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      'Let us be the nation we know we can be': Biden speaks after defeating Trump – US election 2020 live updates

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      Key events

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      10.17am EST10:17
      Trump goes golfing, again

      9.30am EST09:30
      Romney – Trump is ‘900lb gorilla in the Republican party’

      8.49am EST08:49
      US sees fourth consecutive record daily total of new Covid cases

      Live feed

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      10.17am EST10:17

      Trump goes golfing, again

      Hello. Oliver Holmes here, taking over the live blog for the next few hours.
      ‘Surely, this election is over’, I hear millions of fatigued voices cry out. Well, yes, it is. Joe Biden is president-elect after winning the election, but the full count has still not finished and Donald Trump has hunkered down, refusing to concede.
      The latest update is that the current president appears to have gone golfing for the second day in a row. His motorcade recently arrived at Trump National Golf Club, in Sterling, Virginia, according to a White House reporter.
      A handful of demonstrators lined the sidewalks near the entrance of the club. Two signs read: “ORANGE CRUSHED” and “TRUMPTY DUMPTY HAD A GREAT FALL.”

      Updated
      at 10.19am EST

      10.00am EST10:00

      Michael Goldfarb, former London bureau chief of NPR and fellow at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, has written for us today. He says that Trump was no accident, and the America that made him is still with us.

      It’s a measure of the bizarre, outsize impact of the man that pundits are already speaking of Trumpism. Liberal leftish types anticipate his return like Brian de Palma movie devotees anticipate Carrie’s hand coming out of the grave – Trump’s coming to drag them into the darkness. Rightwing radicals – conservative doesn’t seem the right term any more — speak of Trumpism because he was the person who energised their disparate coalition in a way no other person has. I almost typed politician rather than person but Trump is not a pol. He is a “leader”, someone on whom people project their own desires.
      Trump’s presidency was the end product of two strands of American life coming together after a quarter of a century of independent development. First, the Republican party’s evolution from a bloc of diverse interests into a radical faction built around a single idea: winning absolute power and making America a one-party state ruled by people dedicated to tax cuts for the wealthy and stacking the federal courts with judges who would roll back the New Deal/civil rights-era social contract.
      The former speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich, began this process more than a quarter of a century ago. He was the first prominent Republican to see in Donald Trump the man who could fulfil the modern party’s dreams. Gingrich later wrote, in 2018: “Trump’s America and the post-American society that the anti-Trump coalition represents are incapable of coexisting. One will simply defeat the other. There is no room for compromise. Trump has understood this perfectly since day one.”

      Read more here: Michael Goldfarb – Trump was no accident. And the America that made him is still with us
      And I’m done for the day – I’ll see you again tomorrow. Oliver Holmes will be with you shorty…

      9.58am EST09:58

      You are going to see this attack line from Republicans a lot in the coming days. Here’s conservative radio and TV host Mark Simone.

      MARK SIMONE
      (@MarkSimoneNY)
      Didn’t they keep saying Russia tampered with the election, that 17 intelligence agencies, 4 committees confirmed it and all news organizations were investigating it.Now we hear there’s never been any voter fraud and it’s impossible to tamper with an election. #election

      November 8, 2020

      Donald Trump Jr made a similar point earlier.

      Donald Trump Jr.
      (@DonaldJTrumpJr)
      We went from 4 years of Russia rigged the election, to elections can’t be rigged really fast didn’t we???

      November 8, 2020

      It bears repeating that despite team Trump repeatedly dismissing it as the ‘Russian hoax’ and similar, the CIA did find in December 2016 that Russia had interfered to try and help Trump win. Here’s the details:

      Officials briefed on the matter were told that intelligence agencies had found that individuals linked to the Russian government had provided WikiLeaks with thousands of confidential emails stolen from the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and others.
      The people involved were known to US intelligence and acted as part of a Russian operation to boost Trump and hurt the chances of the Democratic candidate, Hillary Clinton. “It is the assessment of the intelligence community that Russia’s goal here was to favour one candidate over the other, to help Trump get elected,” one said.
      The emails were steadily leaked via WikiLeaks in the months before the election, damaging Clinton’s White House run by revealing that DNC figures had colluded to harm the chances of her nomination rival Bernie Sanders.
      A separate report in the New York Times, also sourced to unnamed officials, claimed US intelligence agencies had discovered that Russian hackers had also penetrated the Republican National Committee’s networks, but conspicuously chose to release only the information stolen from the Democrats.
      A third report, by Reuters, said intelligence agencies assessed that as the campaign drew on, Russian government officials devoted increasing attention to assisting Trump’s effort to win the election. Virtually all the emails they released publicly were potentially damaging to Clinton and the Democrats.

