Subterms
The House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, and Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer, held a press conference on Capitol Hill, calling on Republican lawmakers to accept the results of the presidential election.
Pelosi emphasised the need to pass another coronavirus relief bill, saying: ‘Stop the circus and get to work on what really matters to the American people’
US Politics live More
Donald Trump’s attacks on the credibility of Joe Biden’s election win through meritless lawsuits could undermine Americans’ trust in voting and could pose an immediate threat to the security and safety of the country, experts have warned.
Trump’s campaign has unleashed a stream of lawsuits in states key to Biden’s electoral college win, none of which are expected to affect the outcome of the election.
The US attorney general, William Barr, has authorized the Department of Justice to investigate voting irregularities, in a highly unorthodox move, and Republican state representatives in Pennsylvania are calling for an audit of the election, though they have no evidence of fraud.
University of Southern California (USC) law professor Franita Tolson said she was concerned that these actions, which would not change the trajectory of the election, were meant to call into question the legitimacy of the result.
“What does that do to our democracy as we play out this process? What does it do to the belief in the system when 70 million people think the election was stolen,” Tolson said, referring to the popular vote total for Trump. “To me that’s the danger of this narrative, that’s the danger of this litigation.”
Top election officials in every state, representing both political parties, told the New York Times there was no evidence that fraud or other irregularities played a role in the outcome of the race. A coalition of hundreds of journalists from more than 150 newsrooms also found no major problems, in ProPublica’s collaborative election monitoring project Electionland.
“Legal people can say this litigation has no merit, but what do everyday Americans think?” Tolson said. “And they may actually think the president is being treated poorly and he won this election and the system is trying to take it from him.”
Only a few Republicans have publicly acknowledged Biden’s win, but behind the scenes, many Republicans have reportedly accepted the results. Some White House aides have told reporters anonymously that the president’s refusal to concede the election is an embarrassment.
Peter Feaver, who worked on national security in Republican George W Bush and Democrat Bill Clinton’s administrations, said that while the president is within his rights to ask for recounts and investigate reasonable allegations of misbehavior, leveling false charges of fraud without evidence has serious consequences.
“The messaging coming from the campaign, and particularly from the president himself, is far more extreme than that and it’s more reckless messaging and I think it does complicate America’s standing in the world,” said Feaver, a professor of political science and public policy at Duke University.
Feaver said it was also a risk for the president and his team to be focused on fighting a losing legal battle instead of responding to issues such as Covid-19 and the recession.
“Instead they’re distracting the president’s attention and the remaining energy of the administration in another direction,” Feaver said. “That’s what’s hurting the average American family.”
But the Trump campaign continues to bring new challenges.
In Michigan on Wednesday, the Trump campaign sought to block the election results from being certified in the state, where Biden is ahead of Trump by about 148,000 votes.
The campaign also has eyes on Georgia, where young, Black voters appear to have helped flip the state for the Democrats, though the race has not been called. Georgia’s top election official announced on Wednesday there would be a hand recount of the 5 million ballots cast.
Brad Raffensperger, the Republican secretary of state, made the announcement after Trump’s campaign demanded the recount, but insisted he was not bowing to pressure.
“This will help build confidence. It will be an audit, a recount and a recanvass, all at once,” Raffensperger said on Wednesday. “It will be a heavy lift. But we will work with the counties to get this done in time for our state certification.”
Recounts rarely change the outcome and Trump has a large margin to overcome – Biden leads by 14,000 votes in the state.
Tensions are especially high in the state because it has two runoff elections on 5 January which will determine which party controls the Senate. Republican senators Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, who are facing runoff votes, called for Raffensperger’s resignation on Tuesday.
In a press briefing with Feaver, Bruce Jentleson, who worked on Barack Obama and Al Gore’s presidential campaigns, blamed the disquiet on the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell.
“Part of their strategy, what’s going on right now is positioning for 2024, who might inherit the Trump constituency, and positioning for the two Georgia runoffs,” said Jentleson, a professor of public policy and political science at Duke.
