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      The great danger is that this time, Trumpism starts making sense | Randeep Ramesh

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      Donald Trump’s unpredictable style and electoral success reflect a turbulent era when neither progressives nor authoritarians have secured control. Far from signalling an autocratic takeover, his rise shows a political landscape in flux. The 2008 crash and its uneven recovery marked the decline of the old economic order. But in 2016, the rise of Trump on the right and Bernie Sanders on the left highlighted a real shift, as neoliberalism’s grip loosened, making space for once marginalised ideas.Since then, two US presidencies have acknowledged the need to rebuild an economy that supports blue-collar workers affected by free trade, immigration and globalisation. While neither administration succeeded – and paid for it at the ballot box – the result has been a growing constituency on both sides of the American political divide that takes seriously, albeit often rhetorically, economic injustice. But for any political movement to become dominant, it has to shape the core ideas that matter to everyone, not just its diehard supporters.A subtle shift is taking place: once-taboo “protectionism” is now a bipartisan issue, with Joe Biden upholding Trump’s tariffs on China. The two presidents have encouraged US companies to reshore manufacturing. Industrial policy, missing since the 1990s, and antitrust actions now find advocates on both sides of the aisle. Both Trump and Harris gauged voters’ indifference to near-trillion-dollar deficits, promising on the campaign trail to protect social security and Medicare.While the methods are shared, the goals diverge. The US became the world’s top oil and gas producer in the last decade. Biden sought to cultivate a green economy, while Trump promoted fossil fuels so aggressively that it bordered on self-parody.Biden fell short of delivering the transformation he had promised. He set out to tackle inequality, improve public services and address the climate crisis with a $4tn plan funded by taxing the wealthy – a mission to unite social liberalism with economic fairness. But his ambitious plans were shrunk by lobbying by corporate interests and resistance from centrist Democrats.After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Biden shifted away from economic radicalism. When inflation surged, instead of controlling prices, he allowed the cost of essentials to soar, causing the steepest food-price hike since the 1970s. In 2022, the poorest 20% of Americans spent nearly a third of their income on food, while the wealthiest fifth spent just 8%. Biden avoided emergency price controls, unlike Richard Nixon who implemented them in 1971 – and won a landslide reelection the following year.Biden learned the lesson too late, promising to tackle “greedflation” as part of his reelection campaign. Once he dropped out, Harris said she would enact the “first ever federal ban” on food-price gouging. That was slamming the stable door shut long after the horse had bolted. However, in a sign that price controls were becoming mainstream in national politics, Trump promised to cap credit card interest rates.Trump’s populist rhetoric resonated with disillusioned voters, yet his first term’s policies had often mirrored the establishment he criticised, blending and betraying the US’s pro-market ideals. As the historian Gary Gerstle writes in his book The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: “If [the administration’s] deregulation, judicial appointments, and tax cuts pointed toward the maintenance of a neoliberal order … Trump’s assault on free trade and immigration aimed at its destruction.” Trump presents free trade and open borders as threats to US prosperity, advocating for strict controls that admit only goods and people aligned with American interests.The president-elect has abandoned the neoliberal tradition of keeping markets shielded from direct political influence, openly using his power to favour allies and enrich elites. While centrist Democrats support corporate interests by blocking progressive reforms, Trump aligns directly with billionaires, promoting a culture where justice serves the wealthy, prejudice is trivialised and power diminishes equality. This trickle-down bigotry will ultimately create a system where servility to power and social division become normalised, eroding fairness for everyone.Whether Trump can mobilise popular discontent over social and economic inequalities without alienating the oligarchs who support him remains an open question. In the months ahead, a struggle will unfold among factions within Trump’s circle. Economic populists such as the Republican senator Josh Hawley and the vice-president-elect, JD Vance, will differ from libertarians such as Vivek Ramaswamy and the self-interested deregulatory agenda of Elon Musk. Trump’s aim isn’t to lift all boats, but rather to lift enough to convince voters to tolerate the corruption, consumer scams and environmental degradation that enrich a plutocratic class. This strategy, boosted by a pliant mediasphere, enables him to present a party of private power as the voice of the ordinary voter.American political life often oscillates between “normal” and “revolutionary” phases – periods of stability interspersed with upheaval, where ideological shifts reshape public policy. After the crash but before Trump, the Tea Party was a rightwing populist movement frustrated by globalisation yet anti-worker in orientation. Revolutionary moments – such as the rise of nativist populism or democratic progressivism – trigger profound ideological shifts that reshape public values and policy. Trump’s victory was historic, but it is not yet ideologically cohesive or triumphant.If that changes, it could permanently shift certain constituencies. In 1948, Democratic support for civil rights led African Americans to abandon their traditional allegiance to the Republicans. They left the party of emancipation for the party of Jim Crow. Betting that working-class voters have nowhere else to go is a gamble centrist politicians will profoundly regret.For Democrats, the traditional strategy of pairing social liberalism with modest economic reform no longer connects with today’s voters. While social equality is a moral imperative, it requires bold, egalitarian economic policies to truly resonate. Until such policies take shape, political dysfunction and public frustration will persist. The pressing question now, for the US and beyond, is what vision and leadership will meet these urgent demands. More

