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      Despair or denial – are these the only options in the run-up to election night? | Emma Brockes

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      Four days out from the US election, and everyone is feeling tired and emotional. It is hard to focus, easy to agonise, and soothing – if the volume of pain on social media is anything to go by – to share with the group one’s inability to function. This is not limited to people living in the US, but – as with the recent death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg and ascent of Amy Coney Barrett to the supreme court – is felt by plenty of observers abroad as acute and very personal pain. People are, by their own admission, weeping, paralyzed, grief-stricken, terrified, frozen, nauseous and bingeing. You can’t turn it off. There is no escape.
      At least this is the impression one gets after spending too long online. How we live psychologically in relation to the news is something we are assumed not to have much control over. You can be an ostrich and happy or that guy trapped in a feedback loop of conspiracy theories on Facebook – but nobody wants to be him. Or you can be informed and miserable, on which count not feeling completely dismantled at the moment is a dereliction of civic duty. Who runs the US affects the rest of the world, and it is not outlandish for Brits – or, say, affluent New Yorkers, insulated from the worst effects of a Trump re-election – to be emotionally disturbed ahead of the election. What remains curious is whether the sheer levels of reported distress are to any degree optional, or entirely related to the trauma at hand.
      If I put down my immediate worries, I can, within about three mental leaps, get from Trump’s re-election to the ship sailing on climate breakdown, to the end of human civilisation, taking my descendants with it. The same goes for the domino run of panic around Coney Barrett’s confirmation on the supreme court, bringing with it the threat of reversals on abortion and marriage equality. These planes, always idling at the end of the runway, require a small amount of energy to get airborne, however, and with a bit of effort – staying off social media; narrowing my range of vision to the next 45 minutes – I can usually stop the thing taking off.
      The question is whether I should want to. Distress as a form of empathy is imagined to be a precursor to action, the necessary spur to political activity. Denial, meanwhile, is imagined only ever to foster apathy. I’m sure this is true in lots of contexts, and yet when we are powerless to do anything, as we are at this stage of the election, anxiety itself feels like a proxy for Doing Something, and a useless one at that. Fretting on Twitter might offer solace, but it risks exacerbating the very thing it seeks to remedy.
      And it’s an unreliable measure of anything much beyond one’s own temperature. The two sharpest responses I’ve had to an election were in 1997, when Tony Blair became prime minister, ending a Tory run that had lasted all but three years of my life, coinciding with the elation of graduating and the dawn of adult life, and seven years later, when George W Bush won a second term by defeating John Kerry. I was in Britain in 2004: the US election had nothing to do with me – or rather, it was less my concern than it would be in 2016, when Donald Trump became president of the country I lived in. But while Trump’s election was a terrible shock, I felt the disappointment of the Bush re-election more keenly. I was less politically jaded then, more inclined to believe things would turn out OK, and still recovering from the death of my mother. As in 97, my response to the election was more life than politics.
      There are broader injuries that perhaps can’t be dodged. For Americans, Trump has delivered a psychological blow in the form of besmirching the very idea of their country, an injury over-arching all others. And while, for reasons of self-preservation, it might make sense to skirt Twitter for a few days, you can’t entirely avoid these things. I used to sleepwalk – or sleep-bolt – something I haven’t done for 10 years. I am calm during the day, but one night this week, I woke up at 2.30am in my living room, eyes on the clock, heart racing, trying to figure out how I got there and why.
      • Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist More

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      Unions discussing general strike if Trump refuses to accept Biden victory

