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      in US Politics

      Latinos could swing Georgia. Don't repeat the mistakes of Florida and Texas | Chuck Rocha

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      In less than eight weeks, voters of the now-blue state of Georgia will head to the polls to vote in the Senate runoff election on 5 January 2021 to decide if the Rev Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff will join their Democratic colleagues in Congress. These two seats are crucial to deliver the mandate needed by Joe Biden to enact his ambitious vision for America’s future.
      With the Democratic party’s hopes and dreams resting on Georgia’s shoulders, it would be a costly misstep to overlook a key demographic: Latinos. There are nearly a million Latinos living in Georgia, the majority of whom live in and around the Atlanta metro area. About 300,000 persuadable Latino voters who are registered to vote identify as neither Democrat nor Republican. These voters represent a small but decisive 5% of the electorate. In a world in which races are won on razor-thin margins, that 5% is a crucial swing vote.
      In the days leading up to the 2020 general election, I watched my colleagues’ hopes rise at the sight of a string of polls showing Biden with the lead in Florida and record-breaking early voter turnout in my home state of Texas. These hopes were quickly dashed. In the wake of defeat, my phone started to buzz with people asking, urgently: what went wrong with the Latino vote? It was the first time in my 30 years of political experience that the nation finally learned a truth that Latino organizers have been trying to convey for ages. We are not a monolith and you must ask us for our vote if you want to earn our vote.
      Let’s set the record straight: President-elect Joe Biden won Latino voters. He spent more money engaging with Latino voters in his 2020 campaign than either Barack Obama or Hilary Clinton. This investment paid off for Biden, with decisive Latino victories in the states he focused on competing in, including Florida.
      By now, we have all heard about the heroine of Georgia’s historic blue shift. Stacey Abrams’ unprecedented grassroots voter registration and mobilization efforts have unequivocally proven that the antidote to poisonous voter suppression tactics and lagging voter engagement involves two key ingredients: both statewide and community-led operations.
      Fair Fight Action was responsible for the registration of over 800,000 voters in Georgia – a force to be reckoned with in the once reliably red south. This level of mobilization, focused on Latinos, will be critical to swing the Georgia special election toward Democrats and clinch these two remaining Senate seats.
      Every 30 seconds in America, a Latino turns 18 and becomes eligible to vote. Over half of Georgia’s Latino population is under the age of 18. This means there are thousands of Latino youth in Georgia who will turn 18 on or before 5 January who qualify to register to vote in the Senate elections. This is in addition to hundreds of thousands of Latinos already over the age of 18 who are currently unregistered to vote.
      The registration deadline for all Georgians who wish to vote in the runoff elections is less than a month away, on 7 December. These next three weeks present a small window of opportunity for Democrats to expand their electorate. Emerging Latino populations can and will tip the balance in this election.
      Latino organizers and groups on the ground such as Galeo, a non-profit that helps register new Latino voters across Georgia, need funding and resources right now in order to mobilize Latinos in large enough numbers to swing the state. Over the past four months, Nuestro Pac – now the largest Latino-focused Super Pac, which I helped found – spent over $5m to galvanize Latino voters for Biden in swing states like Arizona, Michigan, Nevada and Pennsylvania. These efforts helped deliver the margins of victory for Biden in many of the states he won.
      Georgia presents an enormous opportunity for Democrats, in part because the unique nuances of Latino voters in Texas and Florida, who are culturally distinct from elsewhere, are not present to the same extent in Georgia. The most pressing issue for Latinos in Georgia – and Latinos in general – is Covid relief funds, which are currently being held hostage by the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell. Healthcare is a similarly critical issue for Latinos in Georgia – yet the Republican party has voted over 50 times to strip Americans of health protections provided by the Affordable Care Act, and are trying to defeat it through the supreme court.
      Through the appointment of a new and diverse Covid-19 taskforce, Biden has already taken a crucial first step to instill confidence in these voters. Now it is time for investment in grassroots organizing so that Latinos can deliver Biden a mandate.
      Chuck Rocha is the president of Solidarity Strategies and the founder of Nuestro Pac. He was a senior adviser to the Bernie Sanders campaign More