Jentleson said: “It is politics but there’s a point at which it’s deeply irresponsible for Mitch McConnell to be doing what he’s doing and setting a tone for the other Republican senators.” More
The recent HBO film 537 Votes, about the Florida 2000 election mess, offers one overarching message: Democrats’ refusal to sound a clear alarm about the slow-motion heist in process ultimately let the election be stolen.In that debacle, Democrats seemed to think things would break their way with well-honed arguments inside the cloistered confines of the legal system – they never understood how public-facing politics can play a role in what ended up being a pivotal political brawl outside the courtroom.Twenty years later, the lesson of the Bush-Gore debacle isn’t being heededNow, 20 years later, the lesson of that debacle isn’t being heeded. Donald Trump and his cronies are quite clearly waging a public-facing campaign designed to create the conditions to pull off a coup in the electoral college process.This is a full-scale emergency – and yet the Democratic strategy seems to be to try to pretend it isn’t happening, in hopes that norms win out, even though nothing at all is normal.In the week since the election, Donald Trump and his Republican allies have waged a public campaign to call the election results into question – not just in the courtroom, but in the public’s mind. Their lawsuits and Attorney General William Barr’s recent memo are designed as much to to generate headlines as they are to win rulings and initiate prosecutions. Their tweets asserting fraud, and their high-profile promises of financial reward for evidence of fraud, are all designed to do the same thing.Most ominously of all, Republican lawmakers in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Wisconsin, Michigan and Arizona are already insinuating the results may be fraudulent, even though they haven’t produced any evidence of widespread fraud.Why is public perception so important? Because as the Ohio State University law professor Edward Foley shows in a frighteningly prescient 2019 article, legislatures could use the public perception of fraud to try to invoke their constitutional power to ignore their states’ popular votes, reject certified election results and appoint slates of Trump electors.In an article that predicted almost exactly what has already happened in Pennsylvania, Foley imagined Trump seeming to be ahead at first, then losing his lead as votes are counted, then making allegations of fraud, setting the stage for this:
At Trump’s urging, the state’s legislature – where Republicans have majorities in both houses – purports to exercise its authority under Article II of the Constitution to appoint the state’s presidential electors directly. Taking their cue from Trump, both legislative chambers claim that the certified popular vote cannot be trusted because of the blue shift that occurred in overtime. Therefore, the two chambers claim to have the constitutional right to supersede the popular vote and assert direct authority to appoint the state’s presidential electors, so that this appointment is in line with the popular vote tally as it existed on Election Night, which Trump continues to claim is the “true” outcome.
The state’s Democratic governor refuses to assent to this assertion of authority by the state’s legislature, but the legislature’s two chambers proclaim that the governor’s assent is unnecessary. They cite early historical practices in which state legislatures appointed presidential electors without any involvement of the state’s governor. They argue that like constitutional amendments, and unlike ordinary legislation, the appointment of presidential electors when undertaken directly by a state legislature is not subject to a gubernatorial veto.
Foley notes how public-facing politics – outside the cloistered legal arena – could then come into play.“It might be too much of a power grab. One would hope that American politics have not become so tribal that a political party is willing to seize power without a plausible basis for doing so rooted in the actual votes of the citizenry,” he writes. “If during the canvass itself, Trump can gain traction with his allegation that the blue shift amounts to fraudulently fabricated ballots – along the lines of his 2018 tweet about Florida – then it becomes more politically tenable to claim that the legislature must step in and appoint the state’s electors directly to reflect the ‘true’ will of the state’s voters.”To be sure, pulling this off would be complicated.Republicans would have to get not one but many of the five Biden states with Republican legislatures to try to ignore the popular vote.This isn’t merely infantile behavior or an immature temper tantrum – it is part of a cutthroat planCongress would also have a role to play in deciding which electors to recognize, which gives the House Democratic majority some leverage.And it’s not clear that any of the maneuvers would hold up in court (though let’s remember: the supreme court now includes three Republican-appointed justices who worked directly on the Bush v Gore case that stole the 2000 election for the Republican party).But this is quite obviously what the Republicans are aiming for – and they’ve basically said it out loud. Indeed, Trump’s son has promoted the idea of legislatures overturning the election, and so has Trump’s staunch ally Ron DeSantis, Florida’s Republican governor. Meanwhile, a Republican lawmaker involved in Wisconsin’s new election fraud investigation suggested his state’s popular vote could be ignored. More
Perhaps one day Donald Trump will be dragged out of the Oval Office, his tiny fingernails still dug deep into that fat oak desk. But Trumpland, the country that ignored the politicians and the pollsters and the pundits and gave him the White House in 2016, will outlast him; just as it emerged before he even thought of becoming a candidate. And for as long as it is here it will warp politics and destabilise the US.
