because actually there’s been very little to be optimistic about. It has been one thing after another. So many little hits of pain and disappointment.When it came to the US election, though, I was hopeful. The part of me that has always adjusted to expecting and preparing myself for the worst was dormant. I even surprised myself. We’ve all had such a hard time, and so consistently, that bad news had become predictable. Some part of me knew that we had to have one positive outcome from this year (or maybe even two, with the possible new vaccine breakthrough). And I think that some part of all of us, whether or not we live in the US, or have friends or family there, pinned on it a sense of life, on the whole, getting better. In some way, perhaps the US election ended up symbolising the light at the end of a tunnel we never thought we’d emerge from. More

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      in World Politics

      Why Does God Allow Miscarriage?

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      The Senate hearings on Amy Coney Barrett’s appointment to the Supreme Court did not sit well with American feminists. An ultra-conservative judge belonging to an ultra-conservative Catholic faith group vehemently opposed to abortion and anything gay was hardly a candidate one would expect feminists to endorse. Interestingly enough, feminists zeroed in on one particular aspect defining the candidate, the fact that she is a mother — and a working one at that — to a relatively large family: five of her own, two adopted. This fact provoked a prominent feminist to tweet, “It’s a very weird thing to watch these old creeps congratulate a handmaid on her clown car vagina.”

      Do Romance Novels Offer an Outdated Model of Feminism?

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      For those unfamiliar with the terms, the Urban Dictionary defines “clown car sex” as “the act of trying to place as many penises as possible into a single vagina like many clowns try to fit into one car somehow.” The term “handmaid” as used in the tweet presumably comes from Margaret Atwood’s 1985 dystopian novel “The Handmaid’s Tale,” where women of all statuses living under a totalitarian theocratic state (in the US Northeast and parts of the upper Midwest) “are stripped of their rights, forcing them to live out lives of servitude in a patriarchal society” ” and made “(through servitude and rape) to carry children for the powerful.”

      The link to Barrett is her presumed membership in a Catholic faith group that, according to ex-members, dominates the lives of its members and preaches the subjugation of women.

      Fertility Shaming

      The term, of course, is hardly new. As early as 2012, the conservative Trump convert, Mollie Hemingway, wrote a piece entitled “Fertility Shaming: ‘It’s A Vagina, Not A Clown Car.’” In it, the author noted that she lived in two fundamentally different worlds. Here, a culture where “large families are considered awesome. You’re not looked down on for being childless or having a smaller family — indeed, my folks only had three children — but large families are considered cool.” There (Washington, DC), a different environment where “large families are mocked or derided. You only have 11 children if you’re retarded.” The latter she referred to as “fertility shaming.”

      Hemingway points out the hypocrisy of those who promoted reproductive rights and, one might add, a woman’s right to choose, but only as long as it means “avoiding our fertility, and doing whatever it takes to not have kids (or more than one or two of them).” Ironically enough, her reference in the text is to Michelle Duggar, the Arkansas mother of “19 Kids and Counting,” who supposedly said “It’s a vagina, not a clown car.”

      Embed from Getty Images

      Duggar, unlike Barrett, is not a Catholic. But both women obviously believe artificial (as opposed to natural) birth control methods are fundamentally frowned upon by God. I am not sure where they got that from the Bible, but then I’m not a theologian versed in the intricacies of Bible exegesis. In fact, I started my academic career at a Catholic university where I had a colleague with 11 children, in addition to a number of them who never made it. Initially, even the Duggars were not against birth control — until they saw the light and “vowed to leave how many kids they’d have in God’s hands.” Apparently, the Duggars’ conversion moment was triggered by a miscarriage following the birth of their first son. Duggar blamed herself for the miscarriage thinking that her use of the pill had caused the problem. It somehow never occurred to her that miscarriages are quite common, as are stillbirths. Her miscarriage was not an act of divine punishment but an act of nature, random and unpredictable.

      US statistics suggest that between 10% and 15% of all pregnancies end in miscarriage during the early months of gestation, while one in 160 birth are stillbirths. Research shows that “Miscarriage is the most common complication of pregnancy with 1 in 4 women experiencing at least 1 miscarriage during their reproductive lifetime.” A Swiss website claims that half of all fertilized egg cells end in a spontaneous abortion. Most “natural” abortions occur during the first three months of pregnancy. In a number of cases, women report several miscarriages. And as the age when a woman can become pregnant increases, the prevalence of miscarriage increases too. In fact, after the age of 40, the likelihood that pregnancy ends in miscarriage increases by 50% compared to a woman in her early 20s.