      Important to note one key thing there – the Russian interference was all about the selective leaking of stolen and hacked information to assist Donald Trump, not changing the counting of votes. There was no evidence found that Russia hacked voting machines or faked ballot papers.

      9.49am EST09:49

      Trump’s campaign staff don’t seem in any mood to concede this morning.

      Tim Murtaugh
      (@TimMurtaugh)
      Greeting staff at @TeamTrump HQ this morning, a reminder that the media doesn’t select the President. pic.twitter.com/3ACjkBhxVn

      November 8, 2020

      A reminder that as it stands, Joe Biden has won over over 75m votes, some 4.3m more than the incumbent. He is projected to win at least 290 electoral college votes, and will be the 46th president of the United States.
      In 2000, while Bush did indeed prevail after those earlier calls for Gore, the election ended up hinging on just 537 votes in Florida. In order to prevent Biden reaching the White House, the Trump campaign are going to have to proved evidence that tens of thousands of votes in multiple states should be discounted as fraudulent.
      The 45th president, meanwhile, departed the White House at 9.15 this morning. The press pool were not informed where he was headed. Yesterday’s unscheduled trip was to play golf, during which Trump was informed that he had lost. More

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      The meaning of Kamala Harris: the woman who will break new ground as vice-president

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      Kamala Harris has spent her life crashing through glass ceilings and accumulating “firsts”. She was the first female district attorney of San Francisco, the first female attorney general of California, the first Indian American in the US Senate, the first Indian American candidate of a major party to run for vice-president. Soon she will become the first female vice-president. If Joe Biden only serves one term, as expected, there is a chance that in 2024 she could become the first black female president.
      The problem with phrases like “first black female president” is that they confine the California senator to the sort of boxes she has always tried to avoid. “When I first ran for office that was one of the things that I struggled with, which is that you are forced through that process to define yourself in a way that you fit neatly into the compartment that other people have created,” she told the Washington Post last year. “I am who I am … You might need to figure it out, but I’m fine with it.” She does not agonise over her identity – she simply calls herself a “proud American”.
      As with Barack Obama, there are those who have doubted Harris’s Americanness. The morning after Harris was named as Biden’s running mate, racist “birther” conspiracy theories, amplified by Donald Trump, began to circulate. Newsweek published an op-ed questioning whether Harris was “constitutionally ineligible” to become president because her parents, who met at graduate school in Berkeley, were immigrants. Her mother, a breast cancer researcher, was born in India. Her father, an economist, is black and was born in Jamaica. Harris, meanwhile, was born in Oakland, California. Which, to be very clear, means the 56-year-old is a natural-born US citizen and eligible to run for president.
      Left: Kamala Harris with her mother, Shyamala Gopalan Harris, a breast cancer researcher. Right: At her mother’s lab in Berkeley, California. More

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      Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez ends truce by warning ‘incompetent’ Democratic party

