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      in US Politics

      As America anxiously waits, voters find a bit of laughter in memes

      by

      It’s day three of election week and we are no clearer who the president will be than on day one. We’re all on an emotional rollercoaster ride: with Donald Trump and Joe Biden neck-and-neck, many of us are waiting, refreshing the internet while hoping to be put out of our misery.
      But amid what feels like hour-by-hour updates of “no news yet”, the internet has turned towards what the internet does best: memes, of course. Here is what’s been keeping us laughing.
      It’s a rap for Trump’s spiritual adviser
      In the long wait for the vote, it appears the Trump team have been investing in some alternative remedies – not herbal, no, but spiritual. Trump’s spiritual adviser Paula White led a passionate prayer service last night, which included speaking in tongues. What she didn’t realize, perhaps, is that a few hours later, the internet would have her speaking in four-by-four beats.

      Capitaine OSEF
      (@Soapmoine)
      well sorry @Eminem for that. But that’s the first instrumental track i thought about. pic.twitter.com/5uce3N3GSP

      November 5, 2020

      Nevada deserves its own section
      Nevada has – let’s say – an idiosyncrasy in its vote count procedure, which means it takes the night off in between ballot counting. That, plus technical issues and delays, means people are on the edge of their seats as they wait for Nevada’s result, and the election hangs in the balance.
      Some have turned to memes to express their suspicion, asking what exactly is taking Nevada so long.

      Blade 🗡
      (@Fothousands)
      USA: where u at?Nevada: I’m on the freeway pic.twitter.com/YY3LmfIbWq

      November 5, 2020

      Others simply wonder whether Nevada’s vote count is conducted using some, ahem, eccentric counting methods.

      Liz Jenkins
      (@ej11lizzie)
      Nevada counting ballots pic.twitter.com/GC85ZFZdMd

      November 5, 2020

      Whatever the method, with it drawn out this much, we are all hoping for a Tyra Banks-style result.

      🦃TurkeyTime Tique🍁
      (@nahtiqueee_)
      Nevada gonna wake up tomorrow and announce the presidency like “I have two photos in my hand…” pic.twitter.com/HpfDQZQ5Qh

      November 5, 2020

      An HBO-worthy election
      As Trump repeatedly tweets STOP THE COUNT (at times when stopping the count would render him the loser); and his supporters fight for the vote not to be counting in areas where he is winning (and to be counted in areas where he is losing) someone remembered an eerily reminiscent episode of Veep. Life, imitation, art and all that.

      Alyssa hallucinated a pandemic?
      (@alyssalavacca)
      THIS IS LITERALLY AN EPISODE OF VEEP https://t.co/TkNdIRCxo9 pic.twitter.com/n5BpNwsuiZ

      November 5, 2020

      Which wouldn’t be complete without a conspiracy theorist
      The media is covering up, the Biden crime family steals this election, and this guy just wants BBQ, beer and freedom, and to scream about it on local news. But not without the internet auto-tuning him first.

      Holly Herndon
      (@hollyherndon)
      Sorry I had to pic.twitter.com/XDlnAabuf3

      November 4, 2020

      Remember when times were simpler?
      This one is not funny, but strangely heartwarming. With Trump now suing over the vote in several states, it’s hard not to get all nostalgic about simpler times … like when the loser used to lose and just accepted it.

      Jonathan Freedland
      (@Freedland)
      At the time, this was a routine political moment. Now I find it quite moving pic.twitter.com/AnRmG7iNFs

      November 5, 2020

      This is the world’s relationship to Twitter right now
      Get off Twitter, I mean it!

      Holly Figueroa O’Reilly
      (@AynRandPaulRyan)
      Good morning! Looking forward to another day of this.😭#ElectionResults2020 #Elections2020 #thursdaymorning pic.twitter.com/a4FnKtCOQp

      November 5, 2020

      But special props for the week goes to …
      Last of all, how could we forget to give a shout out to our own Guardian US live bloggers – who have managed to remain cool and collected in the face of it all.

      danielle.
      (@ForeverWithJoeJ)
      Whoever is updating The Guardian’s live updates has had enough lol pic.twitter.com/GpgUoqp2ms

      November 4, 2020 More

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      in US Politics

      Whatever the final US verdict, we're mourning the ‘blue wave' that never was | Emma Brockes