      A recent article in The New York Times recounts the story of a woman desperately trying to have a baby. In the process, she experiences three miscarriages within a relatively short period of time. Unfortunately, studies show that the likelihood of a miscarriage after three previous miscarriages increases by 50%.

      What these stories imply is that miscarriages are a fact of life, a “natural” occurrence. They are one of these things that just happen, for no apparent reason. It’s the bad luck of the draw, similar to the fact that some people (such as Germany’s ex-Chancellor Helmut Schmidt) smoke all of their lives and live prosperously well into their late 80s, while others never touch a cigarette and yet die young of lung cancer. For those who believe that life has no particular meaning, that you get what you get, this is perfectly understandable, perhaps even acceptable.

      It Is What It Is

      For those, however, such as Europe’s dwindling number of true Catholics, and particularly American self-proclaimed Christians, it poses a fundamental problem. America’s “true believers” hold that life starts at conception. They also believe that its termination represents a crime, equivalent to murder in some circles. Unlike abortion, however, miscarriages cannot be blamed on human agency — unlike, for instance, global warming.

      This leaves only one alternative. The termination of human life via miscarriage must be the result of God’s will, similar to the way American Christians explain to themselves the rapid warming of the planet, the eradication of much of the planet’s ecosystem and the potential destruction of humanity. It is all part of God’s plan for humanity. It is, as one of the great sages of our time has observed, what it is.

      To be sure, this is a terrible simplification. And clearly not every American Christian subscribes to this logic. Far from it. At the same time, however, surveys suggest that many do; they certainly act as if they did. The reality is, there is nothing that would suggest that there is any necessity for this planet to survive as a home for intelligent beings. By now we know that over millions of years, this planet was populated by scores of creatures, ferocious and majestic, only to be wiped out by cataclysmic events. Their remnants can be found in museums all over the world, reminders of the fragility of life on Earth.

      The fact that more than 10% of all pregnancies end in miscarriage poses a fundamental challenge to the notion, so dear to Christians, that the termination of a pregnancy represents an abomination in the eyes of God, that life starts at conception and that there is a fundamental “right to life.” God obviously disagrees, otherwise he would not allow for the “natural” termination of the life of millions of fetuses every year. For believers in a merciful God, be they Christians or Muslims, this must be nothing short of frightening. It suggests that God might not be as merciful as they believe or, worse, that God could care less about the fate of humanity.

      Embed from Getty Images

      For non-believers, it is one more piece of confirmation that the existence of God is a myth, that human life is the result of a chain of processes based on trial and error, and that humanity might be nothing but the accidental, and highly destructive, byproduct of natural selection and evolution. We don’t know. For believers, it is all part of God’s plan, like earthquakes, pandemics and the extermination of whole nations.

      Fatally enough, this kind of thinking has failed to imbue us with humility and prudence. Today’s ruling class, from Trump to Johnson, from Bolsonaro to Putin, acts as if the destruction of the natural environment, the extinction of much of the planet’s species and rising average temperatures are of no consequence. Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev is credited with having noted that one day, the living might envy the dead. Khrushchev is said to have made the remark with regard to the threat of nuclear war.

      Today, other threats are much more urgent than nuclear war. Pandemics, global warming, the extinction of a large part of this planet’s flora and fauna are realities that suggest that human life in the decades to come will be confronted with the quite real prospect of extinction, be it because of intolerable climate conditions, the exhaustion of the planet’s freshwater resources or because of pandemics, similar to the plague in the Middle Ages, that wipe out large parts of humanity. Under the circumstances, the living might very well wish they had been among that 10% to 15% whose potential existence ended in miscarriage.

      Bigger Than Nuclear War

      For the likes of Barrett, Hemingway, Duggar and Simcha Fisher, a Catholic freelance writer and blogger with 10 children, these ideas are most likely heretical, detestable and pernicious to the max, given they prevent women from fulfilling their divinely-mandated destiny of motherhood. They tend to ignore the fact that their pursuit of a grand family is only possible because the vast majority of Americans don’t indulge in it. If everybody did it, the consequences would be disastrous.