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      Democrat Ruben Gallego beats far-right Republican Kari Lake to win Arizona senate seat

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      Democratic congressman Ruben Gallego has won the race for US Senate in Arizona, becoming the first Latino to represent the state in the Senate, beating out the far-right firebrand Kari Lake.Gallego will replace the Democrat turned independent senator Kyrsten Sinema, who ran for office as a centrist and charted a way for Democrats to win statewide elections in the right-leaning state, but then consistently stood in the way of her party’s priorities in the Senate. She did not seek re-election.While the presidential race polled neck and neck throughout the election, Gallego polled ahead of Lake by several points the entire campaign, an unlikely position for a progressive congressman trying to win a battleground state. Gallego also outperformed Lake in fundraising, giving him more local airtime and mailbox presence.In the end, he edged out Lake with 50% of the vote to her 48%, while Trump easily beat Harris in the state.“Gracias, Arizona!” Gallego wrote on the social platform X. He planned to speak to his supporters during a news conference Monday night.After Gallego’s win, Democrats will have 47 seats in the 100-member Senate, versus the Republicans 52, erasing Democrats’ previous majority in the chamber.Republicans flipped Democratic-controlled Senate seats in West Virginia, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Montana. In the latter three cases, defeated senators Sherrod Brown, Bob Casey and Jon Tester all polled ahead of Harris but couldn’t overcome their states’ shifts toward the Republicans.Lake ran into trouble winning over moderate Republicans and independent voters, both needed to deliver a victory. Attacks she had made against the late US senator John McCain reverberated, and the so-called McCain Republicans split on supporting her.Lake ran for governor in 2022, losing to the Democrat Katie Hobbs. Lake has yet to accept the results of that election.Republican efforts focused more on Trump’s bid to swing the state back red after he lost there in the narrowest victory nationwide in 2020. Billboards financed by the Arizona Republican party that boasted of “team unity” did not include Lake. Instead, Trump was pictured alongside out-of-staters like JD Vance, Elon Musk, Robert F Kennedy Jr, Vivek Ramaswamy and Tulsi Gabbard.Arizona has had six senators in just over a decade, creating an endless stream of high-priced elections for these coveted seats. Republicans there have run to the right of the electorate, creating an opening for Democrats to make a case to new residents and suburbanites who are shifting to the left.Gallego was able to tell his personal story frequently in his campaign. He is the son of Mexican and Colombian immigrants, who was raised by his mother and worked odd jobs at meat-packing plants and pizza shops to earn extra money for his family. He then graduated from Harvard and joined the Marine Corps, deploying to Iraq as part of a unit that saw some of the heaviest casualties of the war.Lake delivered the news as an anchor on the local Fox affiliate in Phoenix for decades, putting her in Arizonans’ homes daily. Raised in Iowa, she has talked about being the youngest of nine children and called herself a “mama bear”. She has embraced Trump and the Maga movement, happily saying “you can call me Trump in a dress any day.”Lauren Gambino contributed reporting More

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      Trump reportedly picks China critic Mike Waltz as national security adviser – as it happened

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      The Wall Street Journal is reporting, citing unnamed people familiar with the matter, that Trump has chosen Florida congressman Mike Waltz as his national security adviser.The post does not require Senate confirmation and is highly influential.Here are the key recent developments:

      Democratic Representative Mark Takano won reelection to a US House seat representing California on Monday. Takano defeated Republican David Serpa, the Associated Press reports. The congressman is a longtime incumbent, the ranking member on the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs and also sits on the House Committee on Education and the Workforce. Takano was previously a classroom teacher and a community college trustee.

      The Wall Street Journal and CNN reported, citing unnamed people familiar with the matter, that Trump has chosen Florida congressman Mike Waltz as his national security adviser. The post does not require Senate confirmation and is highly influential. Waltz is also on the Republican’s China taskforce and has argued the US military is not as prepared as it needs to be if there is conflict in the Indo-Pacific region.

      Trump is reportedly expected to name Marco Rubio as secretary of state. The New York Times reports that Trump is expected to name Florida senator Marco Rubio his secretary of state. The paper cites three unnamed sources “familiar with [Trump’s] thinking”.

      Donald Trump has announced that he will nominate Lee Zeldin to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, saying the former New York congressman and gubernatorial candidate will focus on cutting regulations.

      Stephen Miller, an architect of the hardline immigration policies Donald Trump enacted during his first term, appears to be heading back to the White House.

      The president-elect has also appointed Tom Homan, who was one of the main officials behind Trump’s family separation policy, as his “border czar”.

