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      in US Politics

      A youth group helped Biden win. Now they want him to fix climate crisis

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      Joe Biden will have to navigate a path for the most ambitious climate agenda ever adopted by a US president through not only stubborn Republican obstruction but also an emergent youth climate movement that is already formulating plans to hold him to account.
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      A record turnout of young voters, a cohort riven by anxiety over the climate crisis, helped Biden beat Donald Trump on the 3 November election. The Sunrise Movement, the youth-led progressive climate group, reached 3.5 million young voters in swing states and now wants to see a return on these efforts.
      “We will have to see if Joe Biden is true to his word when he says that climate change is his number one issue but rest assured the movement will be there to remind him every moment of the way,” said Varshini Prakash, co-founder of the group, which surged to fame last year after a viral video showed a fractious encounter between the Democratic senator Dianne Feinstein and young climate activists who had occupied her office. “We delivered for Biden, now it’s his time to deliver for us.”
      Biden has called the climate crisis an “existential threat” to the US and has outlined a $2tn plan to decarbonize the electricity sector and create millions of jobs in clean energy. This package is far more ambitious than the Democrat’s original climate plan, which groups, including Sunrise, successfully pushed to go further.
      “His ratings among young people were abysmal six months ago but, to his credit, he came back with a much better climate plan,” said Prakash. “It’s clear we don’t have time to wait. Young people are terrified of what is to come and they will push Joe Biden to do everything in his power to ensure climate action.”
      An animating fear for climate activists is a repeat of Barack Obama’s failure to enact climate legislation, after the collapse of a grand bipartisan attempt to institute a price on carbon emissions. Biden will be pressured to push ahead without Republicans, with activists holding talks with the incoming administration to create an office of climate mobilization, in the vein of the war mobilization office set up by Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1943, to coordinate efforts.
      Protests are also brewing over Biden’s cabinet appointments, with disquiet over the rumored return of Ernest Moniz, a former secretary of energy who is in favor of using gas rather than solely renewable energy. “I have the fear that the cabinet that makes it through the nomination process won’t be considered full of climate champions,” said Prakash.
      That nomination process, like much of Biden’s agenda, will hinge upon a Senate that appears likely to remain in Republican hands. Sweeping climate legislation would almost certainly be blocked in this scenario, testing Biden’s ability to force down emissions through executive actions or brokered deals with Republicans.
      “Biden will attempt to legislate first while retaining the prerogative to regulate and I think there is still an opportunity to do that – he spent 30 years in the Senate and knows how to cut a deal,” said Paul Bledsoe, a strategic adviser at the Progressive Policy Institute and a Biden ally. Republicans could be swayed by an economic stimulus package that includes green elements such as new electric vehicle recharge stations, retrofitting buildings to make them more energy efficient and support for solar and wind power, Bledsoe said.
      “I expect him to be very aggressive,” Bledsoe added. “If he had Congress it would be easier, Sunrise understands that. But I don’t think he intends to disappoint this new generation of climate activists.”
      Public opinion will, at least, be broadly in Biden’s favor. Polling shows there is a record level of concern among Americans over the climate crisis, with a clear majority demanding a response from government.
      “The electorate has clearly said it wants action on climate change,” said Heather McTeer Toney, a former regional administrator at the Environmental Protection Agency and now senior director of the Moms Clean Air Force. “It’s exciting that climate is a top line priority. I know it’s not going to be easy but it now feels possible. We should be energized.” More

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      in Elections

      Fauci says Trump hasn’t attended a Covid meeting in ‘several months’ – video

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      Dr Anthony Fauci, the US’s top infectious diseases official and a member of the White House taskforce, has joined the call to allow transition talks to begin amid a surge in coronavirus cases. Asked by CNN’s Jake Tapper if a normal transition would be to the benefit of public health, he replied: ‘Of course, that’s obvious. Of course it would be better if we could starting working with them.’ The president himself has been virtually silent on the public health disaster swirling around him. According to Fauci, Trump has not attended a meeting of the coronavirus taskforce for ‘several months’
      Trump faces growing pressure to start transition as Covid surges across US
      Trump insists ‘I concede nothing’ after tweeting that Biden ‘won’ – as it happened More

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      in US Politics

      Tracking the US election results: 'We needed to be clear, fast, and accurate'