      Take the case of a small country like Switzerland, which has a population of just over 8.6 million people. A large proportion of the country’s territory is covered by high mountains and several large lakes, areas that are largely uninhabitable. In 2016, there were roughly 3.8 million private households in the country. If each one of them had produced 10 children, within a few years, Switzerland’s population would increase by more than 30 million — roughly half that of France. Even the most pro-natalist representatives of the Swiss far right would consider this a nightmare scenario. And this despite the fact that Switzerland is one of the richest countries in the world, with excellent health and social services.

      The consequences of unbridled fertility can daily be seen in the news: the treks of desperate refugees from largely Catholic Central American countries such as Honduras and El Salvador, seeking to make their way on foot to the southern border of the United States. Between 1960 and 2010, the population of Honduras more than quadrupled, reaching more than 8.5 million. And this in a country with rudimentary health care and no social services to speak of. The same is largely true for El Salvador.

      To be sure, over the past two decades, population growth in the two countries has dramatically declined, now approaching European levels. At the same time, the influence of the Catholic Church has considerably waned in the region, compensated by a dramatic upsurge in the number of evangelicals, which might to a certain extent explain the collapse in fertility rates. But by now, the damage is done, reflected, in part, by the steady stream of refugees from the region.

      President Donald Trump’s response was to freeze aid to Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala, thus further aggravating the situation in these countries. Earlier on, his administration, as Summer Brennan writes in Sierra, had already “stopped contributing to the United Nations Population Fund, the largest global supplier of contraceptives and reproductive services.”

      At the same time, the US named Valerie Huber to the UN Commission on the Status of Women. “Huber,” Brennan points out, is “a longtime advocate of abstinence until marriage, is a proponent of “natural” family planning — in other words, the rhythm method.” Now, if they could only stop God from allowing miscarriages and stillbirths, and prevent Catholic priests from sexually assaulting young boys, Donald Trump could find his place in the history books as the president who restored religion to its rightful place in the center of American life.  

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      in US Politics

      How will Joe Biden's presidency affect arts and culture in America?

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      Four years ago, as Donald Trump prepared to be sworn in as the 45th president of the United States, his incoming administration faced a serious hurdle: booking any big-name artist to perform at his inauguration. Several artists declined or pulled out of the event; whereas Barack Obama had Beyoncé, the Trump team eventually secured country artists Lee Greenwood and Toby Keith, whose rah-rah patriotism and jingoistic lyrics fit the bill for an agenda the New Yorker writer Andrea K Scott called “America First, Art Last”. The performances drew middling crowds (ones flatly denied by then White House press secretary Sean Spicer) dwarfed the following day by the Women’s March, which drew a bevy of A-list stars to protest the Maga president.The combative, mutually bitter relationship between Trump and most artists and creative organizations has only deepened since. Though the Trump administration – called a “worst-case scenario” for arts groups – has largely failed to dismantle the federal arts programs it promised to defund, the Trump White House has been largely hostile to the arts, from Hollywood stars to political comedy down to local arts programs in cities, towns and rural areas across the country. Support of the arts, broadly construed, has understandably not been at the forefront of a rancorous and bruising 2020 election, as the economic crisis and ongoing pandemic imperil everything. But with Joe Biden’s election win, however unacknowledged by the current president, it’s worth looking ahead: what would a Biden administration mean for the arts?First and foremost, handling the coronavirus pandemic which has grounded most live performances to a halt, shuttered Broadway and theaters across the country, and tipped millions into unemployment. The Covid recession is the most unequal in modern American history, ensnaring society’s most vulnerable – including all but the biggest name artists – in prolonged, stagnating financial hardship. Without coronavirus under control, most efforts to resuscitate art economies are for nil.Once in office, Biden will undoubtedly call a cease-fire on executive attempts to destroy the cornerstones of federal arts programs: the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), long a target of the conservative culture wars since the late 1980s, and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), which supply funds to programs and institutions ranging from the Met, to regional theaters, to art classes for rural preschools. More

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      The Upswing review – can Biden heal America?

