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      in US Politics

      Joe Biden poised to inherit Disunited States of America

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      “Tomorrow is the beginning of a new day,” Joe Biden said in his final campaign rally in Pittsburgh on the eve of the US election. “There’s one more day to show who we are as a country: looking out for each other, the thousand acts of kindness, the decency that people used to show one another – and still do.”
      Three days later, Donald Trump appeared in the press briefing room of the White House and let the world know what he thinks of kindness and decency. With votes still being counted, he laid out a paranoid fantasy of a vast leftwing conspiracy stealing the election from him, one fraudulent ballot at a time.
      [embedded content]
      For the media networks who cut away from Trump’s speech after just a few minutes, it was all too easy to dismiss his lie-infested rant as the death rattle of a man whose political lifeblood was being drained from him in real time. You could almost say his speech was irrelevant, given that no one is above the law and he doesn’t get to choose, no matter how charismatic he looks on TV.
      Except for three inconvenient truths: Trump will continue to be head of state of the most powerful nation on Earth until at least 20 January; 70 million Americans voted for him, of whom a portion is likely to be susceptible to his falsehoods; some 17m guns have been bought so far this year – the largest number in US history. More

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      Why Democrats lost Latino voters along Texas border: 'They relied on loyalty'

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      While Democrats aggressively pushed to turn Texas blue this election cycle, they were banking on help from people like Barbara Ocañas, a highly educated, 37-year-old Latina voter from the Rio Grande valley.
      But, after Donald Trump faced backlash for using the word “coyote” to describe human smugglers, Ocañas was turned off by liberals focused more on semantics than the actual realities of the migrant crisis affecting her home. As the daughter of a Mexican émigré, she believes that undocumented immigrants are “just people, like you and me”.
      However, when it comes to earning US citizenship, “there is a right way and a wrong way to do it”, she said.
      She also fears what Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s administration could mean for people she knows who rely on jobs in refineries or hauling crude oil. So, faced with a ballot and a choice, Ocañas decided she preferred four more years with Donald Trump in the White House.
      “Not all of us take it to heart when we’re called rapists and bad hombres,” she said. “We have tough skin.”
      In Texas border towns with chronically low voter participation, residents did actually show up to the polls this election, exceeding county turnouts from 2016. But when results rolled in Tuesday night, Biden’s overall success was nowhere near Hillary Clinton’s slam dunk four years earlier, revealing Democratic vulnerabilities among a key bloc whose votes had largely been taken for granted.
      “Democrats have just assumed and relied on this historical loyalty by people in the valley to the Democratic party,” said Natasha Altema McNeely, an associate professor of political science at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. “And that assumption, I think, is very dangerous for the Democrats if they expect to continue to help the valley remain blue.”
      Biden still won Ocañas’s Hidalgo county, but with a fraction of the margin. In Starr county, which Clinton had dominated in a 60-point landslide, voters swung for Biden by just five points. And, after Democrats squandered a nearly 33-point advantage from four years ago, Zapata county flipped to deliver Trump a stunning victory.
      That erosion of Democratic support took place even after high-profile Biden surrogates descended on the US-Mexico border ahead of election day. Jill Biden, Joe’s wife, campaigned in El Paso on the first day of early voting, when – amid buzz that Texas might be in play – she told her audience that a win in the state would mean that “we are unstoppable”. More

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      The vanishing 'red mirage': how Trump's election week soured

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      For Democrats, the familiar sinking feeling began in the early hours of Wednesday morning when Florida came out for Donald Trump. The state is a critical battleground. Up until that point a Democratic victory in Tuesday’s US presidential election had seemed likely. Joe Biden, the former vice-president, was going to win, the polls said. Probably by a landslide. The only question was the giddy margin.
      But the humiliating rout predicted by the pundits wasn’t happening. Trump’s support was holding up remarkably well. This wasn’t just true of diehard fans who had packed into his election rallies in the tumultuous closing days of an extraordinary campaign. Others were backing him as well. This, despite a health pandemic and a divisive presidency like no other.
      The Florida results suggested a more complex picture was emerging. For the Biden camp, it was an alarming one. With 96% of ballots counted, Trump was 375,000 votes ahead. Biden, it turned out, had underperformed in the Democratic stronghold of Miami-Dade County. The president had increased his vote among white, working class and Latino people. And among African Americans.
      Trump, it seemed, had defied his critics yet again. He comfortably won Texas, crushing Democratic hopes of flipping the state. In the crucial swing state of Pennsylvania – visited repeatedly by both candidates in recent months – Trump was more than half a million votes ahead. There were other notable wins, including Ohio and Iowa. Much of the electoral map was going red. More