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      On Wednesday 4 November, the Guardian recorded its highest-ever digital traffic, reaching more than 190 million page views and 52.9m unique browsers worldwide in 24 hours – exceeding all previous traffic records by an enormous margin. Our live results tracker – a collaborative project from the Guardian’s newsroom, visual journalism, designers and engineering teams – has received over 94 million page views so far since launch, and continues to draw in readers. Here, the team behind it explain why visual journalism is so critical to what we do. How did the results tracker come about?We started talking to the US office about this in October 2019, before the primaries. We aim to provide live results for most major elections and we knew the whole world would be watching this one. The live results page for the 2016 US election had been a phenomenal success.We followed a six-month project plan while continuing to cover other major visual stories, most importantly the Covid-19 crisis. Towards the end of the summer, we gradually dedicated more resources exclusively to the election, staying in close contact with US editors throughout.Why was it such an important part of our election coverage?Any serious news organisation needs to be able to keep its readers up to date with election results – especially for a huge event like the US election. However, we also wanted the page to have a narrative, and to provide context for our readers about the election.We included information on the page about the key states to watch and the history of how each had voted in the past. As we launched it several hours before any results came through, we were pleased to see it received more than 3m page views in that time. Attention time on the page showed that people appreciated the extra context.We updated the key states section as the results came in, and also added extra components to reflect the news. For example, when Trump claimed victory the next day we added a clear warning that the election was not over, and a table to show where votes were still being counted.All of these editorial decisions added value to the page for our readers, making it an important page to return to as the count continued. More

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      in US Politics

      The Guardian view on Biden and the world: undoing Trump’s damage | Editorial

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      Donald Trump is a “symptom of malaise, and decline, and decay” in the US, his former top Russia expert Fiona Hill has observed. If some countries have thus seized upon his presidency as an opportunity, many have been horrified.
      Few US elections were watched quite as anxiously as this one around the world. Widespread relief at Joe Biden’s victory is evident. Much foreign policy, unlike domestic, can be enacted by executive order, without the backing of the Senate. At the most basic level, he will be a president who is patient enough to read a report and knowledgeable enough to understand it; who grasps that America cannot prosper alone; who does not lavish praise on dictators while humiliating democratic allies; who listens to his own intelligence services over Vladimir Putin; and who will entrust Middle East policy to seasoned officials rather than his son-in-law.
      Mr Biden has already vowed to undo many of Mr Trump’s decisions, rejoining the Paris climate change agreement and rescinding the order to withdraw from the World Health Organization. He plans to extend the soon-to-expire New Start treaty with Russia – the last arms control agreement standing. Tackling the pandemic is likely to be a priority for his international diplomacy: signing up to Covax – the global initiative to ensure that poorer nations also get a share of coronavirus vaccines – would send a powerful signal. More than 180 countries have already done so, including China.
      The wait to enter the White House has dangers of its own. Other nations may take advantage of US distraction. The president-elect is not receiving intelligence briefings, leaving him in the dark as he prepares for office. There are anxieties that Mr Trump’s replacement of the defence secretary, Mark Esper, and other senior officials with loyalists may not just be payback for public disagreement, but about paving the way for action at home or abroad. Key administration officials have visited Israel, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia since the election to discuss Iran, raising concerns that Mr Trump might yet pursue a scorched-earth policy – perhaps upping the pressure on Tehran so that it hits back, making it far harder to salvage the nuclear deal.
      The Trump administration has been much tougher on Beijing than anticipated, and has taken measures such as imposing sanctions on officials over human rights abuses in Xinjiang. Yet on this relationship, as elsewhere, the president has been both erratic and crudely transactional, making it clear that human rights concerns are barterable for a better deal on trade. The turn against China has also come across the political spectrum, in response to its actions in Hong Kong, Xinjiang and above all internationally. Countering such behaviour will require intelligence, experience (the state department has been hollowed out and politicised) and consistency. Shoring up international alliances is essential. Finding ways to support Taiwan that don’t backfire in the response they trigger from Beijing will be crucial – and extremely hard.
      Critics of Mr Trump have sometimes taken an overly rosy view of US foreign policy before him. Mr Biden is likely, in essence, to pursue the status quo ante. But if Mr Trump recognised that America’s place in the world was changing, he has also sped its decline. That such a man could become president, and that he could govern as he has, has fundamentally diminished US standing. The world has watched in disbelief as the president has allowed coronavirus to ravage his nation – and now as he refuses to concede. Last week, Mike Pompeo, the secretary of state, attacked Beijing for crushing democracy in Hong Kong – but while opining, with a smirk, that at home there would be “a smooth transition to a second Trump administration”.
      If large parts of the world thought the US was malign or at least deeply flawed before, they also thought it mostly functioning and competent, and often enviable. Demolition is an easier task than construction. Mr Biden will undo some of the worst aspects of the last four years, but he cannot erase them from the record. More

