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      Biden campaign boasts its voter outreach beat Obama's 'by a mile'

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      Although the dust is still settling on the 2020 US presidential election it is clear this cycle was one of significant breakthroughs for Democrats. With historic voter turnout for recent times, Joe Biden’s team secured a Democratic win in Georgia, something that hadn’t happened since 1992, and there was record turnout among young people and Black Americans.Ashley Allison, Biden and Kamala Harris’s national coalitions director, said the campaign put a greater effort into building a broad coalition of voters than ever before.“This campaign made a larger investment in coalition work than any other presidential campaign by a mile,” said Allison, who worked on African American outreach for Obama’s 2012 campaign in Ohio, which swung for Obama that year almost entirely due to the Black vote.She may well be right: the Biden camp had close to 500 employees working on outreach this year. It had a virtual headquarters and people on the ground in key battleground states. Biden’s organizing team reached more than 37 million by phone – and in the final weeks of volunteering, they called, texted and knocked on more than double the number of doors the Obama team did in 2012 even as Obama’s campaign is frequently referred to as ground zero for the technological revolution in political campaigning.But with the coronavirus pandemic largely preventing the team from physically knocking on doors, they needed to find a way to safely create an in-person presence. That consisted of dropping literature at people’s doors with handwritten notes and following up with phone calls. Phone-banking teams would call in to video chats, trying to recreate the energy of a traditional phone-banking room, to overcome the ennui of calling alone during a global shutdown.In Arizona, which the Democrats flipped for the first time in 24 years, Biden’s coalitions team did extensive outreach in the Navajo Nation, with indigenous people playing the ceremonial drum to engage voters as they were coming in so they would see themselves as part of the voting experience. In Nevada, horse parades marched down the streets.“We wanted to engage voters in a time where people were feeling so distant due to the pandemic,” said Allison. More

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      Eleanor review: sensitive and superb biography of a true American giant

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      As the 2020 US presidential election winds toward a tortuous and dysfunctional certification, it is tempting to imagine that intrigue and machinations belong only to this particular heated moment in American life and history. That would be wrong.There is always intrigue in American politics, though nothing approaching the current state of near-sedition. We would be also be wrong if we dated the role of iconic first ladies only as far back as Michelle Obama and Hillary Clinton, or even Jackie Kennedy. Before there was Jackie or Hillary or Michelle, there was Eleanor. Niece to one president, wife to another; activist, global citizen; mother of the Democratic party in the mid-20th century, when the mother of the party was still a thing.You will find all these identities in David Michaelis’s elegant new biography of Eleanor Roosevelt, but the beauty of this robust volume is that there are so many more Eleanors to meet. Awkward girl; yearning and unappreciated wife; shy but committed romantic; resolute partner; distant mother. Michaelis, a veteran biographer, shows us all these many faces, rendering a complex and sensitive portrait of a woman who bridged the 19th and 20th centuries, reimagining herself many times with both courage and