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      So the Biden-Harris ticket has won, but by narrow margins in some of the battleground states. How did partisanship reach such a pitch that Donald Trump’s tribal appeal easily cancelled doubts about his manifest unfitness for office? And what can Joe Biden do to patch together a frayed nation? The political scientists Robert Putnam, author of the acclaimed Bowling Alone, and Shaylyn Romney Garrett provide a wealth of sociologically grounded answers in The Upswing. Although the title is reassuringly buoyant, this is a tale of two long-term trends, one benign, the other a dark descent. An unabashed centrism prevails: political stability, the authors recognise, is a dance that requires a measure of cooperation and disciplined deportment from both parties.At the book’s core is a set of graphs describing the broad contours of American social, political, economic and cultural life over the past 125 years. All the graphs broadly conform to a common hump-like pattern: a growing swell over half a century or so of greater social trust, equality, bipartisanship and civic do-gooding peaking around the 1960s – followed by a marked and steady decline in all these criteria in the subsequent 50 years.The bad news is that we are living through the worst of the downswing, amid gross inequalities, corporate exploitation of the vulnerable and uncompromising hyper-partisanship. The good news is that the US has been here before – in the late 19th-century Gilded Age – and successfully pulled itself out of the mire. An antidote emerged to the robber baron industrialists, social Darwinists and anti-corporate populists of the Gilded Age in the form of the Progressive movement, whose ideals attracted reformers from within both main parties. Indeed, the short-lived Progressive party of the 1910s was an offshoot from Theodore Roosevelt’s “Bull Moose” brand of reformist Republicanism.Although Republican moderates managed to see off this third-party threat, Progressive ideals – the replacement of oligarchy, clientilism and corruption with modern, scientifically informed administration by middle-class professionals – endured as a significant strand in Republican politics. Progressive sentiments informed the New Deal of Roosevelt’s distant Democrat cousin FDR, but also the politics of mid 20th-century accommodationist Republicans such as Wendell Willkie and Thomas Dewey.The finest exemplar of harmonious “Tweedledum-Tweedledee” politics was General Eisenhower who, declining the opportunity to run for president as a Democrat, campaigned as a non-partisan Republican and governed as a big-spending progressive. The “low tide” of partisanship came in the mid-1960s when Lyndon Johnson’s war on poverty, the introduction of Medicare and implementation of black civil rights enjoyed support across the aisle from Republicans.Putnam and Garrett perceive an upswing in the position of women and African Americans before the rights revolution of the 60sIn this age of “depolarisation”, the real ideological divisions lay within parties, between liberal Republicans and anti-New Deal conservative isolationists, between unionised northern blue-collar Democrats, many of them Catholic, and southern Democrats – predominantly Protestant segregationists whose cultural values belonged far to the right of liberal Republicans. The authors note that on issues of race and gender progressive Republicans were often to the left of Democrats, and that as late as the 1960s Democrats were more likely to be churchgoers.Politics was, however, only one strand in “the Great Convergence” described by Putnam and Garrett. It was an age not only of growing income equalisation but of volunteering. Americans participated in huge numbers in chapter-based civic associations, such as the Elks and Rotarians, the Knights of Columbus and African American Prince Hall freemasonry. The mainstream Protestant churches themselves converged, favouring an ecumenical, theologically slender, all-American religion of social service and helping out.Staggeringly hard as it is now to believe, the Southern Baptists initially welcomed the pro-choice result in the Roe v Wade abortion case of 1973. Indeed, Putnam and Garrett perceive a long unobtrusive upswing in the position of women and African Americans before the rights revolution of the 60s. The black-to-white income ratio improved 7.7% per decade between 1940 and 1970.But the pendulum had already begun to swing in the other direction. Most of us might guess that it was the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 that initiated the turn to inequality and division. Not so, insist Putnam and Garrett, for the Reagan counter-revolution turns out to be a “lagging indicator”. More ambiguous is the presidency of Richard Nixon, who appears here in strongly contrasting tones: a liberal Keynesian Republican on the policy front, but hard-boiled and amoral when electioneering.Adding a green tinge to progressive Republicanism, Nixon established the Environmental Protection Agency and signed a clean air act. Yet ultimately ideals were a front for