US elections 2020

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      The Observer view on the sniping over Joe Biden’s victory | Observer editorial

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      Now the fog of political war has cleared, it’s plain that Joe Biden scored a truly remarkable victory in the US presidential election. It’s never easy to dislodge a sitting president. Bill Clinton was the last challenger to pull it off, in 1992. When the incumbent is as unscrupulous as Donald Trump, defeating him requires a very special skill set. Yet Biden managed it with votes to spare.Despite jitters over early, unfavourable results, inaccurate opinion polls and Trump’s premature declaration, Biden won the electoral college by a solid margin and beat his rival by more than 5m votes, 50.9% to 47.3%. He reconquered key midwest states lost in 2016 and, it was confirmed on Friday, “flipped” Georgia and Arizona. It’s good news that Americans turned out in record numbers for this momentous democratic exercise. Biden won more votes than any previous presidential candidate. It’s good news, too, that despite fears of repeat Russian meddling and Trump’s ridiculous claims of fraud, federal and state oversight officials have unequivocally declared the election free and fair.Strange, then, that some on the left in America and Britain have been grudging, if not downright critical of a Democratic triumph that owed its success to the broad, inclusive coalition that Biden forged. This odd reluctance stems partly from the sinistral conviction that Biden is doomed to fail. Although he won more than 78m votes, Trump won more than 72m. This is taken as gloomy proof that America is irreparably divided, that Biden’s mission to reunify the country cannot succeed and that in 2024, a sort of Trump-plus candidate – nasty like him, but smarter – will sweep to power. Underlying this analysis is a more fundamental objection: that Biden is not sufficiently radical – a lifelong centrist who cannot deliver the systemic change, ideological and political, deemed necessary to reorder society. This is the view broadly represented by Bernie Sanders, Biden’s vanquished rival, and by new-generation progressives such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.America, or most of it, does not seek a revolution. It seeks a restorationProceeding from this premise, it is argued that, if the Democratic party had pledged itself unambiguously to providing universal healthcare, reducing inequality through wealth redistribution and overthrowing neoliberalism and the “donor class”, it would have gained, not lost, seats in Congress – and Biden would have won even more decisively.His detractors claim Biden offers more of the same old middling Obama agenda. For them, only the iconoclastic “populist left” has a transformative vision; his watchword – consensus – signifies appeasement. Yet it’s precisely because Biden offered a return to the familiar middle ground after Trump’s craziness that people chose him. America, or most of it, does not seek a revolution. It seeks a restoration. Voters want a safe pair of hands, someone they can trust at a time of great anxiety. Biden certainly faces a daunting in-tray: most immediately, the pandemic response, plus the economic recession, racial injustice, an ultra-conservative supreme court threatening health and abortion rights and many international problems, with the climate crisis and China to the fore. It’s true that white working-class alienation and the urban-rural split, which Trump exploited, are prominent among these challenges.Yet to suggest Biden is incapable of bridging these divides and that his proffered solutions – a stimulus package, higher taxes on corporations and the wealthy, large-scale public investment and an epic switch to clean energy – will flop because they do not go far enough is unduly pessimistic. It’s akin to saying America is incapable of change. That’s not so, as history shows.Biden’s critics seem to prefer uncompromising defeat to pragmatic success. By questioning his fitness, they suggest voters are easily fooled, ignorant or don’t know what they want. This is not a good place for a socialist to be. So let’s wholeheartedly applaud Biden’s victory. Trump is beat and there’s a vaccine, too! What’s not to like? More

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      Trump's refusal to concede is just the latest gambit to please Republican donors