      Kamala Harris made her first public appearance since her concession speech at a Veterans Day ceremony. The vice-president did not speak at the event, and has since ended her public itinerary for the day after returning to Washington DC.

      Oklahoma senator Markwayne Mullin is reportedly being considered for a position to lead the Department of Interior or Veterans Affairs under Donald Trump’s administration.

      Trump’s new “border czar” Tom Homan made clear in an interview he is prepared to pursue hardline immigration policies. He told Fox News: “If sanctuary cities don’t want to help us, then get the hell out of the way, because we’re coming.”

      Democrat Cleo Fields has won Louisiana’s congressional race in a recently redrawn second majority-Black district. That flips a once reliably Republican seat blue, according to the Associated Press.

      Juan Merchan, the judge presiding over Trump’s business fraud trial in New York that saw him convicted of 34 felonies earlier this year, will decide on Tuesday whether to overturn the verdict, Reuters reports. The case is the only one of Trump’s four criminal indictments to reach a verdict, and Trump is scheduled to be sentenced on 26 November – though now that he is headed back to the White House, it is unclear if that will happen.
      This live coverage is ending soon, thanks for following along.Democratic Representative Mark Takano won reelection to a US House seat representing California on Monday. Takano defeated Republican David Serpa, the Associated Press reports.The congressman is a longtime incumbent, the ranking member on the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs and also sits on the House Committee on Education and the Workforce. Takano was previously a classroom teacher and a community college trustee.The 39th congressional District covers communities in Riverside County southeast of Los Angeles. The Associated Press declared Takano the winner at 9.08pm EST.Vietnam’s Communist Party head To Lam congratulated Donald Trump in a phone call on Monday and the two discussed ways their countries could boost economic ties, the country’s communist party said.The US is Vietnam’s largest export market, and in September last year the two countries upgraded their relationship to a comprehensive strategic partnership, the highest level in Vietnam’s ranking.“Vietnam is ready to promote stable and long-term development of bilateral relations for the benefit of the people of the two countries,” Lam said during the call, according to a statement posted on the communist party’s website.The statement said Trump expressed his respect for the relationship with Vietnam and Vietnam-US economic cooperation, and wanted to further promote it.While the New York Times has reported that Donald Trump has picked Marco Rubio to be his secretary of state, the report also says “Mr. Trump could still change his mind at the last minute.”Rubio is arguably the most hawkish option on Trump’s shortlist for secretary of state, Reuters reports, and he has in years past advocated for a muscular foreign policy with respect to America’s geopolitical foes, including China, Iran and Cuba.Over recent years he has softened some of his stances to align more closely with Trump’s views. The president-elect accuses past US presidents of leading America into costly and futile wars and has pushed for a more restrained foreign policy.Rubio has said in recent interviews that Ukraine needs to seek a negotiated settlement with Russia rather than focus on regaining all territory that Russia has taken in the last decade. He was also one of 15 Republican senators to vote against a $95 billion military aid package for Ukraine, passed in April.Rubio is also a top China hawk in the Senate. Most notably, he called on the Treasury Department in 2019 to launch a national security review of popular Chinese social media app TikTok’s acquisition of Musical.ly, prompting an investigation and troubled divestment order.As shell-shocked Democrats try to understand why working-class Americans – once the cornerstone of their political base – chose a billionaire over them, progressives argue the path forward is to champion “popular and populist” economic policies.Democratic recriminations have intensified in the nearly seven days since their devastating electoral losses, which may yet deliver a new era of unified Republican governance in Washington, after Donald Trump stormed to a second term while his party easily flipped the Senate and is on the verge of winning a majority in the House. Divisions have deepened, with progressives blaming the party’s embrace of corporate America and swing-state Democrats accusing the left of tarnishing its appeal with ex-urban and rural voters.“Clearly not enough voters knew what Democrats were going to do to make their lives better, particularly poor and working-class Americans across this country,” Representative Pramila Jayapal, chair of the congressional Progressive Caucus, told reporters on Capitol Hill on Monday:The New York Times reports that Trump is expected to name Florida senator Marco Rubio his secretary of state. The paper cites three unnamed sources “familiar with [Trump’s] thinking”.Axios reports that Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s cenvoy, Ron Dermer, met with Trump at Mar-a-Lago on Sunday, and that Dermer also met with Trump’s son in law, Jared Kushner.Axios cites to unnamed two Israeli officials and two US officials with knowledge of the meeting, reporting:
      An Israeli official said the meeting was aimed at passing messages from Netanyahu to Trump and briefing the president-elect on Israel’s plans in Gaza, Lebanon and Iran for the next two months before Trump takes office.
      “One of the things the Israelis wanted to sort out with Trump is what are the issues he prefers to see solved before 20 January and what are the issues he prefers the Israelis to wait for him,” a US official said.
      The US officials mentioned the Israel-Lebanon ceasefire efforts, the plan for Gaza after the war ends and Israeli-Saudi normalization efforts as issues the Israelis want to take Trump’s pulse on.
      Dermer also met with Jared Kushner, a source with knowledge of the meeting said.
      On Ukraine, Waltz has said his views have evolved, Reuters reports. After Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, he called for the Biden administration to provide more weapons to Kyiv to help them push back Russian forces.But during an event last month, Waltz said there had to be a reassessment of the United States’ aims in Ukraine.“Is it in America’s interest, are we going to put in the time, the treasure, the resources that we need in the Pacific right now badly?” Waltz asked.Waltz has praised Trump for pushing Nato allies to spend more on defense, but unlike the president-elect has not suggested the United States pull out of the alliance.“Look we can be allies and friends and have tough conversations,” Waltz said last monthReuters has more information about Mike Waltz, who is reportedly Trump’s pick for national security adviser.If selected, Waltz will be responsible for briefing Trump on key national security issues and coordinating with different agencies.While slamming the Biden administration for a disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, Waltz has publicly praised Trump’s foreign policy views.“Disruptors are often not nice … frankly our national security establishment and certainly a lot of people that are dug into bad old habits in the Pentagon need that disruption,” Waltz said during an event earlier this year.“Donald Trump is that disruptor,” he said.Waltz was a defense policy director for defense secretaries Donald Rumsfeld and Robert Gates and was elected to Congress in 2018. He is the chair of the House Armed Services subcommittee overseeing military logistics and also on the select committee on intelligence.Waltz is also on the Republican’s China taskforce and has argued the US military is not as prepared as it needs to be if there is conflict in the Indo-Pacific region.In a book published earlier this year titled “Hard Truths: Think and Lead Like a Green Beret,” Waltz laid out a five part strategy to preventing war with China, including arming Taiwan faster, re-assuring allies in the Pacific, and modernizing planes and ships.Decision Desk HQ, an organisation that uses models to project how the vote count will unfold, is predicting that the Republicans will win a majority in the House.With a Republican Senate majority already won, this would mean Trump controls both houses of Congress when he takes office in January, making it significantly easier to pass legislation.The Associated Press, which the Guardian relies on to call races, has not yet confirmed that the Republicans have won the four seats needed for a House majority.There is more information now about California Governor Gavin Newsom’s plans to meet with the Biden administration this week to discuss zero-emission vehicles and disaster relief. The Democratic governor is leaving for Washington on Monday and will return home Wednesday, his office said. Newsom will also meet with California’s congressional delegation, the Associated Press reports. He is seeking federal approval for state climate rules, a $5.2bn reimbursement for emergency funding during the Covid-19 pandemic and updates to the state’s Medicaid program, along with other priorities.The trip comes days after Newsom called for state lawmakers to convene a special session in December to protect California’s liberal policies ahead of Trump’s return to office in January.Trump then criticized the governor on social media, calling out the high cost of living in California and the state’s homelessness crisis. He said Newsom was “stopping all of the GREAT things that can be done to ‘Make California Great Again.’”California won against most of the Trump administration’s legal challenges over the state’s environmental and other progressive policies during the Republican’s first term, said Thad Kousser, a political science professor at the University of California San Diego.“The question is: Has Donald Trump changed the legal playing field so much through the court appointments of his first term that he’ll be able to win on policies in his second term?” he said.As president, Trump appointed more than 230 federal judges, including three justices to the US Supreme Court. More

