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    'It's real fear': clash of two Americas could get worse before it gets better

    “There’s not a liberal America and a conservative America; there’s the United States of America,” Barack Obama said in 2004. “While I will be a Democratic candidate, I will be an American president. I will work as hard for those who didn’t support me as I will for those who did,” Joe Biden said this year.
    Both Democrats preached one nation, but the 2020 presidential election has exacerbated fractures of American society: a profound polarisation that veteran journalist Carl Bernstein referred to as a cold civil war. Some fear that another victory for Donald Trump could tear the nation apart.
    And few are under any illusions that a Biden win on Tuesday would drain the poison overnight. Trump and Trumpism would persist, perhaps in an even more raw and angry form, its sense of racial grievance and injustice festering in opposition. Economic, social and racial fault lines predated the 45th president and will survive him.
    “That division and hatred and fear and frustration and anger are not just going to disappear the day after the election,” said Leon Panetta, a former defence secretary and CIA director. “The difference [if Biden wins] is that you have a president who wants to do what he can not to split the country apart but to bring it together.”
    “But it’s going to take time. It isn’t something that is going to be resolved by one election or one speech or even one bill passed through the Congress. It’s going to have to become a pattern that people ultimately agree is a better way to live in our country.”
    Since he rode down an escalator in June 2015 and fulminated about Mexico sending “criminals and rapists”, division and divisiveness have been defining hallmarks of the Trump era: female v male, Black v white, young v old, liberal v conservative, urban v rural, Hollywood v heartland, college-educated v blue collar, pro-choice v anti-abortion, “elite” v “deplorable”, instinct v science, hipster v hunter.
    The split that Mike Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas, once characterised as “Bubble-ville” against “Bubba-ville”, is intensified through the echo chambers of social media and finds myriad cultural expressions. Polls show that Democrats are more willing to wear masks to combat the coronavirus pandemic, whereas Republicans are more likely to heed Trump’s insistence that it is overhyped and fading fast. More

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    Pennsylvania: the battleground state most likely to take entire election with it

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    In a presidential race with an extraordinary number of moving parts, election day finds Pennsylvania under intensifying scrutiny as the place where it could all come together – or fall spectacularly apart.
    The state and its 20 electoral college votes are sitting at the center of a perfect storm. Polls show one of the tightest races among the battleground states between Donald Trump and Joe Biden. Models project Pennsylvania as the state most likely, when it tips, to take the entire election with it.
    The state also overhauled its election laws last year and is allowing no-excuse mail-in voting for the first time. There could be as many as 10 times as many mail-in votes as there were in 2016, Kathy Boockvar, the state’s top election official, said on Sunday.
    Pennsylvania law also prohibits election officials from processing mail-in ballots until election day, which means it could take days to know the winner in the state, leaving a window for Trump to claim victory before all the votes are counted. Boockvar has said she’s confident the majority of votes will be counted by Friday.
    It’s possible that the entire national election could encounter a physical bottleneck in Philadelphia, the state’s most populous city. Every mail-in ballot in the city – as many as 400,000 – is to be counted inside a cavernous convention center downtown using new equipment and newly trained staff observing social distancing measures. More

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    US braces for historic election amid fears democracy is in danger