      by

      In the aftermath of the 2016 election in the US, there was a hope among Democrats that rose to the level of conviction: the results were devastating, yes, but they were also surely anomalous. Donald Trump had won, it would be a lousy four years, then his celebrity would wear off, he would do a terrible job, and the argument of his awfulness would make itself. For the first time in history, people would soberly examine the evidence, come to their senses and, without need of a crushing military defeat, admit they’d been horribly wrong.Obviously that hasn’t happened. As the agonising creep towards a possible Joe Biden victory advances, the only certainty is that the “blue wave”, so anticipated on Tuesday night, hasn’t materialised. Not only have the Democrats failed to secure a resounding win, but in plenty of constituencies, support for Trump has actually increased. Early electoral data showed that in parts of Texas, for instance, while record numbers in the state voted – 6.6% more than in 2016 – in some rural communities, turnout for Trump more than doubled, and Biden lost counties won four years ago by Hillary Clinton. At the national level, whereas four years ago 35% of voters thought Trump had the temperament to govern well, exit polls this week indicated a rise in that figure to 44%.All of which, frankly, is staggering. Weeks of parsing and processing the data will follow, but in the first instance, the only possible response to all this is to scream: “My God, what is wrong with these people?” What has to happen, if alleged tax evasion, a rape accusation and the small matter of 234,000 dead Americans doesn’t tip them off that this guy is bad news? What can be said to be wrong with the people of Florida, 5.6 million of whom – just over half of those who voted in that state – voted for Trump? What’s in the water in rural Pennsylvania? After the election in 2016, there was a rush to understand and empathise with Trump’s supporters with a view to understanding exactly how this had happened. This time, there is only disgust.It isn’t purely emotional. (Although, three days after the election, it is still mostly emotional. A tweet put out by the Gap retail group this week featured a Gap sweater, half red and half blue, beneath the words “Together we can move forward”, inviting many spirited responses as to where precisely Gap and its sweater might be shoved.) But while it is dismal to feel such loathing towards large numbers of one’s countrymen, the deeper hit has been the dawning of what this election might mean. In 2016, Trump was a one-off, an aberration, a dumb novelty whose appeal would surely wane over time. You can’t say that any more. Trumpism – even to name it seems to give it a coherence it lacks – has taken seed, and if Biden wins, this election might still in some ways augur more doom than the last one.Meanwhile, the Trump machine rolls on. As with everything the man does, even at his worst he appears darkly comic. When, on Wednesday, Trump randomly declared victory in states where he had already lost, it had the mad, manic tone of Basil Fawlty denying the reality of a rat in his dining room. On cable news, there was the newly slimmed-down and full of beans Chris Christie, saying with relish that the Democrats would lose because black people didn’t vote. There were similar efforts by Republicans to set white Democrats against Hispanic voters, who on the earliest evidence marginally increased their support for the president.None of it made any sense beyond the knee-jerk Republican need to sow division. There may be small increases in the numbers of black and Hispanic voters for Trump, but those numbers are still dwarfed by support in what nobody calls the “white community”. In Florida in 2016, Trump won two out of 10 minority ethnic votes, a number that increased this week to three out of 10. But early polling data suggests that, as in 2016, Trump’s capture of the white vote held steady at six out of 10 – this in spite of practically every white person in power promising to “do the work”, stop being so racist, and log-jamming a bunch of books about antiracism on the bestseller list for most of the summer. So much for all that. On Wednesday, exit polls nationwide showed that while 55% of white women voted for Trump – up three percentage points from 2016 – some 58% of white men voted to re-elect the president. Men suck. White people suck. Everything sucks.So here we are, awaiting the final verdict, queasy with anxiety and mixed feelings. If, as looks increasingly likely (spit three times), Biden wins, we will celebrate, of course. There will be a huge collective sigh of relief. The country will start to correct and recover. But there remains a clenched sense that something has shifted, an argument has failed to be won, and that none of what has happened over the past four years is going away any time soon. More

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      in Elections

      Trump has not been repudiated – a Biden presidency would face obstruction at every level | Adam Tooze