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      in US Politics

      US election live updates: Biden edges toward victory with leads over Trump in Nevada and Pennsylvania

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      Key events

      Show

      2.20pm EST14:20
      Biden is poised for victory with leads in Pennsylvania and Nevada

      Live feed

      Show

      4.43pm EST16:43

      Let’s check in with Steve Bannon, Donald Trump’s former adviser who is now facing fraud charges over allegations he misused money that was meant to help build a wall along the US-Mexican border.
      Bannon has now lost his lawyer in the fraud case after suggesting Dr Anthony Fauci, the government’s top infectious disease expert, and FBI Director Christopher Wray should be beheaded.
      The Guardian’s Peter Beaumont reports:

      Speaking on his podcast, the War Room, which was distributed in video form on a number of social media outlets, the far-right provocateur appeared to endorse violence against Wray and the US’s most senior infectious diseases expert.
      ‘Second term kicks off with firing Wray, firing Fauci … no I actually want to go a step farther but the president is a kind-hearted man and a good man,’ Bannon said.
      ‘I’d actually like to go back to the old times of Tudor England. I’d put their heads on pikes, right, I’d put them at the two corners of the White House as a warning to federal bureaucrats, you either get with the programme or you’re gone.’
      Twitter banned Bannon’s War Room account permanently, saying it had suspended the podcast account for violating its policy on the glorification of violence.
      The same video was on Facebook for about 10 hours before it was also removed.
      Later on Friday, William Burck, an attorney for Bannon in a fraud case in New York City, told a federal judge he was withdrawing. Bannon is accused of misappropriating money from a group which raised $2m from thousands of donors to build a wall on the border with Mexico, and has pleaded not guilty. Burck did not give a reason for his withdrawal.

      4.26pm EST16:26

      The Guardian’s Sam Levine reports from Philadelphia:
      The corner of 12th and Arch Street has become the epicenter of the political universe over the last few days as demonstrators have gathered to face off. The larger group has urged officials to “count every vote,” while a smaller pro-Trump group has cheered to “stop the steam.”
      At times, it’s felt a little tense as protesters have confronted one another and the anti-Trump crowd has drowned out pro-Trump surrogates like Pam Bondi and Corey Lewandowski.
      But on Friday the intersection had a notably different tone – the “count every vote” group essentially transformed into a large dance party. The celebration came as Joe Biden took a lead in the count for ballots in this key swing state.

      Sam Levine
      (@srl)
      More dancing pic.twitter.com/IQjaalnCEL

      November 6, 2020

      “It feels great to finally celebrate something,” said Ann Dixon, who said she hasn’t been following the incremental changes in vote totals because she wants “every vote to be counted and it’s not over til its over.” She said she was concerned, however, that Trump would try and drag out the vote count, which would divide the country more and more.
      Protesters young and old danced to a mix of music, which included Beyoncé, the Backstreet Boys, and Shakira.
      “I sort of debated whether or not I should come out and then I decided I should. It’s important to sort of celebrate despite having a bunch of work to still do moving forward,” said Rachel MacDonald. “I’m not really motivated by anger in the same way and so I decided I should come out and dance with everybody as well and not just yell,”
      She was there with her friend Hannah Chervitz, who was attending her first protest.
      “It’s nice to come out and channel all of this energy into something positive,” Chervitz said.

      4.09pm EST16:09

      MSNBC’s Steve Kornacki explained why his network, like the AP, has not yet called Pennsylvania for Joe Biden.

