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      in US Politics

      American Crisis review: Andrew Cuomo on Covid, Trump … and a job with Joe Biden?

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      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

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      in US Politics

      Timeline: what a normal US election looks like and what might happen in 2020

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      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

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      in US Politics

      'We don't have any choice': the young activists naming and shaming US politicians

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      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

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      in US Politics

      'The Democratic party left us': how rural Minnesota is making the switch to Trump

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      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

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      in Elections

      Millions of Americans voting early in what could be record election turnout

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      Millions of Americans have already cast their vote in America’s presidential election, underscoring unprecedented enthusiasm in the 2020 race that could lead to record-shattering turnout.Election day is still weeks away, but a staggering 17.1 million voters have already cast their ballots either by mail or in person, according to data collected by Michael McDonald, a professor at the University of Florida who closely tracks voter turnout. Overall, the US has already surpassed 12% of its total vote from the 2016 presidential election. Democrats appear to be disproportionately responsible for driving the early vote turnout and observers say this could be the first election in US history where a majority of voters cast their ballots before election day.Several states, including battlegrounds like Wisconsin, Michigan and Florida have already surpassed 20% of their total 2016 vote, a sign of strong enthusiasm. (The Guardian and ProPublica are tracking these vote-by-mail ballots here.)“That’s nuts,” McDonald said in an interview. “This is orders of magnitude larger number[s] of people voting.”The United States may be heading for record turnout in a presidential election, experts say. McDonald estimates that about 150 million people will vote this year of the approximately 239.2 million eligible voters, the highest turnout in a presidential election since 1908. And Tom Bonier, the CEO of TargetSmart, a Democratic data firm that closely tracks voter data, said he thought as many as 160 million voters could cast a ballot. 137.5 million Americans voted in the 2016 general election.The early enthusiasm comes as voters in Virginia, Ohio, Georgia and Texas have all seen huge lines on the first day of in-person early voting – some counties in those states said they saw record turnout on the first day. For months, election administrators have been trying to figure out how to predict and accommodate an influx of in-person voters as they face a shortage of personnel and locations.Democrats have encouraged their supporters to cast their votes as early as possible either in person or by mail. The push to vote early, both by mail and in person, has also come amid fears about the capacity of the United States Postal Service (USPS) to deliver mail-in ballots on time.“We’ve got to vote early, in person if we can. We’ve got to request our mail-in ballots right now, tonight, and send them back immediately and follow up to make sure they’re received,” Michelle Obama said at the Democratic national convention in August.So far, Democrats are heeding that advice and crushing Republicans when it comes to both requesting and returning mail-in ballots. In North Carolina, a key battleground state, Democratic voters have returned 269,844 ballots, 42.9% of the more than 628,000 they requested. Republicans have returned just 96,051 out of a little over 258,413 requests (roughly 37%).In Pennsylvania, another key state, Democrats have returned more than 22% of the 1.7m ballots they requested, a significant advantage over Republicans, who have returned just over 12% of their 652,516 requested ballots. In Dane county, a liberal stronghold in Wisconsin, more than 62% of the more than 200,000 voters who requested ballots have already returned them, the highest return rate in the state.“It’s like a double advantage for Democrats – not only are there advantages for Democrats for the number of ballot requests, but they’re also adding on to that advantage by having their voters return their ballots at a higher rate than Republicans,” McDonald said.The surge has been enough to cause Republicans to concede privately at the very least that the advantage right now is with Democrats, both in terms of the presidential race and winning a majority of seats in the Senate.“If I’m in Vegas I’d bet on Biden,” said one Republican strategist who specializes in data analytics and asked to remain anonymous. That sentiment is increasingly shared by Republican operatives and top staffers in the Senate who are beginning to plot out life in the minority.But the enthusiasm spans both Democratic and Republican voters. “Look, I’d rather be down 710,000 [registered voters] than 1.4 million. But I don’t want to oversell it. We still have a lot of work to do,” said Republican strategist Mark Harris.The data is so drastically different from previous years that McDonald said it was difficult to predict what it portends for the eventual election outcome. In a typical election, there is usually a spike in voting around the start of early voting, which then falls off until near election day, when it climbs again.“There could be two plausible explanations. One is that Democrats are more enthused and want to vote as soon as they can. The other is that Republicans, even those who have requested mail ballots, are deciding that they want to vote in person and they may wait and then when in-person early voting or election day comes around, go vote then,” he said. More

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      in US Politics

      Trump and Biden offer starkly different visions of US role in world

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      The World’s Election

      Trump and Biden offer starkly different visions of US role in world

      The security council chamber at the UN headquarters in New York.
      Photograph: Valery Sharifulin/TASS

      The world is anxiously watching the election, with the candidates far apart on issues such as the climate crisis and nuclear weapons
      by Julian Borger in Washington

      Main image:
      The security council chamber at the UN headquarters in New York.
      Photograph: Valery Sharifulin/TASS

      Foreign policy barely gets a mention in this US election, but for the rest of the world the outcome on 3 November will arguably be the most consequential in history.
      All US elections have a global impact, but this time there are two issues of existential importance to the planet – the climate crisis and nuclear proliferation – on which the two presidential candidates could hardly be further apart.
      Also at stake is the idea of “the west” as a like-minded grouping of democracies who thought they had won the cold war three decades ago.
      “The Biden versus Trump showdown in November is probably the starkest choice between two different foreign policy visions that we’ve seen in any election in recent memory,” said Rebecca Lissner, co-author of An Open World, a new book on the contest for 21st-century global order.
      In an election which will determine so much about the future of America and the world, the Trump campaign has said very little about its intentions, producing what must be the shortest manifesto in the annals of US politics.
      It appeared late in the campaign and has 54 bullet points, of which five are about foreign policy – 41 words broken into a handful of slogans such as: “Wipe Out Global Terrorists Who Threaten to Harm Americans”.
      The word “climate” does not appear, but there are two bullet points on partnering with other countries to “clean up” the oceans, and a pledge to “Continue to Lead the World in Access to the Cleanest Drinking Water and Cleanest Air”. (The phrase ignores a series of US scandals about poor water quality – and the fact that millions of Americans can no longer afford their water bills.)
      The US remains the world’s second biggest emitter of greenhouse gases and the average American’s carbon footprint is twice that of a European or Chinese citizen. More