Joe Biden

Subterms

    More stories

    • 163 Shares129 Views

      in US Politics

      Biden advances in key states as Trump seeks to challenge results in court

      by

      Joe Biden took significant strides towards winning the presidency on Wednesday but the Trump campaign vowed to reverse them at the vote count and in the courts, ushering in a potentially prolonged and messy endgame to the election.
      Biden was called the winner in the critical battleground of Wisconsin, and was ahead in Arizona, Michigan and Nevada, while Trump held leads in Pennsylvania, Georgia and North Carolina.
      If the current standings are sustained, it would take Biden over the 270 votes in the electoral college needed to clinch victory, even without the deadlocked state of Pennsylvania, where a million ballots were yet to be counted by Wednesday afternoon.
      Unleashing a long-planned legal campaign, the Trump campaign demanded a recount in Wisconsin and called for the count in Michigan to be halted, on the grounds that its representatives did not have “meaningful access”.
      Starting with a television statement after 2am, Trump repeatedly and falsely claimed that the routine counting of ballots after election day was somehow fraudulent. In practice Trump campaign officials were on Wednesday supporting continued vote counts where the president was behind and vigorously opposing them where he was ahead.
      On Wednesday afternoon, Trump staged a rally of his supporters outside a convention centre in Philadelphia where votes were being counted, echoing Republican tactics to stop the recount in Florida 2000, which helped win the election for George W Bush.
      The 2000 election was finally decided by the US supreme court, and on Wednesday afternoon, the Trump campaign also asked the supreme court to rule on its objections to an extended vote count in Pennsylvania.
      The Biden camp has assembled its own legal teams at the chief electoral flashpoints, and launched a “fight fund” to finance the effort.
      Meanwhile the US Postal Service was criticised by a judge for failing to carry out a sweep of its sorting offices for postal votes that had not yet been delivered to polling stations, amid claims that thousands of ballots were stranded at sorting offices.
      As the legal manoeuvring gathered momentum, it was clear the fate of the US presidency was likely to be determined by a few thousand votes in a handful of states, and possibly the decision of an array of judges.
      It was also evident the nation had not delivered the decisive “blue sweep” repudiation of Trumpism Democrats had hoped for, nor did it look likely the election would give them control of the Senate.
      Even before the counting was finished, Biden had won more votes than any president in history – over 70 million – edging out Barack Obama’s 2008 record and about 2.5 million ahead of Trump, once again highlighting the disparity between the popular vote and the arithmetic of the US electoral college system.
      . More