the harvesting of votes. Cynically alert to Southern Democrat disenchantment with Johnson’s civil rights legislation, Nixon embarked on a Southern strategy to woo the solidly Democratic South for the party of Abraham Lincoln. The process took decades, and explains one of today’s most glaring and historically illiterate ironies: the flying of Confederate flags by rural Republican-supporting northerners.However, as Putnam and Garrett demonstrate, the Great Divergence is about much more than political realignment. The great arc of modern American history concerns economic outcomes, social trends and a range of cultural transitions that the authors describe as an “I-We-I” curve. Things started to go awry on a number of fronts from the 1960s. Both the libertarian New Right and the countercultural New Left offered different routes to personal liberation. But individual fulfilment came at a cost in social capital.Escape from the drab soulless conformity associated with the 1950s ended up all too often in lonely atomisation. A long road led from the straitjacket of early marriage in the 1950s via the freedom of cohabitation to the growing phenomenon of singleton households. Chapter-based voluntary organisations that involved turning up for meetings and activities gave way to impersonal professionally run non-profits whose Potemkin memberships existed only as mass mailing lists. Unions ceased to be focal points of worker camaraderie and sociability, and shrivelled to a core function of collective bargaining.The authors believe that the new group loyalties of Republicans and Democrats are only weakly ideological, and are based rather on emotional allegiances of a tribal natureWhat’s more, the great mid-century levelling of incomes went into reverse. First, the gap grew between the middle and the bottom, then the incomes of the elite raced away from those of struggling middle-earners, and finally, as Putnam and Garrett show, the wealth of the top 0.1% vastly outgrew that of the top 1%.The downswing America described in this book contains some surprising features. Partisan antipathy has risen to a high pitch as – seen over the long term – the intensity of religious and racial hostilities has mellowed. The authors believe that the new group loyalties of Republicans and Democrats are only weakly ideological, and are based rather on emotional allegiances of a tribal nature.Today’s partisans do not simply dislike their opponents: they loathe them, and assign character flaws to their rivals. This helps explain why Trump was able to usurp the Republican party and its followers, while to all intents and purposes jettisoning a whole slew of traditional Republican policieslike a new football manager who changes a team’s style of playwithout losing the allegiance of its hardcore fans. We might be tempted to blame social media for this state of affairs, but Facebook and Twitter have an “ironclad alibi”. The beginnings of the Great Divergence predate the internet by decades.A Biden presidency brings into focus the difficult job of healing and reconciliation. But here Putnam and Garrett run into trouble, for it is impossible to identify a single decisive factor that caused the downswing. Rather the authors identify a range of “entwined” trends “braided together by reciprocal causality”. Just as diagnosis of ultimate causes is treacherous, so too is finding a compelling plan for throwing the Great Downswing into reverse. The authors look for the green shoots of a new Progressive movement in various forms of grassroots activism, but are worried that they have yet to see this take a “truly nonpartisan” form. They try to be upbeat, but the dominant note is wistful.Yet even on their terms the election does present limited grounds for optimism. The energetic campaigning efforts of the Lincoln Project and other Biden-endorsing Republicans shows that the party – though long since abandoned by its liberal progressives – still contains several mansions. Consider the crossover potential of libertarians, Republican-inclined, who offer an unpredictable smorgasbord of options for jaded partisan palates: laissez-faire on morals as well as markets. In tight races in Arizona, Wisconsin and Georgia, Jo Jorgensen, the third-party Libertarian candidate, drew small but significant numbers of disaffected Republicans away from Trump.And what are we to make of the quiet Trump phenomenon, the huge numbers of voters who unostentatiously turned to him, largely, it seems, because of the economy? That electorate – however narrowly self-interested – is at least amenable to reason. Despite all the worrying auguries, the election was not a straightforward scrap between whites and minorities. Trump lost white males to Biden, but gained surprising proportions of Latinx and African-American voters, and won niche groups such as older Vietnamese-Americans. Today’s tribes have not, alas, dissolved, but tomorrow’s seem likely on both sides to be rainbow coalitions.• The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again is published by Swift (£25). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. More