      MSNBC
      (@MSNBC)
      WATCH: @SteveKornacki details the outstanding ballots that remain to be counted in Pennsylvania.#TrackingKornacki #MSNBC2020 pic.twitter.com/epjmpGxRLh

      November 6, 2020

      Kornacki explained that there are about 200,000 ballots left to be counted in the state. About half of them are mail-in ballots, and half of them are provisional ballots.
      Mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania have been very favorable for Biden, as it appears most of Donald Trump’s supporters chose to vote in person. But some of those ballots may still be challenged.
      Historically, provisional ballots are also very favorable for Democrats, but so far, they have been a bit better for Trump. One explanation for this is that some of the president’s supporters received mail-in ballots but then chose to vote in person instead, so they received provisional ballots to allow election officials to confirm the vote was valid.
      But election analyst Nate Silver said he was skeptical of that analysis:

      Nate Silver
      (@NateSilver538)
      So, I am open-minded but not super persuaded by this. There are a handful of counties to have counted provisional ballots so far and those ballots indeed went for Trump, but they came from counties where the rest of the vote was *even stronger* for Trump.https://t.co/DXMdQJyfS5 https://t.co/h3gyCwCeNK

      November 6, 2020

      3.51pm EST15:51

      A Republican congressman is engaging in a Twitter battle with one of his new colleagues, Marjorie Taylor Greene, who is a supporter of the far-right QAnon conspiracy theory.
      It all started when congressman Dan Crenshaw, a Republican of Texas, sent a tweet this afternoon, saying, “If Trump loses, he loses. It was never an impossible outcome and we must accept the final results when it is over.
      “But the unfortunate reality is that there is very little trust in the process, where irregularities have been flagrant and transparency lacking.”

      Dan Crenshaw
      (@DanCrenshawTX)
      If Trump loses, he loses. It was never an impossible outcome and we must accept the final results when it is over. But the unfortunate reality is that there is very little trust in the process, where irregularities have been flagrant and transparency lacking.

      November 6, 2020

      That second sentence looks past the fact that Donald Trump has worked diligently to sow distrust in the election results, and the president’s advisers have been allowed to view the vote count in multiple battleground states.
      But we’ll set that aside for a second. After Crenshaw sent that tweet, Greene, who is now a congresswoman-elect after winning her congressional race on Tuesday, replied, “The time to STAND UP for @realDonaldTrump is RIGHT NOW! Republicans can’t back down. This loser mindset is how the Democrats win.”

      Dan Crenshaw
      (@DanCrenshawTX)
      Did you even read past the first sentence? Or are you just purposely lying so you can talk tough? No one said give up. I literally said investigate every irregularity and use the courts. You’re a member of Congress now, Marjorie. Start acting like one. https://t.co/47a7Gqq4lH

      November 6, 2020

      Crenshaw responded by chastising Greene and urging her to live up to the office she has been elected to. “I literally said investigate every irregularity and use the courts,” Crenshaw said. “You’re a member of Congress now, Marjorie. Start acting like one.”
      That dust-up could preview some of the contentious conversations to come in the House Republican caucus once Greene is seated in January.

      3.40pm EST15:40

      The Guardian’s Tom Phillips reports from Rio de Janeiro:
      It is a US-born slur that was inspired by Honduras and has haunted Latin America for decades – a deprecatory way to describe politically volatile and economically puny backwaters ruled by erratic and venal autocrats.
      But on Friday, after Donald Trump’s alarming press conference at the White House yesterday, voices across the region, from Mexico to Uruguay, delighted in lobbing the insult back at their neighbours to the north.
      “Who’s the banana republic now?” wondered the frontpage headline of Colombia’s Publimetro, one of many Latin American newspapers whose editors thought the term perfectly captured the electoral turmoil playing out in the US.

      Tom Phillips
      (@tomphillipsin)
      “Who’s the banana republic now?” wonders Colombia’s @PublimetroCol 😬 pic.twitter.com/GGUUB1oUsT

      November 6, 2020

      Over the border in Venezuela, a columnist from the El Nacional agreed calling Trump’s behaviour “intemperate and foolish” and telling readers the US election seemed to be taking place “in a country at war, or a república bananera”.
      Merval Pereira, one of Brazil’s most prominent political commentators, called his daily column “Bananas americanas” and wrote: “This is a singular event in US democratic history which puts the country in the list of banana republics, an expression created by the Americans themselves.”
      The Latin American Twittersphere went bananas too, with the Uruguayan human rights defender Javier Palummo asking followers: “How do you say banana republic in American English?”

      3.29pm EST15:29

      The Guardian’s Tom Phillips reports from Rio de Janeiro:
      One of Donald Trump’s most devoted international disciples, the Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro, now seems to be decoupling from his political idol.
      Bolsonaro has been one of Trump’s loudest cheerleaders and revels in being portrayed as South America’s “tropical Trump”. Last year Brazil’s far-right leader was reported to have told his fellow populist: “I love you”.
      But on Friday morning, with a Trump defeat looking increasingly likely, Bolsonaro appeared to jump ship. “I’m not the most important person in Brazil just as Trump isn’t the most important person in the world, as he’s said himself,” he told an event in southern Brazil. “The most important person is God.”
      To hammer his point home Bolsonaro later posted a video of those comments to his Twitter feed, where he has 6.6 million followers. Despite Bolsonaro’s admiration for Trump, the US president is reportedly not one of them.

