Subterms
Coronavirus
68,000 new cases on Friday amid Covid-19 resurgence
Dr Fauci warns of danger of ‘high community infection baseline’
Trump to hold Wisconsin rally despite public gathering warning More
When Vernon Jones, a Black Democratic state representative from Georgia, crossed party lines to deliver a passionate endorsement of Donald Trump at the Republican national convention, the party greeted him like a rock star. Now comes evidence the label has gone to his head.At a Trump rally in Macon, Georgia, on Friday night, Jones launched arguably the most ill-advised and dangerous crowdsurf since the electro dance legend Steve Aoki broke a concertgoer’s neck in a dinghy.Thumbs raised and not wearing a mask, the 59-year-old lawmaker launched himself into a mostly maskless audience. Riding a sea of red Maga hats, packed tightly together in contravention of Centers for Diseases Control and Prevention Covid-19 social distancing guidelines, the grinning Jones was passed overhead from deplorable to deplorable, to use a term for Trump supporters Jones cited in a tweet defending the stunt.“Yes, I surfed that crowd!” Jones wrote. “To the haters – stay mad! You’ll be even more mad come 3 November.”On social media, reaction was swift and brutal. One Twitter user dubbed Jones “Captain Covid”. Others denounced him as an idiot and a loser, living in fairytale land.Republicans hope Jones, who was first elected to the Georgia state house in 1992, can help shore up the Black Republican vote in his state. Trump won Georgia from Hillary Clinton by more than five points in 2016, but recent polls show the president trailing Joe Biden by almost one and a half points.Race has also emerged as a key theme in Georgia’s tightly contested US Senate contests, in which both of the Democratic candidates, Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff, hold narrow leads, according to Quinnipiac polling this week.One of the Republican incumbents, David Perdue, was involved in an incendiary moment at Trump’s Macon rally when he mangled the name of Kamala Harris, Biden’s running mate, the first Black woman on a major party presidential ticket.Perdue’s campaign claimed it was an innocent mistake but Ossoff, in an interview with MSNBC, attacked his opponent for “vile, race-baiting trash talk”.In the other race, a special election in which Warnock, a Black pastor, faces both the Republican incumbent Kelly Loeffler and Doug Collins, a serving Republican congressman, the spectre of QAnon looms large. Loeffler has embraced the endorsement of the far-right congressional candidate Marjorie Taylor Greene, an enthusiastic peddler of baseless QAnon theories who has expressed racist views in social media posts.At the Republican convention in August, as one of a number of first-night speakers of color to deliver a similar message, Jones tore into Democrats’ handling of racial issues.“Why is a lifelong Democrat speaking at the Republican national convention?” he said, in a controversial speech he later said he intended to be “a culture shock”.“The Democratic party does not want black people to leave their mental plantation. We’ve been forced to be there for decades and generations.”Jones resigned his Georgia House seat in April, after first endorsing Trump. But he rescinded his decision days later, claiming he had received “overwhelming support”. More
Trump to hold Wisconsin rally despite Covid warnings
Can Biden overcome racist legacy of crime bill he backed?
Sign up for Fight to Vote – our weekly US election newsletter
LIVE
Updated More
The fight to vote
US elections 2020
Data from North Carolina suggests unfamiliarity with voting by mail and need to have witness signature may play a part More
On Thursday, the US reported 65,000 new cases of Covid-19 and Donald Trump falsely told a television town hall 85% of people who wear masks contract the disease. With more than two weeks to the election and a record-shattering 17 million Americans having already voted, the rhythms and tropes of the past seven months will only intensify between now and 3 November.Early in the pandemic, Andrew Cuomo’s daily briefings emerged as must-see television, counter-programming to the campaign commercials that masqueraded as presidential press conferences. The New York governor was forthright and reassuring, even as the body count mounted.Covid-related deaths in the Empire State now exceed 25,000, the highest in the US. New York was both frontline and lab experiment. What happened there foreshadowed national tragedy. Red states were not immune. Right now, the plague rages in the heartland.Cuomo’s new book, subtitled Leadership Lessons from the Covid-19 Pandemic, is his effort to shape perceptions of his own performance amid the pandemic while pointing a damning finger at Trump and Bill de Blasio, New York City’s woefully inept mayor. Like the governor, American Crisis is informative and direct – but not exciting.I believe that this was on a par with the greatest failure to detect an enemy attack since Pearl HarborAndrew CuomoThe book reads like a campaign autobiography except that Cuomo, by his own admission, will never run for president. It contains its share of heroes, villains and family vignettes. Cuomo’s three daughters appear throughout.Like the governor, American Crisis is programmatic, neither poetic nor poignant. Indeed, in a final chapter tritely titled A Blueprint for Going Forward, the governor offers 28 pages of policy proposals.Covid has taken nearly 220,000 American lives. The US suffered 58,000 combat deaths in Vietnam, 116,000 in the first world war. Only the second world war, the civil war and the flu pandemic of 1918-1919 resulted in greater casualties.Not surprisingly, Cuomo saves his harshest words for the Trump administration: “New York was ambushed by Covid. I believe that this was on a par with the greatest failure to detect an enemy attack since Pearl Harbor.”On that score, Cuomo compares Trump to FDR and of course finds him wanting. The administration did deliver early warnings – to members of the financial community and Republican donors. With that in mind, Cuomo’s take is almost mild.Cuomo’s relationship with the president was already fraught. On top of Trump and congressional Republicans capping deductions for state and local taxes, the governor acknowledges fighting with the administration over “immigration policy, environmental policy, you name it”. He adds: “I found his pandering to the far right alternately disingenuous and repugnant.”American Crisis also relays a conversation with the president in which the governor urged the former resident of Queens, a borough of New York City, to invoke the Defense Production Act and mandate private industry to produce tests and personal protective equipment. Trump declined, claiming such a move would smack of “big government” – as opposed to issuing diktats to big tech, directing that companies relocate, unilaterally imposing tariffs on imports and offering private briefings to those favored by the administration.Time has passed. In the 1980s, Governor Mario Cuomo and his son Andrew were Trump allies, of a sort. Back then, Trump retained the services of twentysomething Andrew Cuomo’s law firm, in connection with commercial leases on Manhattan’s West Side. According to Trump, they were “representing us in a very significant transaction”. Not any more.The president is not the only member of the administration to come in for criticism. Mark Meadows, the latest White House chief of staff, receives a large dollop of Cuomo’s wrath. In Cuomo’s telling, Meadows conditioned assistance to New York on it conveying hospital test results for hydroxychloroquine, Trump’s one-time Covid treatment of choice.Cuomo said the state would provide the test data once it was available, not before. Meadows told him the federal government was ready to release hospital funding to states, but “strongly implied” that if the test results did not soon arrive, New York would not “receive any funding”. To Cuomo, that reeked of extortion. More
Kerem Yucel/AFP/Getty Images
1. What a normal US election looks like
Matt Slocum/AP
The first votes cast
Before election day, some states start
early voting and
mail-in voting. That’s happening in this election, as well.