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      in US Politics

      Stacey Abrams: Georgia's political heroine … and romance author

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      Stacey Abrams is the former Georgia state house minority leader, whose fierce fight for Georgians’ right to vote has been credited for potentially handing the state to the Democrats for the first time in 28 years. But Abrams has another identity: the novelist Selena Montgomery, a romance and thriller writer who has sold more than 100,000 copies of her eight novels.Abrams wrote her first novel during her third year at Yale Law School, inspired after reading her ex-boyfriend’s PhD dissertation in chemical physics. She had wanted to write a spy novel: “For me, for other young black girls, I wanted to write books that showed them to be as adventurous and attractive as any white woman,” she wrote in her memoir Minority Leader. But after being told repeatedly by editors that women don’t read spy novels, and that men don’t read spy novels by women, she made her spies fall in love. Rules of Engagement, her debut, was published in 2001, and sees temperatures flare as covert operative Raleigh partners with the handsome Adam Grayson to infiltrate a terrorist group that has stolen deadly environmental technology.Abrams published the novel under a pen name “to separate my fiction from more academic publications on tax policy”. Seven more novels would follow, including Never Tell, which sees criminal psychologist Dr Erin Abbott take on a New Orleans serial killer with the help of journalist Gabriel Moss; Hidden Sins, which follows Mara Reed as she reunites with the scientist whose heart she once broke in her hometown; and Reckless, in which top lawyer Kell Jameson faces her past when the head of her childhood orphanage is accused of murder.In 2018, when Abrams made an unsuccessful bid to become governor of Georgia, she told Entertainment Weekly that she believed she could tell her characters stories “in ways that are engaging, but are also reflective of the complexity of women’s lives”.“Whether I’m writing about an ethno-botanist or a woman who’s raising orphans in South Georgia, the challenge of telling their stories is the same challenge I face as a legislator who has to talk to someone about passing a bill on kinship care, helping grandparents raising grandchildren, or blocking a tax bill because I’m using expertise they don’t realise I have,” she said. “I revel in having been able to be a part of a genre that is read by millions and millions of women, in part because it respects who they are. It respects the diversity of our experiences, and it creates space for broader conversations.”With Biden narrowly ahead in the Georgia recount, readers are now rushing to snap up Abrams’ books. US romance bookshop the Ripped Bodice sold 100 copies of her novels in just 12 hours. And as they pointed out on Twitter, “while [Abrams] was busy turning Georgia blue, she also wrote a new suspense novel”. While Justice Sleeps, out next May, follows a young law clerk, Avery Keene, who works for the legendary but cantankerous Justice Wynn. When Wynn slips into a coma, Avery discovers a conspiracy that has infiltrated the heart of US politics.“A decade ago, I wrote the first draft of a novel that explored an intriguing aspect of American democracy – the lifetime appointments to the US supreme court,” Abrams said in a statement. “Drawing on my own background as a lawyer and politician, While Justice Sleeps weaves between the supreme court, the White House and international intrigue to see what happens when a lowly law clerk controls the fate of a nation.”Abrams’ fellow romance writers, meanwhile, have launched an auction and fundraiser at Romancing the Runoff to help support the Georgia senate run-offs. “We’re here to help give 2020 a happily ever after,” they say. And they’ve already made $60,000 (£46,400). More

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      Kanye West announces 'Kanye 2024' as he fails to make election impact

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      Kanye West has suggested he will run for president in 2024, following his failed bid this year.
      Alongside a photo of him next to an electoral map filled with Republican and Democrat wins, he tweeted “welp”, an expression of disappointment. He added: “Kanye 2024”.

      ye
      (@kanyewest)
      WELP KANYE 2024 🕊 pic.twitter.com/tJOZcxdArb

      November 4, 2020

      West was a latecomer to the 2020 race, announcing his candidacy in July. Initially focusing on abortion and faith, he later drew up a 10-point platform, calling for support for the environment and arts, an anti-interventionist foreign policy, and reforms to the legal system and policing.
      He struggled to make it to the ballots of many states, including some that legally barred him from appearing, and encouraged supporters to write him on to their ballot papers. Across the 12 states whose ballots he appeared on, he won fewer than 60,000 votes. He found most success in Tennessee, winning more than 10,000 votes, 0.3% of the state’s total.
      As he cast his own vote, West said he had never previously voted in a presidential election. He tweeted: “God is so good. Today I am voting for the first time in my life for the President of the United States, and it’s for someone I truly trust … me.” More

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      Lady Gaga attacks Trump's 'grab' remarks at Joe Biden rally