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      Leave it to Trump and his Republican allies to spend more energy fighting non-existent voter fraud than containing a virus that has killed 244,000 Americans and counting.
      The cost of this misplaced attention is incalculable. While Covid-19 surges to record levels, there’s still no national strategy for equipment, stay at home orders, mask mandates or disaster relief.
      The other cost is found in the millions of Trump voters who are being led to believe the election was stolen and who will be a hostile force for years to come – making it harder to do much of anything the nation needs, including actions to contain the virus.
      Trump is continuing this charade because it pulls money into his newly formed political action committee and allows him to assume the mantle of presumed presidential candidate for 2024, whether he intends to run or merely keep himself the center of attention.
      Leading Republicans like Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell are going along with it because donors are refilling GOP coffers.
      The biggest beneficiaries are the party’s biggest patrons – the billionaire class, including the heads of the nation’s largest corporations and financial institutions, private-equity partnerships and hedge funds – whom a deeply divided nation serves by giving them unfettered access to the economy’s gains.
      Their heist started four decades ago. According to a recent Rand study, if America’s distribution of income had remained the same as it was in the three decades following the second world war, the bottom 90% would now be $47tn richer.
      A low-income American earning $35,000 this year would be earning $61,000. A college-educated worker now earning $72,000 would be earning $120,000. Overall, the grotesque surge in inequality that began 40 years ago is costing the median American worker $42,000 per year.
      The upward redistribution of $47tn wasn’t due to natural forces. It was contrived. As wealth accumulated at the top, so did political power to siphon off even more wealth and shaft everyone else.
      Monopolies expanded because antitrust laws were neutered. Labor unions shriveled because corporations were allowed to bust unions. Wall Street was permitted to gamble with other peoples’ money and was bailed out when its bets soured even as millions lost their homes and savings. Taxes on the top were cut, tax loopholes widened.
      When Covid-19 hit, Big Tech cornered the market, the rich traded on inside information and the Treasury and the Fed bailed out big corporations but let small businesses go under. Since March, billionaire wealth has soared while most of America has become poorer.
      How could the oligarchy get away with this in a democracy where the bottom 90% have the votes? Because the bottom 90% are bitterly divided.
      Long before Trump, the GOP suggested to white working-class voters that their real enemies were Black people, Latinos, immigrants, “coastal elites”, bureaucrats and “socialists”. Trump rode their anger and frustration into the White House with more explicit and incendiary messages. He’s still at it with his bonkers claim of a stolen election.
      The oligarchy surely appreciates the Trump-GOP tax cuts, regulatory rollbacks and the most business-friendly supreme court since the early 1930s. But the Trump-GOP’s biggest gift has been an electorate more fiercely split than ever.
      Into this melee comes Joe Biden, who speaks of being “president of all Americans” and collaborating with the Republican party. But the GOP doesn’t want to collaborate. When Biden holds out an olive branch, McConnell and other Republican leaders will respond just as they did to Barack Obama – with more warfare, because that maintains their power and keeps the big money rolling in.
      The president-elect aspires to find a moderate middle ground. This will be difficult because there’s no middle. The real divide is no longer left versus right but the bottom 90% versus the oligarchy.
      Biden and the Democrats will better serve the nation by becoming the party of the bottom 90% – of the poor and the working middle class, of black and white and brown, and of all those who would be $47tn richer today had the oligarchy not taken over America.
      This would require that Democrats abandon the fiction of political centrism and establish a countervailing force to the oligarchy – and, not incidentally, sever their own links to it.
      They’d have to show white working-class voters how badly racism and xenophobia have hurt them as well as people of color. And change the Democratic narrative from kumbaya to economic and social justice.
      Easy to say, hugely difficult to accomplish. But if today’s bizarre standoff in Washington is seen for what it really is, there’s no alternative.
      Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His new book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a columnist for Guardian US More

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      Million Maga March: Trump fans rage against dying of the light

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      Jerry Babb and Robert Beckner stood on a brick pedestal and looked on at a crowd of tens of thousands, gathered by the Freedom Plaza for the Million Maga March.
      “America is beautiful,” Babb said, a sea of Trump flags in front of him. “And America is back.”
      The crowd sang the national anthem, sporadically erupting in cheers for the president. The rally began at the Freedom Plaza on Saturday morning, and would culminate in a crowd of hundreds and thousands by late afternoon.
      A large number of protesters had travelled cross-country to show their support for Donald Trump, from as far as Los Angeles and Seattle. One group, with the banner “Korean Americans Support 2020 President Trump”, said they came in from South Korea for the election and had showed up to support their man again on Saturday.
      Craig Johnson, who had driven 14 hours from Florida, was giving out dollar bills featuring a photo of Melania Trump.
      “Isn’t she gorgeous?” he said to protesters walking by. “That’s my first lady.”
      “I want this nightmare to end,” he told the Guardian. “I haven’t slept much since the election because I’m sad that Donald Trump is not our president. He’s gonna be our president though.”
      Johnson wasn’t the only one with such strong belief in Trump’s claims, made without evidence, that the election was rigged – and in his refusal to concede to Joe Biden after all major media organisations called the race for the Democrat, by 306-232 in the electoral college. More

