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      Senate overrides Donald Trump's veto of defense spending bill

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      Donald Trump’s fellow Republicans in the US Senate on Friday took the atypical rebellious step of overriding his veto for the first time in his presidency.The Senate pushed through a bill on defense spending against Trump’s strong objections – just 20 days before he leaves office.Meeting in a rare New Year’s Day session, the Senate secured the two-thirds majority needed to override the veto with bipartisan support two days before a new Congress will be sworn in on Sunday.Eight previous vetoes of legislation have been upheld. Under the US constitution, the president has the power to veto a bill passed by Congress, but lawmakers can uphold the bill if two-thirds of both the House of Representatives and the Senate vote to override it.The Republican-led Senate, following the Democratic-controlled House on Monday, passed the measure without Trump’s support, voting 81-13 on Friday afternoon.Overriding Trump’s veto marks a striking departure for GOP senators, who have largely stood by the president during his turbulent White House term.But Trump’s objections to the bill angered lawmakers, who had labored for months to put together a bipartisan bill and pride themselves on passing the military bill each year for 60 years, and voted to ignore his opposition to it.The $740bn National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) determines everything from military programs and construction projects to how to address geopolitical threats.Trump refused to sign it into law because of its failure to repeal Section 230, a federal law that provides a legal liability shield for internet companies, and because it includes a provision stripping the names of Confederate generals from military bases.“We’ve passed this legislation 59 years in a row. And one way or another, we’re going to complete the 60th annual NDAA and pass it into law before this Congress concludes on Sunday,” Senate leader Mitch McConnell said.As votes were being counted indicating Trump had lost the battle, the president tweeted, touting a protest planned in Washington on Wednesday when the new Congress officially tallies the electoral college votes certifying Democrat Joe Biden’s presidential victory in November’s election. More

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      The Guardian view on liberal Christians: is this their moment? | Editorial