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      Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has criticised the Democratic party for incompetence in a no-holds-barred, post-election interview with the New York Times, warning that if the Biden administration does not put progressives in top positions, the party would lose big in the 2022 midterm elections.
      Signaling that the internal moratorium in place while the Democrats worked to defeat Donald Trump was over, the leftwing New York representative sharply rejected the notion advanced by some Democrats that progressive messaging around the Movement for Black Lives and the Green New Deal led to the party’s loss of congressional seats in last week’s election.
      The real problem, said Ocasio-Cortez, was that the party lacked “core competencies” to run campaigns.
      “There’s a reason Barack Obama built an entire national campaign apparatus outside of the Democratic National Committee,” she told the Times’ Astead Herndon. “And there’s a reason that when he didn’t activate or continue that, we lost House majorities. Because the party – in and of itself – does not have the core competencies, and no amount of money is going to fix that.”
      Ocasio-Cortez, who defeated a longtime Democratic politician in 2018 and who won re-election in her Bronx district by more than 50 points, endorsed the Vermont senator, Bernie Sanders, over Joe Biden in the Democratic presidential primary.
      Since then, Ocasio-Cortez and her closest allies in Congress – a four-woman group known as “the squad” who all won reelection last week – toed the party line while calling on grassroots activists to boost Biden and Democrats down-ticket.
      The truce is over. The failure of the party to operate an online strategy “in a real way that exhibits competence”, Ocasio-Cortez told the Times, made it hypocritical for the party to advance criticism of progressive messaging.
      “If I lost my election, and I went out and I said: ‘This is moderates’ fault. This is because you didn’t let us have a floor vote on Medicare for all.’ And they opened the hood on my campaign, and they found that I only spent $5,000 on TV ads the week before the election?” Ocasio-Cortez said. “They would laugh. And that’s what they look like right now trying to blame the Movement for Black Lives for their loss.”
      Grassroots activism that produced large turnout in Detroit, Philadelphia and Georgia was crucial to Biden’s win, and if the Democratic party fails to recognise that and incorporate the grassroots, the party disintegrates at the ballot box, Ocasio-Cortez said.
      “It’s really hard for us to turn out nonvoters when they feel like nothing changes for them. When they feel like people don’t see them, or even acknowledge their turnout,” Ocasio-Cortez said.
      “If the party believes after 94% of Detroit went to Biden, after Black organisers just doubled and tripled turnout down in Georgia, after so many people organised Philadelphia, the signal from the Democratic party is the John Kasich won us this election? I mean, I can’t even describe how dangerous that is.”
      Kasich is a former Republican governor of Ohio who campaigned for Biden, endorsing him as a centrist that moderate Republicans could get behind. Such an appeal might have had traction in some places, such as northern Michigan and western Omaha. But Trump beat Biden in Ohio by eight points and half a million votes.
      The Ocasio-Cortez interview is full of frank impressions freely shared. Asked what her “macro takeaway” was from the election, she said: “Well, I think the central one is that we aren’t in a freefall to hell anymore.” Asked whether there was anything about the election that surprised her, she said: “The share of white support for Trump. I thought the polling was off, but just seeing it, there was that feeling of realising what work we have to do.”
      While there were concerns about the reliability of exit polls this year with so much voting happening over mail and the failure of polls generally, Trump appeared to have won white voters in 2020 by about as much as he did in 2016 – 15 points.
      The coming period of presidential transition and the Biden administration’s early days will be crucial to determining whether the Democratic party will incorporate in a permanent way its grassroots progressive engine – or veer off down a path toward defeat, Ocasio-Cortez said.
      “So I need my colleagues to understand that we are not the enemy,” she said. “And that their base is not the enemy. That the Movement for Black Lives is not the enemy, that Medicare for all is not the enemy. This isn’t even just about winning an argument. It’s that if they keep going after the wrong thing, I mean, they’re just setting up their own obsolescence.”
      Appearing on CNN later in the day, Ocasio-Cortez said: “Progressives have assets to offer the party that the party has not yet fully leaned into… Every single swing seat member that co-sponsored Medicare for All won their re-election, and so the conversation is a little bit deeper than saying anything progressive is toxic.” More

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      in US Politics

      Was Libertarian candidate Jo Jorgensen a 'spoiler' for Trump?