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      Lady Gaga gave an impassioned message of support for Joe Biden as America heads to the polls, making reference to Donald Trump’s history of crude sexual remarks and alleged sexual assaults.“Vote like your life depends on it, or vote like your children’s lives depends on it, because they do,” she told a rally in Pennsylvania. “Everybody, no matter how you identify, now is your chance to vote against Donald Trump, a man who believes his fame gives him the right to grab one of your daughters, or sisters, or mothers or wives by any part of their bodies … Vote for Joe. He’s a good person.”Her words referred to Trump’s infamous 2005 boast that “when you’re a star, they let you do it … Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything”.Trump referred to Gaga at his own Pennsylvania rally, saying she “is not too good … I could tell you stories about Lady Gaga. I know a lot of stories.”On Sunday, Trump’s communications director Tim Murtagh tweeted: “Nothing exposes Biden’s disdain for the forgotten working men & women of PA like campaigning with anti-fracking activist Lady Gaga. This desperate effort to drum up enthusiasm is actually a sharp stick in the eye for 600,000 Pennsylvanians who work in the fracking industry.” Gaga responded: “I’m glad to be living rent free in your head.”At his Pennsylvania rally, Trump also criticised Jon Boni Jovi, Jay-Z, and LeBron James, who won the 2020 NBA championship with the LA Lakers in October. “I didn’t watch one shot, I got bored, back forth, back forth,” Trump said. “You know why? When they don’t respect our country, when they don’t respect our flag, nobody wants to watch”, a reference to the kneeling protests James and his team made on their return in July.James later endorsed Biden on Instagram, saying: “We need everything to change and it all starts tomorrow.” More

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      Trump v Biden: how to watch the US election coverage in the UK

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      So, you are in the UK and want to watch the US election results? Even after what happened in 2016 – and even though the election wasn’t called for Donald Trump until 7.30am GMT – you really want to put yourself through all that again? Well, fine. I cannot condone this sort of behaviour, but I can, begrudgingly, guide you through your viewing options.
      BBC One: US Election 202011.30pm-1pm
      Katty Kay and Andrew Neil – in his last gig for the broadcaster – will present rolling coverage, from Washington and London respectively, starting half an hour before the first presidential polls close. Jon Sopel and Clive Myrie will be with the Trump and Biden campaigns, while Nick Bryant, Emily Maitlis and others will report from various battleground states. Experts will be shepherded in for analysis and Christian Fraser will have a big screen to play with.
      Kay and Neil’s heroic – and potentially traumatising – shift will conclude at 9am. At this point, Matthew Amroliwala and Reeta Chakrabarti will begin four further hours of reaction and analysis. Hopefully, by the time this is over, we will know who won. Even if we don’t, BBC One is scheduled to return to normal. Sure, the election is important, but not important enough to derail Doctors.
      ITV: Trump Vs Biden: The Results11pm-6am
      As with all elections, ITV’s coverage will be less watched than the BBC’s, but fitfully more interesting. The good news is that Tom Bradby is holding the fort, so we might witness another of his planet-sized, shoulder-slumping sighs when he finally knocks off. However, official coverage ends at 6am, so there is an almighty chance that the result will be revealed on Good Morning Britain, provided that Piers Morgan can be quiet for long enough.
      Sky News: America Decides9pm-7am
      Sky’s election output kicks off at 9pm with an hour-long programme entitled Trump: America Interrupted, which will look at the impact of the Trump presidency. After that, results coverage begins at 10pm – four hours before many polls close – with America Decides, which Dermot Murnaghan will present live from Washington. Apparently, Sky will use its most comprehensive election data yet and will work closely with NBC News. It will also include an augmented reality “Race to the White House”, whatever that means. Either way, Kay Burley will take over at 7am.
      CNN: Election Night in America5am-9pm Thursday
      For those of you who hate sleep, CNN’s rolling coverage has already begun and will continue unbroken until The Lead with Jake Tapper begins 64 hours later. Why has such a vast amount of time been devoted to election coverage? It is almost as if CNN knows that the result will be contested and that the contest will rattle on unsatisfactorily for days.
      Other options
      As you would expect, your best bet of thorough election coverage would be to follow the Guardian’s election liveblog. But there are other options for the more news-averse. At 10pm, Comedy Central is showing the vastly underrated Die Hard knock-off White House Down. And, given his bracing, shellshocked reaction four years ago, you would be foolish to miss Stephen Colbert’s Showtime election show; it won’t be shown live on UK TV, but it will be all over YouTube after it airs. Then again, you could just go to bed as normal and avoid the whole sorry mess. More