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      “No one is saved alone,” writes Pope Francis in Let Us Dream, a short book of Covid-related reflections published last month. Those words carry an obvious Christian resonance. But the meaning that the pope intends to convey is primarily secular. The pandemic, he believes, has underlined our shared vulnerability and mutual dependency. By shocking us out of everyday indifference and egotism, our present troubles can open up the space for a new spirit of fraternity. A fresh emphasis on looking out for each other, claims the pope, can become the theme of a more generous and caring post-pandemic politics.Let Us Dream is a pastoral, spiritual book that aspires to address a lay audience as well as a religious one. In its emphasis on civic solidarity, tolerance, concern for the poor and the environment, it is also the latest attempt by Pope Francis to shift the dial of 21st-century Christianity away from the culture wars that have consumed it.There is an obvious temptation to respond wryly: “Good luck with that.” In a number of high-profile ways, 2020 was another depressing year for liberal-minded Christians. The Polish Catholic church worked hand in glove with the state in an attempt to effectively ban abortion and trample over LGBTQ+ rights. The strong disapproval of a majority of Poles, who have no wish to live in a theocracy, cut no ice. In neighbouring Hungary, the Reformed, Lutheran and Catholic churches kept stumm as Viktor Orbán’s government continued to bully minorities in the name of “illiberal Christianity”. During the lead-up to November’s US presidential election, Donald Trump’s cynical weaponisation of the abortion debate helped ensure strong Christian backing for the most profane, religiously illiterate president in the country’s history. And this week, Pope Francis himself indicated his disapproval of the legalisation of abortion in his native Argentina.But this stark summary of the church at odds with the liberal world does not tell the whole story. In Britain, as elsewhere, Christian churches, alongside mosques and synagogues, played a frontline role in the community activism that kept people and families afloat during months of acute uncertainty and hardship. It is from that wellspring of fellow feeling and altruism, the importance of which is suddenly front and centre in our lives, that Let Us Dream believes a “new humanism” can emerge. For those who share that aspiration, whether secular or religious, there are genuine grounds for hope in 2021.A liberal CatholicThe election to the White House of Joe Biden, a Democrat who is also a practising Catholic, is the best news liberal Christians have had for a long time. In a book published last month, the conservative Australian cardinal George Pell said Mr Trump was “a bit of a barbarian, but in some important ways he’s ‘our’ (Christian) barbarian”. The end of that cynically transactional relationship between Mr Trump’s White House and the religious right signals new possibilities. In his victory speech, Mr Biden quoted from Ecclesiastes, saying that for a divided America, “it was a time to heal”. When he has discussed his faith, the president-elect has tended to talk about altruism, decency and personal integrity, steering clear of provocative dividing lines.Mr Biden has backed access to abortion and same-sex marriage. He will, as a result, be relentlessly targeted by conservative Catholic critics and evangelicals. The president of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, José Gomez, has convened a working group to address the “difficult and complex” situation of dealing with a liberal Catholic in the White House. But the Catholic vote was split evenly between Mr Biden and Mr Trump. And, crucially, Pope Francis is likely to have the new president’s back.This relationship could constitute an important new axis of liberal influence in the west. After a recent phone call between the two, a statement from Mr Biden’s transition team said the president-elect “expressed his desire to work together on the basis of a shared belief in the dignity and equality of all humankind, on issues such as caring for the marginalised and the poor, addressing the crisis of climate change and welcoming and integrating immigrants and refugees into our communities”. This was to more or less tick off the list of priorities the pope has attempted to set, while under constant assault from religious conservatives. The disruption of the recent alliance between Christianity and rightwing populism carries significant implications not only for America, but for the battle against global poverty, the climate emergency and the migration crisis.Fraternity as the new frontierMr Biden’s election is not the only hopeful sign for Christians who long for their leaders to look beyond the narrow preoccupation with reproductive rights and sexuality. Last year was marked by two significant theological documents, one from the eastern church and one from the west. Towards a Social Ethos of the Orthodox Church, published during Lent, is a radical clarion call for Orthodox Christians to engage with deepening inequalities in developed societies, and to confront wealthy nations with their moral obligations to refugees. The tone is set by the opening words of the text: “Our spiritual lives … cannot fail to be social lives.” Endorsed by Bartholomew I, the spiritual leader of the Orthodox church, the document recalls that “[the] early and Byzantine church had a bold voice on social justice”. This, it states, must be revived and renewed. Pope Francis’s recent encyclical, Fratelli Tutti (Brothers All), was written in the same spirit. Ideas of fraternity and friendship are developed as a necessary complement to the familiar political categories of liberty and equality. The argument is summed up in Let Us Dream, where the pope writes: “Without the ‘we’ of a people, of a family, of institutions, of a society that transcends the ‘I’ of individual interests, life … becomes a battle for supremacy between factions and interests.”Intriguingly, variations on this theme have been explored in a string of recent publications, both secular and religious. In his valedictory work Morality: Restoring the Common Good in Divided Times, the late chief rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, criticises the modern priority of “I” over “we”. Robert Putnam and Shaylyn Romney Garrett’s The Upswing and Michael Sandel’s The Tyranny of Merit both attempt to map out a civic territory that avoids the twin dangers of selfish individualism and illiberal populism.In recent years, Christian leaders have too often been silent, complicit or cravenly proactive, as the Bible has been deployed as a weapon in conservative culture wars. The image of Trump marching through teargassed streets to brandish a bible outside a Washington church encapsulated a kind of capitulation. But in the new year, liberal Christians have grounds for cautious optimism. In the necessary project of carving out a new space for a less polarised, more fraternal public square, they have a vital role to play. More

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      'It's put Delaware on the map': Biden’s win drags state from the shadows