    • 188 Shares159 Views

      in US Politics

      The pollsters were wrong – again. Here's what we know so far | Mona Chalabi

      by

      On any given day, my role is to write. On this particular day, I am supposed to write about what 240 million people decided – whether they stood in line or stuck down an envelope and which box they checked on a piece of paper.But at this particular moment, I have nothing to write. I am watching people talk loudly on a television screen and reading people type in ALL CAPS on Twitter and I am thinking about the importance of not writing.Journalists, supposedly chastened by a 2016 Trump win that they did not see coming, were going to be very cautious this time around. No more flailing New York Times needle. No more decimal places on FiveThirtyEight’s homepage – instead, a cartoon fox in glasses explaining to you what voters might do. And yet countless articles were still written over the past few months predicting that a Biden win was more likely than a Trump win, and so a lot of people are shouting online and offline because they have been caught by surprise. Because yet again, somehow, they trusted the polls.Maybe we will still see a President Biden. I understand you are here looking for factual certainties instead of “maybes” and I can’t give you those right now at a presidential level. Here is what I can say:1. The polls were probably inaccurate. Again.When I say “polls” here, I’m not talking about the actual process of voting in an election, I am referring to very expensive surveys that ask about a thousand US adults who they will vote for (although it’s confusing that these both have the same name).Overall, most polls gave Biden a lead nationally. A significant lead of 5 to 10 percentage points appeared as soon as the surveys started and persisted right up until election day. Pollsters claimed that they had learned the lessons from their 2016 mistakes. In fact, Biden was so far out in front, according to the pollsters’ questionnaires with strangers, that even if they were as wrong in 2020 as they were four years ago, Biden would still probably win comfortably.It’s possible, however, that they were actually more wrong this time around – either because they found it even harder to track down and speak to 1,000 adults who accurately represented 240 million voters, or because Trump voters were even more reluctant this time to tell a stranger their preferred candidate. Or both.As of around 11.30am EST on Wednesday, it looks like if Biden does win, it will not be by a large margin. Unfortunately, it is going to take a very long time to count all of the votes. Four key battleground states – Pennsylvania, Nevada, Michigan and Georgia – still have tens of thousands of absentee ballots uncounted. Election workers might need days, not hours, to get to a final tally.2. The electoral college is still broken.In US presidential elections, there are two kinds of “wins”: by popular vote and by the electoral college. Only the latter means you become president. The two do not necessarily go hand in hand. In 2000 and 2016, Democratic candidates who won the popular vote still did not go to the White House. It is quite possible that Biden will win the popular vote and lose the electoral college.Currently, it looks like Biden will win the popular vote, and he still has some hope of winning the electoral college, too. Most of the votes left to be counted are absentee or mail-in ballots. We know that those ballots are more likely to be Democrat than Republican. Early voting has long skewed Democrat, but this time there is also a pandemic that is more likely to make Democrats choose to vote by mail over voting in person, compared to Republicans. (Republicans are more likely to have consumed media that has downplayed or flat-out denied Covid-19.)Take Pennsylvania, for instance, where, at time of writing, 84% of votes have been counted and Biden is losing by more than 300,000 ballots. There are almost 1.1m ballots left to count and Biden is winning three mail-in ballots for every one that goes to Trump. A little simple arithmetic (winning approximately 75% of 1.1 million votes = 825,000) indicates that Biden might comfortably win, once the votes are fully counted.3. Some women voted for Biden. Some women did not.Initially, this article was supposed to analyze the demographics of support for each candidate so let me try to at least throw my editor a bone.As much as I am thoroughly skeptical of polling, exit polls are slightly more accurate – they interview far more people (this Edison survey spoke to 14,318 adults, whereas most polls speak to around 1,000) and they speak to people who have already voted rather than asking people days, sometimes weeks, ahead of time who they maybe plan to maybe vote for.The exit polls suggest that whereas men were pretty evenly split (49% Biden, 48% Trump), women as a group tended to favor Biden (57% Biden, 42% Trump). But, in case you haven’t noticed, women are a pretty big old group. Demographics cannot be divided into neat slices of the pie – Americans can be rich and Black and male and living in a suburb and college-educated and each of those factors can influence someone’s vote differently.Despite the fact that Trump described Mexican immigrants as “bad hombres” and “rapists” during his 2016 campaign, Hispanic voters in Florida still showed up for Trump because many Cubans appreciated his anti-communist stance. So I’m not placing much faith in these numbers either. People do not vote in tidy groups.So I do not have much to write. Except to resurface the article I wrote on 9 November 2016, and make the same plea: avoid predicting the behavior of 240 million people, avoid reading those predictions, avoid complacency.Journalists will continue to create charts predicting future presidents as long as readers continue to demand them. I do not know how many times polls have to be wrong or how wrong they have to be for us to finally walk away from the dangerous seduction of predicting political outcomes. Seeing graphics that tell us the future is hypnotic, but it is very important to be awake. Especially now. More

    • 163 Shares109 Views

      in US Politics

      Trump calls foul play as Biden takes Wisconsin: Politics Weekly Extra – podcast

      by

      As we wait for the final few votes from battleground states, Jonathan Freedland and David Smith run through the latest results from the 2020 US presidential election

      How to listen to podcasts: everything you need to know

      The blue wave never made it to shore, but the pathway for a Joe Biden win looks slightly clearer than that for Donald Trump. So what do we know and what should we preparing for over the next few days? Let us know what you think of the podcast. Send your feedback to podcasts@theguardian.com Help support the Guardian by going to gu.com/supportpodcasts More

    • 150 Shares189 Views

      in US Politics

      Paths to US election victory: what Trump and Biden need to win

      by

      Paths to victory remain in the US presidential race for both Donald Trump and Joe Biden, but Biden has more ways to win and appears to be running stronger state to state, based on the places – cities, mainly – where large absentee votes have yet to be counted.
      Biden leads the electoral tally 248-214 after he was declared the winner in Wisconsin on Wednesday and Trump gained one vote in Maine. Adding Alaska for Trump – which had not been called but where the result is not in doubt – gives the president 217.