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      Trump didn’t just win. He expanded his voter base | John Zogby

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      Donald Trump defied the polls and pundits and received both a majority of the popular vote and of the electoral college. His margin of 3.4 percentage points (thus far) was well beyond anything that anyone projected and it is the first time a Republican candidate for president received a majority of popular votes since 2004. It is probably safe to say that even his own pollsters did not see this tornado coming, otherwise the president-elect’s team would not have issued statements earlier in the day attacking voting irregularities and election tampering. Certainly not if you are expecting to win.Published polls and the television network-sponsored exit polls both revealed some new truths that help explain what really happened and must be studied by winners and losers, academics and both political strategists and junkies.For starters, Trump has built on his coalition of angry and disaffected voters. The Maga movement (“Make America great again”) was once the exclusive club of angry white voters, conservatives who wanted to win, people filled with status anxiety – the fear of losing their middle-class status – and folks deeply concerned about the loss of traditional values like hard work, the nuclear family, frequent church attendance, marriage of only men and women, and heterosexuality. They also feared that the day had arrived when America lost its standing in the world. To be sure, the doors to this movement were not-so-subtly opened to white nationalists and supremacists. Their standard bearer was seen only as an aberration, and protest against Hillary Clinton, who represented government paternalism and patronage and a candidate not to be trusted.But 2024 exit polling has clearly shown that Maga has expanded beyond its original base. Trump outperformed his previous runs by substantial numbers among men and women, particularly young men; Black people, Latinos, Asian/Pacific Islanders; and suburban voters. He grew his support among voters in every state.There are lessons to be learned here. Democrats have targeted demographic groups by using one-dimensional definitions and messages. This view suggests that Black people are mainly concerned about civil rights. Latinos are obsessed about immigration and women are defined by second-class status and reproductive rights. Following the successful playbook of Barack Obama in 2008, Democrats bought into the idea of a coalition of young voters, particularly young women, along with people of color and suburbanites that would only produce a winning formula for the ages. Two authors, John Judis and Ruy Teixeira even wrote the manual for the party The Emerging Democratic Majority, in which they argue that these groups were growing in numbers and thus constituted the future. Both authors have since repudiated their own argument because, while it worked for Obama again in 2012, it failed miserably in most off-year elections and fell short in the 2016 Trump/Clinton election when key elements of the coalition chose to not vote.The election of 2024 put the final nail in the coffin of that theory. While there was a 21-point gender gap with men overwhelmingly choosing Trump and women supporting Kamala Harris, Trump won a majority of men and women in the suburbs. He received 50% of the vote among those earning less than $100,000 last year, compared with 46% voting Harris. He also won 21% of Black men and 55% of Latino men and 66% of voters with less than a college degree. Even though the president-elect has made several controversial statements about combat veterans, he won the vote of veterans by 26 points (65% for him, 34% for Harris).The vice-president managed to win only 17% of those who identify as born-again/evangelical Christians, even though every Democratic candidate since Barack Obama had won at least 30% of this group.Pre-election polls showed the race too close to call. Our John Zogby Strategies poll showed a 3.7 -point margin for Harris as of Sunday with minor candidates in the mix. Our simple head-to-head brought Harris’s “lead” down to 2.4 points. We all caught the anxiety over the economy, the threat to American democracy, the loss of reproductive rights, immigration and the security of the southern border, and crime. We also showed a majority with a negative view of Trump.But he still won – and convincingly. At a moment when the sitting president has a 40% approval rating and about seven in 10 voters feel that things in the US are headed in the wrong direction, voters wanted change. Now Trump will have to steer the ship of state during turbulent times. He will have to govern. That is the hard part.

      John Zogby is senior partner at the polling firm of John Zogby Strategies and is author of Beyond the Horse Race: How to Read the Polls and Why We Should (Rowman & Littlefield) More

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      Not changing course on Gaza was a colossal mistake by Kamala Harris | Moustafa Bayoumi