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      It is not so much a flyover state as a does-the-train-have-to-stop-here? state. Most travellers between New York and Washington do not disembark at the Joseph R Biden Jr Railroad Station in Wilmington, Delaware. Perhaps they will now take a second look.The station is where Biden launched his first, ill-fated campaign for US president in June 1987 and where, standing on a deserted platform 33 years later, proud local Democrats cast the votes that clinched his nomination at a virtual convention. Now, with Biden as president-elect, this unglamorous station, city and state are enjoying a rare moment in the sun.“If there’s anything that people know about Wilmington it’s that there’s an Amtrak station,” said Xavier Teixido, a local restaurateur who has served Biden often. “We don’t really have an airport of any note but the Amtrak station is like our airport. Every Acela [train] that comes up and down the east coast stops in Wilmington, Delaware, and I think there’s a reason for that. It’s probably Joe and our other senators that commute to work.”Delaware is the second smallest state in the union after Rhode Island. It does not have a professional sports team, signature cuisine or claim to fame except as a corporate tax haven. Wilmington, founded by Swedes in 1638, was long dominated by credit card companies and the chemical giant DuPont. Biden does not have much competition as Delaware’s most famous man.Caesar Rodney, who signed the declaration of independence, is described by the History Channel’s website as “the founding father you’ve probably never heard of”. A slave owner, his statue was removed from Wilmington’s Rodney Square this summer amid the uprising over racial injustice.John Eleuthère du Pont built Delaware’s natural history museum to display his collections of 66,000 birds and 2m seashells. He was also a wrestling enthusiast who shot dead an Olympic champion in 1996 and spent the rest of his life in prison (the story was given a chilly retelling in the film Foxcatcher starring Steve Carell).A recent New York Times article argued that Wilmington, which has a population of just 72,000, has spent centuries in obscurity and long struggled to define its identity, with officials devising earnest slogans such as “A Place to Be Somebody”, then “Wilmington, in the middle of it all” and most recently. “It’s Time”.But with Biden, it can finally call one of its own “Mr President”. His victory speech at the Chase Center on the Riverfront, and his transition events unveiling cabinet picks at the Queen theatre, have drawn thousands of supporters and journalists. Suddenly thrust centre stage, the city and state are emerging – at least momentarily – from the daunting shadow of New York, Washington and neighbouring Philadelphia.Teixido, owner of Harry’s Savoy Grill and Kid Shelleen’s Charcoal House & Saloon, said: “I really do think it’s put Delaware on the map.”Teixido, 67, was born in Paraguay but grew up in Wilmington and after, a few years in Philadelphia and New Orleans, came back for good. “It’s going to be ‘reporting from Wilmington, Delaware’ or ‘Joe Biden did this’ or ‘These people came to Wilmington’,” he predicted. “I’m sure he’s proud of this state and he’s going to show it off the best he can. At a time that things seem so dark and so bleak, it’s nice to have a little light shone on the place that you live and work. Not everyone has that.”The aura of the presidency can lift small-town America out of obscurity. Dwight Eisenhower, from Abilene, Kansas, once remarked: “The proudest thing I can claim is that I am from Abilene.” Jimmy Carter still lives in Plains, the small Georgia farm town where he was born, and Bill Clinton, from Hope, Arkansas, accepted the 1992 Democratic nomination by declaring: “I still believe in a place called Hope.”Now it is the turn of Biden’s modest home to get name-checked on the nightly news. Michael Purzycki, the Democratic mayor of Wilmington, said: “Joe’s being elected has created this curiosity about Wilmington that people just never had before. All of a sudden, there’s mystique about Wilmington. Here he is broadcasting from the Queen – where’s the Queen? What’s on Market Street? What are the restaurants down there? What’s special about this place? Where does Joe live? Where did he grow up?”It might be said to be fitting that Donald Trump – whose brash personality is reflected by garish Trump Tower in New York and opulent Mar-a-Lago in Florida – is about to be supplanted by a man who honed his common touch in Delaware, a low-key state whose riches are less instantly obvious. The place is a measure of a man.Purzycki, 75, who shared a dormitory with Biden at the University of Delaware and was a classmate of his sister, added: “Joe can expound on subjects but he’s a modest person, he’s not a person with this massive ego that needs to be stroked all the time and I think if you could take a look at our state, we’re an understated place.“Our train station is small, our convention space is much smaller than you find in the big cities. We have an intimate scale to the city, which I think is a pretty accurate reflection of Joe Biden.”In fact Biden was born in Scranton, a hardscrabble city in neighbouring Pennsylvania, but when he was 10, his father moved the family to Delaware to work as a car salesman. Biden went on to represent the state for 36 years in the US Senate, famously commuting by train, before becoming Barack Obama’s vice-president.The size of the state was ideal for Biden to hone his style of retail politics; it does not take long to find someone whom he has looked in the eye or whose hand he has shaken. Local activist Coby Owens noted that his uncle, Herman Holloway Sr, Delaware’s first Black legislator, was a close acquaintance of the future president.Owens said: “Because we’re a small city, I feel as though we’re connected. We have a very strong sense of self and unity. Everyone knows each other. In some neighbourhoods in the big cities you grew up on your block so you know people on your block. In the city of Wilmington, you know people throughout the city and that’s one of the unique things.”Although Biden’s vice-presidency was something of a dress rehearsal, Owens, 25, has already noticed an increase in TV crews, Secret Service agents and the Biden motorcade, as well as supporters eager to pay homage. “It’s cool to see that we are literally the centre of democracy right now and, each time he rolls out a new cabinet member, having them come to Wilmington and speak here just brings joy to my heart.”For the out-of-towners, what else is there do to? Owens suggests attractions including beaches in Sussex county, picturesque churches and parks and the Christiana shopping mall, which includes a popular Apple store. “But we don’t have an Empire State building, we don’t have a Rockefeller. In Washington you have the monuments; we don’t have that here. So I think it’s less of a draw towards that and more a draw towards the shopping and the vacation areas.”Delaware does boast DuPont family mansions, museums and gardens that are open to visitors. Local tourism officials are also hoping for a post-pandemic boom courtesy of their local hero. Liz Keller, director of the Delaware Tourism Office, which has one of the smallest budgets of any such office in the country, admitted that “we can’t buy the type of media exposure” that comes from Biden’s election.“It 100% has benefited our state tourism industry and we’re definitely looking forward to welcoming people and also sharing with them some of the Biden favourite spots: some of the dining locations that we know the family likes to visit to get a taste of Delaware.”It is surely only a matter of time before a Biden statue is erected, perhaps at the railway station he made famous. But some residents are still rather skeptical about the state’s tourism charms.Cris Barrish, 62, a veteran newspaper journalist now based in PBS affiliate WHYY’s Wilmington office, said: “I’ve travelled to Europe, I’ve been up the east coast a lot, I’ve been north-west, I’ve been to Canada, I’ve been to New England and I can’t imagine wanting to be a tourist and like, ‘Let’s go to Delaware for a trip’ – unless you were going to the beach for a week. l’d put those beach towns up against almost anywhere but the Caribbean or the Mediterranean.” More