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      When it became increasingly clear that a handful of battleground states would decide the winner in 2020’s US presidential election, many were struck by the razor-thin margins that emerged.
      The results also revealed a striking data point: Libertarian candidate Jo Jorgensen’s share of the vote in some of these states was higher than margins between Joe Biden and Donald Trump.
      Before Biden became president-elect, this breakdown of ballots prompted questions whether Jorgensen – a third-party candidate who did not have a serious chance of winning in 2020 – drew votes away from Trump.
      In the Republican stronghold of Georgia, which will award 16 electoral college votes, Biden presently bests Trump by fewer than 8,000 ballots. The percentage-based breakdown puts this into sharp relief: Biden has won 49.5% of the votes compared to Trump’s 49.3%.
      Jorgensen has won the remaining 1.2% – which now totals 61,792 votes. That number is more than seven times the Trump-Biden split there. The Associated Press has not yet called Georgia’s results. On Friday, state officials announced a recount.
      Numbers from Arizona, which the AP has already called in favor of Biden, are also noteworthy. With 90% of the vote counted, Biden holds 1,626,943 votes to Trump’s 1,606,370 – a 49.6 to 48.9% divide. Jorgensen has landed 49,182 votes, or 1.5%. Arizona awards 11 electoral college votes.
      In Wisconsin, which Trump won by 22,748 votes in 2016, Biden has been called as the winner, with 1,630,570 votes compared to his opponent’s 1,610,030. Jorgensen got 38,415 votes, which is more than the difference between these candidates. Wisconsin has 10 electoral college votes.
      That said, a vote for Jorgensen is not by any means necessarily a vote that Trump would have otherwise won.
      Jorgensen herself doesn’t believe she is responsible for Republicans’ losses, and that the party’s candidates are to blame.
      “They should be mad at those candidates for not following through on their campaign promises,” Jorgensen told the Greenville News, which is in her home state of South Carolina, earlier this week. She reportedly said that many of her supporters were “recovering Democrats” who want US troops brought home from abroad, as well as Republicans tired with federal spending.
      “If I can get Republicans to start acting like Republicans and cutting the deficit. And if I can get the Democrats to go back to being the party of peace, bringing our troops home, and giving the average individual their rights? Then yes, I would be very pleased,” she told the newspaper.
      “In the personal conversations I had [on the campaign trail] a lot of people would say, ‘Yeah, in 2016 I voted for Trump. I was so excited and then he didn’t follow through on his promises.’”

      Several experts do not believe Jorgensen was a Trump “spoiler” in 2020.
      The Cato Institute’s David Boaz, who has penned books on Libertarianism, told Reuters earlier this week: “We just don’t know what would have happened if the Libertarians had not run a candidate.”
      He added: “Libertarians also get votes of people who just would not bother voting if they didn’t have another choice.”
      Moreover, it’s unclear which party is more heavily affected by Libertarian votes.
      Kenneth Mayer, American politics professor at the University of Wisconsin, told Reuters earlier this week: “It’s possible she played a role, but there is no way to know, and it doesn’t matter. The results of the election are the results of the election.”
      Third-party candidates rarely impact overall election results. The 2000 Presidential election – where Ralph Nader won 97,000 votes in Florida, and George W Bush won this state by 537 votes – is a rare exception, Mayer rsaid.
      Neither Jorgensen nor the Libertarian party immediately responded to requests for comment. More

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      Democrats left to sift through aftermath of ‘blue wave’ that never crested