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      in US Politics

      'Whatever it takes': how Black women fought to mobilize America's voters

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      [embedded content]
      Even before networks projected the presidential race for Joe Biden last Saturday, Wanda Mosley, a 50-year-old organizer based in Atlanta, Georgia, began to prepare to mobilize voters for her state’s two critical Senate runoff elections on 5 January.
      After one of the most turbulent presidential elections in US history, the two races in the battleground state will determine if the balance of power in Washington will fall to the president-elect once he is sworn into office. Georgia has yet to be called for Biden, a Democrat, though he currently leads Donald Trump, which motivates organizers such as Mosley who until early December will continue to register voters planning to vote in the January runoffs.
      “We understand fully how important these races are,” says Mosley, the senior state coordinator for Georgia’s Black Voters Matter, a nonprofit dedicated to voter engagement.
      “We’re still here. We’re still working,” Mosley said.
      Democrats have long pointed to Black voters, more specifically, Black women, as a crucial voting bloc, decisive to elections since former president Bill Clinton’s victories in the 1990s. But this November, successfully flipping the southern, Republican-led state of Georgia to the Democrats for the first time in 28 years has drawn attention to the organizational power of Black women, whose large-scale mobilization efforts appear to have resulted in massive turnout among people of color in those cities, experts say.
      “What might have been different is the greater role of on the ground mobilization and voter registration efforts in states like Georgia, and I think that that was the effort that was largely built by Stacey Abrams and others on the ground,” said Jamil Scott, an assistant professor in the government department at Georgetown University.
      Rather than rely on outside political consultants swarming into battleground states, Abrams, who lost to the Republican Governor Brian Kemp in 2018, led that charge in Georgia this year, says Aimee Allison, the founder of She the People, a national network advocating for women of color in politics. There was a 69% increase in voter turnout among women of color in Georgia this year compared to 2016, according to Allison, who cites data She the People analyzed from progressive data firm Catalist.
      “You have a group of voters of Black women who are the most effective organizers on the ground because they are trusted voices and are working in organizations year round. They don’t come in six weeks before and kind of rent out a storefront, they’re actually invested in, long-term, empowering the community through civic and political action,” she said.
      In America, this election year has not played out in a vacuum. Rather, it has been met with – and compounded by – America’s year of reckoning with police brutality and systemic inequality, which has driven even more people to vote.
      Thousands of Americans took to the streets to protest against police brutality in the wake of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor’s deaths earlier this year as the Black community also shouldered the disproportionate impact of Covid-19. The meeting of those moments spurred political mobilization among Black voters, says Tim Stevens, the CEO of Pittsburgh’s Black Political Empowerment Project, a non-profit voting rights organization based in Allegheny county, Pennsylvania, where Trump was swiftly defeated last week.
      “The tragedies … made what was already present in the heart of Black people and people of color even more evident and more urgent,” said Stevens.
      Those mobilization efforts were evident as ballots were counted in diverse urban centers in key states such as Wisconsin, Michigan, Georgia and Pennsylvania where large populations of Black voters in Milwaukee, Detroit, Atlanta and Philadelphia helped push Biden towards victory.
      Then there were a number of prominent Black women in leadership roles – like Abrams, Nikema Williams, who took on John Lewis’s congressional seat and is chair of Georgia’s state Democratic party, and Atlanta’s mayor, Keisha Lance Bottoms – helped fuel mobilization efforts among Black women this election, suggests Dianne Pinderhughes, a professor of political science and the chair of the department of Africana studies at the University of Notre Dame.
      One organizer in Pennsylvania points to the most prominent: the first Black and south Asian American vice-president-elect, Kamala Harris. “We had the same feelings we had when Obama was first elected,”says Brittany Smalls, the Pennsylvania state coordinator for Black Voters Matter. “We just never thought we would see the day that a woman in leadership looks like us.”

      Kamala Harris
      (@KamalaHarris)
      I want to speak directly to the Black women in our country. Thank you. You are too often overlooked, and yet are asked time and again to step up and be the backbone of our democracy. We could not have done this without you.