      From there, five states remained to be called as Wednesday evening approached in the US: Nevada, North Carolina, Georgia, Michigan and Pennsylvania.
      Trump’s paths
      The simplest way for Trump to find the 53 electoral votes he needs would be to win Pennsylvania and at least three other states. If he does not win Pennsylvania, Trump must make a clean sweep of all four remaining states to get to 270.
      But a huge Democratic vote share remained to be tallied in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, meaning Trump could have difficulty hanging on to a narrow lead gained elsewhere in the state. In Michigan, Trump appeared to be in even deeper trouble, because the outstanding vote was expected to be heavily Democratic.
      Trump’s path (Wisconsin update)
      Biden’s paths
      Biden had many paths to find his remaining 22 electoral votes. His most likely path lay through the Great Lakes states, where Pennsylvania and Michigan combined would net 36 votes.
      Without Pennsylvania, Biden could win by winning Michigan and Nevada, where he held a clear but narrow lead. A Biden victory in either of the two reddest states in the mix – Georgia or North Carolina – would almost certainly foretell wins elsewhere and a Biden victory.
      Biden’s path (Wisconsin update) More

    • 163 Shares109 Views

      in US Politics

      The Guardian view on the US elections: a nation dangerously divided | Editorial

      by

      Whoever wins this year’s election, America remains a country bitterly and evenly divided. It has been more than three decades since the last presidential landslide. Despite polls suggesting that Donald Trump was poised to suffer a sweeping rejection by the voters, there was no repudiation of the president. Rather, just a fraction of the popular vote separates Joe Biden and Mr Trump.
      Our view was that Mr Trump deserved to lose and in a big way. His mismanagement of the coronavirus crisis, which cost hundreds of thousands of American lives, was cause enough. But there were numerous reasons for Mr Trump’s ejection from the White House, given he ran the worst administration in modern US history.
      It is small comfort that Americans understood the threat that Mr Trump represented and turned out in record numbers to vote against him. Yet, as this election depressingly revealed, there was an almost equal and opposite reaction from Mr Trump’s base. The president’s appeal, it seems, has only widened and deepened since he took office. Mr Trump received so many more votes than he did in 2016 that his tally is only surpassed by Mr Biden this year, and Barack Obama in 2008.
      Should he depart, and there are few signs he will do so without a fight, Mr Trump’s legacy will be the politics of anger and hate. It is a tragedy for America that a poisonous division is becoming the norm rather than the exception. The concern in the US is that cultural divisions have gone past the point of no return. The priority for Americans must be to work out a way to stop the political rift from yawning so wide that the two hostile, sometimes armed, camps are incapable of talking to each other.
      The national conversation will not be easy to start, especially given the venomous way in which President Trump conducts politics. If there was any idea that the country could pick up after the election where it left off in 2016, it vanished the moment Mr Trump declared a victory he obviously had not yet won. His claim that his legal team would attempt to block states from counting all the votes that have already been cast, ballots which are widely viewed as certain to skew Democratic, was as outrageous as it was expected.
      Republicans have embraced their inner Trump, which is why democracy itself was on the ballot in 2020. Under Republican control, the US Congress, for the first two years of Trump’s presidency, did not check Mr Trump’s assault on the norms of democratic governance as much as enable it. The Grand Old Party has increasingly turned to policies designed to constrain the majority electorate. Faced with unfavourable demographic change, Republicans have cemented minority rule across American political institutions. The question that Mr Trump now poses is whether Republicans would go as far in their pursuit of power to undo a presidential election.
      The president may be counting on Republicans to subvert longstanding election norms or hope that the supreme court, to which he appointed three justices, will make the final call. If permitted, the ensuing constitutional crisis would dwarf Trumpism’s outrages. It would also play out against a background of heightened political mobilisation, which would bring with it the threat of civic strife.
      There is a real worry that the two main US parties appear locked in a dangerous and ferocious power struggle for control of the government. Mr Trump’s divisive politics have seen elections become a source of volatility in the world’s leading democracy. The margin of control of the Senate is so narrow that it would be foolish to predict who may end up in charge. Democrats retain their hold on the House of Representatives, but with a looser grip than before. This is a zero-sum game, where one party’s loss is another’s gain. Government in America, and its people, will be the losers. More