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      in US Politics

      Trump tweets that Biden 'won' – but repeats baseless vote fraud claim

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      On Sunday morning, Donald Trump tweeted about Joe Biden.
      “He won,” he wrote.
      But it was not the formal concession of the US presidential election which Trump has refused to give, despite every major media organisation calling the race for Biden with an electoral college result of 306-232 – coincidentally the same margin by which Trump beat Hillary Clinton in 2016, a result he insisted was a landslide.
      Clinton beat Trump by nearly 3m in the popular vote. Biden is more than 5m up.
      “He won because the election was rigged,” Trump wrote, before recycling a melange of the baseless claims of voter fraud he continues to push and which his lawyers are attempting to prove in court in battleground states – with little to no chance of success, according to most observers.
      According to practice, Twitter tagged the Trump tweet with a message: “This claim about election fraud is disputed.”
      According to NBC News, an anonymous White House official said the tweet about how Biden won “may very well” represent the start of some sort of Trump concession.
      One Republican governor, Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas, followed suit, telling NBC’s Meet the Press: “It was good actually to see President Trump tweet out that ‘he won’. I think that’s a start of an acknowledgment.”
      But the president disagreed, tweeting: “He only won in the eyes of the FAKE NEWS MEDIA. I concede NOTHING! We have a long way to go. This was a RIGGED ELECTION!”
      Mainstream experts and analysts agree it was not. The presidential result in Georgia is subject to a recount – which Trump on Sunday called a “scam” – but it is not expected to slip from Biden’s column and the Democrat will be inaugurated as the 46th president on 20 January.
      On Sunday Biden’s chief of staff, Ron Klain, said Trump’s tweets had no bearing on the actuality of the election.
      “Donald Trump’s Twitter feed doesn’t make Joe Biden president or not president,” Klain told NBC’s Meet the Press. “The American people did that.”
      From Wilmington, Delaware, the president-elect continues to consider cabinet appointments and legislative priorities and to issue appeals to the country to take seriously the spiralling coronavirus pandemic.
      But Trump’s refusal to concede is affecting Biden’s preparations, with transition funds unreleased and national security briefings not given.
      Klain said the federal government needed to sign off on transition efforts this week, so briefings can begin, and so Biden can begin to address the Covid-19 crisis.
      Hutchinson agreed, telling NBC: “It is very important that Joe Biden have access to the intelligence briefings to make sure that he is prepared.
      “During times of transition our enemies have an opportunity to take advantage of us, and we want to make sure that there is a smooth transition, particularly when it comes to the vaccine distribution [so that] everybody understands what we’re doing there and what the plan is for the future.”
      But Hutchinson also pointed to a problem for Republican elected officials, which is that Trump retains the support of most Republican voters – many of whom believe his claims about the election.
      “Clearly, President Trump will have a voice for a long time in the party,” Hutchinson said. “Anybody that can generate those kinds of crowds … will have an influence for some time to come.”
      On Saturday, Trump supporters gathered in Washington to back the president and reject Biden. Trump waved to the crowd from his motorcade, as it drove to his golf club in Sterling, Virginia.
      On Sunday, the president had no public events on his schedule. From the White House, he issued volley after volley of tweets. Then he drove back to his golf course. More