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      Joe Biden secured a historic presidential victory on Saturday yet some Democrats have spent the tense days since the election engulfed in recriminations, finger-pointing and infighting as they sift through the aftermath of expectations of a “blue wave” that never crested.
      Long-simmering tensions between moderate Democrats who represent conservative districts and progressives who have massive online followings erupted into public view, after a series of unexpected losses in parts of the country where the president proved surprisingly resilient.
      Once united behind the shared priority of removing Donald Trump from office, swaths of Democrats are now racked with anxiety and uncertainty over a path forward.
      Moderates accused liberals of embracing “socialism” and supporting leftwing proposals to “defund the police”, which Republicans weaponized against vulnerable Democrats. Progressives argue that the base powered many of the party’s biggest victories and that it was the lack of an inspiring message – and not their politics – that hurt members. Meanwhile, Democrats were alarmed by Trump’s apparent success with Hispanic voters in some battleground states.
      In the weeks before the election, Democrats had begun to imagine the legislative agenda their party could deliver with an undivided Congress and a new Biden administration. House Democrats anticipated expanding their majority by a significant margin – potentially even double digits. In the Senate, Democratic challengers, fueled by a historic wave of donations, appeared poised to knock off enough Republican incumbents to take the gavel from Mitch McConnell, even in states such as Iowa and South Carolina where Democrats rarely win statewide.
      As Democrats engage in what has become a ritualistic practice of soul-searching, there are unlikely to be any easy answers. The election delivered a mix of successes and disappointments for both parties, raising complex questions about their coalition and their message.
      For now, Democratic leaders are trying to keep the focus on their victories – Biden defeated Donald Trump, they will retain their majority in the House and control of the Senate will be decided by a pair of runoff elections in Georgia in January.
      “This has been a life‑or‑death fight for the fate of our democracy,” the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, told reporters on Friday, with tens of thousands of votes still uncounted. “We did not win every battle in the House, but we did win the war.”
      Tensions came to a head during a private conference call with House Democrats on Thursday, part of which was made public by the Washington Post, when the congresswoman Abigail Spanberger, a freshman who narrowly held on to her seat in a conservative-leading Virginia district, accused her liberal colleagues of costing the party seats by referring to themselves as “socialists”.
      “If we are classifying Tuesday as a success,” she added, using an expletive, the party will get “torn apart in 2022”.
      Republicans struggled to portray Biden, whose reputation as centrist, bipartisan dealmaker was forged over the course of his decades-long political career, as a captive of the radical left. But there was evidence the attacks were more effective on Senate and House candidates, particularly those running in a forbidding environment.
      Moderates have pointed to Nebraska’s 2nd congressional district, which Biden flipped but where Democratic candidate Kara Eastman, a progressive who supported Medicare for All, lost.
      “The whole ‘progressivism is bad’ argument just doesn’t have any compelling evidence that I’ve seen,” the New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who identifies as a democratic socialist, wrote on Twitter. She added that such attacks by Republicans are about “racial resentment” and “you’re not gonna make that go away.” More

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      'Spread the faith': Biden and Harris victory speeches offer message of unity – video highlights

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      Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have offered a message of unity as the pair spoke following their election victory. Harris, who will be the first woman to be vice-president, paid tribute to her mother. For Biden, his speech was an opportunity to offer an olive branch to his political rivals after nearly four years of division under Donald Trump
      ‘We must restore the soul of America’: Joe Biden’s victory speech in full – video
      ‘You chose truth’: Kamala Harris’s historic victory speech in full – video More

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      How can Biden heal America when Trump doesn’t want it healed? | Robert Reich