      3.16pm EST15:16

      Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state, held another press conference as the margin in the race for his state’s 16 electoral votes remains razor-thin.
      “We will get it right, and we will defend the integrity of our elections,” Raffensperger said, promising an “open and transparent” vote-counting process.
      Raffensperger once again acknowledged that, with a margin this small, a recount was all but certain in the state.
      The Republican official defended the integrity of the vote-count, saying he was committed to ensuring trust in the process.
      As of now, Joe Biden leads Donald Trump by 1,603 votes in Georgia, out of nearly 5 million ballots cast in the state.

      3.07pm EST15:07

      The Guardian’s Sam Levin reports from Los Angeles:
      Jackie Lacey, the Los Angeles district attorney, was ousted by her progressive challenger, in one of the most closely watched criminal justice races in the US this year.
      George Gascón, the former police chief and district attorney of San Francisco, won the race to lead the Los Angeles prosecutors’ office with more than 53% of the vote. Black Lives Matter LA and other activist groups played a major role in the heated contest, having protested Lacey’s policies for years. More

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      in US Politics

      What's happening in Pennsylvania? The state that may be about to tip the US election

      by

      Joe Biden appeared to be on the verge of victory in the US presidential election on Friday morning, passing Donald Trump in the vote tally in the key state of Pennsylvania.
      Would a Pennsylvania win absolutely make Biden president-elect?
      Yes, it would. A win in Pennsylvania would bring Biden to 284 electoral votes, beyond the 270 threshold needed to win. He would not need to win any further states, and he could even afford to lose Arizona (11 electoral votes), where the margin separating the candidates has narrowed after an early call in Biden’s favor.
      Why hasn’t the race been called?
      It might be called at any moment. At least one high-profile election decisions clearinghouse, Decisions Desk HQ, had already declared Biden to be president-elect. The thousands of votes remaining to be counted in Pennsylvania were coming from heavily Democratic areas, and Biden’s lead in the state was expected to grow.
      The major television networks and the Associated Press, on whose decision desk the Guardian relies, were expected to declare victory for Biden after an anticipated growth in his lead in Pennsylvania to somewhere beyond half a percentage point.
      Biden could be summarily declared president-elect at any moment.
      “The Associated Press continues to count votes in the presidential election and has not declared a winner,” the news organization said at just after noon eastern time.
      When will the race be called?
      At the rate Pennsylvania has been counting, Biden is likely to grow a significant lead over the course of the day on Friday, and the race might be called at any time.
      Does Trump still have a path?
      Not really. If Trump loses Pennsylvania, he loses the election. Trump is now behind in Pennsylvania, and the votes remaining to be counted come from areas where Biden has been getting 75% of the vote or better. The more votes are counted, the greater Biden’s lead becomes.
      Can Trump do anything to stop this?
      It’s an extreme long shot. The Trump campaign is pursuing lawsuits in multiple states in an attempt to have various batches of ballots thrown out. For example, Trump has joined a case before the supreme court that could potentially reverse a decision allowing ballots received after election day in Pennsylvania (but postmarked by election day) to be counted.
      The problem for Trump is that most of the legal claims his team is advancing appear to be weak, and several have already been thrown out of court. Another problem for Trump: the total number of ballots challenged by his lawsuits does not appear to be anywhere close to large enough to flip the result in any state.
      The Trump campaign has said it will formally request a recount in Wisconsin and may do so in other states, but recounts in major US elections rarely move the tally by more than a few hundred votes, not nearly enough to make a difference.
      What other variables are in play?
      The basic point to understand is that every last avenue to re-election for Trump has been pretty much closed off. But because it’s Trump, who appears ready to try anything to stay in power, the question is worth exploring.
      The multi-stage nature of the electoral college, in which voters in each state pick a winner and then state legislatures appoint “electors” who cast 538 total ballots for president, could allow some opportunity for foul play, although it’s extremely unlikely.
      There has been some wild talk among some Republicans about trying to get a Republican-controlled legislature in a state such as Pennsylvania to ignore the will of the voters and appoint a slate of electors that favors Trump instead of Biden. The Republican leaders of both chambers of the state legislature, however, have adamantly knocked down the idea.
      Trump has loudly called on supporters to “defend” the election, and some have brought guns to rallies outside ballot-counting sites. It’s not clear how such tensions might develop as the realization of Trump’s probable loss sinks in.
      The attorney general, William Barr, has been wholly offstage since before election day. It’s possible that Trump’s justice department could yet make some kind of coordinated legal play against the election.
      But owing to the decentralized nature of US elections, that would be exceedingly difficult. Unlike in the 2000 election, when the entire race came down to one state, Florida, and a legal challenge by Republicans succeeded in halting a recount, this year there are multiple states contributing to a Biden victory and he does not need a recount to win. More