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      US unions have begun discussing the idea of a general strike if Donald Trump refuses to accept an election results showing a Joe Biden victory.
      Such a move would be unprecedented in the modern era. There has not been a general strike in the United States since 1946 – and that was restricted to Oakland, California.
      The local labor federation in Rochester, New York, was the first union group to officially support the idea. Union federations in Seattle and in western Massachusetts have followed suit, approving resolutions saying a general strike should be considered if Trump seeks to subvert the election outcome.
      Dan Maloney, president of the Rochester-Genesee Valley Area Labor Federation, said his 100,000-member group adopted the resolution to get people discussing the idea – from local unions to the AFL-CIO, the nation’s main labor federation which represents more than 12.5 million people.
      On 8 October, the Rochester federation voted to support preparing for and holding “a general strike of all working people, if necessary, to ensure a constitutionally mandated peaceful transition of power as a result of the 2020 presidential elections.”. The union leaders voted to stand “firmly in opposition to any effort to subvert, distort, misrepresent or disregard the final outcome” of the election.
      The Rochester move spurred discussion and debate of a possible general strike in union after union, even though some labor leaders see it as a drastic, hard-to-pull-off action. “The idea has gotten a lot more legs than I ever thought it would,” Maloney told the Guardian. “Our democracy is in jeopardy of a wannabe dictator. It’s time to be counted and do whatever it takes to remove him from office if he attempts to retain power against the will of the American people.”
      Maloney acknowledged that a general strike would be an extraordinary measure. “In drastic times, you need drastic measures,” he said.
      The Rochester federation’s resolution states: “The extreme risk currently posed to the historic institutions of democracy in our nation may require more widespread and vigorous resistance than at any time in recent history.”
      Maloney said that in a 22 October call with labor leaders, Richard Trumka, the AFL-CIO’s president, stressed that until 3 November, unions should overwhelmingly focus on maximizing voter turnout for Biden. After that, Trumka said, unions can focus on what to do if Trump resists a peaceful transition.
      The AFL-CIO’s executive council, approved a resolution on October 19 saying: “Democracies are not, in the last analysis, protected by judges or lawyers, reporters or publishers. The survival of democracy depends on the determination of working people to defend it. And America’s labor movement is indeed determined to defend our democratic republic.”
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      Michael Podhorzer, a senior Trumka adviser, said: “We believe democracy is stronger than Trump. We are not looking for a fight. We want the election results to be respected. We’re getting ready if they’re not respected because of what he said. We believe this is a country where what voters say matters.”
      Podhorzer, who used to be the AFL-CIO’s political director, said: “The thing that is really striking is that Joe Biden and the labor movement are doing everything they can to win the election, and Donald Trump is doing everything he can to defeat the election.”
      Podhorzer added that at the moment, “a general strike is a slogan, not a strategy”.
      But for many it is an inspiring slogan. Sara Nelson, president of the Association of Flight Attendants, helped put the idea of a general strike idea into the national conversation after the federal government shut down in December 2018 because of a standoff between Trump and Congress over funding for his border wall. In a speech on 20 January 2019, Nelson called for a general strike to end the shutdown, and many people credit her call for helping get Trump to end the 35-day shutdown and relent about wall funding.
      Nelson said a general strike could definitely be useful if Trump refuses to respect the election results. “What we’ve seen is people going about our business during the day and conducting mass protests at night, and that’s not going to be enough to make this president move,” Nelson said. “He will use those protests to further divide the country. We will have to do the one thing that takes all power and control from the government or anyone with corporate interests in keeping this person in office, and that is withholding our labor.”
      Nelson said a strike to make sure Trump honors the election results will “improve our jobs” including “our job security and safety at work”. “Donald Trump remaining in office puts all of us in jeopardy,” she said. “This directly relates to our basic safety and financial security.” Nelson has repeatedly criticized Trump for doing too little to help unemployed workers and the ailing airline industry. Such a general strike, she said, would be “firmly grounded” in what’s best for workers.
      Nicole Grant, who heads MLK Labor, the Seattle-area federation of 150 local unions with nearly 200,000 members, said her group approved its resolution to spur internal discussion and planning in response to the “chaos and anxiety” she said Trump has spurred. Her federation’s resolution said we “will take whatever nonviolent actions are necessary up to and including a general strike to protect our democracy, the constitution, the law and our nation’s democratic traditions.”
      “This is a break-in-case-of-emergency kind of demand,” Grand explained. She said labor leaders hope they do not have to reach such a point, “but at the same time, when we consider the potential of a coup, that’s not something we’re going to stand for”.
      Erik Loomis, a labor historian at the University of Rhode Island and author of A History of America in Ten Strikes, said: “So much of the conversation on the left about general strikes in this country is kind of a romanticized, people are going to rise up.” But Loomis added: “If there is ever any general strike in this country, it’s probably going to come out of the established labor movement. The only group capable of running the thing is the established labor movement.” If there is a general strike, union leaders say, they hope college students, Blacks Lives Matter activists, women’s and environmental groups and many others will join in.
      Nelson acknowledged that pulling off a successful general strike might not be easy. There needs to be “a spark that lights the fire”, she said, as well as “people to lead the fight”. “Do I think the labor movement is prepared to conduct a general strike? No,” Nelson said. “Can we do it, though? Can we organize quickly? Can we define the urgency of the moment? Absolutely.” More

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      'Voters are fed up': will Arizona's suburbs abandon the party of Trump?