I first stumbled upon Trumpland in 2012, a time when it bore no such name and appeared on no maps.
I was reporting in Pittsburgh that autumn, as Barack Obama crushed Mitt Romney while cruising to a second term as president. The big US broadsheets wrote up the Republicans as if they were an endangered species , while thirtysomethings in DC gazed deep into their spreadsheets or West Wing boxsets and foretold permanent Democratic majorities, gaily handed to them by a rainbow coalition of black, Latino and granola-chewing graduate voters.
Except I kept meeting people who lived in an alternative country. People like Mike Stout and his family. He’d worked for decades in the local steel mills and had been a fiery union leader. Now he spent every spare hour as a reincarnation of Woody Guthrie, carrying a guitar along with memories of standing in 2009 on Washington’s Mall to watch Obama’s inauguration, his breath freezing in the January air as the first black president was sworn in . “It was like a new world had opened up, just for an afternoon,” said his wife, Steffi.
But it was their far more subdued daughter, Maura, who troubled me. The steelworks of her dad’s day was long gone, so she’d gone to university and then spent two years hunting for a job. Now the 23-year-old was doing the accounts for a hotel, a non-graduate position paying $14 an hour, which Mike recalled as the same rate he’d earned at the steelworks in 1978 – without, of course, three decades of inflation. Among Maura’s year of about 500 graduates, she counted as one of the lucky ones.
“I don’t think I’m ever going to earn as much as my parents,” she said. “I don’t think my husband and I will ever have the same life as they did.”
We were in Pennsylvania, often painted as a land of blue-collar aristocracy and true-blue Democrats. But the political economy that had underpinned those ballot-box majorities was as rusted as an abandoned factory. Instead, Maura saw a political system that had failed her and her generation, in which every new day was worse than yesterday. And while the Stouts were leftwing, they had little in common with the party they supported. In their eyes, their home had been gutted of manufacturing and bilked by foreign trade deals, and appeared nowhere on the Clinton/Obama ideological map.
Sure enough, four years later Pennsylvania became one of the rustbelt states that won Trump the White House.
Trumpland is not the same as the old Republican heartlands, even if they overlap. What the dealmaker saw more clearly than the Bushes, the Romneys and the McCains was that there was a new electoral coalition to be forged out of downwardly mobile white voters. “The people that have been ignored, neglected and abandoned,” he called them in Ohio in 2016. “I am your voice.”
And so he completed the great inversion of American politics: he turned the Republicans into a party whose future is tied to Trumpland. Even Trump’s rivals accept that. This summer, Texas senator Ted Cruz said: “The big lie in politics is that Republicans are the party of the rich and Democrats are the party of the poor. That just ain’t true. Today’s Republican party are Ohio steelworkers, today’s Republican party are single mums waiting tables…”
Whatever promises Trump made on the threshold of the White House, once inside he spent four years giving billions in tax cuts to rich people and trying to deprive millions of low-paid Americans of decent healthcare. For the poor whites who put him in power, Trump had nothing to offer apart from racism.
However grossly used by its leader, Trumpland is more than an imagined community. It has its own society and economics and politics – and they barely resemble the rest of the US. The 477 large and densely populated counties won by Biden account for 70% of America’s economy, according to new calculations by the Brookings Institute ; Trump’s base of 2,497 counties amount to just 29% (a further 1% is still to be counted). Brookings describes Trumpland as “whiter, less-educated and … situated in the nation’s struggling small towns and rural areas. Prosperity there remains out of reach for many.”
These people haven’t been left behind so much as cut loose from the US. Between 2010 and 2019, the US created nearly 16m new jobs but only 55,000 of them were suitable for those who left school at 16. Inequality this deep is not just economic, it is social and psychological. It is also lethal.