      November 9, 2020

      Now, as Americans across the country shift their attention away from the presidential race and to the runoff elections in Georgia, organizers like Mosley say they are keen to build on their success, in an election that could ultimately determine what kind of presidency Joe Biden will have.
      “This is the culmination of years and years and years of work, when other people didn’t think it was possible,” said Mosley. “We know how important the Senate is, and so if we can play a role in getting one – or possibly two seats – to try to shift that balance of power, you need to understand that Black women will do whatever it takes.”
      This piece was published in partnership between the Guardian and The Fuller Project. More

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      in US Politics

      Donald Trump has lost the election – yet Trumpland is here to stay | Aditya Chakrabortty

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      Perhaps one day Donald Trump will be dragged out of the Oval Office, his tiny fingernails still dug deep into that fat oak desk. But Trumpland, the country that ignored the politicians and the pollsters and the pundits and gave him the White House in 2016, will outlast him; just as it emerged before he even thought of becoming a candidate. And for as long as it is here it will warp politics and destabilise the US.
      I first stumbled upon Trumpland in 2012, a time when it bore no such name and appeared on no maps.
      I was reporting in Pittsburgh that autumn, as Barack Obama crushed Mitt Romney while cruising to a second term as president. The big US broadsheets wrote up the Republicans as if they were an endangered species , while thirtysomethings in DC gazed deep into their spreadsheets or West Wing boxsets and foretold permanent Democratic majorities, gaily handed to them by a rainbow coalition of black, Latino and granola-chewing graduate voters.
      Except I kept meeting people who lived in an alternative country. People like Mike Stout and his family. He’d worked for decades in the local steel mills and had been a fiery union leader. Now he spent every spare hour as a reincarnation of Woody Guthrie, carrying a guitar along with memories of standing in 2009 on Washington’s Mall to watch Obama’s inauguration, his breath freezing in the January air as the first black president was sworn in . “It was like a new world had opened up, just for an afternoon,” said his wife, Steffi.
      But it was their far more subdued daughter, Maura, who troubled me. The steelworks of her dad’s day was long gone, so she’d gone to university and then spent two years hunting for a job. Now the 23-year-old was doing the accounts for a hotel, a non-graduate position paying $14 an hour, which Mike recalled as the same rate he’d earned at the steelworks in 1978 – without, of course, three decades of inflation. Among Maura’s year of about 500 graduates, she counted as one of the lucky ones.
      “I don’t think I’m ever going to earn as much as my parents,” she said. “I don’t think my husband and I will ever have the same life as they did.”
      We were in Pennsylvania, often painted as a land of blue-collar aristocracy and true-blue Democrats. But the political economy that had underpinned those ballot-box majorities was as rusted as an abandoned factory. Instead, Maura saw a political system that had failed her and her generation, in which every new day was worse than yesterday. And while the Stouts were leftwing, they had little in common with the party they supported. In their eyes, their home had been gutted of manufacturing and bilked by foreign trade deals, and appeared nowhere on the Clinton/Obama ideological map.