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    Americans are bracing for an election day unlike any in US history, shadowed by threats of manipulation and violence, stoking fears that democracy itself is at stake when the polls close on Tuesday night.
    It marks the end of a campaign that has been unprecedented in many ways. More than 94 million Americans had already cast their ballots by Monday, a record for early voting, in the midst of a pandemic. It was equivalent to 70% of the 2016 turnout even before election day dawned.
    It is also the first election in which the incumbent president has said he would try to stop the vote count if early returns on election night show him to be ahead and has openly encouraged acts of intimidation by his supporters.
    On Monday, a high “non-scalable” fence, last seen during the Black Lives Matter protests over the summer, was being erected around the White House. In anticipation of unrest, businesses in Washington and major city centres across the country boarded up their windows. The DC business district advised residents to “take precautions such as securing outdoor furniture and signage that can be used as a projectile”.
    A poll by USA Today and Suffolk University found that three out of four voters were worried about possible violence, with only a quarter of the electorate “very confident” there would be a peaceful transfer of power if the Democratic challenger, Joe Biden, won the election.
    Delivering his closing message on the last day of the campaign, Biden repeated his campaign message that the election was a “battle for the soul of the nation”.
    “The character of America is literally on the ballot,” he said at a drive-in rally in Cleveland, Ohio. “It’s time to take back our democracy.”
    On his final campaign stops, Trump has sought to portray his opponent’s future response to the coronavirus pandemic as a dystopian lockdown that would stifle economic and social life.
    “The Biden plan will turn America into a prison state locking you down, while letting the far-left rioters roam free to loot and burn,” he told a rally in Iowa.
    The air of apprehension has been deepened by repeated threats from Trump that he would seek to portray all votes not counted by election night as illegitimate. He said “we are going in with our lawyers” as soon as voting closes.
    Vote-counting routinely continues for days and sometimes weeks after a US election, but the result is usually called by news agencies based on projections from incomplete counts. That is less likely to be possible this time because of the heavy early and postal voting. More

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    Latest election polls show Biden ahead but race tightening in key states

    Joe Biden is still favoured to win Tuesday’s presidential election, according to the final opinion polls, but a tightening race in several key states offers Donald Trump rising hopes of a pathway back to the White House.
    The Democratic candidate holds a significant lead in national polling, at anywhere between four and 10 percentage points, according to a cluster of polls released on Monday. The poll aggregator fivethirty.eight.com shows Biden with an 8.3-point advantage overall, while Real Clear Politics reflects a lead of 6.5.
    But the Republican president is performing better in some of the battleground states he must win to secure a second term.
    In Florida, largest of the handful of crucial swing states, Trump has cut Biden’s lead to a single point, according to fivethirtyeight.com. Analysts agree that Trump must retain Florida, which he won from Hillary Clinton by only 1.2 points in 2016, and its 29 electoral college votes if he is to stand any chance of reaching the winning figure of 270.
    Florida also offers Biden the cleanest and quickest path to victory. Early votes in the state will be tallied through the day on Tuesday, meaning a declaration is possible before midnight if the race is not too close.
    If Biden loses Florida, attention will turn to Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, three so-called Blue Wall states that Trump prised from Democratic hands four years ago.

    In Pennsylvania, which offers 20 electoral votes, Biden holds an average 4.2-point advantage. In Michigan, with 16 votes, his lead is 5.1 points, and in Wisconsin, which has 10 votes, it is 6.6 points. Victory in all three, plus the retention of states won by Clinton in 2016, would see Biden elected as the 46th president. However, margins of error built into opinion polling mean such races are probably tighter than they appear.
    Democrats are also wary as polls released just before the 2016 election showed Clinton with a similar national advantage over Trump. She won the popular vote by more than 3m ballots, but defeat in several battleground states handed the White House to Trump.
    On Monday, Trump and Biden spent the final day of campaigning in such vital states. Biden was heading to Pennsylvania for a rally after a stopover in Ohio, where polls show he trails Trump by a sliver. Barack Obama, the former president, was rallying for Biden in Florida. Kamala Harris, Biden’s running mate, was also in Pennsylvania, underlining the state’s importance.
    Trump was barnstorming four states in his final push for victory. After a midnight rally in Miami, Florida, on Sunday, the president was heading for North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and two appearances in Michigan. More

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    US election set to be £1bn betting event with Biden firm favourite