Paul J. Richards/AFP/Getty Images
On election day, everyone else votes
Americans go to polling places to cast their vote. This is also when mail-in ballots can be counted in most states. Once ballots are tallied, results start being released.
Kevin Lamarque/Reuters
Organizations like the
Associated Press often project a winner on election night based on an analysis of votes already counted, the number of outstanding votes and the margin between the candidates.
Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
The losing candidate typically concedes
This usually happens in the early hours of the next morning. A public concession makes it clear to the American people who has won. It can make everything after this feel like a formality.
The results are finalized
Even if it’s clear who won local officials finish counting ballots in the days after the election and send their results to state officials. They approve the results and send them to federal officials.
Election disputes need to be settled before 8 December
States need to settle any election disputes and have a winner by this date, known as the “safe harbor deadline.” Otherwise, federal law says Congress can refuse to accept the electoral votes from that state.
Then states pick ‘electors’ to represent them
When Americans vote they don’t directly vote for president and vice president. Rather, they vote for their state “electors” who represent their choice.
For example, if Joe Biden wins Michigan this year, the state’s 16 allotted electors would be Democrats. They represent the state at the
electoral college meeting on 14 December, where electors meet at their respective state capitols to elect the president and vice-president.
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
The winning candidate is sworn into office
On 20 January, or 21 January if it’s on a Sunday, the constitution says the presidential term is over and the new president is inaugurated.
Ron Adar/SOPA Images/REX/Shutterstock
2. In 2020, things might be different
The weeks before election day
By early October,
6.6 million Americans had already voted, largely because of a surge in mail-in voting. Trump has said
mail-in voting is rigged against him, and his allies
have helped sow doubt in the election.
Democrats tend to be more likely to vote by mail, according to
research by election scholars Edward Foley and Charles Stewart. That means Democrats will gain more votes as mail ballots are counted, but it might also mean they are less represented in the in-person voting that happens on election day. More
It was a Saturday night in September when 160 or so middle and high school students logged on to a Zoom call about how to confront American politicians using tactics inspired by young civil rights activists fighting for the abolition of slavery.The teenagers were online with the Sunrise Movement, a nationwide youth-led climate justice collective, to learn about organizing Wide Awake actions – noisy night-time protests – to force lawmakers accused of ignoring the climate emergency and racial injustice to listen to their demands.It’s a civil disobedience tactic devised by the Wide Awakes – a radical youth abolitionist organization who confronted anti-abolitionists at night by banging pots and pans outside their homes in the run-up to the civil war.Now, in the run-up to one of the most momentous elections in modern history, a new generation of young Americans who say they are tired of asking nicely and being ignored, are naming and shaming US politicians in an effort to get their concerns about the planet, police brutality, inequalities and immigration heard.The first one targeted the Kentucky senator Mitch McConnell after details emerged about the police killing of Breonna Taylor. In the days following the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sunrise activists woke up key Republican senators including McConnell and Lindsey Graham, demanding that they delay the vote on Trump’s supreme court nominee until a new president is sworn in.“Even though we can’t vote, we can show up on the streets and wake up politicians. It’s our future on the line not theirs,” said 17-year-old Abby DiNardo, a senior from Delaware county. The high school senior recently coordinated a Wide Awake action outside the home of the Republican senator Pat Toomey, a former Wall Street banker who has repeatedly voted against climate action measures.The Sunrise Movement was founded by a small group of disparate young activists in 2017 and initially focussed on helping elect proponents of clean energy in the 2018 midterms. More
Ask Larry Cuffe why, after decades of voting for Democrats, he voted for Donald Trump four years ago, and he’ll talk about his distrust of Hillary Clinton and the need to get northern Minnesota’s mines back to work.Ask the former police officer why he’s sticking with Trump in 2020 and the list is very much longer.“The Democratic party left us. Even in the past four years it’s changed so much. Supporting people who riot? Defunding the police? That’s crazy. I think a lot of us up here are Democrats in Republican clothing now,” he said.Cuffe, who twice voted for Barack Obama, is one of six mayors from a stretch of Minnesota mining country, known as the Iron Range, who turned their back on the Democratic party and signed a joint letter endorsing Trump even as the state is swinging behind the president’s opponent, Joe BidenThe mayors said that after decades of voting for Democrats, they no longer regarded the party as advocating for workers.“Lifelong politicians like Joe Biden are out of touch with the working class, out of touch with what the country needs, and out of touch with those of us here on the Iron Range and in small towns like ours across our nation,” they said. More