resilience.Born into the strictures of upper-class white womanhood, Eleanor was conversant with and adjacent to political power from an early age. Born to a beautiful, critical mother and an affectionate, drug- and alcohol-addicted father, she might well have been identified in the 21st century as an adult child of an alcoholic, with all the needy and compliant behavior implied. Her mother, Anna, consumed with keeping up appearances, was no better than any other woman of her class; indeed, her constant mockery of the young Eleanor certainly compounded the child’s insecurity and desire to truly belong. Michaelis writes with great sensitivity, utilizing Eleanor’s own recollections and other research materials to set the backdrop for recurring themes in his young subject’s life, including her mother’s “ritualized humiliation … as often as not in front of company”, including her mocking nickname of “Granny”.With both parents and a brother dead by the time she was 10, Eleanor found herself introduced to tragedy – as well as to something steadfast within herself: “No matter what happened to one in this world, one had to adjust to it.” And adjust she did, to her grandmother’s strictures, her mother-in-law’s disdain, the ambitions of her husband, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. This biography gives equal weight to Eleanor’s personal and political longings, her frustrations with her husband and her fury at his indiscretions; and her own loves, requited and otherwise.At the same time, however, Michaelis reveals, again and again, that Eleanor found her truest self through duty, hard work and sometimes punishing overachievement. She felt most loved in partnership and was misled by the illusion of it. Longing to be the center of one person’s love, she settled instead for the larger, public love of a generation as she wrote, traveled and agitated to change the world. What is especially refreshing about this biography are the ways in which Michaelis refuses to hide the fact that Eleanor’s struggles for justice had limits, drawn not only by her grudging acceptance of a political spouse’s role, but also through the limitations of her race and class.Impressively, the author does not sugarcoat or diminish the casual racism and xenophobia of the age, highlighting FDR’s use of the N-word and comfort with segregation, as well as the well-documented anti-Asian racism undergirding the internment of Japanese citizens during the second world war. Indeed, Michaelis’s framing of these deficiencies in American political life helps us to trace their provenance in our own era and allows us to see what Eleanor was up against in her bravest as well as her most timid moments.Her commitment to global citizenship and human rights served to mirror white activists in that period as well as this one: they find the courage to fight for human rights and dignity in the far corners of the globe yet choke at the exact moment when their courage could be most effective. She found herself in full command of the symbolic gesture – making it possible for Marian Anderson to sing on the steps of the Lincoln memorial and resigning from the Daughters of the American Revolution but refusing to attend the concert herself, at a moment when such a symbolic gesture might have made a greater difference.These sections will not surprise many African or Japanese Americans. Such readers will likely have personal experience with the failures of white Americans who talk a good game about democracy and equal justice under law, but who can’t deliver when the chips are down. Indeed, Michaelis does such an excellent job of outlining Eleanor’s grueling work to bring to fruition the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that the country’s domestic deficiencies during and after FDR’s presidency are drawn in sharp relief. More