    The 2020 US election is shaping up to be the biggest betting event of all time, with one player placing a record-breaking £1m bet on a victory for the Democratic challenger, Joe Biden.People were still rushing to place bets on Monday on the eve of the election and Matthew Shaddick, the head of political betting at Ladbrokes Coral Group, said it estimated about £1bn would be wagered globally across the industry. Donald Trump’s odds of re-election grew slightly over the weekend, but Biden remained a clear favourite in online betting markets. Betters on the British exchange Smarkets give Biden a 65% chance of winning, while Trump’s prospects have improved to 35% from 34%.Betfair said it also recorded an improvement in Trump’s odds, at the same level. One person had placed £1m on Biden, Betfair said, in the biggest political bet of all time. If Biden wins, the player will bag £1.54m.The former vice-president has a substantial lead in national opinion polls, although the contest is slightly closer in the battleground states that are likely to decide the race.“Florida is one where the polls suggest Biden is the more likely winner, but the [betting] markets have Trump as favourite [there],” Shaddick said. “The GOP have tended to overperform the polls quite regularly in that state.”The election is on track to be by far the biggest betting event, with £271m bet so far, Betfair said. Most of the big-money betting occurs outside the US as betting on politics is illegal there. More

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    Which swing states could decide the US election – video explainer

    Joe Biden is leading ​Donald Trump in the national polls for the presidential election, but that doesn’t guarantee ​the Democratic candidate victory. Hillary Clinton also had a clear lead over Trump in the polls for almost the entire 2016 campaign and ended up losing in the electoral college.
    ​Because the presidential ​voting system assigns each state a number of electoral college votes, which​ go to the state’s victor regardless of the​ margin of victory (with the exception of Nebraska and Maine), a handful of swing states will ​probably decide the election and be targeted heavily by campaigners.
    The Guardian’s Lauren Gambino examines how the race is developing in the areas that could decide the election
    Watch Anywhere but Washington – our video series examining the key election battlegrounds More

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    It's been a strange trip. Four years ago, who would've thought Biden might win? | Art Cullen

    Nearly a year ago, at the side of a snowy and windswept county road in north-west Iowa, I climbed the steps on to the “No Malarkey” campaign bus. Joe Biden rose to greet me. “Where have I been? In South Carolina, that’s where!”We had seen all the candidates but him – Pete Buttigieg was practically a nextdoor neighbor. The week before, we had asked in a headline in our little country paper: “Where’s Joe?”Donald Trump had been impeached and was being tried in the Senate. The Iowa caucuses were a few weeks off. Former Iowa governor Tom Vilsack, agriculture secretary in the Obama administration, rode shotgun while Biden held forth for a half-hour on fighting climate change through regenerative farming practices.