      by

      Whatever else emerges from the US’s 2020 election, one thing is clear: it has not delivered a comprehensive repudiation of Donald Trump. The shock of 2016 has not been undone. There is nothing in the result to expiate the humiliation of the last four years, the disgraceful vulgarity and illegality. Even if Joe Biden is ultimately sworn in as president, the fact that Trump was not booed off the greatest stage in world politics in disgrace will be hard for Biden’s supporters to come to terms with. This is an inconvenient truth not for the US alone, it has implications for the rest of the world too.Rather than a rejection of Trump, the election results reshuffle the finely balanced and deeply polarised configuration that has prevailed in American politics since the days of Bill Clinton in the 1990s. As in 2016, Trump lost the overall vote, but he continues to command overwhelming majorities in small-town and rural white America. Despite his vituperative hostility towards immigrants, Trump made remarkable gains among the rather diverse group crudely lumped together under the label Latino. Confusingly, he did well not only with anti-socialist communities of Cubans and Venezuelans in Miami, but with Mexican-Americans in Texas too. And he continues to garner a majority of votes from white women and white men of all backgrounds.In the meantime no one, either inside or outside the country, should be under any illusion about the scale of the nationalist and xenophobic electoral bloc. The GOP has lurched into the territory of Viktor Orbán and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and, nevertheless, commands solid support. Indeed, for a sizeable minority of the electorate, it is precisely the stridency of Trump and the GOP that appeals. They love Trump’s aggression, and his gleeful slaughter of liberal sacred cows. Now he has modelled the style, there will be plenty of others who will want to follow.In a divided country, virtually every facet of reality is seen through a partisan lens. Not unreasonably, the Democrats tried to make the election into a referendum on Trump’s handling of the coronavirus crisis. But that did not prove to be a winning card. Almost half of Americans did not agree that Trump’s disastrous and irresponsible performance disqualified him from the presidency. This hardly bodes well for the effort to gain control of the disease, which would be the first task of a Biden administration.If there is no collective will to take preventive action, then everything continues to ride on a magic bullet: a vaccine. But even that will not guarantee success. Opinion polling suggests that no more than a bare majority will agree to be vaccinated, with Republican-leaning Americans particularly resistant. The implication is that the US will limp along, not effectively controlling the outbreak and going through repeated lockdowns. The impact on communities and small businesses is likely to be devastating.Even assuming the virus can be mastered, a Biden administration would face an uphill political battle. Its formidable foes are the GOP in Congress, led by Mitch McConnell, the sulphurous boss of the Senate Republicans. Ahead of the election, riding a wave of over-optimism about the likely result, Nancy Pelosi played a dangerous game. The House speaker held out for a gigantic second stimulus package in excess of $2tn, but no “blue wave” swept the Democrats to control of Congress. Now, with a diminished majority, Pelosi will have to return to the bargaining table to negotiate with McConnell. To the pleasure of Wall Street, he has announced that he is willing to make a deal, but this is an ominous sign. Any package that McConnell will agree to is more or less guaranteed not to meet the social crisis facing tens of millions of unemployed Americans, and struggling cities and states across the country. And yet, to save the economy from catastrophe, the Democrats may well be forced to accept McConnell’s terms.However necessary, any deal with McConnell should be regarded as a poison pill. Every item of Biden’s progressive agenda – health, childcare and education – would be on the block. The wider world would be pleased to see a Biden administration reverse Trump’s decision to exit the Paris climate agreement. But any talk of a Green New Deal would likely be cut off at the knees. The Republicans like to talk about infrastructure but in four years in office, Trump never delivered an investment programme. If Senate Republicans were won over to a Biden green energy plan, you can count on it being tailormade for the business lobby. There is no chance whatsoever that the Senate would grant Biden the formal ratification of the Paris agreement, a legal victory denied to Barack Obama as it was to Bill Clinton over the Kyoto protocol.This would leave the United States unable to credibly commit to carbon neutrality. The progress of technology and the falling cost of renewable energy may be the trump card, but a technical fix can only take you so far. Deep decarbonisation may in due course open the door to a new green growth model. But, in the medium term, it requires painful structural change that will have to be initiated from the top down.Any progress in the next four years would depend on administrative makeshift and painful compromise. The Obama administration delivered a masterclass in both the potential and the limits of that kind of governance. A Biden administration would no doubt benefit from this experience, but it would face what may be Trump’s most formidable legacy: a court system packed at every level with pro-business, anti-regulation judges. In a single term Trump managed to appoint a quarter of federal judges, who will be enacting his agenda for decades to come.Faced with obstruction in every direction, we should not be surprised if the de facto lead on economic policy continues to lie not with the elected executive branch, but with the Federal Reserve. The Fed chairman, Jay (Jerome) Powell, has been nothing if not accommodating. And, from the point of view of the rest of the world, Fed leadership may be no bad thing. Cheap dollars ease the pressure on the world economy. But there are distinct limits to what any central bank can do in responding to the economic shock caused by the virus. And there are seriously toxic side-effects of an endlessly expansionary monetary policy, notably in inflating speculative bubbles that benefit the fortunate minority who own shares.What the Fed cannot deliver is what the US desperately needs, a major upgrade in public services, starting with electoral machinery, childcare, healthcare and 21st-century infrastructure. Without that, the impasse of a divided American society and a dysfunctional politics will continue. That is the prospect that should most worry the rest of the world. Far from closing the book on the last four years, even if there is a change of incumbent in the White House, this election threatens to confirm and entrench the poisonous status quo. More