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      Could Kamala Harris have won the election if she had promised to change course in Gaza? It’s impossible to know, of course, but there’s reason to think so. Instead, Harris hewed far too closely to Biden’s position, alienating large numbers of voters along the way. The result? We can expect the catastrophe for the Palestinian people to continue, while we learn to live with a much more dangerous Donald Trump, a man whose far-right agenda threatens many of us in and out of the United States.What seems to have doomed Harris most was not so much traditional Democrats casting votes for the Republican Trump, though there was some of that. In fact, party loyalty, at around 95% for both parties, was basically the same as in 2020. Rather, Harris’s shortcomings point to the rank-and-file of the Democratic party not coming out to vote and to more first-time voters casting Republican ballots. We don’t have the final voter tally yet, but so far Harris has amassed just over 68m votes, compared with Trump’s 72m. Biden, by contrast, earned over 81m votes in 2020. By the time the final numbers are in, it’s likely that Trump will have won more than the 74m votes he had in 2020, and Harris will have been the first Democrat to lose the popular vote in 20 years.Some of those lost votes surely must be attributable to Harris’s weak position on Palestine. A significant majority of young people sympathize with Palestinian rights, according to the Pew Research Center, and young people are also highly critical of Biden’s policies on Palestine. Meanwhile, reporting from around the nation indicates that voter turnout among young people in this election was low. The Chicago board of elections noted that 53% of registered voters between the ages of 18 and 24 cast a ballot, well below the city’s average turnout of 58%. And compared with the 2020 election, Trump doubled his support from first-time voters there.In Dearborn, Michigan, where 55% of the population is of Middle Eastern descent, Trump scored a victory over Harris, an upset considering Biden won Dearborn with almost 70% of the vote in 2020. And while Black voters continued to overwhelmingly support Harris, their numbers also dropped, reflecting a lack of excitement for the vice-president. Christopher Shell, a scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told Foreign Policy magazine that “it’s hard to ignore the impact of US war-making under the Biden-Harris administration and the administration’s inconsistent stance on issues like the Israel-Palestine conflict, which likely deflated enthusiasm for Harris among the influential Black voting bloc”.If you’re wondering what such inconsistencies regarding Gaza could be, you can watch a report by CNN that aired on 1 November, which showed how the Harris campaign aired two completely different ads about their position. One ad, aimed at Arab American voters in Michigan, shows Harris speaking from a podium. “What has happened in Gaza over the past nine months is devastating,” she says. “We cannot allow ourselves to become numb to the suffering, and I will not be silent.” Meanwhile, in another ad, this time aimed at Jewish voters in Pennsylvania, she says: “Let me be clear. I will always stand up for Israel’s right to defend itself, and I will always ensure Israel has the ability to defend itself, because the people of Israel must never again face the horror that a terrorist organization called Hamas caused on October 7.”It gets worse. In the Pennsylvania ad, the campaign also spliced together two parts of a Harris speech, which enabled them to cut out the part where Harris talks about ending the suffering in Gaza so that “the Palestinian people can realize their right to dignity, security, freedom and self-determination”. CNN’s Andrew Kaczynski sums this all up understatedly. “Here you have two entirely different constituencies,” he says, “and they are getting two entirely different messages.”I realize I sound like I’m Monday-morning quarterbacking, but many thousands of people – myself included – had been warning the Democrats for months that they had to take a stand against the wholesale slaughter of innocent people if they wanted to earn our trust, let alone earn our vote. Instead, not only did the Harris campaign refuse to let a Palestinian American on stage during their national convention in August and not only did they remove an Arab Muslim Democrat from a rally in late October, but they also decided in their wisdom to trot out two different messages to two different communities, thinking no one would notice. It seems they believed that Democrats would not vote for Trump in any large number, but how did they not realize that if you are repeatedly ignored, insulted and slighted by your party, then you just might not come out to vote.Obviously, Gaza was not the only issue in this campaign, and voters had multiple reasons for their choices, including the economy and concerns over asylum policies, among others. But conventional wisdom already seems to be lining up to say that Gaza played no discernible role in Harris’s defeat, pointing out that the margins in Trump’s victories in swing states such as Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Georgia appear to be greater than any measurable voter discontent over a largely US-funded genocide, the term, incidentally, that prominent experts increasingly use to describe Israel’s actions in Gaza.But much of that post-election analysis is based on exit polling, and exit polling, as far as I know, does not aim to capture why people did not come out to vote in the first place. Why Democratic voters didn’t show up is the crucial question that must be posed. And the answer, I suspect, is abundantly clear. Not changing course on Gaza was a colossal mistake on the part of the Harris campaign, a fatal error certainly for Palestinians and quite likely, as we now see, for Americans, too.