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      'Sore loser': Walmart apologizes after tweet mocks Senator Hawley

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      Walmart on Wednesday apologized to Josh Hawley, the Republican senator who said he would not vote to certify electoral college results, after a post on its Twitter account called him a “#soreloser”.“The tweet published earlier was mistakenly posted by a member of our social media team. We deleted the post and have no intention of commenting on the subject of certifying the electoral college,” the retail giant said in a tweet. “We apologize to Senator Hawley for this error and any confusion about our position.”The social media controversy started unfolding before noon, about one hour after Hawley tweeted his position on the usually ceremonious count. “Millions of voters concerned about election integrity deserve to be heard. I will object on January 6 on their behalf,” Hawley said.“Go ahead. Get your 2 hour debate. #soreloser” said a reply posted to Walmart’s Twitter account.Hawley replied “Thanks ⁦@Walmart⁩ for your insulting condescension. Now that you’ve insulted 75 million Americans, will you at least apologize for using slave labor?” In another tweet, the Missouri legislator said: “Or maybe you’d like to apologize for the pathetic wages you pay your workers as you drive mom and pop stores out of business.”Congress will meet on 6 January to count electoral college votes, which is the last step in affirming president-elect Joe Biden’s win. Hawley’s move won’t thwart Biden’s victory, but it could delay the count by spurring separate House and Senate votes. The move would force other Republicans to openly cast a vote that puts President Trump’s false voter fraud allegations against millions of voters’ enfranchisement. More

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      Biden and Harris to campaign in Georgia as Trump calls on its governor to quit