      Sure enough, four years later Pennsylvania became one of the rustbelt states that won Trump the White House.
      Trumpland is not the same as the old Republican heartlands, even if they overlap. What the dealmaker saw more clearly than the Bushes, the Romneys and the McCains was that there was a new electoral coalition to be forged out of downwardly mobile white voters. “The people that have been ignored, neglected and abandoned,” he called them in Ohio in 2016. “I am your voice.”
      And so he completed the great inversion of American politics: he turned the Republicans into a party whose future is tied to Trumpland. Even Trump’s rivals accept that. This summer, Texas senator Ted Cruz said: “The big lie in politics is that Republicans are the party of the rich and Democrats are the party of the poor. That just ain’t true. Today’s Republican party are Ohio steelworkers, today’s Republican party are single mums waiting tables…”
      Whatever promises Trump made on the threshold of the White House, once inside he spent four years giving billions in tax cuts to rich people and trying to deprive millions of low-paid Americans of decent healthcare. For the poor whites who put him in power, Trump had nothing to offer apart from racism.
      However grossly used by its leader, Trumpland is more than an imagined community. It has its own society and economics and politics ­– and they barely resemble the rest of the US. The 477 large and densely populated counties won by Biden account for 70% of America’s economy, according to new calculations by the Brookings Institute ; Trump’s base of 2,497 counties amount to just 29% (a further 1% is still to be counted). Brookings describes Trumpland as “whiter, less-educated and … situated in the nation’s struggling small towns and rural areas. Prosperity there remains out of reach for many.”
      These people haven’t been left behind so much as cut loose from the US. Between 2010 and 2019, the US created nearly 16m new jobs but only 55,000 of them were suitable for those who left school at 16. Inequality this deep is not just economic, it is social and psychological. It is also lethal.
      Two economists, Anne Case and Angus Deaton, have found that working-age white men and women without degrees are dying of drug overdoses, alcohol-related liver disease and suicide at unprecedented rates . In 2017 alone, they calculated that there were 158,000 of these “deaths of despair” ­– equal to “three fully loaded Boeing 737s falling out of the sky every day for a year”.
      As Case and Deaton point out, African Americans have still harder lives. They die younger, and are less likely to go to college or get a job. Yet over decades their prospects are improving. For poor white Americans, on the other hand, the trends point straight down. The result, according to a new study by Andrew Oswald and former Bank of England rate-setter David Blanchflower, is that middle-aged, white American school leavers are now suffering an epidemic of “extreme mental distress”.
      When you live in a zero-sum economy, in which you always lose while the other guy wins, then you too might subscribe to zero-sum politics – in which the Democrats aren’t just opponents but enemies, and democratic norms are there to be broken. “These people are hurting,” says Blanchflower. “And when you’re hurting you’ll buy what looks like medicine, even if it’s from a snake-oil merchant.”This is where Biden’s kumbaya politics, all his pleas to Americans to join hands and sing, looks laughably hollow. You can’t drain the toxicity of Trumpism without tackling the toxic economics of Trumpland. And for as long as Trumpland exists, it will need a Trump. Even if the 45th president is turfed out, he will carry on issuing edicts and exercising power from the studio set of any TV station that will have him.
      Eight years after meeting Mike Stout, I spoke to him this week. He didn’t have much good news for me. Maura lost her hotel position last year and is now working from home in the pandemic, phoning up people deep in debt and pressing them to repay their loans. His son, Mike, lost his job just a few weeks ago for the second time in five years, and now has no medical insurance while his wife has stage-4 cancer.
      “They’ve been pushed off the shelf straight into the gutter,” he told me. “I don’t see any party out there willing to protect my children’s lives: not Democrat, not Republican.”
      • Aditya Chakrabortty is a Guardian columnist More

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      in Elections

      US election 2020: Biden says denying result 'will not help Trump's legacy' – live updates

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      Key events

      Show

      8.44am EST08:44
      Florida bracing for second hit from Hurricane Eta

      8.03am EST08:03
      Joe Biden’s vote lead over Donald Trump stretches to more than 5 million

      7.48am EST07:48
      Canadian PM Trudeau says looking forward to working with Biden on climate change, economy and Covid response

      7.11am EST07:11
      Texas becomes first US state with more than 1 million confirmed Covid cases

      Live feed

      Show

      10.06am EST10:06

      Even Donald Trump’s own campaign is acknowledging they have failed to produce any evidence of election fraud.

      Jessica Silver-Greenberg 🕵🏻‍♀️
      (@jbsgreenberg)
      A Pennsylvania judge asked a Republican lawyer whether he was alleging any fraud. His answer, in direct contradiction of @realDonaldTrump: “at present, no.” pic.twitter.com/nUxMt6W0bB

      November 11, 2020

      Appearing before a Pennsylvania judge yesterday, one of the president’s lawyers was asked flat-out whether the campaign was alleging fraud in connection to a batch of ballots.
      The lawyer replied, “To my knowledge at present, no.”
      Just to be crystal clear: there has been absolutely no evidence of widespread fraud in the presidential election.

      9.48am EST09:48

      Republican Al Schmidt, a Philadelphia city commissioner, defended the integrity of his city’s vote count after Donald Trump and his team raised baseless concerns about election fraud.

      New Day
      (@NewDay)
      “I realize a lot of people are happy about this election, and a lot of people are not happy… one thing I can’t comprehend is how hungry people are to consume lies and to consume information that is not true.”- Phila. City @Commish_Schmidt on claims of widespread voter fraud pic.twitter.com/XoweYxMUQO

      November 11, 2020

      Schmidt said the city had to stay focused on counting valid ballots before the certification deadline, a goal that “should not be controversial.”
      “I have seen the most fantastical things on social media, making completely ridiculous allegations that have no basis in fact at all,” Schmidt told CNN.
      “I realize a lot of people are happy about this election, and a lot of people are not happy,” Schmidt added. “One thing I can’t comprehend is how hungry people are to consume lies and to consume information that is not true.”
      As Schmidt’s interview aired, Trump accused the city commissioner of being “used big time by the Fake News Media to explain how honest things were with respect to the Election in Philadelphia.”
      “He refuses to look at a mountain of corruption & dishonesty. We win!” Trump said in a tweet.
      In reality, Joe Biden currently leads Trump in Pennsylvania by about 48,000 votes, and the president’s team has provided no evidence to substantiate allegations of election fraud.