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      in Elections

      Is the show finally over for Donald Trump? | Judith Butler

      by

      There was never any question that Donald Trump would fail to make a gracious and swift exit. The only question for many of us was just how destructive he would become in the course of his downfall. I know “downfall” is usually reserved for kings and tyrants, but we are operating in that theatre, except here the king is at once the clown, and the man in power is also a child given over to tantrum with no discernible adults in the room.We know that Trump will try to do anything to stay in power, to avoid that ultimate catastrophe in life – becoming “a loser”. He has shown that he is willing to manipulate and destroy the electoral system if he has to. What is less clear is whether he can do what he threatens to do, or whether the “threat” is left hanging in the air as an impotent command. As a posture, the threat to stop or nullify the vote is a kind of spectacle, composed for his base’s consumption. Considered as a legal strategy, however, by a team of lawyers, even lawyers working for the government, it constitutes a serious danger to democracy. As so many times before in the Trump presidency, we are left to wonder whether he is bluffing, scheming, acting (putting on a show) or acting (doing real damage). It is one thing to posture as the kind of guy who would do untold damage to democracy to hang on to power; it is quite another to make that show into reality, initiating the lawsuits that would dismantle the electoral norms and laws that guarantee voting rights, striking at the very framework of US democracy.When we went to the polls, we were not voting for Joe Biden/Kamala Harris (centrists who disavowed the most progressive health and financial plans of both Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren) as much as we were voting for the possibility of voting at all, voting for the present and future institution of electoral democracy. Those of us outside of carceral institutions lived with a sense of enduring electoral laws as part of a constitutional framework that gave coordinates to our sense of politics. Many of those who had not suffered disenfranchisement before were not even aware of how their lives rested on a basic trust in the legal framework. But the idea of law as something that secures our rights and guides our action has been transformed into a field of litigation. There is no legal norm that cannot be litigated under Trump. A law is not there to be honored or followed, but as a potential site of litigation. Litigation becomes the ultimate field of law’s power, and all other kinds of law, even constitutional rights, are now reduced to negotiable items within that field.Although some fault Trump for bringing a business model to governing, setting no limits on what can be negotiated for his profit, it is important to see that many of his business deals culminate in legal proceedings (as of 2016, he has been engaged in more than 3,500 lawsuits). He goes to court to compel the conclusion he wants. When the basic laws supporting electoral politics are litigated, if every legal protection is proclaimed as fraudulent, as an instrument profiting those who oppose him, then no law is left to constrain the power of litigation to destroy democratic norms. When he calls for an end to counting votes (much like his call to end Covid testing), he seeks to keep a reality from materializing and to maintain control over what is perceived as true or false. The only reason the pandemic is bad in the US, he argues, is that there is testing which furnishes numerical results. If there were no way to know how bad it is, then apparently it would not be bad.In the early hours of 3 November, Trump called for an end to counting ballots in key states where he feared losing. If counting continues, Biden may well win. To circumvent that outcome, he wants to stop the count, even if citizens are deprived of their right to have their vote count. In the US, counting has always taken awhile: that is the accepted norm. So what’s the rush? If Trump were sure to win if the electoral count stops now, we could understand why he wants to stop it. But given that he does not have the electoral numbers, why would he stop it? If the lawsuit that stops the count is accompanied by a lawsuit that alleges fraud (without any known basis for doing so), then he can produce a distrust in the system, one that, if deep enough, will ultimately throw the decision to the courts, the courts he has packed, the ones that he imagines will put him in power. The courts, along with the vice-president, would then form a plutocratic power that would enact the destruction of electoral politics as we know it. The problem, however, is that those powers, even if they generally support him, will not necessarily destroy the constitution from loyalty.Some of us are shocked that he is willing to go this far, but this has been his mode of operating from the outset of his political career. We are still frightened to have seen the fragility of the laws that ground and orient us as a democracy. But what has always been distinctive of the Trump regime is that the executive power of the government has consistently attacked the laws of the country at the same that he claims to represent law and order. The only way that contradiction makes sense is if law and order are exclusively embodied by him. A peculiarly contemporary form of media-driven narcissism thus morphs into a lethal form of tyranny. The one who represents the legal regime assumes that he is the law, the one who makes and breaks the law as he pleases, and as a result he becomes a powerful criminal in the name of the law.There is a general logic of destruction that kicks in when the downfall of the tyrant seems nearly certainFascism and tyranny take many forms, as scholars have clarified, and I tend to disagree with those who claim that national socialism remains the model by which all other fascist forms should be identified. And though Trump is not Hitler, and electoral politics is not precisely military war (not yet civil war, at any rate), there is a general logic of destruction that kicks in when the downfall of the tyrant seems nearly certain. In March 1945, when both the allied forces and the Red Army had vanquished every Nazi defensive stronghold, Hitler resolved to destroy the nation itself, ordering a destruction of transportation and communication systems, industrial sites, and public utilities. If he was going down, so too was the nation. Hitler’s missive was called “Destructive Measures on Reich Territory” but it was remembered as the “Nero Decree”, invoking the Roman emperor who killed family and friends, punishing those perceived as disloyal, in his ruthless desire to hold onto power and punish those perceived as disloyal. As his supporters starts to flee, Nero took his own life. His allegedly last words: “what an artist dies in me!”Trump has been neither a Hitler nor a Nero, but he has been a very bad artist who has been rewarded by his supporters for his wretched performances. His appeal to nearly half of the country has depended upon cultivating a practice that licenses an exhilarated form of sadism freed from any shackles of moral shame or ethical obligation. This practice has not fully accomplished its perverse liberation. Not only has more than half of the country responded with revulsion or rejection, but the shameless spectacle has all along depended on a lurid picture of the left: moralistic, punitive and judgmental, repressive and ready to deprive the general populace of every ordinary pleasure and freedom. In that way, shame occupied a permanent and necessary place in the Trumpian scenario insofar as it was externalized and lodged in the left: the left seek to shame you for your guns, your racism, your sexual assault, your xenophobia! The excited fantasy of his supporters was that, with Trump, shame could be overcome, and there would be a “freedom” from the left and its punitive restrictions on speech and conduct, a permission finally to destroy environmental regulations, international accords, spew racist bile and openly affirm persistent forms of misogyny. As Trump campaigned to crowds excited by racist violence, he also promised them protection from the threat of a communist regime (Biden?) that would redistribute their income, take away their meat, and eventually install a “monstrous” and radical Black woman as president (Harris?).The waning president, however, declares that he has won, but everyone knows he has not, at least not yet. Even Fox does not accept his claim, and even Pence says every vote is to be counted. The tyrant spiraling down calls for an end to testing, to counting, to science and even to electoral law, to all those inconvenient methods of verifying what is and is not true in order to spin his truth one more time. If he has to lose, he will try to take democracy down with him.But when the president declares himself the winner and there is general laughter and even his friends call him a cab, then he is finally alone with his hallucinations of himself as a powerful destroyer. He can litigate as much as he wants, but if the lawyers scatter, and the courts, weary, no longer listen, he will find himself ruling only the island called Trump as a mere show of reality. We may finally have the chance to let Trump become a passing spectacle of a president who, in seeking to destroy the laws that support democracy, became its greatest threat, opening the way for some rest from what has seemed an interminable exhaustion. Bring it on, Sleepy Joe!Judith Butler is Maxine Elliot professor in the department of comparative literature and the program of critical theory at the University of California, Berkeley. Her latest book is The Force of Nonviolence (Verso) More

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      in US Politics

      'Every vote counts': peaceful protests spread as election goes down to wire – video