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      in US Politics

      Democrats beware: the Republicans will soon be the party of the working class | Samuel Hammond

      by

      Following an election mired in chaos and confusion, this at least is clear: Donald Trump’s political career will soon be coming to an end, but Trumpism – his inchoate brand of conservative populism – is here to stay.The narrative would surely be different had Trump lost in the resounding landslide foreseen by professional pundits and pollsters. In that universe, the president and everything he represents would have been repudiated, creating an immense temptation for the Republican party to revert back to its lily-white, elite-driven comfort zone.Instead, Trump defied expectations by winning the largest share of non-white voters of any Republican since 1960. This ranged from modest gains among African American men, to major swings in party preference within working-class Latino communities – and not just in Miami-Dade, where Cuban-American turnout helped secure Florida for Trump while unseating two Democratic incumbents. In Starr county, Texas, for example, Biden beat Trump by five points down from Hillary Clinton’s 60 – a 55-point swing in a border town that’s 95% Hispanic and which has a median income of only $17,000.The Missouri senator Josh Hawley, a rising star within the GOP’s populist faction, was quick to offer his interpretation on Twitter. “Republicans in Washington are going to have a very hard time processing this,” he wrote. “But the future is clear: we must be a working class party, not a Wall Street party.”The Florida senator Marco Rubio concurred. “#Florida & the Rio Grande Valley showed the future of the GOP: A party built on a multi-ethnic multi-racial coalition of working AMERICANS.”Ironically enough, the primary demographic Trump lost relative to 2016 was non-college-educated white men. A key factor seems to have been the Biden campaign’s strategic positioning on issues that resonate with rust belt voters – from a “Buy America” plan so supercharged that it made Steve Bannon blush, to tax incentives for manufacturers that reshore. Thus even in defeat, the ideas behind Trumpism were on some level victorious.All that said, the gap between Trumpism in theory and practice remains enormous. Despite campaigning on a rejection of conservative economic orthodoxies in 2016, once in office Trump pursued an agenda of tax cuts and deregulation that was almost comically conventional. And by the final days of the 2020 campaign, Trump scarcely talked about policy at all, much less his core issues of trade and immigration.Trump’s narrow loss thus marks the beginning of an internal struggle for the soul of American conservatismTrump’s narrow loss thus marks the beginning of an internal struggle for the soul of American conservatism. Many in the Republican party long for a return to the socially moderate, fiscal conservatism of a bygone era. Others, like Hawley and Rubio, are calling upon their peers to embrace the working-class realignment that Trump grasped at an intuitive level, even as he failed in execution.Between deindustrialization and the steady exodus of college-educated voters to the Democratic party, the Republican party’s shift toward the working class has been decades in the making. A similar trend can be seen elsewhere, too, from Boris Johnson’s blue-collar supporters, to the unabashedly pro-union platform of Erin O’Toole, the newly minted leader of the Conservative party of Canada.The main difference in the US case has been the failure, if not outright resistance, of the Republican party’s political machinery to adapt in real time. Indeed, for all of Trump’s capacity for disruption, he was no match against the institutional edifice of the so-called “conservative movement” – the dozens of free-market thinktanks, law firms and leadership organizations that were called upon to staff his administration and define his agenda.So while the notion of the Republican party becoming a multiethnic working-class coalition may seem farcical now, the longer-term trend speaks for itself. The only question is whether the party’s elite will continue to deny this reality, or take the next four years to rebuild and realign conservative institutions to better reflect the actual interests of their rank and file. More