“It all starts here. We can do anything if we put our minds to it,” Biden declared.And it all ends here. The former vice-president held a parking lot rally in Des Moines on the Friday before election day, his final call in a state he had worked since 1988 on his route to the White House but never quite won.When the February caucuses cleared, Biden was down in the pack. Buttigieg and Bernie Sanders were tied for first in a delayed result from a failed cellphone reporting app that may well have doomed Iowa’s half-century run as first-in-the-nation. Nevada is itching for pole position.Iowa’s role was to winnow the field. Biden nearly was winnowed here and, a week later, in New Hampshire. Essentially, a half-dozen Democrats had their tickets punched out of Iowa from a field of 25. Mike Bloomberg had his own strategy, bypassing the first states with his bet on Super Tuesday. He could not bypass Elizabeth Warren, who ripped him to shreds in one of the final debates.And Biden had done his work in South Carolina.There, black voters rose up to have their say: No gambling on a lefty. They wanted Safe Joe to bring it home. Representative Jim Clyburn, dean of South Carolina politics, touched Biden’s shoulder. That was that. Little did I know, that blustery day on the bus, how it would play out.Nor do I know this weekend before the election how this long, strange trip of the last four years will end.Iowa is in play after Trump won the state by nine percentage points in 2016. The 2018 midterms saw two women, Cindy Axne and Abby Finkenauer, defeat two incumbent Republican congressmen. Senator Joni Ernst, a Republican who did a brain meld with Trump in her first term, watched her popularity tank – from over 60% to underwater. Ernst narrowly trails Democrat Theresa Greenfield in most polls. Democrats swamped her in fundraising. Biden holds a slight lead over Trump, who can’t afford TV ads in Iowa.Next door, in Wisconsin, Biden has a healthy margin. Trump thinks he can take Minnesota, but it appears he is down by double digits. It’s grim for the president in Michigan, as well. The upper midwest has figured out that trade wars and picking fights with your friends can suck the life out of agriculture and manufacturing. Iowa and Wisconsin are among the most export-sensitive states in the nation.And, as people honked in their cars in the Des Moines parking lot listening to Biden over their FM radios, Iowa set a weekly record for Covid hospitalizations. It’s as bad in Wisconsin, which Biden also hit on Friday along with Minnesota. Despite the danger, people are lining up for early voting from north to south, masked up and resolute for what surely will be a record turnout.In my corner of Iowa, our county auditor expects a smooth and safe election with results by 10pm. Iowa is your early swing-state bellwether. If Trump loses Iowa or Ohio, he loses the presidency. Each is currently a dead heat. Who would have thought that four years ago – or even two years ago, when candidate John Delaney first crossed our threshold by helping shovel snow from our front door after a blizzard?We’re worn out from the countless cafe campaign appearances, and rancorous debates, and this damned pandemic, and the stream of lies from a corrupter in chief. A record number turned out for the primaries – in Storm Lake, young Latinos caucused for Sanders in droves. They protested in the park for Black Lives last summer, and the police knelt right along. On Labor Day there was a big boat parade for Trump. His flags fly along those blacktops where the Biden bus ran. $60bn in trade and disaster subsidies to agriculture washed over those fields the past two years. We were wiped out by floods in 2019 and a freak wind storm in 2020 while California and Colorado burned.We take note and vote. It all comes down to a few states like Iowa and Wisconsin, where Biden aims to seal that victory at long last.Art Cullen is editor of the Storm Lake Times in north-west Iowa, where he won the Pulitzer prize for editorial writing. He is a Guardian US columnist and author of the book Storm Lake: Change, Resilience, and Hope from America’s Heartland More