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      It’s over. Donald Trump is history.
      For millions of Americans – a majority, by almost 5m popular votes – it’s a time for celebration and relief. Trump’s cruelty, vindictiveness, non-stop lies, corruption, rejection of science, chaotic incompetence and gross narcissism brought out the worst in America. He tested the limits of American decency and democracy. He is the closest we have come to a dictator.
      Democracy has had a reprieve, a stay of execution. We have another chance to preserve it, and restore what’s good about America.
      It will not be easy. The social fabric is deeply torn. Joe Biden will inherit a pandemic far worse than it would have been had Trump not played it down and refused to take responsibility for containing it, and an economic crisis exacting an unnecessary toll.
      The worst legacy of Trump’s term of office is a bitterly divided America.
      Judging by the number of ballots cast in the election, Trump’s base of support is roughly 70 million. They were angry even before the election (as were Biden supporters). Now, presumably, they are angrier.
      The nation was already divided when Trump became president – by race and ethnicity, region, education, national origin, religion and class. But he exploited these divisions to advance himself. He didn’t just pour salt into our wounds. He planted grenades in them.
      It is a vile legacy. Although Americans have strongly disagreed over what we want the government to do, we at least agreed to be bound by its decisions. This meta-agreement required enough social trust for us to regard the views and interests of those we disagree with as equally worthy of consideration as our own. But Trump continuously sacrificed that trust to feed his own monstrous ego.
      Elections usually end with losing candidates congratulating winners and graciously accepting defeat, thereby demonstrating their commitment to the democratic system over the particular outcome they fought to achieve.
      But there will be no graciousness from Trump, nor a concession. He is incapable of either.
      He will be president for another two and a half months. He is still charging that the election was stolen from him, mounting legal challenges and demanding recounts, maneuvers that could prevent states from meeting the legal deadline of 8 December for choosing electors.
      If he continues, America could find itself in a situation similar to what it faced in 1876, when claims about ballot fraud forced a special electoral commission to decide the winner, just two days before the inauguration.
      I wouldn’t be surprised if Trump refuses to attend Biden’s inauguration and stages a giant rally instead.
      He’ll send firestorms of aggrieved messages to his followers – questioning Biden’s legitimacy and urging that they refuse to recognize his presidency. This will be followed by months of rallies and tweets containing even more outlandish charges: plots against Trump and America by Biden, Nancy Pelosi, “deep-state” bureaucrats, “socialists”, immigrants, Muslims, or any other of his standard foes.
      It could go on for years, Trump keeping the nation’s attention, remaining the center of controversy and divisiveness, sustaining his followers in perpetual fury, titillating them with the possibility he might run again in 2024, making it harder for Biden to do any of the national healing he’s promised and the nation so desperately needs.
      How can Biden heal the nation when Trump doesn’t want it healed?
      The media (including Twitter, Facebook, and even Fox News) could help. They have begun to call out Trump’s lies in real time and cut off his press conferences, practices that should have started years ago. Let’s hope they continue to tag his lies and otherwise ignore him – a fitting end to a reality TV president who tried to turn America into a reality warzone.
      But the responsibility for healing America falls to all of us.
      For starters, we’d do well to recognize and honor the selflessness we have observed during this trying time – starting with tens of thousands of election workers who have worked long hours under difficult and sometimes dangerous circumstances.
      Add to them the hospital workers across the nation saving lives from the scourge of Covid-19; the thousands of firefighters in the west and the emergency responders on the Gulf coast battling the consequences of climate change; the civil servants getting unemployment checks out to millions of jobless Americans; social workers dealing with family crises in the wake of evictions and other hardships; armies of volunteers doling out food from soup kitchens.
      These are the true heroes of America. They embody the decency of this land. They are doing the healing, rebuilding trust, reminding us who we are and who we are not.
      Donald Trump is not America.
      Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His new book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a columnist for Guardian US More

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      With humility and empathy, Biden speech seeks to make America sane again | David Smith's sketch

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      Joe Biden ran jauntily on to the stage, wearing a black face mask but suddenly looking several years younger. Looking, in fact, like millions of Americans felt, with burdens to bear but a spring in his step.
      The new US president-elect offered a Saturday night speech that did not brag or name call, did not demonise immigrants and people of colour, did not send TV networks and social media into meltdown and did not murder the English language.
      After the mental and moral exhaustion of the past four years, Biden made America sane again in 15 minutes. It was an exorcism of sorts, from American carnage to American renewal.
      Donald Trump’s performative populism revealed a Biden-shaped hole that America never knew it had. It has been widely noted that the unthinkable losses he endured in his long life made him the right person at the right time for a grieving, coronavirus-ravaged America.
      But his political setbacks also strike a chord as a model of perseverance, an everyman who had shrugged off life’s disappointments and kept smiling. His runs for president in 1988 and 2008 crashed and burned, and when Barack Obama failed to encourage him to try again in 2016, that appeared to be the end of the road.
      Instead he came back for one final act that rendered him the hero of his own story, not a supporting player in someone else’s. Biden proved not to be a Salieri to Obama’s Mozart. It was a victory for solid, unspectacular strivers everywhere. Such humility is essential at this moment of division. It produces magnanimity rather than crowing over the losing side.
      “For all those of you who voted for President Trump, I understand the disappointment tonight. I’ve lost a couple of times myself,” he said wryly. “But now, let’s give each other a chance.
      “It’s time to put away the harsh rhetoric, lower the temperature, see each other again. Listen to each other again. And to make progress, we have to stop treating our opponents as our enemies. They are not our enemies. They are Americans. They’re Americans.
      “The Bible tells us to everything there is a season, a time to build, a time to reap, and a time to sow. And a time to heal. This is the time to heal in America.” More