      9.29am EST09:29

      This is Joan Greve in Washington, taking over for Martin Belam.
      Donald Trump’s advisers are privately acknowledging they are unlikely to prevent Joe Biden from taking office, after the president-elect was named the winner of the electoral college.
      The Washington Post reports:

      [E]ven some of the president’s most publicly pugilistic aides, including White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel and informal adviser Corey Lewandowski, have said privately that they are concerned about the lawsuits’ chances for success unless more evidence surfaces, according to people familiar with their views.
      Trump met with advisers again Tuesday afternoon to discuss whether there is a path forward, said a person with knowledge of the discussions, who, like others interviewed for this report, spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal discussions. The person said Trump plans to keep fighting but understands it is going to be difficult. ‘He is all over the place. It changes from hour to hour,’ the person said. …
      The vote counting, meanwhile, continued apace as the states work toward certifying the vote, a process that should largely be finished by the beginning of December. In Georgia, the deadline for county certification is Nov. 13, but the majority of counties had already completed the task by Tuesday afternoon. Next comes a statewide audit, after which Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, must certify the results no later than Nov. 20.

      As a reminder, every major news outlet has declared Biden to be the winner of the presidential race, and the Democrat currently leads Trump in the popular vote by more than 5 million votes.

      9.01am EST09:01

      Speeches from candidates conceding defeat in past US elections have been resurfacing after Donald Trump refusal to speak out since losing to Joe Biden. Here’s a little supercut to remind you of the way things used to be done after an election defeat.

      Incidentally, while they are attracting a lot of attention, Trump’s claims that voter fraud has denied him victory is cutting little mustard with the broader American public. A Reuers/Ipsos poll released Tuesday showed 79% of US adults believe Biden won. That includes around 60% of those who identified themselves as Republican supporters.
      And with that I shall hand you over to Joan Greve in the US. Thanks for reading, I’ll be back next week…

      8.57am EST08:57

      You’ll probably want to pop this in your diary.

      CBS News
      (@CBSNews)
      Barack Obama will be interviewed on “60 Minutes” and “CBS Sunday Morning” on Sunday, November 15, in what will be his first television interviews following the 2020 presidential election https://t.co/JbJfKbcoxs

      November 11, 2020

      8.52am EST08:52

      It wasn’t just the presidency and Senate and House races on the ballot last week. Lots of states were also asking their residents to make decisions of statewide laws. Kari Paul in San Francisco reports for us on one that might have a much wider significance – California’s Prop 22.

      After a historic spending spree and an aggressive public relations campaign, Uber and Lyft emerged victorious on election day when California voters passed a ballot measure that exempts gig companies from having to treat their drivers like employees.
      For big tech companies, the win was a crucial step in their fight to protect their business model, and they hope it will serve as an example for tech legislation around the US.
      For opponents, it showed the power of big money in fighting legislation, and represents a harbinger of the labor rights battle to come.
      Prop 22 was authored by Uber, Lyft, Doordash and Instacart, and will carve out an exception for these firms from AB5, a landmark labor law in California that came after years of complaints from driver organizers and would have forced ride-share and delivery companies to treat drivers as employees.
      Under Prop 22, workers at gig companies will continue to be classified as contractors, without access to employee rights such as minimum wage, unemployment benefits, health insurance, and collective bargaining.
      The ballot initiative, opponents warned, would continue poor wages and substandard working conditions for gig workers, and it would leave them with little recourse to fight those conditions. Labor advocates fear the victory for tech firms could mark the beginning of similar efforts across the US.