      Moustafa Bayoumi is a Guardian US columnist More

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      Black women on what Harris’s loss says about the US: ‘Voters failed to show up for her’

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      In the hours after Joe Biden’s decision to end his re-election bid and endorse Kamala Harris as the democratic nominee for president, 40,000 Black women – leaders in politics, business and entertainment – met on a Zoom call to rally around the vice-president.“We went from that call to organizing our house, our block, our church, our sorority, and our unions,” said Glynda C Carr, president and co-founder of Higher Heights, an organization that works to help Black women get elected to political office. “That is what we did for the 107 days that she ran for office. Black women used our organizing power around a woman that we knew was qualified, that had a lived experience.”View image in fullscreenFor many, Harris seemed to be the one woman to break the glass ceiling of reaching the highest office in the US. Harris, a graduate of Howard University, a historically Black college in Washington DC and a member of the country’s oldest Black sorority Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority Inc (AKA), who had become the first Black female vice-president after spending a career as a prosecutor, California’s attorney general and senator, had reached a point where voters would welcome a woman – many deemed to be beyond qualified – versus Donald Trump, an embattled former president then awaiting sentencing on more than three dozen felony convictions.“Here is a woman that has had access to be able to build upon legacies and blueprints,” Carr said. Harris’s candidacy was so exciting because “she literally embodies Black excellence for Black women.”Harris’s 107-day campaign to become president began in a year of recognizing the anniversaries of pivotal advancements for Black people during the Jim Crow era and Civil Rights movement – 70 years after Thurgood Marshall, Constance Baker Motley and the NAACP dismantle school segregation; 60 years after Fannie Lou Hamer spoke at the 1964 Democratic national convention; and 52 years since Shirley Chisholm became the first woman and first Black to run for president.“It gave so much hope,” said Christian F Nunes, president of the National Organization for Women and part of generation X, who never thought she’d see a Black president – let alone a Black woman president. “It was like the opportunity and manifestation of our ancestors’ wildest dreams. That’s what I thought to myself like, if she is elected, this is what our ancestors have dreamt about, and women, and Black women have dreamt about our entire lives.”It was that hope that fueled a wide-range of support from Democratic leadership, including former president Jimmy Carter who cast his ballot for Harris weeks after turning 100. Republicans such as former congresswoman Liz Cheney and her father, Dick Cheney, who served as vice-president in the George W Bush administration. Bipartisan support, an aggressive and energized campaign with a huge funding arm from several groups supporting Harris wasn’t enough to overcome the second election of Trump, who saw growth in his voting base among Black and Latino voters. Trump garnered more than 75m votes as of Sunday evening, and won the popular vote for the first since he began his ascension to the White House.“Harris’s candidacy was working for unity and democracy and protecting freedom,” Nunes, 46, said. “Then we had another candidate who basically ran on a campaign to take away freedoms. I felt that this loss was not a reflection of her ability to lead. I felt like it was a reflection of voters who said that they would show up for her, but failed to show up for her. And also, people’s inability to trust women and stand up for women – particularly, especially a Black woman. And I feel like this continuously resonates and shows up in so many spaces and I think that’s the part that was hurtful.”View image in fullscreenTrump’s victory came from voters who were so put off by the US’s trajectory that they welcomed his brash and disruptive approach. About three in 10 voters said they wanted total upheaval in how the country is run, according to AP VoteCast, a sweeping survey of more than 120,000 voters nationwide. Even if they weren’t looking for something that dramatic, more than half of voters overall said they wanted to see substantial change.Both nationwide and in key battleground states, Trump won over voters who were alarmed about the economy and prioritized more aggressive enforcement of immigration laws. Those issues largely overshadowed many voters’ focus on the future of democracy and abortion protections – key priorities for Harris’s voters, but not enough to turn the election in her favor.Rarely has ethnicity, race or gender been mentioned in many after-election interviews, as reasons for not supporting Harris’s bid for president or why they preferred Trump, but some Harris supporters believe they were an underlying reason many will not admit to.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionShavon Arline-Bradley, president and CEO of the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW) said Harris’s campaign of inclusion and strong support from the Democrats’ most loyal voting block – Black women – could not withstand “the wall of white nationalism and racism and classism and sexism and misogyny”.“It could not withstand the wall of an electorate that used class, race and gender to block the opportunity for an all-inclusive society that our country is so-called built on,” she said. “This idea of womanhood in leadership still becomes unfathomable for many.”New Orleans resident Laureé Akinola-Massaquoi is the mother of a two -year-old daughter, and said that Harris being the Democratic nominee for president, meant a more equal, progressive future for all of America, not just for Black people, but for everybody.But when Akinola-Massaquoi, 36, woke up on 6 November and saw that Trump had won the election, she was “disgusted, disappointed, just annoyed, really annoyed”.“Nowhere else can other people do the things he does or say the things he does, or have the record he has and become president of the United States. I just don’t even know how he even got this far,” she said. More