    • 113 Shares199 Views

      in Elections

      Democrats fail to persuade swaths of rural America's heartlands

      by

      America’s rural heartland stuck firmly with Donald Trump on Tuesday, dashing Joe Biden’s hope of a decisive victory that would have allowed him to claim he had reunited the country, as well as undercutting Democratic expectations of winning the US Senate.
      Results across the midwest showed the US still firmly divided as Trump again won a solid victory in Iowa, a state that twice voted for Barack Obama, and the Republicans held on to crucial Senate seats targeted by the Democrats.
      Iowa’s Republican governor, Kim Reynolds, a close Trump ally, proclaimed that the Democrats were now history in her state as the president’s base turned out in force.
      “We have proven without a doubt that Iowa is a red state,” she told a rowdy victory rally in Des Moines where few Republicans wore masks.
      Trump was ahead in Iowa by more than seven points with over 90% of the vote counted, a victory just two points short of his 2016 win.
      In Iowa and Missouri, Trump’s support in rural counties generally held up or strengthened. In some states that delivered him victory. In others, such as Wisconsin, Biden triumphed after a surge of urban votes.
      But the president’s solid performance in rural America could cost the Democrats control of the Senate after what the party regarded as its best shot at two midwestern seats in Iowa and Kansas flopped.
      Iowa’s Republican senator, Joni Ernst, beat her Democratic rival, Theresa Greenfield, by more than six points in a race that opinion polls for many months said would be closer. Ernst won the seat from a Democrat in 2014.
      Results showed that the president dominated in rural counties that he took from the Democrats four years ago. Opinion polls said that in recent weeks voters’ primary concern shifted from coronavirus to the economy which helped swing independent voters the president’s way to supplement his core support.
      “The economy was doing well before coronavirus. That was a big thing for me, said Elysha Graves as she clutched her toddler after voting for Trump in Urbandale, Iowa.
      “They tried to blame him for the pandemic. I don’t know how anybody else would have handled it. It’s a hard situation. He just seems real. He’s not a politician. He’s more relatable. I trust him more than I trust Biden.”
      Left: Elysha Graves and her son Parker Peters of Urbandale Iowa pose for a photo after Graves cast her vote on election day in Urbandale, Iowa. Right: A sign informs residents of a voting location on election day in Urbandale, Iowa on Tuesday, November 3, 2020. Photographs by KC McGinnis/The Guardian
      Democrats disappointed
      Iowa is not a crucial state for Biden but his failure to significantly reduce the size of Trump’s 2016 victory there is evidence that the Democrats failed to persuade swaths of rural America that the party had much to offer them or was even paying attention to their communities and concerns.
      Biden was counting on the president defeating himself with his style of governing and handling of coronavirus as the economy collapsed. But large numbers of midwestern voters were prepared to forgive Trump his hostile tweeting and other sins because, in a widely heard refrain, “he is not a regular politician”, a quality they regard as central to their support of him.
      They also did not blame Trump for the economic downturn, saying it would have happened no matter who was in the White House. While the president’s handling of coronavirus was widely scorned in other places, there is a popular view in the rural midwest that Trump got it right when he opposed lockdowns as too economically damaging. More