      Read more here: Prop 22 – why Uber’s victory in California could harm gig workers nationwide

      8.44am EST08:44

      Florida bracing for second hit from Hurricane Eta

      Residents in Florida are still dealing with the flooding that tropical storm Eta caused earlier in the week – and there’s now further bad news. Associated Press report that Eta has regained hurricane strength and the state needs to brace for a second hit from the storm. More

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      in US Politics

      Joe Biden's coalition is whiter, wealthier – and will not stick around | Ben Davis

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      Democrats went into last Tuesday’s election with a clear strategy: flip enough suburban Republican voters to beat Donald Trump. This paid off: Joe Biden won the election by flipping enough voters in the suburbs of Atlanta, Detroit, Milwaukee, Philadelphia and Phoenix. The election, however, exposed the gaping flaws in this strategy for any party that hopes to win and wield power. Democrats may have accomplished their near-term goal, but in the long term the party is in an extraordinarily weak place, built on a rickety coalition united only by a hatred of a president who will soon no longer be a threat. The Democrats took the shortest route to beating Trump, but in the process may have irreparably damaged their ability to build a governing majority and implement progressive policy.The period immediately after an election tends to be a time of myth-making rather than serious analysis. These myths, however, often take the place of truth and influence both political strategy and voters themselves for years after. So what do we know actually happened? Biden won the presidency, by a fairly clear margin in both the popular vote and electoral college, but with margins that were far too close for comfort in the decisive states. Democrats lost seats in the House and, pending special elections in Georgia, will either have lost or tied in the Senate. They were projected to win both the House and Senate.Biden was able to hit the numbers he needed in the crucial highly educated suburbs, but many of these traditionally Republican voters split their tickets down ballot, voting for the Republican in the US Senate and House of Representatives. Despite polls showing clear gains for Biden among white non-college-educated voters in the rural midwest, Democratic gains here were minimal, and in some places, like much of rural Wisconsin, Trump actually increased his margin after it had seemed like Democrats had hit rock bottom in 2016. With the hugely increased turnout, Trump actually netted more votes out of much of the rural midwest than in 2016.Most concerningly, Democrats hemorrhaged votes among non-white working-class voters. Exit polls show Trump winning more non-white voters than any Republican in a generation. This was most apparent among Cuban American voters in Miami-Dade county, who of course have their own idiosyncratic politics. But losses among Latino voters could also be seen in huge margins in the Rio Grande valley, one of the most impoverished regions in the country, in Osceola county, Florida, and up and down the map from El Centro, California, to Lawrence, Massachusetts. Early returns also show consistent gains for Republicans among black voters across the board. Even in the crucial states Biden was able to flip, Trump reduced Democratic margins in Detroit, Milwaukee and Philadelphia. These results should be setting off alarm bells among Democrats.The first post-election myth is the same that emerges from Democratic leadership and media talking heads after every election: the threat of the “far left”. The election has given an opportunity for elected Democrats to engage in their favorite pastime and primary political commitment: lashing out at anyone, anywhere who might want to do anything about climate change or crushing inequality or systemic racism. This myth must be combatted, not only is it a threat to the progressive left and Democrats ability to win elections, it’s on its face false.As noted by the New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, incumbent Democrats in swing and even Republican-leaning seats who co-sponsored Medicare for All were undefeated, while every Democrat who lost their seat took a conservative position on the issue. An analysis of swing seats by Justice Democrats showed that more conservative voting records were actually correlated with decreased vote share among incumbent Democrats. Exit polls showed massive support for a leftwing policy agenda. Where this agenda was on the ballot, it was triumphant even as moderation-obsessed Democrats lost up and down the ballot. In Florida, where Democrats distanced themselves from a ballot measure to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour, the result was a huge win for the $15 minimum wage and a bloodbath for Democratic candidates. For many voters, the Democratic party isn’t associated with raising the minimum wage, and with the Democrats’ messaging strategy, why should it be?If leftwing policy is popular, are Democratic losses among Latino voters a question of branding?If leftwing policy is popular, are Democratic losses among Latino voters a question of branding? Some centrists Democrats say an aversion to “socialism” was the issue, causing voters to flee the Democrats. Luckily, we have a good test of this idea from just this year, the primary run of avowed socialist Bernie Sanders. Far from fleeing in horror, Latino voters went for the socialist Sanders by enormous margins. In the nearly all-Latino Rio Grande valley, where Trump saw his largest gains anywhere, Sanders took nearly every county. Outside of Florida, Sanders won nearly every majority-Latino jurisdiction where Trump saw gains this year. These voters aren’t opposed to “socialism” – they are skeptical of the political establishment, not receptive to Democratic messaging about “decency” and political norms, and, most importantly, can’t be taken for granted. Following the lead of the Sanders campaign, Democrats need a real commitment to Latino outreach.This current iteration of the Democratic coalition should be terrifying to anyone with leftwing policy goals or anyone who wants to see Democrats win elections. Biden’s coalition was whiter and wealthier than any Democrat’s before. Biden’s winning margins depended on suburban voters who were entirely motivated by personal animus towards Trump, who voted Republican down-ballot and will certainly be voting Republican in future elections. After buying into the mantra that turning out working-class voters was an impossible Bernie Sanders fantasy and messaging had to be tailored to wealthy suburbanites, Democrats were entirely caught off guard by massive turnout among working-class voters of all races, voters who voted Trump at higher rates than any previous Republican has achieved.Democrats are now staring down the barrel of a future where Republicans have a real foothold among working-class voters, including non-white voters. For the left, we now have to confront a Democratic party where a real organized segment of its base has material interests opposed to any redistributive policy. This election has proven the moderate suburbanite strategy is unsustainable. The only path forward for the left is one of confrontation with the Democratic establishment and a message of economic populism aimed at working-class voters of all races. This election proved that workers vote; it’s the left’s task to capture them. More