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      in Elections

      What is voter certification – the process that Trump targeted in 2020?

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      With voting completed in the US presidential election, election officials across the country will now turn to certifying the results before the electoral college meets in December and Congress certifies the vote in January.Until the 2020 election, few paid attention to certification, which was seen as a bureaucratic way of officializing the results of the election. But after 2020, Donald Trump and allies, who questioned the election results, targeted the certification process as a way of causing confusion. In advance of the presidential election, there were deep concerns that the former president and allies would try and block certification of the election results, starting at the local level.Trump’s victory in the election means that there likely won’t be an effort to block certification of the presidential results. But there still are some close US Senate and House races that could prompt battles over certification. Experts say it is clear that certification is not discretionary and those who refuse to certify could face criminal penalties.What is certification?Certification refers generally to the process of making the election results official. The process works differently in each state. Election results are unofficial until they are certified.It takes place after a canvass, the process that takes place after every election to aggregate all of the ballot totals, resolving outstanding disputes over challenged or provisional ballots and reconciling any discrepancies or inconsistencies. Officials investigate any discrepancies, if they exist, in vote totals. The process varies by jurisdiction, but there is usually a board of people which then votes to certify the election. Various state laws make it clear that this is a ministerial responsibility and that officials cannot refuse to do so.For a statewide election, results are certified at both the local and state level.Is certification when disputes over election results are resolved?No. The canvass and certification process is aimed at reconciling vote totals and getting an official count. The process may identify abnormalities that could become the basis for an election contest or challenge later. State laws allow for separate legal processes outside of the certification process to challenge election results. These typically take place in the courts.What happens if an official or a board refuses to certify?Most boards certify the vote on a majority vote, so a single member refusing to certify wouldn’t block certification.But if a majority of the board refuses to certify, a secretary of state or election watchdog group would likely sue them to get a court to force them to certify. Watchdog groups have already warned that those who refuse to certify will face criminal charges.Could an effort to block certification actually work?No. If there were substantial irregularities in an election that could affect the outcome, it would be resolved in court. Experts are confident that the winners of elections will be the ones seated.Despite that confidence, there’s still concern that refusals to certify will allow people to continue to question the election results and seed further doubt about the election.What happens after certification?In a presidential election, there are additional steps after states certify the vote.In nearly every state, the winner of the statewide vote gets all of the state’s electors to the electoral college. A new law, the Electoral Count Reform Act, requires the governor of each state to certify the list of their state’s electors no later than six days before the electoral college meets. This year, that means the electors will be finalized by 11 December and the electors will meet in state capitols across the country on 17 December.Once the electors meet and cast their votes, they transmit them to the National Archives in Washington. Congress will oversee the counting of the vote on 6 January 2025 to make the results official. The constitution says that the president of the Senate – the vice-president – will oversee counting of the votes. That means that Kamala Harris will oversee the counting of the vote this year. Harris, who conceded the election to Trump on Wednesday, said in her concession speech that she “will engage in a peaceful transfer of power”. More