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      Driving Mr Donald – White House excursion reveals a presidency pushing up daisies

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      It was a jarring few minutes of seeing the world through Donald Trump’s eyes and indulging his fantasies.
      As the White House pool reporter on Saturday, taking a turn to shadow the US president for print media outlets, the Guardian found itself at the back of Trump’s motorcade, rolling out of the executive mansion grounds and on to Pennsylvania Avenue.
      At 10am the dozen black shiny vehicles with flashing blue and red lights were greeted by a sight seldom seen in Washington, a Democratic bastion: hundreds of Trump supporters, cheering and clapping, whistling and whooping, punching the air and hailing their idol as if he had in fact won a glorious victory over Joe Biden.
      What a difference from the previous Saturday when Trump returned from a round of golf to be jeered and booed by denizens of the capital who had just learned that he had been fired by the electorate. Some foreign observers compared that scene to Paris after the liberation or a Middle East autocracy that had overthrown its dictator.
      But a week later, with Trump adding election defeat to the coronavirus disaster and climate crisis as truths that must be denied, supporters – among them far-right groups including the extremist Proud Boys – poured into town to endorse his baseless claims that the election was stolen from him.
      Attendees at the “Million Maga March”, a number as inflated as Trump’s estimation of his inauguration crowd, swarmed the motorcade as it made its stately progress down Pennsylvania Avenue, which in its time has witnessed inaugural parades and funeral marches, suffragists and the Ku Klux Klan.
      Some punched the air; others took pictures with phones. Many sported clothes patterned in red, white and blue, like the stars and stripes. Outside the Willard Hotel, a man proudly wore a t-shirt that declared “I’m deplorable” – a reference to Hillary Clinton’s disparaging remark about Trump supporters that he and they never let go. Biden’s glancing reference to “chumps” never stuck in the same way.
      Among the signs being waved were “Best prez ever” and “Stop the steal”. Among the numerous flags were “Trump 2020: Keep America great”; “Trump 2020: No more bullshit”; “All aboard the Trump train!”; “Women for Trump”; and “Trump 2020: Pro-life, Pro-God, Pro-gun”. More

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      Trump supporters gather in Washington as president refuses to concede to Biden

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      Donald Trump continues to rage against the dying light of his US presidency, falsely claiming to be the victim of mass voter fraud and praising rightwingers and conspiracy theorists who gathered in Washington on Saturday to echo his fabrication.
      [embedded content]
      Trump has still not conceded that he lost the 3 November election to Joe Biden, despite a protracted count showing the Democrat has comfortably secured the electoral college votes needed for victory, seizing formerly safe Republican states in Arizona and possibly Georgia, where a hand recount is under way.
      Across the US, Biden has more than 5m more votes.
      The president has refused to cooperate with a transition of power to Biden, who will enter the White House on 20 January, or even provide his successor with national security briefings. Trump continued on Saturday to claim, without evidence, that the election was “rigged” and that he is the rightful winner.
      On Friday, federal and state officials said the election was the “most secure in American history”, with no evidence votes were compromised or altered.
      Plenty of Trump supporters accept the president’s assertions, however, with several hundred rallying in Washington in demonstrations organised under titles including “Million MAGA March” and “Stop the Steal”. Fringe extremist figures such as Infowars founder and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, Enrique Tarrio, chairman of the far-right Proud Boys group and Jack Posobiec, who promoted the infamous “Pizzagate” conspiracy that led to a 2016 shooting at a Washington restaurant, spearheaded rallies that Trump called “heartwarming”.
      Trump emerged from the White House on Saturday morning to applause, cheers, waving and whistles from hundreds of supporters lining both sides of the street. They punched the air, took pictures with phones and held signs that included “Best prez ever” and “Stop the steal”.
      The crowd also waved flags including “Trump 2020: Keep America great”, “Trump 2020: No more bullshit”, “All aboard the Trump train!” and “Trump 2020: Pro life, pro God, pro gun”. A stand had been set up to sell merchandise, as if at a Trump rally. Some ran excitedly after the motorcade. There were chants of “USA! USA!”, “We want Trump! We want Trump!” and “Four more years! Four more years!”
      One attendee, Mike Sembert, from Fort Meyers in Florida, told the Guardian he had traveled to the rally because “we need our president back and we need four more years”. He said the election was fraudulent and votes were cast by “illegals and dead people”.
      Anti-Trump protesters have also continued to congregate in Washington since street celebrations erupted when Biden’s win was confirmed a week ago. Signs, some reading “Loser” and “Failure”, have plastered a non-scalable fence erected around the entire White House perimeter.
      There has been an “outrageous and illegitimate attempt to overturn the election which must be stopped in its tracks by people in the streets making clear: the election is over,” said Sunsara Taylor, a counter-protester. “Biden won. Trump lost.”
      The courts, as well as the major news organisations that typically project election winners, appear in no mood to indulge Trump. The president’s campaign has suffered a slew of legal losses in Michigan, Arizona and Pennsylvania after arguing that ballots were illegally counted.
      “The Trump campaign keeps hoping it will find a judge that treats lawsuits like tweets,” Justin Levitt, a Loyola Law School professor and elections law expert, told CNN. “Repeatedly, every person with a robe they’ve encountered has said, ‘I’m sorry, we do law here.’”