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      [embedded content]
      Joe Biden and Kamala Harris will travel to Georgia to campaign for next week’s high-stakes Senate runoff elections, it was announced on Wednesday, as Donald Trump called on the state’s Republican governor, Brian Kemp, to resign.
      For weeks, Trump has been attacking Kemp for his refusal to overturn the results of Georgia’s presidential election, a state he won in 2016 and narrowly lost to Biden in 2020, and on Wednesday went as far as to call on his fellow Republican to resign.
      “@BrianKempGA should resign from office,” Trump wrote in a tweet that encouraged supporters to watch a broadcast of a hearing on purported election irregularities. “He is an obstructionist who refuses to admit that we won Georgia, BIG! Also won the other Swing States.”
      Kemp, long considered a staunch ally of the president, has refused to embrace Trump’s meritless accusations that the state’s vote count was tainted. Earlier this month, Kemp recertified Georgia’s 16 electoral votes for Biden after multiple recounts affirmed Biden’s victory in the state.
      Despite dozens of lawsuits brought by the Trump campaign, they produced no credible evidence of widespread voter fraud in Georgia or any other state. Yet Trump’s insistence that the presidential vote was fraudulent has rattled some Republicans in the state who fear his unfounded claims may depress turnout among his supporters ahead of runoff elections, scheduled for 5 January.
      The runoffs will determine which party controls the Senate.
      “I love the Great State of Georgia, but the people who run it, from the Governor, @BrianKempGA, to the Secretary of State, are a complete disaster and don’t have a clue, or worse,” Trump wrote in a pair of tweets on Tuesday night. “Nobody can be this stupid. Just allow us to find the crime, and turn the state Republican….”
      He also made reference to a conspiracy theory that claims the Republican secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, has a brother named Ron who works for a Chinese tech firm, which purportedly explains his refusal to accept Trump’s unfounded claims about voter fraud in the state. The man is not related to Raffensperger.
      Trump will hold a rally with Georgia’s Republican senators in Dalton on Monday, setting up a split screen with Biden, who will campaign for the Democratic challengers, the Rev Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff, in Atlanta on the same day. On Sunday, Harris will appear with the Democrats in Savannah, while Vice-President Mike Pence has made frequent visits to the state on behalf of the Republican candidates. More

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      Georgia Senate runoff elections: how they work and why they matter