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      Republicans are right: democracy is rigged. But they are the beneficiaries | Stephen Holmes

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      The Republican establishment, despite being unfairly advantaged by the skewed composition of the electoral college, by over-representation in the House due to partisan gerrymandering and in the Senate due to equal State suffrage, has been in no hurry to reject Donald Trump’s ludicrous allegation that the American electoral system is rigged to favor Democrats. Sweating the make-or-break Georgia runoffs, the party’s leaders are apparently frightened to cross the mad king, who owns their voters, lest he cause their ratings to plummet as he is doing with Fox News. But Republican complicity with this unprecedented attack on American democracy is not a matter of short-term expediency or fear of reprisals. It is much worse than that. Mitch McConnell and the others are not merely humoring the president until his mania subsides. Trump’s voters are the Republicans’ voters and the Republican party cannot easily cut them, and their deranged conspiracy theories, loose even after 20 January.This has important implications for how Biden should respond to the incalculable damage Trump has inflicted on the country, including how his Department of Justice approaches the restoration of the rule of law.The Republican party is deeply committed to the outrageously tilted playing field that allows a minority of voters to choose a majority of senators and, indirectly, a majority of supreme court justices, not to mention the occasional president as in 2000 and 2016. They are an unabashedly anti-democratic party in that sense alone, even if we set aside their brazen efforts at voter suppression and voter intimidation. This is perhaps the main reason why its leaders have proved so reluctant to dissociate themselves from Trump’s specious allegation that the 2020 presidential election was “rigged”. They know that the system is rigged. It is rigged to favor Republicans. And they relish not only the irony of Trump’s audacious reversal of the truth, but also the way it distracts attention from the genuinely unconscionable rigging that gives an American minority the power to impose its will on the American majority.Republican officials are slowly distancing themselves from the embarrassingly delusional president’s refusal to accept the reality of his defeat. But the fact that it is taking them so long reflects a deep truth about the country’s politics, namely that Americans are still fighting the civil war. When Trump and his madcap surrogates cry “voter fraud”, they do not mean fraud in the technical sense of ballot stuffing or the miscounting of legal votes. What they mean is that Democrats have debased the composition of the electorate by making it easier for African Americans in Detroit, Atlanta, Philadelphia and Milwaukee, the most reliably Democratic voters in the country, to register and vote. Trump would have been elected in a landslide, they imply, if only “real Americans”, meaning exactly who you think, had been allowed to vote.Nixon’s famous “southern strategy”, crafted with the support of Strom Thurmond, the infamous South Carolina segregationist, suffices to remind us that Republican pandering to white fears of demographic inundation did not begin, and will not end, with Donald Trump. Key to the historical origins of Republican acquiescence in Trump’s efforts to wreck American democracy is his last-ditch and doomed gambit to convince Republican controlled state legislatures in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania to replace the pro-Biden delegates to their state’s electoral college with a pro-Trump slate of electors.Trump’s advisers evidently believe that this anti-democratic maneuver is perfectly constitutional since article II, section 1, clause 2 of the US constitution declares that “each state shall appoint” presidential electors “in such manner as the legislature thereof may direct”. That clause seems straightforward enough until we recall, as Republicans are apparently loath to do, that the framers’ constitution was radically revised by the civil war amendments. In particular, section 2 of the 14th amendment of 1868 was designed to penalize any state that attempted to deny any American citizen “the right to vote at any election for the choice of electors for president and vice-president of the United States”. Allowing Republican-controlled state legislatures to appoint the electors would run grievously afoul of this all-important clause. It was bitterly contested in the states of the former Confederacy for the same reason that Trump’s diehard supporters are refusing to accept his defeat. Section 2 of the 14th amendment was seen at the time, and is apparently still seen today, as a betrayal of the racial solidarity of the white majority because crafted to reshape the American electorate by enfranchising African Americans. Shamelessly echoing the South’s post-civil war howls of betrayal, Trump shows why he should forever be remembered as the second president of the Confederacy.While none of this implies that Joe Biden’s well-meaning appetite for some measure of bipartisanship is completely hopeless, it does suggest that he may be thinking about it in the wrong way. The Republican establishment, as mentioned, is panicked by the prospect of alienating Trump’s voters. But they also have strong reasons, after 20 January, to consign Trump himself to political oblivion. This is the wedge that the president-elect should exploit. After all, the presidential hopes of Nikki Haley, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz and even Mike Pompeo depend on the current darling of their electorate being swept from the scene. And if his strident voice can be silenced, the party can hope to retreat into its pre-Trump habits of making only the kind of discreet appeals to white resentment acceptable in polite company.Although Biden says that he wants to restore the rule of law that has been desecrated by the outgoing attorney general, William Barr, he may imagine that the best way to convince at least some Republicans to cooperate with his administration is to close the books on the past by directing his new justice department to let bygones be bygones. But attempting to “heal the soul of the nation” by discouraging a thorough inquiry into Trump’s potential violations of federal law recalls Robert Frost’s definition of a liberal as “a man who can’t take his own side in an argument”.If retreat from confrontation is what Biden has in mind, he may be underestimating the tacit desire of the Republican leadership to rid themselves of the rabble-rouser who is keeping their electorate hostage. They may well silently but heartily approve if Biden keeps his promise to abstain from interfering with his new attorney general’s efforts to uncover the extent of Trump’s malfeasance in office. Even criminal prosecution, if it comes to that, might be an act of bipartisanship since, by publicly disgracing Trump, it would free a few more Republicans to be occasionally cooperative. This possibility should appeal to a president-elect who, with 80 million voters at his back, is not only willing to reach across the aisle but eager to take his own side’s side in an argument. More