      The bulk of senior Republicans have either sided with Trump or refused to condemn his refusal to acknowledge his loss, a stance that will lead America down a “dangerous path”, former president Barack Obama has warned. There are some notable Republican exceptions. George W Bush, another former president, has congratulated Biden on his win.
      The tumultuous transition comes as the US is ravaged by a surge in coronavirus cases. On Friday, a new daily record of 184,514 infections was recorded by Johns Hopkins University, with Americans now dying at a rate of around 1,000 a day. Nearly 250,000 people in the US have died due to the pandemic, by far the worst death toll in the world.
      Biden has urged people to take basic precautions, such as wearing masks, while attacking the “woefully lacking” Trump administration response to the crisis.
      “I will not be president until next year,” the president-elect said. “This crisis does not respect dates on the calendar, it is accelerating right now. Urgent action is needed today, now, by the current administration – starting with an acknowledgement of how serious the current situation is.” More

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      'Can we have America back?' Fox News video echoes Trump election claims

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      Fox News has come in for criticism over a promotional video in which opinion hosts echo Donald Trump’s baseless claims about the presidential election, which he lost to Joe Biden but which he refuses to concede.
      “Oh my god,” Andrew Laurence of Media Matters for America, a liberal media watchdog, wrote on Twitter. “Fox is running a promo of their ‘opinion’ hosts casting doubt on the election results and I guess trying to keep their rabid viewers sated.”
      Oliver Darcy, a media reporter for CNN, said the video showed executives at the Rupert Murdoch-owned channel “really have no shame”.
      In the short video, an announcer introduces a montage of “the voices America trusts”. Laura Ingraham is shown first, saying: “These legal efforts are critical.”
      That is a reference to cases Trump has mounted in key battleground states, alleging without evidence that voter fraud and ballot irregularities occurred, and seeking to overturn results via recounts.