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      In the agonizing days after the 2018 election, Christine Marsh, a Democratic candidate for state Senate in a traditionally Republican suburban Phoenix district, watched her opponent’s lead dwindle to a few hundred votes, with thousands of ballots left to be counted.
      In the end, just 267 votes separated them.
      Marsh lost. But the result was ominous for Republicans, in a corner of Phoenix’s ever-expanding suburbs where Barry Goldwater, the long-serving Arizona senator and conservative icon, launched his presidential campaign in 1964 from the patio of his famed hilltop estate in Paradise Valley.
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      In the decades since, population growth and shifting demographics have transformed the cultural, political and economic complexion of the region.
      And the election of Donald Trump has exacerbated these trends across the country, perhaps nowhere more dramatically than in diverse, fast-growing metropolitan areas like Phoenix, where the coalition of affluent, white suburban voters that once cemented Republican dominance is unraveling.
      “We’ve seen a huge shift in my district, even in just the last two years,” said Marsh, a a high school English teacher who is challenging Republican incumbent Kate Brophy McGee again this year. The district, which includes the prosperous Paradise Valley and parts of north central Phoenix, is now at the center of the political battle for Arizona’s suburbs.
      Over the last four years, Republicans have watched their support collapse in suburbs across the country, as the president’s divisive rhetoric and incendiary behavior alienates women, college graduates and independent voters. But as Trump continues to downplay the seriousness of the coronavirus pandemic, even after more than 225,000 deaths nationwide and as cases continue to climb, his conduct is imperiling not only his own re-election campaign, but his entire party. More

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      'Division and discord': Biden says Trump's rallies are 'spreading more than the virus' – video

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      The Democratic presidential candidate has slammed the president’s campaign rallies, saying they are spreading more than just Covid-19 – they are dividing the nation politically. ‘Donald Trump just had a super-spreader event here again,’ Biden told supporters in Tampa, Florida. ‘They’re spreading more than just coronavirus. He’s spreading division and discord.’ Biden also criticised the Trump camp’s approach to managing the spread of Covid, with the president playing down its impact despite rising case numbers across the country
      US election roundup: Biden and Trump descend on key battleground of Florida
      US election 2020: confusion after court rules to separate Minnesota ballots that arrive late – live More

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      Australians ask me what the mood is in the US. I say optimism, quickly smothered by dread | Chloe Angyal