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      Romance novelists raise $400,000 for Georgia Senate races – with help from Stacey Abrams

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      Rallying behind Stacey Abrams, the Democratic politician, voting rights activist and romance author, American romance novelists have helped raise nearly $400,000 to help elect two Democratic senators in Georgia.Now, Abrams herself has joined the “Romancing the Runoff” fundraiser, and has donated a copy of the first of her eight published romance novels–one signed with both her real name, and her pen name, Selena Montgomery.“I’m privileged to be one of you,” Abrams wrote on Twitter, praising the romance authors’ “amazing” fundraising efforts.Abrams’ work fighting against suppression of black voters and organizing voter registration efforts is widely credited with helping Joe Biden become the first Democratic presidential candidate to win Georgia in more than a quarter century. Democrats have said her work was “pivotal” in flipping Wisconsin and other battleground states.Thank you @RomancingRunoff for your amazing efforts. I’m privileged to be one of you. For the cause, I’d like to throw in an autographed copy of my first novel, Rules of Engagement, in the rare hardback version. Both Selena & Stacey will sign. 😉https://t.co/32aiezmJmW— Stacey Abrams (@staceyabrams) November 25, 2020
      Since election day, Abrams has not stopped fighting: a January runoff between two pairs of Democratic and Republican candidates in Georgia will determine whether Republicans maintain control of the US senate – and have the votes to block Democrats and the incoming Biden administration from enacting any substantial new policy agenda.In the week after the election, Abrams helped raise $3.6m in just two days to help campaigns for the Georgia Democrats Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock as they fight re-matches in a runoff election against the incumbent Republican senators David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler.Meanwhile other American romance novelists, many of whom have active social media platforms, began organizing to auction off romance-novel related items to support the Democratic candidates through donations to the New Georgia Project, Black Voters Matter, and Fair Fight, the voting rights group Abrams founded.“Democracy only thrives when every vote can be cast and counted, and we are fighting to help dismantle the legacy of voter suppression in Georgia,” the four bestselling authors who organized the auction said in a statement.Political activism is not a new development in the American romance writing community, which has been fighting fierce battles over entrenched racism in the publishing industry, as well as within their own industry trade group, the Romance Writers of America, for years.But the Georgia fundraising effort is also a testament to romance novelists’ pride in Abrams, who has continued to tout her work as an author of romantic suspense, even as she has become a star in national Democratic politics and a bestselling author of political nonfiction, including her memoir, Lead from the Outside.When writers who got their start publishing romance novels move on to more prestigious genres, “they sometimes back away from romance, like it’s this dirty secret in their past: ‘Oh, I don’t write those kinds of books any more,’” the author Courtney Milan, one of the auction’s organizers, said. “Stacey Abrams has never once done that to us.”“She’s not playing the game of trying to advance where she is by denigrating where she’s been,” Milan said. “She’s very clear that she doesn’t think any apologies are needed, which they aren’t.“I revel in having been able to be a part of a genre that is read by millions and millions of women, in part because it respects who they are,” Abrams told Entertainment Weekly in an interview in 2018, when she was campaigning to be governor of Georgia.Asked by the Washington Post how she would respond to people who made fun of the romance genre, Abrams wrote: “Telling a well-crafted story is hard. Full stop. Regardless of genre, good writing is good writing”. She added that she was “honored to be in the company of extraordinary writers.”The “Romancing the Runoff” auction had grown past its initial goal of raising $20,000, Milan said, as a wide range of authors and romance fans donated thousands of items, including first editions of romance novels, including the first Harlequin novel published by a black author, Sandra Kitt’s Rites of Spring; one-on-one sessions for writing advice, a chicken recipe from Dame Barbara Cartland, and handmade crafts, such as a “blue wave” crocheted scarf to a hand-embroidered sampler reading “F*ck the GOP”.The fantasy and science fiction novelist Neil Gaiman also joined the effort, donating a signed collector’s edition of one of his novels that sold for $4,590.A spokesperson for Fair Fight did not immediately respond to a request for additional comment about the Romancing the Runoff fundraiser beyond Abrams’ tweet.Milan said she had “no clue” how much money the copy of Abrams’ own signed romance novel might raise for the Georgia election, but she expected it would “easily be four figures”.Hundreds of millions of dollars will be spent on political advertising in Georgia in the weeks before the runoff election on 5 January, NBC News reported this week, with at least $46m already spent since election day. More

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      'This is not a third Obama term’, says Joe Biden in first sit-down interview – video

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      President-elect Joe Biden says his presidency would not be ‘a third Obama term’ after announcing a slew of cabinet nominees that included many former Obama administration staffers. In his first sit-down interview since the election, Biden said the appointments reflected the spectrum of the American people and the Democratic party. ‘This is not a third Obama term. We face a totally different world than we faced in the Obama-Biden administration,’ he told NBC’s Lester Holt, adding that Donald Trump’s ‘America first’ approach meant ‘America alone’. He also said he would consider appointing a Republican in upcoming appointments.
      President-elect says ‘this is not a third Obama term’ in first sit-down interview More

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      How do we avoid future authoritarians? Winning back the working class is key | Bernie Sanders