      Such quixotic efforts have met with little success and experts say they are almost guaranteed to fail. More than 5m votes down in the popular vote, Trump lost the electoral college to Biden by 306-232, the score by which he beat Hillary Clinton in 2016 in what he claimed was a landslide.
      On the Fox News video, Tucker Carlson appears next, saying: “There are apparent irregularities.”
      “The media mob, and the Democrats, they lie,” says Sean Hannity.
      “Speaking up for you, and the issues that matter most to the people,” says the announcer.
      “They thought there would be a blue wave, not the case,” says Steve Doocy of Fox & Friends, a morning show favoured by Trump. In fact Doocy’s comment points to an electoral truth: that Trump attracted the most votes of any sitting president, staving off an expected landslide defeat, and that Republicans made gains at state level and in the US House and look set to retain control of the Senate.
      “You’re gonna see something even bigger than Trump in 2022 and 2024,” says Greg Gutfeld, referring to the next two election years.
      “The truth does need to come out,” says Ingraham.
      “Can we speak freely, again, can we have America back?” asks Carlson.
      “We the people deserve better,” says Hannity.
      “Fox News,” the announcer says. “America is watching.”
      Trump has attacked Fox News since the election, in which it was quick to call Arizona, a key state, for Biden, then joined other media organisations in calling the whole race for the Democrat last Saturday.
      “Fox News daytime ratings have completely collapsed,” Trump tweeted on Thursday. “Weekend daytime even WORSE. Very sad to watch this happen, but they forgot what made them successful, what got them there. They forgot the Golden Goose. The biggest difference between the 2016 Election, and 2020, was Fox News!”
      Darcy, of CNN, wrote that the Fox News video “appears to be part of a bid to hold on to its bleeding audience – an audience that refuses to believe reality, in large part because Fox has primed millions to distrust credible news sources”.
      Fox News has countered that its ratings remain strong, saying in a recent release it “finished the month of October as the most-watched cable network in both total day and primetime total viewers … notching 52 months in a row in the top spot”.
      According to Media Matters, Trump’s conspiracy theories have crossed into Fox News’ “straight” news operation.
      In the four days after the result was called, the watchdog said, Fox News “cast doubt on or pushed conspiracy theories about the election results at least 255 times. A review by Media Matters found 111 such claims on Fox’s ‘straight news’ shows and 144 claims on the network’s opinion shows”.
      “Where are the adults at Fox?” Darcy asked. “Why aren’t they getting their talent under control? Well, this ad makes it clear: The executives approve their talent behaving the way they have. In fact, they’re so proud of the undemocratic commentary, they’re happy to showcase it in an ad. They really have no shame.”
      Fox News did not offer comment on its promotional video. More

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      White men swung to Biden. Trump made gains with Black and Latino voters. Why? | Musa al-Gharbi