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      in US Politics

      Democrats divided: Biden's election win brings end to party's uneasy truce

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      Joe Biden’s first hours as president-elect were met by his supporters with spontaneous dance parties, champagne showers and car parades that wound through several blocks. But amid the “Biden-Harris” placards and T-shirts dotting a diverse crowd gathered in front of the White House last week, there was a creeping sense that the source of their shared jubilation had less to do with the dragon-slayer than the dragon slayed.
      Since the moment Donald Trump was sworn in as president, Democrats aligned to plot his removal. They resisted, organized and mobilized, unified around the goal of removing a president they believed was uniquely dangerous. They succeeded. But their success also marked the end of an election-season truce that at times obscured deep ideological and generational differences.
      Democrats face a reckoning, four years in the making, after an election that accomplished their mission but did little to resolve urgent questions about the party’s political future and serious internal divisions.
      The first order of business is a “deep dive” into why more Americans than at any moment in the nation’s 244-year history voted for Biden and yet, despite bold predictions of a unified government come January 2021, Democrats ended up with a weakened House majority and an uphill battle to take control of the Senate.
      “What’s clear is that voters did not feel comfortable giving Democrats every lever of power,” said Lanae Erickson, senior vice-president for social policy and politics at the centrist thinktank Third Way. “And the question is, why not?”
      The answer, of course, depends on who you ask.
      A tense conference call among House Democrats, in which moderate members blamed the left wing for costing them congressional seats, opened a fiery public debate over how to turn a majority coalition into governing majorities.
      Moderates argue that Biden’s success, which included reclaiming three states in the Rust Belt Trump won in 2016 and expanding the map to Sun Belt battlegrounds, was evidence that a moderate who rejected liberal appeals was best positioned to build a winning coalition.
      “There are clearly some parts of the Democratic brand that voters across the country did not feel comfortable with,” Erickson said. A post-election analysis by Third Way found that Republicans effectively weaponized ideas like defunding the police and Medicare for All against Democrats in competitive districts, even if they did not support such policies.
      Far from being tempered by the congressional setbacks, progressives are emboldened. In a series of interviews, op-eds and open letters, they blamed unexpected losses on an embrace of “status quo centrism” that failed to capture voters’ imagination and faulted moderate candidates for not developing strong enough brands and digital strategies to withstand inevitable attacks.
      “They are dead wrong,” Bernie Sanders, the progressive senator who lost to Biden in the Democratic primary, wrote in an USA Today op-ed. He noted that every House co-sponsor of Medicare for All and all but one co-sponsor of the Green New Deal were re-elected, including several competitive districts.
      “The lesson is not to abandon popular policies like Medicare for All, a Green New Deal, living wage jobs, criminal justice reform and universal childcare,” Sanders wrote, “but to enact an agenda that speaks to the economic desperation being felt by the working class – Black, white, Latino, Asian American and Native American.”
      Biden won the primary after refusing to move left, but as the nominee embraced a sweeping economic vision that drew comparisons with FDR’s New Deal. In remarks after the election, Biden said that his resounding victory had given him a “mandate for action” on the economy, the pandemic, climate and racial inequality.
      But the breadth and contours of that mandate are up for debate. The election returned a complicated tableau of wins and losses for Democrats that defy sweeping conclusions about the electorate.
      Biden won Arizona and is set to take Georgia, after years of organizing by progressive Black and Latino activists in the traditionally Republican states. At the same time, sweeping advances with moderates and independents in the suburbs around fast-growing metropolitan areas like Phoenix and Atlanta helped secure his lead.
      It was moderate Democrats who flipped Senate seats in Colorado and Arizona, the party’s only additions so far, even as a number of battleground states voted for progressive ballot measures that included legalizing marijuana, raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour and taxing wealthy Americans to fund public education. More

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      US poll chaos is a boon for the enemies of democracy the whole world over