Two economists, Anne Case and Angus Deaton, have found that working-age white men and women without degrees are dying of drug overdoses, alcohol-related liver disease and suicide at unprecedented rates . In 2017 alone, they calculated that there were 158,000 of these “deaths of despair” – equal to “three fully loaded Boeing 737s falling out of the sky every day for a year”.
As Case and Deaton point out, African Americans have still harder lives. They die younger, and are less likely to go to college or get a job. Yet over decades their prospects are improving. For poor white Americans, on the other hand, the trends point straight down. The result, according to a new study by Andrew Oswald and former Bank of England rate-setter David Blanchflower, is that middle-aged, white American school leavers are now suffering an epidemic of “extreme mental distress”.
When you live in a zero-sum economy, in which you always lose while the other guy wins, then you too might subscribe to zero-sum politics – in which the Democrats aren’t just opponents but enemies, and democratic norms are there to be broken. “These people are hurting,” says Blanchflower. “And when you’re hurting you’ll buy what looks like medicine, even if it’s from a snake-oil merchant.”This is where Biden’s kumbaya politics, all his pleas to Americans to join hands and sing, looks laughably hollow. You can’t drain the toxicity of Trumpism without tackling the toxic economics of Trumpland. And for as long as Trumpland exists, it will need a Trump. Even if the 45th president is turfed out, he will carry on issuing edicts and exercising power from the studio set of any TV station that will have him.
Eight years after meeting Mike Stout, I spoke to him this week. He didn’t have much good news for me. Maura lost her hotel position last year and is now working from home in the pandemic, phoning up people deep in debt and pressing them to repay their loans. His son, Mike, lost his job just a few weeks ago for the second time in five years, and now has no medical insurance while his wife has stage-4 cancer.
“They’ve been pushed off the shelf straight into the gutter,” he told me. “I don’t see any party out there willing to protect my children’s lives: not Democrat, not Republican.”
• Aditya Chakrabortty is a Guardian columnist More
Democratic senator Bernie Sanders says members of the Republican party are afraid to stand up to Donald Trump as he continues his refusal to concede the result of last week’s presidential election. Speaking on CNN, Sanders said his Senate colleagues on the Republican side are not ‘idiots’, but there’s an intimidation factor from Trump that is preventing members from speaking up. ‘They understand Trump has lost,’ Sanders said. ‘But one of the other things we should all be nervous about and fearful about is the degree to which Trump intimidates and scares the hell out of Republican members of Congress. They are afraid to stand up to him’
Trump under growing pressure to accept election defeat – US politics live More
Key events
Show
8.44am EST08:44
Florida bracing for second hit from Hurricane Eta
8.03am EST08:03
Joe Biden’s vote lead over Donald Trump stretches to more than 5 million
7.48am EST07:48
Canadian PM Trudeau says looking forward to working with Biden on climate change, economy and Covid response
7.11am EST07:11
Texas becomes first US state with more than 1 million confirmed Covid cases
Live feed
Show
10.06am EST10:06
Even Donald Trump’s own campaign is acknowledging they have failed to produce any evidence of election fraud.
Jessica Silver-Greenberg 🕵🏻♀️
(@jbsgreenberg)
A Pennsylvania judge asked a Republican lawyer whether he was alleging any fraud. His answer, in direct contradiction of @realDonaldTrump: “at present, no.” pic.twitter.com/nUxMt6W0bB
November 11, 2020
Appearing before a Pennsylvania judge yesterday, one of the president’s lawyers was asked flat-out whether the campaign was alleging fraud in connection to a batch of ballots.
The lawyer replied, “To my knowledge at present, no.”
Just to be crystal clear: there has been absolutely no evidence of widespread fraud in the presidential election.
9.48am EST09:48
Republican Al Schmidt, a Philadelphia city commissioner, defended the integrity of his city’s vote count after Donald Trump and his team raised baseless concerns about election fraud.
New Day
(@NewDay)
“I realize a lot of people are happy about this election, and a lot of people are not happy… one thing I can’t comprehend is how hungry people are to consume lies and to consume information that is not true.”- Phila. City @Commish_Schmidt on claims of widespread voter fraud pic.twitter.com/XoweYxMUQO
November 11, 2020
Schmidt said the city had to stay focused on counting valid ballots before the certification deadline, a goal that “should not be controversial.”