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      ‘Count the vote’ demonstrators gathered in cities across the US after Donald Trump falsely claimed victory in the presidential election and sued to halt vote-counting in crucial battleground states. Demonstrations took place from Philadelphia to Los Angeles, with some ending in clashes with police. Meanwhile, Trump supporters attempted to halt ballot-counting in Michigan as Joe Biden looked set to overtake Trump in the state vote
      US election 2020 live: Biden wins Michigan in vital step towards presidency as Trump tries to challenge results
      US election 2020 live results: Donald Trump takes on Joe Biden in tight presidential race More

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      in Elections

      US election 2020: Joe Biden holds lead over Donald Trump in tense wait for results – live

      by

      Key events

      Show

      6.38am EST06:38
      US recorded record 102,831 new coronavirus cases yesterday

      Live feed

      Show

      10.21am EST10:21

      Donald Trump is again tweeting in all caps, making false claims about the remaining ballots left to be counted.
      “ANY VOTE THAT CAME IN AFTER ELECTION DAY WILL NOT BE COUNTED!” Trump said.

      Donald J. Trump
      (@realDonaldTrump)
      ANY VOTE THAT CAME IN AFTER ELECTION DAY WILL NOT BE COUNTED!

      November 5, 2020

      In reality, a number of states, including Pennsylvania, allow ballots to arrive for days after election day as long as the ballots are postmarked by election day.
      It’s also worth noting that it often takes longer for ballots to arrive from service members who are deployed overseas. It’s unclear whether the president thinks those Americans’ ballots should be thrown out.

      10.05am EST10:05

      If both of Georgia’s Senate races advance to runoffs, Democrats could take the Senate majority by winning both races and the White House.
      It would be a heavy lift for Democrats to win both Senate races in the traditionally conservative state, as the extremely close presidential race in Georgia demonstrates, and Republicans are still very likely to maintain control of the Senate.
      But Republicans’ chances of success in Georgia may be tied to whether Donald Trump would still campaign for their candidates if he becomes a lame-duck president, as an Atlantic writer noted.

      Edward-Isaac Dovere
      (@IsaacDovere)
      If Biden wins and control of the Senate comes down to those two Georgia seats, GOP hopes of winning them/the majority will likely hinge on whether a defeated Trump would invest himself into turning out his voters in races where he’s not on the ballot and wins won’t benefit him

      November 5, 2020

      9.56am EST09:56

      Democratic Senate candidate Raphael Warnock has released his first ad for the January runoff election in Georgia.
      The ad features Warnock subjecting himself to the potential attacks that might come from his Republican opponent, Senator Kelly Loeffler.
      “Raphael Warnock eats pizza with a fork and knife,” the narrator’s ad says in a menacing voice. “Raphael Warnock once stepped on a crack in the sidewalk.”

      Reverend Raphael Warnock
      (@ReverendWarnock)
      Get ready Georgia. The negative ads against us are coming.But that won’t stop us from fighting for a better future for Georgians and focusing on the issues that matter. pic.twitter.com/VN0YIA02MG

      November 5, 2020

      The ad then pivots to Warnock saying, “Get ready, Georgia. The negative ads against us are coming. Kelly Loeffler doesn’t want to talk about why she’s for getting rid of healthcare in the middle of a pandemic, so she’s going to try and scare you with lies about me.”
      Warnock and Loeffler advanced to the January runoff after no candidate in the special Senate election managed to attract 50% of the vote.
      The other Senate race in Georgia, between Republican incumbent David Perdue and Democrat Jon Ossoff, is likely headed to a runoff as well, as it looks like Perdue’s numbers could slip below 50% with the final batch of Georgia ballots.

      9.42am EST09:42

      There are about 61,000 outstanding votes in Georgia, most of them from Democratic-leaning counties, according to the Washington Post.

      Amy Gardner
      (@AmyEGardner)
      UPDATE: 61k votes are outstanding in Georgia. 17,157 from Chatham; 11,200 from Fulton; 7,338 from Gwinnett; 4,713 from Forsyth; 3,641 from Harris; 1,797 from Laurens; 1,552 from Putnam; 1,202 from Sumter; 700 from Cobb. FEAST

      November 5, 2020

      Donald Trump currently leads by about 18,000 votes in the state, and the mail-in ballots that are being counted have favored Joe Biden. It’s expected to be an extremely close final result.

      9.28am EST09:28

      This is Joan Greve in Washington, taking over for Martin Belam, and we still don’t have a winner in the US presidential election.
      Donald Trump is reacting to the state of play in his now-standard manner: by demanding election officials stop counting valid ballots.
      “STOP THE COUNT!” the president said in a new tweet.

      Donald J. Trump
      (@realDonaldTrump)
      STOP THE COUNT!

      November 5, 2020

      Election officials have pledged to count every valid vote cast by election day, and many of them have defended the integrity of the counts in their states.
      It’s also worth noting that, if counting were stopped now, Biden would win the presidency because he is ahead in Nevada, which would get him to the 270 electoral votes needed to win the White House.