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      In Iowa, lawn signs keep vanishing. They’ll be there in the front garden one night, red white and blue against the unnaturally lush suburban American green grass, advertising to drivers and dog walkers alike that the people inside want Joe Biden to be the next president of the United States. “Joe 2020.” “Unity over division, Biden-Harris 2020.” “Bye-Don.” And the next morning, they’re gone. One man got caught stealing a sign, and then got caught stealing the newspapers reporting what he’d done. (Trump signs have been stolen and vandalised too).
      Iowa, where the presidential primaries began with the shambolic caucuses in February, has become one of the most expensive electoral battlegrounds in the nation. In 2016, the state went for Trump by a massive 10 points after voting for Obama by two in 2012; the 12-point swing was the largest of any state in the nation. Now, the swing state is living up to that label: FiveThirtyEight has Biden slightly ahead. But it’s not only the presidential race on the line: the incumbent Republican senator Joni Ernst is neck-and-neck with her Democratic challenger, Theresa Greenfield, who has raked in a staggering amount of money – $28.7m in the third quarter of this year alone – to try to flip one of Iowa’s two red Senate seats to blue.
      This is my fourth presidential election in the US, but my first in Iowa. I grew up in Australia, and moved to this state two years ago after living in New York City for a decade, because my partner, an Iowan, ran for office here.
      The vanishing lawn signs, of course, are not the only dirty trick we’ve seen this year: Republicans have done everything in their power to make voting harder for people who likely won’t vote for them, from closing ballot drop locations to reimposing felon disenfranchisement to knee-capping the postal service.
      I voted early and in person, waiting for half an hour in a socially distanced line at the local library. That’s nothing compared with the hours-long wait other voters have endured, but still a tax in the form of time, and in the middle of a pandemic in which Iowa is faring absolutely terribly, a risk voters shouldn’t have to take to get their ballot counted.
      By now it has become a cliche to compare America’s voting system – a state-by-state patchwork of time-consuming and easily-screwed up registration procedures, followed by deliberately limited in-person voting options – to Australia’s. Similarly, it has become a threadbare exercise in horror to compare how the US has responded to coronavirus with how Australia has. When I returned home to see my family in July, I was required to spend two weeks in a hotel room in Sydney and was regularly tested for coronavirus during my quarantine. Six weeks later, when I flew back to Iowa, there was nothing to stop me from driving from the airport to my local supermarket, mask-free, and breathing all over my fellow Iowans.
      To date, more than 120,000 people in Iowa have contracted coronavirus, and 1,693 of them have died. The population of Iowa, where a Republican governor never issued a stay-at-home order and has pushed the state to a full re-opening even as case numbers continue to rise, is 3.1 million. Australia, with its population of 25 million, has seen 27,569 cases to date, 907 of them fatal.
      Cliches or no, it is hard to avoid making these comparisons as election day hurtles towards us. Because they are not simply thought experiments, they’re questions about life and death, and about who and what government is for. What would this country look like if it invested in the infrastructure of a truly representative democracy, as Australia has? Would the officials elected under such a system have taken the threat of the pandemic seriously, rather than allowing partisanship to warp their understanding of not just science but of what sacrifices we owe to each other?
      Just as it was hard to explain to Americans how stringent Australia’s policies for returnees were, it has been hard to explain to Australians what the mood is here as the election approaches. After four years under Trump’s Republican party – four years of obscene policies meant to harm the most vulnerable, four years of testing and in some cases breaking the institutional guard rails of American democracy – and eight months of coronavirus, the mood is sheer anxiety. The mood is utter exhaustion.
      The mood is optimism quickly smothered by fear and dread. This time in 2016, the polls predicted a Trump loss, but voter suppression and Russian interference kept just enough people from voting in crucial states to swing the election Trump’s way.
      The mood, for me and many of my fellow journalists, is disassociation and numbness, coping mechanisms we learned a long time ago are essential for doing the work of covering the horrors and incompetencies of this administration.
      The mood is anticipation of relief, mingled with the knowledge that relief might not come, that it all might go wrong, and that the election, like our lawn signs, might once again be stolen from us.
      • Chloe Angyal is a contributing editor at marieclaire.com and the author of the forthcoming book Turning Pointe: How a New Generation of Dancers Is Saving Ballet From Itself. She is from Sydney and lives in the Iowa City area More

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      Glenn Greenwald resigns from the Intercept over 'editorial freedom'

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      The investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald has resigned abruptly from the Intercept, the news website he co-founded, and accused the organization of seeking to censor him over a planned article critical of the Democratic nominee, Joe Biden.
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      Greenwald, who was a vital part of the Guardian US team that broke the Edward Snowden whistleblower story in 2013, released a statement online that blasted the editors of the Intercept as being in hock to Biden and the Democratic party.
      “The Intercept’s editors, in violation of my contractual right of editorial freedom, censored an article I wrote this week, refusing to publish it unless I remove all sections critical of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, the candidate vehemently supported by all New-York-based Intercept editors involved in this effort at suppression,” he wrote in a lengthy resignation post.
      Greenwald is a vocal critic of the US media and American politics, with an abrasive style that has won him many admirers as well as a legion of critics. Recently, he has been especially critical of media coverage of the Russian attempt to interfere with the 2016 US election and has been criticized by some leftwing commentators for appearing on rightwing Fox News host Tucker Carlson’s show.
      He co-founded the Intercept in 2014 with investment from the tech billionaire Pierre Omidyar. The website rapidly established itself as a scrappy online news organization that could punch above its weight on some issues, especially cybersecurity, politics and tech and corruption in Brazil, where Greenwald lives.
      Greenwald said the site no longer carried out the mission that he had intended when it was founded, which was to amplify voices rarely heard in American journalism. In his resignation statement Greenwald said: “The current iteration of The Intercept is completely unrecognizable when compared to that original vision.”
      He also said he would post the article on Biden that he said had been censored online.
      In a sharply worded statement, the Intercept’s editor-in-chief, Betsy Reed, said that the charge that the Intercept was censoring its staff was “preposterous” and that Greenwald’s main problem had been a desire to have his work published unedited.
      “The narrative he presents about his departure is teeming with distortions and inaccuracies – all of them designed to make him look like a victim, not a grown person throwing a tantrum,” she added. More