“I have seen the most fantastical things on social media, making completely ridiculous allegations that have no basis in fact at all,” Schmidt told CNN.
“I realize a lot of people are happy about this election, and a lot of people are not happy,” Schmidt added. “One thing I can’t comprehend is how hungry people are to consume lies and to consume information that is not true.”
As Schmidt’s interview aired, Trump accused the city commissioner of being “used big time by the Fake News Media to explain how honest things were with respect to the Election in Philadelphia.”
“He refuses to look at a mountain of corruption & dishonesty. We win!” Trump said in a tweet.
In reality, Joe Biden currently leads Trump in Pennsylvania by about 48,000 votes, and the president’s team has provided no evidence to substantiate allegations of election fraud.
9.29am EST09:29
This is Joan Greve in Washington, taking over for Martin Belam.
Donald Trump’s advisers are privately acknowledging they are unlikely to prevent Joe Biden from taking office, after the president-elect was named the winner of the electoral college.
The Washington Post reports:
[E]ven some of the president’s most publicly pugilistic aides, including White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel and informal adviser Corey Lewandowski, have said privately that they are concerned about the lawsuits’ chances for success unless more evidence surfaces, according to people familiar with their views.
Trump met with advisers again Tuesday afternoon to discuss whether there is a path forward, said a person with knowledge of the discussions, who, like others interviewed for this report, spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal discussions. The person said Trump plans to keep fighting but understands it is going to be difficult. ‘He is all over the place. It changes from hour to hour,’ the person said. …
The vote counting, meanwhile, continued apace as the states work toward certifying the vote, a process that should largely be finished by the beginning of December. In Georgia, the deadline for county certification is Nov. 13, but the majority of counties had already completed the task by Tuesday afternoon. Next comes a statewide audit, after which Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, must certify the results no later than Nov. 20.
As a reminder, every major news outlet has declared Biden to be the winner of the presidential race, and the Democrat currently leads Trump in the popular vote by more than 5 million votes.
9.01am EST09:01
Speeches from candidates conceding defeat in past US elections have been resurfacing after Donald Trump refusal to speak out since losing to Joe Biden. Here’s a little supercut to remind you of the way things used to be done after an election defeat.
Incidentally, while they are attracting a lot of attention, Trump’s claims that voter fraud has denied him victory is cutting little mustard with the broader American public. A Reuers/Ipsos poll released Tuesday showed 79% of US adults believe Biden won. That includes around 60% of those who identified themselves as Republican supporters.
And with that I shall hand you over to Joan Greve in the US. Thanks for reading, I’ll be back next week…
8.57am EST08:57
You’ll probably want to pop this in your diary.
CBS News
(@CBSNews)
Barack Obama will be interviewed on “60 Minutes” and “CBS Sunday Morning” on Sunday, November 15, in what will be his first television interviews following the 2020 presidential election https://t.co/JbJfKbcoxs
November 11, 2020
8.52am EST08:52
It wasn’t just the presidency and Senate and House races on the ballot last week. Lots of states were also asking their residents to make decisions of statewide laws. Kari Paul in San Francisco reports for us on one that might have a much wider significance – California’s Prop 22.
After a historic spending spree and an aggressive public relations campaign, Uber and Lyft emerged victorious on election day when California voters passed a ballot measure that exempts gig companies from having to treat their drivers like employees.
For big tech companies, the win was a crucial step in their fight to protect their business model, and they hope it will serve as an example for tech legislation around the US.
For opponents, it showed the power of big money in fighting legislation, and represents a harbinger of the labor rights battle to come.
Prop 22 was authored by Uber, Lyft, Doordash and Instacart, and will carve out an exception for these firms from AB5, a landmark labor law in California that came after years of complaints from driver organizers and would have forced ride-share and delivery companies to treat drivers as employees.
Under Prop 22, workers at gig companies will continue to be classified as contractors, without access to employee rights such as minimum wage, unemployment benefits, health insurance, and collective bargaining.