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      The prevailing narrative of the last five years has been that Trump seized and maintains power by appealing to the desires of white voters and men (and especially, white men) to preserve the patriarchy and white supremacy. However, it seems difficult to square these talking points with the preliminary exit poll data from this year’s presidential race.
      Let’s start with gender: across racial and ethnic groups, women shifted towards Trump this cycle. In the last election, Trump won white women by a margin of 9 percentage points. This year, he won by 11 percentage points. In 2016, Democrats won Hispanic and Latina women by 44 percentage points; in 2020 they won by 39. Last cycle, Democrats won black women by 90 percentage points. This year, by 81 points. That is, in a year when a black woman was on a major party ticket for the first time in US history, the margin between Democrats and Republicans among black women shifted 9 percentage points in the other direction – towards Trump.
      Trump saw comparable gains with Black and Hispanic men as well.
      Overall, comparing 2016 and 2020, Trump gained 4 percentage points with African Americans, 3 percentage points with Hispanics and Latinos, and 5 percentage points with Asian Americans. The shifts described in Edison’s exit polls are verified by AP Votecast, which showed similar movement among black and Hispanic voters this cycle.
      We can look at The American Election Eve Poll to gain some additional context on this movement.
      Let’s start with the Hispanic and Latino vote: comparing 2016 and 2020, the margins shifted 47 percentage points towards Trump (or, away from the Democrats) among those of South American ancestry. The margins also shifted 37 percentage points towards the Republican party among those whose families hail from Central America, 35 percentage points among Dominicans, 16 percentage points among Puerto Ricans, 15 percentage points among Mexican Americans and 9 percentage points among Cubans. Indeed, this latter group actually ended up favoring Trump over Biden outright.
      That is, while recognizing that these populations are not monolithic, and although Democrats won most of the Hispanic and Latino vote overall, nonetheless Hispanic and Latino voters shifted decisively towards Trump this cycle.
      Similar patterns hold among Asian Americans: Filipino, Korean, Chinese and Indian Americans alike seem to have drifted towards Trump. The trend was so dramatic among Vietnamese Americans that they, like Cubans, actually favored Trump outright. Among Asians, only Japanese Americans seem to have shifted towards the Democrats since 2016.
      That is, minorities and women (and minority women) – the very people who are supposed to be central to the Democratic coalition, and who have suffered most in the current pandemic and economic recession – seem to have shifted in Trump’s direction across the board.
      In fact, virtually the only racial or gender constellation the President did not gain with are the people that are often described as his core constituency: white men.
      In 2016, Trump won white men by a margin of 31 percentage points. In 2020, however, he won this constituency by 23 percentage points. Put another way, comparing 2016 to 2020, white men shifted 8 percentage points in Biden’s direction this year – helping flip the election towards the Democrats, despite Trump’s significant gains among minorities and women across the board.
      What changed in the racial and gender dynamics this cycle to produce these apparently extraordinary results? The truth is, absolutely nothing. These trends have been underway for the entirety of Trump’s public life.
      In fact, Democrat losses with minority voters precede Trump’s candidacy. Over the course of Obama’s tenure in office, Democrats saw attrition with black and Hispanic voters in 2010, 2012 and 2014. Trump won in 2016 precisely of this long-running erosion. Despite lackluster support among whites for the Republican candidate, Asian, Black and Hispanic voters continued to defect from the Democratic party – tipping key swing states in Trump’s direction, and handing him the election.
      Contrary to the prevailing narratives, the Republican party saw continued attrition with whites throughout Trump’s tenure in office. Almost all the losses Republicans saw in 2018, for instance, were due to defections by white voters. As compared to 2016, Republicans slightly improved their numbers with Blacks and Hispanic voters during the midterms. However, the margins among whites shifted 10 percentage points in the other direction, helping Trump’s opposition win the House.
      In the leadup to the 2020 election, the polling continued to tell the story it’d been telling all along: Trump was poised to see continued defections from whites, while Democrats would see continued attrition among voters of color. The trends in the polling were consistent and clear.
      The main question the available data couldn’t answer prior to the ballots being cast was whether or not Trump’s losses with whites would eclipse his growth among minorities (as they did in 2018) — or if minority voters would again help Trump deliver an upset despite his relative softness with whites (as happened in 2016). Now we know.
      Swing state breakdowns by the New York Times – comparing actual voting data to regional demographics — suggest that gains with Hispanic and Latino voters helped Trump hold Florida and Texas despite Democrats’ gains with whites. Republican gains among African Americans did the same in North Carolina. In Georgia, 8 of the 11 counties with the highest shares of African American voters shifted towards Trump as well – although these gains were more than offset by Biden’s gains in more racially heterogenous counties. In Arizona, Trump shrunk Democrats 2016 margins in regions with a majority Hispanic population. Meanwhile, shifts among white voters are what flipped Michigan to Biden.
      In other words, the prevailing discourse around race seems to be flat out wrong. Shifts among minorities were responsible for Trump’s surprising strength this cycle, while shifts among whites are what helped put Biden over the edge in the end.
      Unfortunately, the dominant narratives around gender have been just as deficient as those on race.
      For instance, men did not support Trump in record-shattering numbers in 2016 – nor did women rally strongly behind Clinton. Instead, Hillary lost because of anemic support among women. She got one of the lowest shares of the female vote of any Democrat in decades – and turnout among women was down as compared to the previous cycles. Had female turnout – or Democrat’s female vote share — been as strong for Clinton as it had been for Obama, Hillary would have won.
      Consequently, the question of why women exercised their agency the way they did in 2016 becomes an extremely important question. In fact, it is objectively more critical than how men voted: women comprised a larger share of the electorate than men in 2016. Indeed, they’ve comprised a majority of the electorate every cycle since 1976.
      Nonetheless, narratives about the 2016 election have overwhelmingly focused on men, sexism, patriarchy, etc. How women voted has been largely ignored.
      When discussed at all, Democrats’ surprising weakness with women in 2016 is typically attributed to white women having prioritized their commitment to white supremacy above their commitment to feminism. Yet, there was absolutely nothing special about Trump winning a majority of white women:
      Going back to 1972, Democrats have literally never won an outright majority of white women, and only reached a plurality twice. White women were less supportive of Trump in 2016 than they were of the Republican candidates in 1972, 1984, 1988, 2004 or 2012 (for the reference, similar patterns hold for white men).
      Nonetheless, white women’s 2016 votes are often described as being uniquely motivated by racism – despite the fact that voters were choosing between two tickets comprised 100% of white people.
      This time around, spinning such narratives will be much harder. Yes, white women actually did shift in Trump’s direction this time, unlike in 2016. However, Black women and Hispanic women shifted in the exact same direction.
      In short, it was shifts among minority voters that helped Trump win the presidency in 2016. This movement among minority voters carried into 2020 – and women across the board shifted towards the Republican party as well. Fortunately, defections among white men overrode the preferences of this growing share of women and minorities, bringing about Trump’s political demise.
      Musa al-Gharbi is a Paul F Lazarsfeld fellow in sociology at Columbia University More