      8.58am EST08:58

      Look, you know and I know that as soon as enough races have been called that Biden has 270 Electoral College votes, it is still not going to be the end of this.
      Wisconsin, provided Trump is within 1% of Biden, will get recounted for sure. And there are the legal challenges. Reuters have just put together this handy outline of a few of the key ones:
      Michigan ballot-counting fightTrump’s campaign said on Wednesday it had filed a lawsuit in Michigan to stop state officials from counting ballots. The campaign said the case in the Michigan Court of Claims seeks to halt counting until it has an election inspector at each absentee-voter counting board. The campaign also wanted to review ballots that were opened and counted before an inspector from its campaign was present.
      Pennsylvania court battlesRepublican officials on Tuesday sued election officials in Montgomery County, which borders Philadelphia, accusing them of illegally counting mail-in ballots early and giving voters who submitted defective ballots a chance to re-vote. At a hearing on Wednesday, US District Judge Timothy Savage in Philadelphia appeared skeptical of their allegations and how the integrity of the election might be affected.
      In a separate lawsuit, the Trump campaign asked a judge to halt ballot counting in Pennsylvania, claiming that Republicans had been unlawfully denied access to observe the process.
      Meanwhile, Republicans in Pennsylvania have asked the US Supreme Court to review a decision from the state’s highest court that allowed election officials to count mail-in ballots postmarked by Election Day that arrived through until Friday 6 November. On Wednesday, Trump’s campaign filed a motion to intervene in the case.
      Supreme court justices said last week there was not enough time to decide the merits of the case before Election Day but indicated they might revisit it afterwards. As a result, Pennsylvania election officials said they will segregate properly postmarked ballots that arrived after Election Day, which opens the possibility the court could subsequently strike them out.
      US Postal Service litigationA judge on Wednesday said Postmaster General Louis DeJoy must answer questions about why the USPS failed to complete a court-ordered sweep for undelivered ballots in about a dozen states before a Tuesday afternoon deadline. US District Judge Emmet Sullivan is overseeing a lawsuit by Vote Forward, the NAACP, and Latino community advocates who have been demanding the postal service deliver mail-in ballots in time to be counted in the election.
      Georgia ballot fightThe Trump campaign on Wednesday evening filed a lawsuit in state court in Chatham County, Georgia. Unlike the Pennsylvania and Michigan actions, that lawsuit is not asking a judge to halt ballot counting. Instead, the campaign said it received information that late-arriving ballots were improperly mingled with valid ballots, and asked a judge to enter an order making sure late-arriving ballots were separated so they would not be counted.
      After the announcement just now that there will be a press conference in Nevada this morning featuring the Republican chair of the state and attorneys, presumably we’ll be able to add Nevada to that list soon.

      8.47am EST08:47

      This could be intriguing. 8:30am PST is 4:30pm this afternoon if, like me, you are in London.

      Andrew Feinberg
      (@AndrewFeinberg)
      INBOX: @TeamTrump will make a “major announcement” in Las Vegas this morning, headlined by 2000 Brooks Brothers Riot participant ⁦@mschlapp⁩, ex-Acting DNI Ric Grenell, Nevada GOP Chair Michael McDonald, and ex-NV AG Adam Laxalt. pic.twitter.com/OCGjmnOKRz

      November 5, 2020

      Nevada still has around 25% of its votes to count, which is approaching 400,000. Joe Biden has a narrow lead of about 7,500 at the moment. Under state law, ballots can still be accepted so long as they were postmarked by Election Day up until 10 November.
      Trump narrowly lost Nevada in 2016 as the state has trended toward the Democrats in the past decade. The last Republican to win the state was George W. Bush in 2004.
      The tweet mentions Matt Schlapp as a Brooks Brothers Riot participant. For those of us without total recall of US elections from twenty years ago, my colleague Adam Gabbatt reminded us what the Brooks Brothers Riot was recently:

      In late November 2000, hundreds of mostly middle-aged male protesters, dressed in off-the-peg suits and cautious ties, descended on the Miami-Dade polling headquarters in Florida. Shouting, jostling, and punching, they demanded that a recount of ballots for the presidential election be stopped.
      The protesters, many of whom were paid Republican operatives, succeeded. The counting of disputed ballots in Florida was abandoned. What became known as the Brooks Brothers riot went down in infamy, and George W Bush became president after a supreme court decision.

      Updated
      at 9.23am EST

      8.39am EST08:39

      A very simple message coming out from the Biden campaign this morning: Count every vote.

      Joe Biden
      (@JoeBiden)
      Every vote must be counted. pic.twitter.com/kWLGRfeePK

      November 5, 2020

      8.29am EST08:29

      These two charts sum up exactly why in one state Trump supporters were protesting to keep the count going, and in another state the Trump campaign has been taking legal action to try and shut the counting down.

      Sophy Ridge
      (@SophyRidgeSky)
      Here’s the changing situation in Arizona & Pennsylvania – things are narrowing in opposite directions. It could really go to the wire pic.twitter.com/OdWpR2OvvR

      November 5, 2020

      Pennsylvania’s Gov. Tom Wolf, by the way, was quite clear yesterday on the state’s determination to count every vote, saying:

      Pennsylvania is going to count every vote and make sure that everyone has their voice heard. Pennsylvania is going to fight every single attempt to disenfranchise voters and continue to administer a free and fair election.

      8.07am EST08:07

      I suspect it is the experience of watching Donald Trump grind out the last few Electoral College votes to win in 2016 that is making some people still lack confidence that Biden will actually win.
      However, as well as Jennifer Rubin being convinced, Giovanni Russonello writes this for the New York Times politics newsletter this morning. Note, that unlike Fox News and the Associated Press (and us), NYT have not yet put Arizona into Biden’s column. But he writes:

      Joe Biden has now won 253 electoral votes and has multiple routes to the White House, with five swing states still undecided and uncounted votes in several likely to favor him. While Trump has not indicated that he has any plans to concede, and his campaign insists he could still prevail, at this point a path to victory would most likely run through the courts. It’s a hard road ahead for him.