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      Believe it or not, the world did not stop turning on its axis because of the US election and ensuing, self-indulgent disputes in the land of the free-for-all. In the age of Donald Trump, narcissism spreads like the plague.But the longer the wrangling in Washington continues, the greater the collateral damage to America’s global reputation – and to less fortunate states and peoples who rely on the US and the western allies to fly the flag for democracy and freedom.Consider, for example, the implications of the Israeli army’s operation, on US election day, to raze the homes of 74 Palestinians, mostly women and children, in the occupied West Bank village of Khirbet Humsa. The pace of West Bank demolitions has increased this year, possibly in preparation for Israeli annexation of the Jordan Valley – a plan backed in principle by Trump. Appealing for international intervention, the Palestinian prime minister, Mohammed Shtayyeh, claimed Israel had acted while “attention is focused on the US election”. Yet worse may be to come.Trump’s absurdly lopsided Middle East “peace plan” gave Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s rightwing leader, virtual carte blanche to expand settlements and seize Palestinian land. Joe Biden has promised to revive the two-state solution. But while the power struggle rages in Washington, analysts warn, Netanyahu may continue to arbitrarily create new “facts on the ground” – with Trump’s blessing.“Over the next 11 weeks, we are likely to see a major uptick in Israeli demolitions, evictions, settlement announcements, and perhaps even formal annexation of parts of the occupied territories, as Netanyahu and his allies in the settler movement seek to make the most of Trump’s remaining time in office,” Khaled Elgindy of Washington’s Middle East Institute predicted.The Khirbet Humsa incident gained widespread media attention. The same cannot be said of a football pitch massacre in northern Mozambique that also coincided with US polling. While Americans were counting votes, villagers in Cabo Delgado province were counting bodies after Islamic State-affiliated extremists decapitated more than 50 victims.Nearly 450,000 people have been displaced, and up to 2,000 killed, in an escalating insurgency in the mainly Muslim province where extreme poverty exists alongside valuable, western-controlled gas and mineral riches. Chinese, US and British energy companies are all involved there. Mozambique’s government has appealed for help, saying its forces cannot cope.Trump’s ‘man of the people’ myth of resisting a liberal conspiracy is the ultra-toxic element of his poisonous legacyBiden vows to maintain the fight against Isis. But it’s unclear if he is willing to look beyond Syria-Iraq and expand US involvement in the new Islamist killing grounds of the Sahel, west Africa and the Mozambique-Tanzania border.As for Trump, he claimed credit last year for “defeating 100% of the Isis caliphate”. The fool thinks it’s all over. In any case, he has shown zero interest in what he calls “shithole” African countries.Afghanistan is another conflict zone where the cost of US paralysis is counted in civilian lives. It’s a war Trump claims to be ending but which is currently escalating fast.While all eyes were supposedly on Pennsylvania, Kabul university was devastated when gunmen stormed classrooms, killing 22 students. Another four people were killed last week by a suicide bomber in Kandahar.Overall, violence has soared in recent months as the US and the Taliban (which denied responsibility for the Kabul atrocity) argue in Qatar. Trump plainly wants US troops out at any price. Biden is more circumspect about abandoning Afghanistan, but there’s little he can do right now .The Biden-Trump stand-off encourages uncertainty and instability, inhibiting the progress of international cooperation on a multitude of issues such as the climate crisis and the global pandemic. It also facilitates regression by malign actors.China’s opportunistic move to debilitate Hong Kong’s legislative assembly last week by expelling opposition politicians was a stark warning to Democrats and Republicans alike. Beijing just gave notice it will not tolerate democratic ideas, open societies and free speech, there or anywhere.China’s leaders apparently calculated, correctly, that the US was so distracted by its presidential melodrama that it would be incapable of reacting in any meaningful way.Taiwan’s people have cause to worry. The “renegade” island is next on Chinese president Xi Jinping’s reunification wish-list. Who would bet money on the US riding to Taipei’s rescue if Beijing takes aim?Much has been said about the negative domestic ramifications of Trump’s spiteful disruption of the presidential transition – his lawsuits, his refusal to share daily intelligence briefings with Biden, and his appointment of loyalists to key Pentagon posts. He hopes to turn January’s two Senate election re-runs in Georgia into a referendum – on him.But not enough attention is being paid to how this constitutional chaos affects America’s influence and leadership position in the world – or to the risk Trump might take last-minute, punitive unilateral action against, say, Iran or Venezuela. Like Xi, Vladimir Putin undoubtedly relishes US confusion. He may find ways to take advantage, as with last week’s Moscow-imposed Armenia-Azerbaijan “peace deal”. Authoritarian, ultra-nationalist and rightwing populist leaders everywhere take comfort from America’s perceived democratic nervous breakdown.This is the worst of it. By casting doubt on the election’s legitimacy, Trump nurtures and instructs anti-democratic rogues the world over. The Belarus-style myth he peddles, and will perpetuate, of a strong “man of the people” resisting a conspiracy plotted by corrupt liberal elites, is the final, toxic element of his profoundly poisonous legacy.Farmers in Palestine, fishermen in Mozambique, and students in Kabul all pay a heavy price for his unprincipled lies and puerile irresponsibility. So, too, does the cause of global democracy. More