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      US election roundup: Joe Biden and Donald Trump descend on key battleground of Florida

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      [embedded content]
      Donald Trump and Joe Biden converged on Florida on Thursday in the final stages of the battle for the swing state, which the president must win to have a realistic chance of holding on to power.
      “You hold the key,” Biden told a rally in Broward county. “If Florida goes blue, it’s over. It’s over!”
      The rivals duelled over interpretations of new data which showed the US economy recovering fast in the third quarter, but still suffering from the impact of the Covid pandemic. And despite Trump’s efforts to push the issue aside, the candidates’ widely different approaches to the pandemic came into focus once more.
      The Trump campaign broadcast new Spanish-language advertisements showing the president wearing a mask – a tacit admission that his frequent derision of mask-wearing was damaging his standing among at least some of his supporters.
      But the president’s rally held outside a Tampa football stadium followed the pattern of his campaign, packing thousands of mostly maskless fans together.
      Adding to the irony, Melania Trump told the crowd that her husband and his team were focused on creating ways for people to “start gathering with friends again on safe distances”.
      The president’s disregard for masks has alienated many elderly voters, who are critical in Florida, where polls show the race to be more or less tied – and whose 29 votes in the electoral college have proved decisive in the past.
      Most electoral analysts argue that it would be virtually impossible for Trump to hold on to the presidency without winning the state.
      If Trump wins Florida, it would increase pressure on Biden to win the big battleground states to the north, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. The Democratic challenger began the day in Broward county, part of the coastal urban sprawl north of Miami, before crossing the state to Tampa, where he was due to arrive in the evening, a few hours after Trump had departed for North Carolina, one of the traditionally Republican strongholds he is trying to defend against a Democratic surge.
      As part of the continuing deliberate contrast with the president’s campaign style, the Biden Broward county event was a socially distanced drive-in at a college campus, where supporters were cautioned not to stray more than an arm’s length from their cars. The evening rally scheduled in Tampa was also a drive-in.
      In a new advertisement launched on Thursday, Biden pledged to set up a special taskforce on his first day in office which would be devoted to finding the families of 545 children forcibly separated from their families under Trump immigration policies.
      Data released on Thursday showed GDP had bounced back dramatically in the third quarter of 2020, 33% on an annualized rate in the third quarter after dropping 31% in the second quarter, but the economy was still nearly 4% down compared with the end of 2019.
      On Twitter, Trump proclaimed the recovery to be the “Biggest and Best in the History of our Country”. Biden countered that the country was still “in a deep hole” and warned that the recovery was “slowing if not stalling” while benefiting the wealthiest Americans. More

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      The polls point to a Biden victory but can they be trusted this time?

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      [embedded content]
      For months, activists and Democratic party officials have been telling Joe Biden supporters that the only answer to the question “can we trust the polls?” is to go out and vote for Biden, and then get others to do the same.
      “The polls are a mirage,” one organizer told the Guardian last month.
      For partisans on either side of the presidential election, “go vote” remains the only sound advice. Tens of millions of people have acted on that advice and cast their ballots early in record numbers. Others are preparing to vote in person on Tuesday.
      After the dust has settled on the election, there will be plenty of time to analyze whether the state-level polling delivered a better picture of the race this year than it did in 2016, political organizers say.
      But one thing is certain: the polls at the end of the 2020 presidential race are telling a very different story from the polls at the end of the 2016 race, and it’s a rosier picture for Biden than it was for Clinton.
      An unchanging polling graphic has emerged in this presidential race: two lines, a blue one above and a red one below, running in parallel, separated by 8 points or so, for the entire year.
      Those lines represent the national polling averages over time of a head-to-head match-up between Biden and Donald Trump, and they have never intersected.
      In the last presidential election, between Trump and Hillary Clinton, the polling averages intersected every couple of months, weaving their way towards an endpoint that depicted Clinton ahead by three points. She won the popular vote by two points.
      The averages this time have Biden up by 7.5 points (Real Clear Politics), 9 points (New York Times/Upshot) and 9 points (FiveThirtyEight) – depicting a lead that is two or three times larger than that depicted for Clinton.
      The White House is not won through a popular vote, of course. But opening up a large national lead is impossible without opening up state-level leads. And the state-level polls in 2020 also depict larger leads for Biden in key battlegrounds than they did for Clinton – with some important caveats. More