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      On 5 January the US state of Georgia will vote, again, on who to send to the Senate.The control of the Senate is up for grabs, and thus the prospects for the Biden administration – at least for the next two years. As millions of dollars and hundreds of campaigners descend on the state, here is an explainer about what is happening.What is at stake?Two seats are up for grabs. Republicans hold 50 of the 100 seats, and Democrats hold 48. There are 46 formally party-aligned and two independents – Angus King of Maine and Bernie Sanders of Vermont – who caucus with the Democrats. When there is a 50-50 tie, the deciding vote is cast by the vice president. That will be Democrat Kamala Harris after the Biden administration is sworn in on 20 January.If Democrats can win both seats they will control the Senate.A Senate majority is crucial in deciding a range of legislative changes, cabinet appointments, potential presidential impeachments and nominations to the supreme court. Republicans have controlled the Senate since 2014.The Democrats have a majority in the House, so a Democratic Senate majority would make Joe Biden’s next two years much easier. Conversely a Republican-controlled Senate under majority leader Mitch McConnell would be able to block much of his agenda, just as it did with former president Barack Obama’s. Biden has a history of attempting compromise across the aisle and could try to entice one or more Republicans on individual votes, but given McConnell’s history of obstructionism that seems a distant prospect. With so much hanging on the result, money has been pouring in to the state to support both sides. More than US$400m was spent on political ads by the middle of December, most going to the two Republicans.Today in FocusThe Georgia Senate runoffSorry your browser does not support audio – but you can download here and listen https://audio.guim.co.uk/2020/05/05-61553-gnl.fw.200505.jf.ch7DW.mp300:00:0000:00:00Who are the candidates?Both Georgia seats are contested between one Democratic candidate and one Republican.One race pitches Republican David Perdue, incumbent senator since 2015, against Democrat Jon Ossoff, a former journalist, who is only 33.Their battle has been vitriolic at times, Ossoff repeatedly calling Perdue a crook and referring to investigations into Perdue’s alleged insider trading.But Perdue has mostly not risen to the bait, and he declined to meet Ossoff in their scheduled TV debate earlier this month, leaving Ossoff to make his points on an empty podium.The other, much more colourful, race is between Republican Kelly Loeffler, a seriously wealthy former businesswoman, and Democrat Rev Raphael Warnock.Warnock, bidding to become Georgia’s first black senator, is a pastor at the Atlanta church where Martin Luther King held the same position. A long-time civil rights campaigner, he is a powerful orator in the tradition of King, and a strong supporter of the Black Lives Matter movement.As a result he has been denounced as a “radical liberal” by his opponent, Loeffler, at every possible opportunity, but has responded in disarming campaign ads by accusing Loeffler of having nothing positive to say about herself and stressing how much he loves puppies.Loeffler ran into controversy when she criticised players from the WNBA team she owns – the Atlanta Dream – over their support for Black Lives Matter, saying BLM had “Marxist foundations”.Loeffler is also technically an incumbent – she was appointed an interim senator on 6 January after former Republican senator Johnny Isakson resigned due to ill health.Why are they runoffs?Georgia state law requires runoffs in both elections because no candidate in either seat reached 50% in the November election.For the Loeffler-Warnock seat, the vacancy was created by the resignation of a sitting senator.This meant the November vote was contested by 20 people, in what is known as a “blanket” or “jungle” primary, which is to say it was almost always going to a runoff, with the top two from the first round going through. In that blanket primary, Loeffler also faced strong competition from moderate Republican congressman Doug Collins, and Warnock competed against a range of Democrats.Warnock topped the blanket primary with 32.9%, Loeffler came second with 25.9% and Collins came third with 19.95%. The top two – Warnock and Loeffler – then advanced to the runoff.In the other seat, contested by Perdue and Ossoff, the 2.32% of the vote won by Libertarian party candidate Shane T Hazel was enough to ensure that neither main party candidate reached 50% in a tight race: Perdue received 49.73% and Ossoff 47.95%.Who is likely to win?A Democrat has not won a Senate race in Georgia in 20 years, so the odds of winning two at the same time do not look great.However, Biden won the state in the November presidential election, the first time in 30 years a Democratic candidate had done so.How the outcome of the presidential race will affect the runoffs is the great unknown. Will traditionally Republican voters who rejected Donald Trump return to the party to ensure the Biden agenda is tempered by Republican control of the Senate? Or will Trump’s insistence on continuing to campaign in Georgia on the basis that the election was a fraud – and tying the Senate candidates to that cause – again motivate Democratic voters to turn out in high numbers?As in the presidential election, voting is not compulsory – so turnout will be a huge concern for both camps.A few more younger voters will be eligible to vote in January. Anyone who turns 18 on or before 5 January is eligible to vote, according to the Georgia Voter Guide. Registration to vote closed on 7 December.What do the polls say?By 24 December the poll average compiled by FiveThirtyEight had Perdue ahead of Ossoff by 0.5%, but Warnock leading Loeffler by 0.6%. Real Clear Politics on 22 December gave the Republicans slightly better figures, with Perdue up by 1% and Loeffler by 0.2%, but the numbers for the Democrats were improving over the past week or so with both agencies.Both polling outfits came under sustained criticism over the presidential election when they drastically underestimated Republican support in some states.When will we know the result?It depends how close the races are. The first Ossoff-Perdue race from November was so close that the result was not known for three days, but under most circumstances the result should be apparent on the night. More

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      Democrats battle for soul of party as Biden win masks alarming failures