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      in Elections

      Trump campaign vows to keep fighting: 'This election is not over'

      by

      [embedded content]
      Donald Trump repeated his unfounded claims of election fraud on Friday, as it seemed increasingly likely he would refuse to accept the results and concede defeat to Joe Biden.
      “This is about the integrity of our entire election process,” the president insisted in a statement issued early on Friday afternoon, adding: “I will never give up fighting.”
      Earlier, as the Democratic challenger moved into the lead in Georgia and Pennsylvania – two states Trump must win to have any chance of retaining the presidency – the Trump campaign insisted in a statement talk of a Biden victory was a “false projection” and hinted at further legal challenges to come.
      In return, Biden’s spokesman, Andrew Bates, said: “The American people will decide this election. And the United States government is perfectly capable of escorting trespassers out of the White House.”
      Trump’s refusal to acknowledge a probable Biden victory seems likely to set the scene for an ugly legal battle waged across several states. Given the incumbent is yet to provide any evidence of widespread voter fraud, it seems like this will be a futile fight. But the campaign insisted it would be waged in any case.
      “This election is not over,” said the Trump campaign general counsel, Matt Morgan. “The false projection of Joe Biden as the winner is based on results in four states that are far from final.”
      Morgan said the campaign was confident it would find “improperly harvested” ballots in Georgia, and claimed there had been “many irregularities in Pennsylvania”. In Nevada, according to Morgan, individuals cast mail-in ballots incorrectly.
      “Biden is relying on these states for his phoney claim on the White House,” he said, “but once the election is final, President Trump will be re-elected.”
      The Trump campaign had not provided any evidence for these claims.
      Over the past six months Trump has repeatedly refused to commit to a peaceful transition of power, when asked, and has claimed he will only lose if the election is rigged.
      Gen Mark Milley, the chairman of the joint chief of staffs and the country’s top military officer, has said the armed forces would not get involved in the transfer of power.
      Biden, however, back in June said the military would remove Trump if it came to that. He told the Daily Show: “I promise you, I’m absolutely convinced they will escort him from the White House with great dispatch.”
      Recount
      In Georgia on Friday morning, as Biden squeezed into a narrow lead, the state secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, said there would be a recount. He also promised transparency. It seemed likely both Georgia Senate races, key to control of the upper chamber, would be decided in January runoffs.
      Biden’s most significant lead was in Pennsylvania, where thousands of votes remained to be counted. The majority of those votes were from counties that lean heavily Democratic, the process taking longer than usual due to more votes having been cast by mail.
      Trump quoted a talking head on Fox Business when he tweeted that “Philadelpiha [sic] has got a rotten history on election integrity”. But the Pennsylvania senator Pat Toomey was among Republicans edging away from what appeared to be the death throes of the Trump presidency.
      Toomey told NBC that though he thought “the president still has a very narrow path by which he can win”, he also thought there was “absolutely not” any “evidence [of] significant large-scale fraud or malfeasance anywhere in Pennsylvania”.

      Other senior party figures sprang to the president’s defence. Several GOP politicians who might fancy themselves as contenders for the presidency in 2024 did so on Thursday night, after the president’s sons goaded the party on Twitter.
      Among senators, Tom Cotton of Arkansas, Ted Cruz of Texas and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina – a former friend and ally of John McCain, the 2008 Republican nominee, once seen as a relative moderate but who swore fealty to Trump long ago – all raged against the tide of Biden votes, echoing the president’s baseless claims of fraud.
      Of the counting in Pennsylvania, which is being watched by official Republican observers, Cruz echoed Trump’s baseless claims of fraud when he told Fox News: “I am more than a little frustrated that every time they close the doors and shut out the lights, they always find more Democratic votes.”
      The three only intervened, however, after receiving a public shaming from Trump’s sons Eric and Donald Jr.
      “The total lack of action from virtually all of the ‘2024 GOP hopefuls’ is pretty amazing. They have a perfect platform to show that they’re willing & able to fight but they will cower to the media mob instead,” tweeted Donald Trump Jr – seen by many as a possible 2024 contender himself. More