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    'Democracy is broken': state races aim to undo decade of Republican map-rigging

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    The small farming communities of Wisconsin’s 32nd state senate district, with names like Romance and Avalanche, sit nestled along the Mississippi River. It’s within these rural towns that millions of political dollars are pouring into small counties to influence a local race for state senators who are paid a far more humble amount.
    That’s because in Wisconsin, like several other states this year, both Democrats and Republicans are trying to rack up seats in the state legislatures to hold influence over the political maps which are redrawn every 10 years after the decennial census count.
    “One race should not have this kind of significance,” says Ben Wikler, the Democratic state party chairman tasked with wrestling back majority rule in a state where Democrats won 54% of the overall assembly vote in 2018, but won just over 36% of the seats. “But democracy in Wisconsin is broken.”
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    Republicans asserted their dominance in 2010 by targeting 107 state legislative seats in 16 key states through a $30m national strategy appropriately called REDMAP. It worked: the hi-tech maps the GOP produced have kept every one of those swing-state chambers red throughout this decade, even in years when Democratic candidates won more votes.
    Legislatures in these states, contrary to popular opinion, then worked quickly to undermine collective bargaining, erode voting rights, enact draconian new limits on reproductive rights, refused to expand Medicaid and much more.
    But if Republicans flip the open seat in Wisconsin’s 32nd district – carried by a Democrat in 2018 by just 56 votes – they could block the Democratic governor’s agenda and claim complete control over drawing the next decade of legislative and congressional maps. They could cement their majority in the legislature, and continue implementing restrictions on voting like they are this year, potentially impacting which way Wisconsin goes in the presidential election.
    “It’s all on the line,” Wikler says. “Imagine that? It can be a lot to run for local office and feel like the future of your state and maybe even the electoral college rests on your race.”
    While races for the White House and control of the US Senate demand the largest headlines and the wildest fundraising sums, the stakes of America’s down-ballot races are huge. In three states in particular, Texas, Wisconsin and North Carolina, these local races will determine nothing less than the next decade of the states’ politics, and also influence the electoral college state of play into the 2030s.
    “Collin county, Texas, and outside Dallas, Houston, Waco, even,” says Jessica Post, who leads the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee. “Overland Park, Kansas. Livonia, Michigan. Those are the places that will change the country.”
    North Carolina: ‘They know what’s at stake’
    Just how important are these district lines? A 2016 report by the Electoral Integrity Project at Harvard measuring the health of American democracy gave North Carolina a seven on a scale of 100, the worst in the nation, and a rating in line with Iran and Venezuela. North Carolina Republicans locked themselves in power, then enacted a “monster” voter suppression bill that targeted black voters with “surgical” precision. They passed the infamous transgender bathroom bill. And when voters elected a Democratic governor in 2016, they curtailed his powers in a shocking lame-duck session.
    Those maps not only kept Republicans in power with fewer votes, it allowed them to command 10 of North Carolina’s 13 congressional districts, more than 70%, again, even when voters preferred Democratic candidates.
    Chart showing North Carolina voters voted for Democrats but Republicans had the majority in the state house.
    State Democrats broke the GOP’s gerrymandered monopoly in 2018, when they gained two seats in the state senate and nine in the house. Then, the following year, a North Carolina court tossed out the map, calling it an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander that violated the state constitution. A new, fairer map was introduced – but it is now up for replacement.
    The state elections this year are the last chance for Democrats to win a seat at the table for next year’s redistricting. The new, fairer map will be gone. If the GOP wins both chambers, Democratic governor Roy Cooper can’t veto the Republican plan.
    “We’re going to have maybe 15 races where we’ve spent half a million dollars, just on the Democratic side, for a [state senate] job that pays $14,000 a year,” says state Representative Graig Meyer, who has led Democratic recruitment efforts to win back at least one chamber of the North Carolina legislature ahead of redistricting. “It’s all about the maps.”
    Meyer and state Democrats made a strategic shift as they recruited candidates. Instead of seeking out veteran Democratic officeholders – quite likely a “slightly older than middle-aged white guy who was pretty boring,” Meyer says – they looked for people with deep community connections and a high degree of emotional intelligence. As a result, the ensuing slate is younger and features more women and candidates of color.
    That’s the case here in state senate district 18, which includes Franklin county, in central North Carolina, and also some of the growing far outer suburbs of Raleigh. Rising home prices in the capital region pushed more families into these once quiet rural towns. Population shifts, newcomers from the north, and now a newly drawn state senate map that now reaches deeper into the outer Raleigh rings in Wake county could bring even more change.