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      in US Politics

      Enough is enough: Republicans' fealty to Trump imperils America itself | Jill Filipovic

      by

      The Republican party has spent four years enabling Donald Trump: backing up his lies, defending his most egregious misbehaviors, shattering longstanding democratic norms to keep his, and by extension their, iron grip on power. But by refusing to push him to concede an election he clearly lost, they’re truly following him off a cliff – and threatening to take America with them.Donald Trump lost the popular vote by 5 million. He was handily trounced in the electoral college, too. There is no real question that he lost the election and Joe Biden won.And yet, predictably, the president who has spent his entire time in office denying the facts that are in front of his face is insisting that the clear results of this election must be the result of malfeasance. We know that to assuage his own ego and maintain his position, he will say and do just about anything. We know that he is not a statesman or a person who cares about anything beyond himself; we know he is happy to tear the nation apart at the seams if it means he gets what he wants. And we know that many members of the Republican party have thus far aided and abetted him.But there was some question of when enough would be enough. Surely there was some line the president could cross that would directly imperil America itself and make Republicans finally say: enough. Now, the president is mounting what in any developing country would be called an attempted coup. He is spreading outright lies about America’s system of free and fair elections, claiming he won when he didn’t. His sycophantic legal team is pulling issues out of thin air to undermine the American system of voting. He is wielding his power to try to install himself as an unelected leader. He is refusing to concede so that he might find some way to illegally grab power. And Republicans are letting him.The president is “100% within his rights” to challenge the clear election results in court, said the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, before scolding Democrats for demanding the president concede. “Let’s not have any lectures about how the president should immediately, cheerfully accept preliminary election results from the same characters who just spent four years refusing to accept the validity of the last election.”But these election results are not “preliminary”; they are clear and decisive. And Democrats did not refuse to accept the results of the 2016 election. Democrats did insist on looking into foreign interference into the election, and asked necessary questions about the president’s interactions with foreign adversaries. But Democrats did not refuse to concede. They did not undermine the democratic process and American confidence in a free and fair vote.Trump is refusing to concede so he might find some way to illegally grab power. And Republicans are letting himThis isn’t about letting the president have his temper tantrum or, as one GOP official put it, “humoring him for a bit”. This is about whether Americans can trust in our system, and whether Americans will trust in our system. America will, hopefully, outlast Donald Trump, and hopefully it will outlast every person alive today. But America is as much an idea as it is a land mass; our democracy is an agreed-upon set of rules and norms, many of them written, but many of them customary. Americans have always sought to make the rules fairer, and to extend more rights and privileges to a wider swath of people: that’s what the civil rights movement did, and the women’s movement, too. But the goal was to get in on the system, not to undermine its legitimacy.What Trump and his Republican enablers are doing is a wholly different thing. They aren’t saying that the system is unfair because it excludes some people who deserve to be a part of it. They aren’t even saying that they lost because the rules were unfair. They are saying that one side cheated, that the system is rigged. Once that cat is out of the bag – once you sow widespread distrust in the entire concept of free and fair American elections – it’s awfully hard to put it back in.When the president refuses to concede, it also has a real, tangible impact on the nation’s future. The incoming president needs to be fully briefed; he needs to be able to staff up and start to put his team in place so that he can hit the ground running. It’s bad for the country if we slow that process down. And it’s especially dangerous during an escalating pandemic: Joe Biden is facing a huge public health emergency that experts predict will worsen this winter, and he needs to be able to manage it as efficiently as possible.It’s sad and stunning that it has even come to this: that the integrity of the American electoral process is at stake, and many of the most powerful and prominent members of Republican party still declare fealty to their Dear Leader, even at the expense of the nation. This isn’t just about one party acting unscrupulously because they’re sore losers. This is how democracy itself comes undone. More