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      in US Politics

      The left urgently needs to lose its inferiority complex | Andy Beckett

      by

      This week Joe Biden – few people’s idea of an outstanding candidate – won the biggest presidential vote in United States history. Seven times in the last eight such contests, the Democrats have got more votes than the Republicans.
      You could see this latest popular-vote victory as further confirmation of a theory that’s been promoted by some political scientists and journalists for a quarter of a century, most notably in The Emerging Democratic Majority, a 2002 book by John B Judis and Ruy Teixeira. The theory says that American social trends, which are making much of the country more diverse, urban and better educated – all characteristics associated with voting Democrat – are slowly but inexorably shifting the US away from the Republicans.
      This might sound like liberal wishful thinking, but it’s a view that has also been held by senior Republicans. In 2012, Senator Lindsey Graham warned his party: “We’re not generating enough angry white guys to stay in business for the long term.” Combined with the horror that many Americans feel at Donald Trump and how disastrously he has governed, this long-term leftward drift was widely expected this week to become an irresistible electoral force.
      Instead, it met a series of seemingly immovable objects. First, Trump’s infamous aversion to ever being “a loser”. Second, his immense and again underrated appeal to conservative voters. Third, his party’s reluctance, which has intensified dramatically since the early 1990s, to accept any Democratic president as legitimate. Fourth, the Republicans’ willingness to use gerrymandering and voter suppression to tilt elections in their favour. And finally, the US’s rickety old election system itself: the electoral college and the system for choosing the Senate, with their seemingly ever stronger pro-Republican biases.
      The result was deadlock – a weirdly frenzied deadlock in keeping with the mania of Trump’s presidency. Even if Biden eventually wins with some comfort, as looks increasingly possible, the result in the electoral college will probably be close, late and contested enough to be misrepresented as “a fraud” by Trump and millions of other rightwing Americans for decades to come. And the Republicans will probably have enough senators to seriously obstruct any Biden presidency.
      Once more, the great Democratic breakthrough seems to have been postponed. Particularly left-leaning and anxious Biden supporters may be tempted to quote the melancholy Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci: “The old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”
      Watching from Britain, it is possible to see the past few days as a uniquely American saga. If you can temporarily forget about the implications for the entire planet, you can even follow it as a sort of political box set, an addictive multi-level drama to binge on as our national lockdown and our greyer politics grind on.
      But to exoticise this crisis is a mistake. Versions of the American battle, between left-leaning parties backed by rising social groups such as the young on the one side and entrenched rightwing governments backed by older voters on the other, are under way in other countries. They will decide what sort of societies many western democracies become: how they distribute their assets and liabilities between the generations; how they respond to long-term threats such as the climate emergency.
      In Britain, the 2017 and 2019 elections and the Brexit referendum exposed and left unresolved many of the same divisions as the current US election. And the Conservatives have become almost as aggressive as the Republicans in their efforts to prolong their dominance, launching culture wars, suspending parliament and gaming the electoral system, for example, by making it harder to register to vote.
      Like the US, Britain has an admired old constitution (though ours is unwritten) that has proved easier for a shameless government to work around than many political traditionalists expected. And, as in the US, Britain’s two main parties currently have similar levels of support. Whenever our next general election comes, the third hung parliament since 2010 is a distinct possibility. Britons shaking their heads at the US’s election chaos probably shouldn’t gloat.
      What can the left do about these deadlocks? One obvious but difficult solution is to reform the electoral systems that are biased against them – or at least make many more voters uncomfortable with how unfair these systems are. Another solution is to have more charismatic leaders, more effective election campaigns and more popular policies than the right. That’s a tall order, but stubborn rightwing ascendancies have been broken in Britain and the US before: by Labour in 1945, 1964 and 1997; by the Democrats in 1960, 1992 and 2008.
      The enemies of conservatism also need to shed their inferiority complex. After Trump was elected, many liberals and leftists argued that he would be impossible to beat in 2020, as an incumbent with supposedly so much dark charisma. When Trump took an early lead this week, the same pessimistic mindset spread an expectation that Biden would be defeated, despite the well-known fact that many Democratic votes would be counted last. And once Biden went ahead, the pessimists started predicting that any presidency of his would be doomed before it began, and that Trump could even win next time.
      Some of this pessimism may turn out to be justified. But it also suits the right’s political narrative: that they are the US and the west’s natural rulers, and that any periods of government by anyone else are temporary aberrations.
      Twenty years ago, the Republicans captured the presidency in even more contentious circumstances, through the supreme court. George W Bush went on to govern as if he had decisively won. He was re-elected. The Democrats, and liberals and leftists everywhere, could learn from that.
      • Andy Beckett is a Guardian columnist More