    • 125 Shares179 Views

      in Elections

      Mail-in ballot tracker: counting election votes in US swing states

      by

      This piece is published in partnership with ProPublica, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive their biggest stories as soon as they’re published
      An unprecedented number of Americans have voted by mail this year to avoid Covid-19 risk. Joe Biden’s supporters said they were more likely to vote by mail while Donald Trump’s supporters said they were more likely to vote in person. With postal delays, rejected ballots and a dearth of funding, the process isn’t always smooth – ballots can be rejected for multiple reasons, and due to court challenges, election rules are changing even while voting is underway. Meanwhile, Trump and other Republican officials have spent the last months casting doubt on the mail-in voting process, paving the way for legal battles during the vote count.
      Propublica badge
      With data from University of Florida political science professor Michael McDonald, the Guardian and ProPublica are tracking votes in politically competitive states through the election to find out how many people are voting by mail, how their votes are counted, and what it means for the 2020 election. Our tracker will be updated as we obtain updated information, as well as other state data. We will also be investigating any aberrations and issues in the mail-in voting process as we find them, and telling the stories of the people and communities affected most.
      Georgia
      16 electoral votes
      Democrats believe Joe Biden may be able to win a state long seen as a Republican bastion, which would be a coup for the campaign. More people have already returned their ballots than voted by mail in total in 2016. The state has thousands of outstanding ballots to count, and liberal cities like Atlanta are expected to skew more towards Biden. Voters must return their ballots to election offices by election day in order to have them counted.

      Wisconsin
      10 electoral votes
      Trump won Wisconsin in 2016 by fewer than 23,000 votes, a year when voter turnout in key cities such as Milwaukee was also low. This year, voting rights groups are pushing the state to count ballots if they are postmarked by election day but arrive afterward. Currently, mail-in ballots must be received by 3 November at 8pm.

      Pennsylvania
      20 electoral votes
      Home to some of the most intense legal battles of the election, the state where Joe Biden was born could be the deciding factor in 2020. Pennsylvania had been a Democratic stronghold for six presidential elections until Trump carried the state by 0.7% in 2016. It’s very possible that the election result in Pennsylvania will not be known for days. That’s because Philadelphia, the state’s biggest city, could take days to count its mail-in ballots, according to officials there. Ballots must be postmarked by election day and received by 6 November at 5pm to be counted.

      Florida
      29 electoral votes
      Few states were more important on election night than Florida, where Trump has already been projected the winner. Voters must return their ballots to election offices by 7pm on election night to have them counted. Local election officials are required to contact voters if the signature on their ballot does not match the one on file.

      North Carolina
      15 electoral votes
      A battleground state Donald Trump carried in 2016, North Carolina is in the spotlight for being still too close to call. The state has seen an unprecedented surge in mail-in voting, not typically used widely in the state. Ballots must be postmarked by election day and received no later than 12 November at 5pm.

      Michigan
      16 electoral votes
      Michigan is one of the midwestern states that offer a clear path of victory for Joe Biden. The state has seen a massive change in voting procedures since 2016, including a constitutional amendment that gives everyone in the state the right to vote by mail without an excuse. Ballots must be postmarked by election day and received that day by 8pm.

      Ohio
      18 electoral votes
      Trump won the swing state easily in 2016, and was declared the projected winner on Tuesday night. Mail-in ballots must be postmarked by 2 November, or in person on election day, and received by 13 November at 7.30pm.

      Iowa
      Six electoral votes
      Donald Trump won Iowa on election night, while Democrats failed to oust the first-term GOP senator Joni Ernst. Anyone in Iowa is eligible to vote by mail and must return their ballot to election officials by the close of the polls on election day to have it counted.

      Minnesota
      10 electoral votes
      Trump claimed he could win Minnesota this year, though he lost the reliable blue state in 2016 by 1.5%, because of rural voters who favor the president. But after police killed the unarmed Black man George Floyd in the state earlier this year, it also launched the biggest protest movement and civil unrest in decades – a factor that could play into voter turnout. Ballots must be postmarked by 3 November, and received by 10 November. More