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      in US Politics

      Sweep of swing states rubs salt in Democrats’ wounds as Trump prepares to meet Biden

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      Donald Trump was declared the winner in Arizona early on Sunday, completing the Republicans’ clean sweep of the so-called swing states and rubbing salt in Democrats’ wounds as it was announced that the president-elect is scheduled to meet with Joe Biden at the White House on Wednesday to discuss the presidential handover.In a national campaign that was projected as being extremely close but he ended up winning handily, the result in Arizona gives Trump 312 electoral college votes, compared with Kamala Harris’s 226. The state joins the other Sun belt swing states – Nevada, Georgia and North Carolina – and the three Rust belt states of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania in voting Republican. All were expected to be extremely competitive but all went for Trump, though by fairly close margins.Republicans also regained control of the Senate – they hold 53 seats to the Democrats’ 46 – and look likely to keep control of the House of Representatives, where 21 races remain uncalled but Republicans currently have a 212-202 advantage, giving them a “trifecta” – both houses of Congress as well as the presidency – that will allow them to govern largely unfettered for at least the next two years.The political realignment comes after a bruising election that has set the stage for the Democratic party to re-evaluate a platform that appeared to have been rejected by a majority of US voters. Trump also won the popular vote, the first time a Republican has done so since George W Bush in 2004 following the 9/11 attacks a few years before.At Biden’s request, Trump will visit the Oval Office on Wednesday, a formality that Trump himself did not honor in 2020 when he lost the presidency to Biden but refused to accept the results.In a speech last week, Biden said he would “direct my entire administration to work with his team to ensure a peaceful and orderly transition”.But as president-elect, Trump has reportedly yet to submit a series of transition agreements with the Biden administration, including ethics pledges to avoid conflicts of interest. The agreements are required in order to unlock briefings from the outgoing administration before the handover of power in 72 days’ time.The national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, said Biden will brief Trump on foreign policy on Wednesday, telling CBS Face the Nation: “The president will have the chance to explain to President Trump how he sees things.”Asked if Biden will ask legislators to pass additional aid for Ukraine before he leaves office, Sullivan said the president “will make the case that we do need ongoing resources for Ukraine beyond the end of his term”. Trump allies have said the incoming administration’s focus would be on peace not territory.View image in fullscreenSullivan also said that the international community needs “to increase pressure on Hamas to come to the table to do a deal in Gaza, because the Israeli government said it’s prepared to take a temporary step in that direction” because the group had told mediators, he said, it “will not do a cease-fire and hostage deal at this time”.The political fallout from Trump’s win continues to reverberate, not least in the Democratic camp. The Harris-Walz campaign is estimated to have spent $1bn in three months but is now reportedly $20m in debt.The Republican pollster Frank Luntz told ABC News’s This Week that whoever “told” Harris to focus on Trump during her presidential campaign had “committed political malpractice”.“We all know what Trump is,” Luntz said. “We experienced him for four years.”Progressive senator Bernie Sanders, who votes with Democrats, defended Harris’s campaign and refused to be drawn into further analysis on whether Biden should have stepped away from his re-election bid sooner.“I don’t want to get involved,” he told CNN. “We got to look forward and not in the back. Kamala did her very best. She came in, she won the debate with Trump. She worked as hard as she possibly could.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionView image in fullscreen“Here is the reality: the working class of this country is angry, and they have reason to be angry,” he added. “We are living in an economy today where people on top are doing phenomenally well while 60% of our people are living paycheck-to-paycheck.”Republicans, meanwhile, have not explained why Trump and many in the party argue last week’s election was free and fair but maintain the 2020 one was somehow rigged, despite every single lawsuit alleging fraud being rejected.Jim Jordan, the Republican chair of the the house judiciary committee, called Trump’s victory last week the “greatest political comeback”.On Friday, Jordan and fellow Republican representative Barry Loudermilk sent a letter to special counsel Jack Smith to demand that his office preserve records of the justice department’s prosecutions of Trump.Asked by CNN whether Trump would go after his political opponents, Jordan said: “He didn’t do it in his first term. The Democrats went after him and everyone understands what they did.”“I don’t think any of that will happen,” Jordan reiterated. “We are the party who is against political prosecution. We’re the party who is against going after your opponents using lawfare.”Byron Donalds, a Republican congressman from Florida, told Fox News that claims of a list were “lies from the Democratic left”.“I will tell you, this is not something that Donald Trump has ever spoken to, or he’s committed to, whatsoever. There’s no enemies list,” Donalds said. Trump has regularly referred to his political opponents as “the enemy within”. More