    In 2018, Republican state senator John Alexander held this seat by just 2,639 votes. When the court mandated a new map, however, the new district that had been carefully crafted to tilt red no longer included Alexander’s home. This newly open seat is now far more blue-leaning, and one of the seats Democrats see as a must-flip. In almost any scenario, if Democrats are to take the senate, the road runs through these towns of Zebulon and Wake Forest.
    “It’s a lot of pressure,” says Democratic senate nominee Sarah Crawford. “If I lose, I might have to consider moving out of state. I might not be able to show my face. It’s about the future of North Carolina. It’s about the next decade.”
    The mother of two and nonprofit executive said the skewed maps have taken a toll on the state.
    “In a 50/50 state, you shouldn’t have one party with an extreme majority over another,” Crawford says. “What it’s meant for North Carolina is that public education has suffered. We haven’t expanded Medicaid. Now we have a whole new layer of inaction with the Covid-19 pandemic. All of these bad things have come out of gerrymandering.”
    Just over an hour west sits the newly redrawn 31st senate district, encompassing the rural, tobacco environs surrounding Winston-Salem. This district has changed dramatically as well – from a Republican plus-18 seat to just a Republican plus-four on the new map. For the last decade, the only action has come in heated Republican primaries, followed by a November coronation.
    “We haven’t had a history of competitive elections,” says Terri LeGrand, the Democratic challenger. But this seat is winnable. The new district not only cuts deeper toward blue Winston-Salem, it includes 20 new precincts – almost all of them Democratic-leaning – that had been buried inside a neighboring Republican district.
    “My opponent is on record, very open about the fact that she supports gerrymandering. She has absolutely no problem with it. So, it’s not something that we want to leave to chance.”
    Republicans aren’t gambling, either. Millions in dark money from Republican donors have been funneled into North Carolina through something called the Good Government Coalition. It is registered to an address at a UPS store in suburban Virginia, according to Raleigh television station WRAL, and the custodian of records is listed as Matthew Walter – formerly the president of the Republican State Legislative Committee, which pioneered the party’s REDMAP efforts in 2010.
    The funds have gone toward negative ads being hurled against LeGrand, for example, incorrectly suggesting that she supports defunding the police. Similar ads have targeted other Democratic contenders in close districts, in a strategy mimicking REDMAP ads that identified a hot-button local issue, then buried mailboxes under a weeks-long avalanche of misleading negative ads.
    “It’s grinding and vitriolic,” LeGrand says. “They’ve thrown everything at me because they know what’s at stake.”
    Texas: ‘It’s not a red state. It’s a suppression state’
    Deep in the upper-middle-class suburbs north-east of Dallas are the well-manicured towns neighboring the ultra-wealthy enclaves that George W Bush and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban call home. Here, Brandy Chambers holds one of the nine keys to Democratic hopes of flipping the Texas house for the first time in nearly two decades.
    White people, for example, make up just over 40% of all Texans, according to 2019 census figures, yet still control nearly 70% of the state’s congressional and state legislative seats. In 2018, Texas Republicans won just over 50% of the statewide vote for Congress, but nevertheless won two-thirds of the seats.
    That could change in 2021, and the 112th district could make all the difference. Nine seats separate Democrats from winning an all-important ticket to the redistricting table next year. They are increasingly competitive in Texas and had been able to flip 12 seats in the 2018 midterms.
    If they succeed, Democrats would influence the drawing of as many as 39 congressional districts gerrymandered by the GOP dating back to the early 2000s redraw, which divided liberal Austin into four districts with four conservatives. There could also be a strong impact on national politics, because Texas could receive at least three new seats in Congress following census reapportionment next year.
    A Democratic state house would provide a brake on voter suppression efforts that sunk Texas to 50th in voter turnout in 2018 and limited massive counties the size of New England states to one dropbox each this fall.
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    “It’s not a red state. It’s a suppression state, and by God, my governor and my attorney general are doing their damndest to keep it that way,” Chambers says. “But when Texas goes blue, we take our 38 to 41 electoral votes with us, and then there’s no math in which a Republican can win the White House without Texas. If they draw the maps? We could be stuck like chuck for another decade.”
    According to the Princeton Gerrymandering Project, which rates state legislative races Moneyball-style, with an eye toward pushing donations toward the most meaningful races to impact redistricting, Texas’s 112th district is the most valuable in the state. “I was able to get so close in a historically very red district,” Chambers tells me. “If my race goes, a couple other races go, and we get a new House majority.”
    This year, determined Texans have withstood suppression efforts and set turnout records. More than seven million voted early, and numbers were highest in Houston, Dallas, Fort Worth and the surrounding environs that mirror the fast-growing, wealthy suburbs that have turned against the Republicans and Donald Trump.
    “The story this year is the Texas voter overcoming these obstacles inspired by the women by and large who are running for the Texas house,” says Beto O’Rourke, the former congressman who lost a Senate battle to Ted Cruz in 2018, but has organized nightly phone banks aimed at flipping the chamber. “I’ve never seen this level of organization and capitalization and strategic deployment of resources in my life.” More