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      The sense of relief Democrats felt with Donald Trump’s defeat in the 2020 election was not the same as a feeling of victory.
      The party’s loss of congressional seats and failure to take control of state legislatures, not to mention the US Senate, indicated an alarming slippage for a party that had thought it was growing as Trump was supposedly torching the Republican brand.
      After the election, a fierce internal Democratic debate broke out, with centrists arguing that slogans such as “Defund the police” and “Medicare for All” had hurt the party with moderate voters and exposed candidates to wild accusations from Republicans equating universal healthcare with Pol Pot.
      The progressives said that on the contrary, the party had not staked out its program on behalf of working people proudly enough, instead trying to play it safe behind an innocuous presidential candidate whose main pitch was a return to normalcy.
      The problem, said Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, was that the party lacked “core competencies” to reach voters with decisive rebuttals to wild charges from Republicans.
      The political strategist David Axelrod said the problem was that the party needed to learn how not to talk down to working-class voters, noting that while Democrats dominated in and around big cities in the 2020 election, Republicans had won in 80% of US counties.
      “If Democrats continue to cede 80% of the country, if they can’t break through, they’re kind of screwed, in my view, at least in the short run,” Axelrod said on his podcast.
      The debate is not academic. Two years from now, with Joe Biden in the White House and the Senate up for grabs, the Democrats could create their first opportunity in more than a decade to do something big: deliver major legislation to expand healthcare, protect voting rights, defend the environment, or implement humane immigration policy.
      Democratic political analysts, organizers and operatives interviewed by the Guardian agreed that opportunity lay ahead, but emphasized that to capitalize on it, the party must renew its efforts to connect with voters all year long, at a local level, and not be afraid of progressive messaging especially on economic issues.
      One key insight: local politics is not the same as national politics, and opportunities to reach even diehard Trump supporters abound when there is no Super Bowl presidential race inflaming partisan passions.
      “Locally, you can do more,” said David Pepper, the outgoing state chair of the Democratic party in Ohio. “You can win and make progress despite the national conversation. It’s a different type of politics.
      “It’s what the Koch brothers did for decades before we caught up.”
      The entire Democratic party sensed opportunity in 2020. With Trump having alienated a significant share of moderate voters, and Democrats running high-single-digits ahead of Republicans on the generic ballot, control of both Congress and the White House seemed tantalizingly close. The party spent $50m in an effort to flip state legislatures in advance of the redistricting process.
      But when the dust had settled, none of the eight statehouses targeted by Democrats produced a win, and control of the US Senate hung on thin hopes of winning two runoff races next month in Georgia. Most damagingly, Democrats had lost at least 11 seats in Congress, with candidates swamped by Trump voters but also not helped by Biden at the top of the ticket.
      Democratic primary voters picked Biden in part on the theory that he was most capable of beating Trump. But Democrats disagree on whether Biden’s success in districts where other Democrats lost meant that the party seemed too far left – or insufficiently bold in its progressive prescriptions.
      “In general, instead of blaming the progressives for the down-ballot failures, we should listen to them more,” said Brad Bannon, a Washington-based Democratic strategist. “Because I think the progressives in the party do a better job of talking basic economics, and talking about it in a way that people relate to.”
      There were bright spots. In Ohio, Democrats flipped a state supreme court seat by 10 points – in the single race in the entire country in which Democrats flipped a statewide seat from red to blue in a state Trump won.
      Pepper, the outgoing party chair, said the party had made local gains by encouraging voters to vote their entire ballots – instead of skipping down-ballot races – and by seeking to contest every election, no matter how local, in every year, not just in presidential races and during midterms.
      “We’ve done that for five years and it totally works,” Pepper said. “We have in Ohio now our biggest city footprint in recent history at least. We have mayors in almost every big city, winning by more, and bigger council footprints in these big cities.”
      Fighting to win local elections in 2019, Ohio Democrats unseated Republican mayors in three cities – Irontown, Coshocton and Norwalk – in counties that Trump won just one year later by an average of 45 points.
      But the swell of partisan politics in 2020 overwhelmed the ability of scrappy campaigning to make a difference statewide, with Trump taking Ohio by eight points.
      To fight in a noisy election year, Ocasio-Cortez told the New York Times last month, Democrats need to beef up their ability to go on TV and target ads on the internet for an entire election cycle instead of right before elections.
      But it’s not clear what level of messaging would be required to bring around Republican-leaning voters, when a majority of Republicans are prepared to believe, absent any evidence, in a multi-state conspiracy to steal the presidential election – in short, to believe anything that Trump, a historic liar, says.
      One of Trump’s strengths is his zeal at playing into the empirically proven politics of anger and resentment, of racist fears and xenophobic scapegoating. Democrats are aware that one challenge they face is to offer an alternative to voters who might be susceptible to, or at least not repelled by, that kind of pitch.
      “It’s not just about having deliverables and tangibles to offer,” said Axelrod on the Hacks on Tap podcast. “It’s about changing an attitude that basically thinks of these folks as something less.
      “The Democratic party envisions itself as the party of working people but it doesn’t feel that way to a lot of working people. And the Democratic party needs to figure that out.” More

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      Biden criticises Trump over slow Covid-19 vaccine rollout – video

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      US President-elect Joe Biden has criticised the Trump administration’s promise of a swift coronavirus vaccine rollout, saying it has ‘fallen far behind’ expectations. Biden, speaking in Wilmington, Delaware, said some 2 million people have been vaccinated, well short of the 20 million Trump had promised by the end of the year. Biden said the vaccine rollout is the ‘greatest operational challenges we’ve ever faced as a nation’ and outlined his plan for ramping up vaccinations, including the use of the Defense Production Act More