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      As the count currently stands, nearly 80 million Americans voted for Joe Biden. With this vote against the authoritarian bigotry of Donald Trump, the world can breathe a collective sigh of relief.But the election results did also reveal something that should be a cause for concern. Trump received 11 million more votes than he did in 2016, increasing his support in many distressed communities – where unemployment and poverty are high, healthcare and childcare are inadequate, and people are hurting the most.For a president who lies all the time, perhaps Donald Trump’s most outlandish lie is that he and his administration are friends of the working class in our country.The truth is that Trump put more billionaires into his administration than any president in history; he appointed vehemently anti-labor members to the National Relations Labor Board (NLRB) and he gave huge tax breaks to the very rich and large corporations while proposing massive cuts to education, housing and nutrition programs. Trump has tried to throw up to 32 million people off the healthcare they have and has produced budgets that called for tens of billions in cuts to Medicare, Medicaid and social security.Yet, a certain segment of the working class in our country still believe Donald Trump is on their side.Why is that?At a time when millions of Americans are living in fear and anxiety, have lost their jobs because of unfair trade agreements and are earning no more in real dollars than 47 years ago, he was perceived by his supporters to be a tough guy and a “fighter”. He seems to be fighting almost everyone, every day.He declared himself an enemy of “the swamp” not only attacking Democrats, but Republicans who were not 100% in lockstep with him and even members of his own administration, whom he declared part of the “deep state.” He attacks the leaders of countries who have been our long-standing allies, as well as governors and mayors and our independent judiciary. He blasts the media as an “enemy of the people” and is ruthless in his non-stop attacks against the immigrant community, outspoken women, the African American community, the gay community, Muslims and protesters.He uses racism, xenophobia and paranoia to convince a vast swath of the American people that he was concerned about their needs, when nothing could be further from the truth. His only interest, from day one, has been Donald Trump.Joe Biden will be sworn in as president on 20 January and Nancy Pelosi will be speaker of the House. Depending upon what happens in Georgia’s special elections, it is unclear which party will control the US Senate.Democrats’ job during the first 100 days of the Biden administration is to make it clear whose side they are onBut one thing is clear. If the Democratic party wants to avoid losing millions of votes in the future it must stand tall and deliver for the working families of our country who, today, are facing more economic desperation than at any time since the Great Depression. Democrats must show, in word and deed, how fraudulent the Republican party is when it claims to be the party of working families.And, in order to do that, Democrats must have the courage to take on the powerful special interests who have been at war with the working class of this country for decades. I’m talking about Wall Street, the pharmaceutical industry, the health insurance industry, the fossil fuel industry, the military industrial complex, the private prison industrial complex and many profitable corporations who continue to exploit their employees.If the Democratic party cannot demonstrate that it will stand up to these powerful institutions and aggressively fight for the working families of this country – Black, White, Latino, Asian American and Native American – we will pave the way for another rightwing authoritarian to be elected in 2024. And that president could be even worse than Trump.Joe Biden ran for president on a strong pro working-class agenda. Now we must fight to put that agenda into action and vigorously oppose those who stands in its way.Which Side Are You On? was a folk song written by Florence Reece, the wife of an organizer with the United Mine Workers when the union went on strike in Kentucky in 1931. Democrats need to make it absolutely clear whose side they are on.One side is for ending starvation wages and raising the minimum wage to $15 per hour. One side is not.One side is for expanding unions. One side is not.One side is for creating millions of good paying jobs by combating climate change and rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure. One side is not.One side is for expanding healthcare. One side is not.One side is for lowering the cost of prescription drugs. One side is not.One side is for paid family and medical leave. One side is not.One side is for universal pre-K for every three- and four-year-old in America. One side is not.One side is for expanding social security. One side is not.One side is for making public colleges and universities tuition-free for working families, and eliminating student debt. One side is not.One side is for ending a broken and racist criminal justice system, and investing in our young people in jobs and education. One side is not.One side is for reforming and making our immigration system fair and humane. One side is not.Democrats’ job during the first 100 days of the Biden administration is to make it absolutely clear whose side they are on, and who is on the other side. That’s not only good public policy to strengthen our country. It’s how to win elections in the future. More

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      in US Politics

      Gary Younge on minority voters and the future of the Republican party – podcast

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      A look at the history of US voting rights and what the changing demographics of the country mean for Republicans

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      Black and Latino voters overwhelmingly favoured the Democrats in the 2020 US election. Without their huge margins in key states, Joe Biden could not have won, the journalist Gary Younge tells Anushka Asthana. By 2045, white voters will be in the minority. These changing demographics are a concern for the Republican party. In 2013, just a year after turnout rates for black voters surpassed those for white voters for the first time, the supreme court gutted the Voting Rights Act, which affected poor, young and minority voters. It’s important to remember, Gary tells Anushka, that the US was a slave state for more than 200 years; and an apartheid state, after the abolition of slavery, for another century. It has only been a non-racial democracy for 55 years. And that now hangs in the balance. If Biden does not produce something transformative, the disillusionment among voters may grow and people may once again look for someone who can disrupt the status quo, which is how Donald Trump won in 2016. • Read Gary Younge’s piece: Counted out: Trump’s desperate fight to stop the minority vote More