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      'An embarrassment': Biden responds to Trump's refusal to concede election – video

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      President-elect Joe Biden says Donald Trump’s refusal to concede the presidential election is ‘an embarrassment’. Biden was outlining plans for the transition period before he takes office in January 2020 when he was asked what he would say to Americans anxious over Trump’s refusal to concede and what it would mean for the country. “Well, I just think it’s an embarrassment, quite frankly,” Biden said. “I think it will not help the president’s legacy.” Biden has promised to “get right to work” despite alarm over whether there would be a smooth transition of power
      ‘An embarrassment’: Joe Biden criticises Trump’s refusal to concede election
      Joe Biden says Trump’s refusal to concede defeat ‘an embarrassment’ – live More

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      'An embarrassment': Joe Biden criticizes Trump's refusal to concede election

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      Joe Biden said Donald Trump’s refusal to concede the election was “an embarrassment”, vowing to move forward with the presidential transition despite resistance from the White House and Republican leaders.
      Biden, answering questions for the first time since he was declared the winner of the 2020 election, intensified his criticism of the president, who continued to baselessly allege voter fraud, and said Trump’s denial would “not help his legacy”.
      Though the situation at the White House has caused deepening alarm over whether the US would witness a smooth transfer of power that has been a hallmark of American democracy for generations, Biden promised his team was “going to get right to work” confronting the compounding crises facing the nation.
      Pointing to unfounded claims of voter fraud, Trump, with the support of senior Republicans in Washington, has maintained that the election is not over and is contesting the results in several states, despite it being called for Biden on Saturday morning almost four days after the polls closed.
      In a call with reporters on Monday, transition officials said the General Services Administration had yet to issue a letter of “ascertainment” that would recognize Biden as the president-elect and allow his team to begin the transfer of power.
      Until the decision is made, Biden’s staff cannot meet with their counterparts in the White House and other federal agencies, begin to perform background checks for potential appointees or receive security briefings.
      Biden insisted the delay “does not change the dynamic at all of what we’re able to do”. Receiving the intelligence briefings that are traditionally shared with the incoming president “would be useful,” he said, but added: “We don’t see anything slowing us down, quite frankly.”

      Biden was joined by the vice-president-elect, Kamala Harris, at a theater near his home in downtown Wilmington, Delaware, where they delivered remarks after the US supreme court heard the latest challenge to the Affordable Care Act.
      The Democratic leadership have vowed to protect and expand the signature legislation from the Obama administration, in which Biden served as vice-president, during the worst public health crisis in more than a century.
      The US recently surpassed 10m cases of coronavirus, as most states struggled to contain outbreaks during the latest wave of infections.
      “In the middle of a deadly pandemic that’s affecting more than 10 million Americans, these ideologues are once again trying to strip health coverage away from the American people,” Biden said of the Republican state officials who brought the lawsuit that has ended up before the supreme court, aiming to invalidate the healthcare law.
      Democrats made healthcare a central theme of the election, and a focus of the supreme court hearing last month for Judge Amy Coney Barrett, whose confirmation cemented a 6-3 conservative court.
      The health coverage of millions of Americans hangs in the balance if the court rules in favor of Republicans, though Tuesday’s arguments indicated that the justices were skeptical of striking down the entire law.
      “Each and every vote for Joe Biden was a statement that healthcare in America should be a right and not a privilege,” Harris said in her remarks. She added: “And Joe Biden won this election decisively.” More