    • 188 Shares109 Views

      in Elections

      Vote totals expected to swing back and forth as key US states continue to count

      by

      Many Americans woke up bleary-eyed Wednesday morning after a late night of watching presidential returns as key places in battleground states, including Michigan, Pennsylvania, Nevada and Georgia, continue to count votes.The message from experts and election officials to Americans have been to stay patient as the votes are counted because there’s nothing unusual about the ongoing count. Election officials and experts have said for months that counting was likely to extend past election night because of a surge in mail-in ballots that take longer to tally.Donald Trump falsely claimed early Wednesday morning that he won the election and pledged to go to take legal action to stop counting, including going to the US supreme court, even though there were still a significant number of ballots to be counted.Vote totals are expected to swing back and forth on Wednesday in key states as different places report their counts. The president suggested Wednesday the swings were evidence of nefarious activity, but that’s not true. The swings reflect the fact that different parts of a state that have different political leanings are reporting their results at different times.Democratic-friendly areas such as Detroit, Milwaukee and Philadelphia have been slower to report their results than other jurisdictions in their respective states because of the higher volume of ballots. Republicans who control the state legislatures in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania also refused to move up the deadline to count absentee ballots, contributing to the delayed counts Wednesday.To win the presidency, Joe Biden needs to win at least the states of Wisconsin and Michigan, key battlegrounds that Trump won in 2016. In Michigan, Biden holds a narrow lead, but officials in some of the state’s largest places, including Detroit, are still counting ballots. It’s difficult to know when the state will have final results, but Jocelyn Benson, the Michigan secretary of state, said Wednesday there should be a more “complete picture” in the state by the end of the day.As counting continued, the United States Postal Service (USPS) released new data Wednesday morning showing poor on-time delivery rates for ballots across the country. In the Detroit postal district, about 79% of ballots were delivered within the agency’s window for on-time delivery, and in the area that covers most of Wisconsin, 76% were delivered on time. In the Philadelphia district just 66.3% were on time. Michigan and Wisconsin both require voters to return their ballots by the close of polls on election day in order to have them counted.But USPS said in a legal filing the numbers are “unreliable” and do “not reflect accurate service performance” because they don’t reflect mail taken out of normal process to be delivered faster closer to election day.A federal judge in Washington DC is also set to hold a hearing Wednesday after USPS failed to comply with an order to perform a last-minute sweep of election facilities after the agency said there were 300,000 ballots that did not have an outgoing scan. The agency has cautioned these ballots may not contain that scan because they were expedited.Democrats had urged voters to avoid the mail and return their ballots in person, and that message appears to have successfully gotten that message out in Milwaukee.In recent weeks, a sorting facility in the overwhelmingly Democratic city was processing about 3,000 absentee ballots daily, but only sent through 44 ballots on Tuesday, said Ron Kania, president of the National Association of Letter Carriers branch 2. The deadline for ballots to count in Wisconsin was 8pm on election day.“We trickled down to practically zero the last couple days,” Kania said. His facility conducted regular sweeps for ballots throughout election day and expedited any that they found.“As far as I know, everything we received went out,” he added.If Biden does carry Wisconsin and Michigan, he only needs to carry Nevada to win the presidency. Biden holds a narrow lead in the state, but the secretary of state’s office said Tuesday no more vote totals would be reported until Thursday morning. Trump’s campaign foreshadowed legal action in the state Wednesday morning, saying it was confident the president would carry the state if all “legal ballots” were counted.In Pennsylvania, vote totals at 1pm showed Trump leading by about 469,000 votes. But the state still needs to count “millions of ballots”, Kathy Boockvar, the state’s top election official, said Wednesday. In Philadelphia, a Democratic stronghold, the city’s top election official said officials had counted 141,000 out of 351,000 mail-in votes Wednesday morning.In Pennsylvania, there’s also an additional complication. Because of a state supreme court ruling, the state is legally required to count ballots that arrive by Friday. It’s unclear how many ballots will arrive between now and Friday.There are also about 200,000 votes that still need to be counted in Georgia, the state’s top election official said Wednesday. The state, long seen as a Republican bastion, is considerably closer this year. Trump led as of Wednesday morning by 109,000 votes and there are at least 107,000 outstanding votes in Democratic-leaning counties, the Journal-Constitution reported.Tom Perkins contributed to this report More