      He does point out though that capturing the presidency won’t take away all the question marks about the Democratic performance at this election.

      If Democrats end up declaring a victory over all, it will be a beleaguered one. Not only did Trump outperform their expectations in the battlegrounds, but Democratic candidates for both the House and the Senate also lost races — some in states that split their tickets and favored Biden for president — that the party had been fairly confident about. More

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      in US Politics

      Fight to Vote: what election experts warned about versus what really happened

      by

      [embedded content]
      Good morning Fight to Vote readers,
      By now many of you have already stared endlessly at election maps like me, hitting refresh every few minutes to find out if Nevada counted more ballots, or if the gap in Pennsylvania is narrowing more, as you also glance at your TV screen. But if you’ve opened this newsletter, I’m going to assume that you’re hungry for more answers.
      Today I’m thinking a lot about the warnings we’ve gotten for the past few months, and what has played out in reality so far. Were we right to wave red flags about the democratic process and voter suppression? Was 2020 really that bad if a record number of Americans turned out to vote?
      Here are some of the scenarios election experts warned about, and what has actually happened:
      Scenario 1: there wouldn’t be a clear winner on election night
      True to form, there was no victor on Tuesday night, or on Thursday morning, with millions of ballots still left to count in key states like Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Nevada and Georgia
      Scenario 2: Trump would declare himself a winner before the votes were all counted
      The president indeed attempted to claim victory both on Twitter and in a speech early Wednesday morning, while simultaneously calling any votes counted after election day corrupted. Twitter flagged his tweet immediately, labeling it misleading, and Wednesday and Thursday showed a much different scenario on the electoral map.
      Scenario 3: election offices would be understaffed, underfunded and incapable of carrying out their jobs
      With record turnout and mail-in ballots, election officials were under immense pressure after the polls closed on Tuesday evening. But despite only receiving a fraction of the necessary funding from Congress, there have not been reports of significant lapses or problems in their counts.
      Scenario 4: lawsuits would abound over every vote
      Partisan lawsuits were going strong until election day, with Republicans attempting to discount ballots in Texas drive-thru drop-offs, and local electors in Pennsylvania claiming certain counties were giving their voters an unfair chance to correct ballots. This has only continued: the Trump campaign sued in Michigan and Georgia, setting the stage to contest election results. The lawsuits are demanding, among other things, that campaign observers have better access to locations where ballot are being counted and raised questions over mail-in ballots. On Wednesday, Trump also said he would contest election results in the supreme court.
      It is normal for there to be legal battles after a US election, but this year’s challenges seem to be on track to be lengthier and uglier than most.
      Scenario 5: thousands, maybe millions of people would be disenfranchised by last-minute restrictions, deadlines or ballot rejections
      On Wednesday morning, a new flood of United States Postal Service data had experts concerned that thousands of ballots could have been delayed and left uncounted in states with strict counting deadlines. In states like North Carolina and Georgia, thousands of mail-in ballots had been rejected for voter errors. In Texas, some students reported having their voter registration bungled last minute and casting provisional ballots instead. We won’t know the scale of how Republican voting restrictions and procedural problems impacted voters, but there are likely a significant number of votes threatened.
      Scenario 6: there would be mass chaos on the street and at polling stations on election day or in the days after
      Election day went relatively smoothly, and voter intimidation issues, though apparent, were not widespread. As we await results, demonstrations have cropped up across the US from both camps. About 150 Trump supporters – some of them armed and with gas masks – showed up at an election center in Phoenix, Arizona, on Wednesday to protest the fact that some media organizations (including the Guardian) have called the state for Biden before all the votes are counted. Similar clusters have cropped up in cities like Detroit, Michigan, where the president has lost.
      Meanwhile, anti-Trump protesters are also marching across the country, including in Minneapolis, where this summer’s George Floyd uprising started. Many are demanding that Trump accept election results, since the president has launched several legal challenges to recount or stop counting votes.
      We’ll continue to report on the key takeaways from the election, and the impact it has had on voting access in the days to come.
      Beyond the presidential
      While most people had their eyes on the White House seat, there were several significant smaller races that will impact the US electoral map for the next 10 years, as David Daley wrote in the Guardian yesterday.
      Here in the US, the maps that determine state and legislative and congressional maps are first apportioned according to a census count that happens every decade, and then finalized according to state rules. Some states appoint independent commissions for the job, but most allow state legislators to draw district lines. This can enable gerrymandering, which allows Republicans to manipulate maps for massive partisan gain in 2010. Through gerrymandering, politicians can dilute communities’ political power by splitting them up, or carving up districts to isolate the voters they want.
      What happened this year?
      Though Democrats poured millions into down-ballot races, Republicans ultimately pulled through in the key states of Texas, North Carolina, Florida, Ohio and Kansas. This gives them a huge advantage when it comes to redrawing new state legislative and congressional maps next year.
      And there’s real-world impact at stake: these wins could propel conservative legislation on voting rights, healthcare, reproductive rights, education funding and much more.
      What now?
      If you’re still looking for ways to get involved, there are still trainings happening for people who want to help voters “cure” or fix ballots that were rejected for technical errors, like missing signatures. States have different deadlines by which voters can cure their ballots.
      Otherwise, can remain patient, and rested while the results are confirmed. May I recommend the Atlantic’s election anxiety playlist? More