The ballot initiative, opponents warned, would continue poor wages and substandard working conditions for gig workers, and it would leave them with little recourse to fight those conditions. Labor advocates fear the victory for tech firms could mark the beginning of similar efforts across the US.
Read more here: Prop 22 – why Uber’s victory in California could harm gig workers nationwide
8.44am EST08:44
Florida bracing for second hit from Hurricane Eta
Residents in Florida are still dealing with the flooding that tropical storm Eta caused earlier in the week – and there’s now further bad news. Associated Press report that Eta has regained hurricane strength and the state needs to brace for a second hit from the storm. More
The Republican party has spent four years enabling Donald Trump: backing up his lies, defending his most egregious misbehaviors, shattering longstanding democratic norms to keep his, and by extension their, iron grip on power. But by refusing to push him to concede an election he clearly lost, they’re truly following him off a cliff – and threatening to take America with them.Donald Trump lost the popular vote by 5 million. He was handily trounced in the electoral college, too. There is no real question that he lost the election and Joe Biden won.And yet, predictably, the president who has spent his entire time in office denying the facts that are in front of his face is insisting that the clear results of this election must be the result of malfeasance. We know that to assuage his own ego and maintain his position, he will say and do just about anything. We know that he is not a statesman or a person who cares about anything beyond himself; we know he is happy to tear the nation apart at the seams if it means he gets what he wants. And we know that many members of the Republican party have thus far aided and abetted him.But there was some question of when enough would be enough. Surely there was some line the president could cross that would directly imperil America itself and make Republicans finally say: enough. Now, the president is mounting what in any developing country would be called an attempted coup. He is spreading outright lies about America’s system of free and fair elections, claiming he won when he didn’t. His sycophantic legal team is pulling issues out of thin air to undermine the American system of voting. He is wielding his power to try to install himself as an unelected leader. He is refusing to concede so that he might find some way to illegally grab power. And Republicans are letting him.The president is “100% within his rights” to challenge the clear election results in court, said the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, before scolding Democrats for demanding the president concede. “Let’s not have any lectures about how the president should immediately, cheerfully accept preliminary election results from the same characters who just spent four years refusing to accept the validity of the last election.”But these election results are not “preliminary”; they are clear and decisive. And Democrats did not refuse to accept the results of the 2016 election. Democrats did insist on looking into foreign interference into the election, and asked necessary questions about the president’s interactions with foreign adversaries. But Democrats did not refuse to concede. They did not undermine the democratic process and American confidence in a free and fair vote.Trump is refusing to concede so he might find some way to illegally grab power. And Republicans are letting himThis isn’t about letting the president have his temper tantrum or, as one GOP official put it, “humoring him for a bit”. This is about whether Americans can trust in our system, and whether Americans will trust in our system. America will, hopefully, outlast Donald Trump, and hopefully it will outlast every person alive today. But America is as much an idea as it is a land mass; our democracy is an agreed-upon set of rules and norms, many of them written, but many of them customary. Americans have always sought to make the rules fairer, and to extend more rights and privileges to a wider swath of people: that’s what the civil rights movement did, and the women’s movement, too. But the goal was to get in on the system, not to undermine its legitimacy.What Trump and his Republican enablers are doing is a wholly different thing. They aren’t saying that the system is unfair because it excludes some people who deserve to be a part of it. They aren’t even saying that they lost because the rules were unfair. They are saying that one side cheated, that the system is rigged. Once that cat is out of the bag – once you sow widespread distrust in the entire concept of free and fair American elections – it’s awfully hard to put it back in.When the president refuses to concede, it also has a real, tangible impact on the nation’s future. The incoming president needs to be fully briefed; he needs to be able to staff up and start to put his team in place so that he can hit the ground running. It’s bad for the country if we slow that process down. And it’s especially dangerous during an escalating pandemic: Joe Biden is facing a huge public health emergency that experts predict will worsen this winter, and he needs to be able to manage it as efficiently as possible.It’s sad and stunning that it has even come to this: that the integrity of the American electoral process is at stake, and many of the most powerful and prominent members of Republican party still declare fealty to their Dear Leader, even at the expense of the nation. This isn’t just about one party acting unscrupulously because they’re sore losers. This is how democracy itself comes undone. More