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      in Elections

      Even if Biden wins, the world will pay the price for the Democrats' failures | Owen Jones

      by

      How could the electoral circumstances for the US Democrats have been more favourable? A quarter of a million Americans have died in a pandemic bungled by the incumbent president, and at least 6 million have consequently been driven into poverty. The coronavirus crisis is the devastating climax of a presidency defined by hundreds of scandals, many of which alone, in normal circumstances, could have destroyed the political career of whoever occupied the White House.Despite having the active support of almost the entire US press, Joe Biden’s victory looks to be far narrower than predicted. During the Democratic primaries, Biden’s cheerleaders argued that his socialist challenger Bernie Sanders would repel Florida’s voters, and yet Donald Trump has triumphed in the sunshine state. They argued that his “unelectable” rival would risk the Senate and down-ballot races, yet the Republicans may retain control of the Senate, and Democrats are haemorrhaging seats in the House of Representatives.Without coronavirus, Trump would have undoubtedly secured another term and potentially dismantled an already flawed US democracy for a generation or more. This should have been a landslide, and now the world will pay the cost for the self-inflicted wounds of the Democratic establishment. Trump may be defeated; Trumpism lives on.While attention should now focus on resisting attempts by Trump and his allies to steal the election, the Democratic establishment must also understand why this entirely avoidable farce came to pass. As their phones lit up four years ago with notifications that he had become the 45th president of the American republic, Trump was, to self-styled Democratic “moderates”, a sudden hurricane that materialised under clear blue skies: an aberration; a glitch; a perverse accident to be undone so normality and civility could be restored.Many Democrats comforted themselves with the notion they had nothing to answer for: they had simply been cheated, Russia was to blame, and Hillary Clinton – whose hubristic campaign had initially wanted Trump as its preferred Republican nominee – had been tragically wronged. Rather than offering an inspiring alternative, Biden would bask in the reflected glory of Barack Obama, present himself as the “grownup” in the room, and focus on flipping erstwhile Trump voters on the grounds of competence alone. Striking, then, that not only did Trump win more votes than 2016, but 93% of Republicans opted for him this time around, up three points from that fateful election.Ample criticisms can be made of Biden’s candidacy, which limited its political horizons in deference to the Democrats’ corporate client base, when even Fox News exit polls showed that most Americans favoured a government-run healthcare plan. Democrats have taken Latino and black Americans for granted, an oversight that Trump ably exploited, winning (albeit from low numbers) increased support among both groups. But the roots of this failure go back decades. The Democratic establishment has long refused to embrace even the basic tenets of social democracy – not least taxing the better-off to fund programmes such as a comprehensive welfare state and universal healthcare.The political consequences of this failure have been devastating. In the 1960s, the Democratic president Lyndon B Johnson launched a series of “great society” programmes to tackle poverty. Yet while the tax burden of the average American family nearly doubled between the mid-1950s and 1980, taxes on corporate America have been successively slashed. Here was a resentment to be tapped into: that hard-working Americans, rather than the boss class, were subsidising those demonised as the “undeserving” poor.This fury became racialised as the struggle of black Americans – which was met with harsh white backlash – forced the federal government to introduce basic civil rights. When Ronald Reagan furiously denounced “welfare queens”, many blue-collar workers heard a dog whistle targeting often single black mothers, who their hard-earned tax dollars were supposedly subsidising. When Bill Clinton’s administration backed trade agreements that devastated industrial jobs in the rust belt, here was another grievance waiting to be mined. And it was, by the most unlikely figurehead, the former host of the Apprentice. Trumpism has exploited racism, and fury at economic grievances, successfully welding both forces together.In the aftermath of the financial crash, Obama’s presidential campaign appeared to offer a break with the failures of successive Republican and Democratic administrations. But while he rescued the banks and let financial executives off the hook for their role in the 2008 crash, wages for millions of Americans stagnated or declined. While the slice of national income belonging to middle Americans fell from 62% to 43% between 1970 and 2018, the number of billionaires has surged: from 66 in 1990 with a combined wealth of $240bn, to 614 today, with a total fortune of nearly $3tn. America is now a society in which one in every 11 black adult is either in prison, or on parole or probation – racial injustices that Black Lives Matter has urgently underlined.The Democratic establishment has proved itself politically bankrupt and unable to meet these challenges. The party lost against Trump in 2016, and has at best scraped a stillborn administration this time around. We will all pick up the tab for this failure. Although Biden committed to signing the world’s biggest polluter back up to the Paris climate accords, a failure to win the Senate will block a Green New Deal that is desperately needed to tackle the existential threat of the climate emergency. The world cannot afford another four years of inaction. With Biden’s likely presidency held hostage by a potentially hostile Senate and supreme court, the Republicans will be able to further gerrymander an already fatally compromised democratic system and, come mid-terms, tap into people’s disillusionment with an inevitably do-nothing government.That does not mean there is no hope. The so-called Squad of progressive Congressional Democrats – whose most famous member is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez – has doubled in number, including the election of former nurse Cori Bush in Missouri and the first queer black Congressman, Mondaire Jones, in New York. The old Democratic establishment has failed to inflict the final reckoning on Trumpism that is deserved. It falls to this new generation of progressive leaders – predominantly working-class people of colour – to finish the job, not just for the United States, but for all of us.Join Guardian journalist Owen Jones, Labour MP Dawn Butler and academic Maya Goodfellow as they discuss the hostile environment and attitudes towards immigration in Britain. Tuesday 24 November, 7pm GMT Book tickets here More