US elections 2020
Subterms
More stories
- in US Politics
Fight to Vote: when a loser won’t concede
[embedded content]
Good morning Fight to Vote readers,
In a normal election year we might be wrapping up our newsletter by now, reporting on who came out to vote and speculating on the president-elect’s plans for the next four years. But this year we don’t have that luxury.
Donald Trump will not concede
Despite the fact that the president-elect, Joe Biden, leads in the popular vote by at least 5 million people, and despite the fact that he has significant leads in five key states, Donald Trump has baselessly claimed that the election is rigged against him.
He’s weaponizing those claims to undermine the election results, to cast doubt on the democratic process, and to try to convince the American people that he is the true winner.
These are his tactics
Litigation: The Trump campaign has lodged a slew of baseless lawsuits in swing states, with claims that range from “dead people voted” to “ballots that arrived late are being counted”. So far, as our reporter Sam Levine wrote this week, judges have ruled against the campaign in almost every instance, citing a lack of evidence.
Undermining the media: Trump and his supporters are even railing against Fox News because it called the election for Biden.
Federal investigation: William Barr, the attorney general, has authorized federal prosecutors to investigate election irregularities, an unprecedented move that prompted the head of the justice department’s election crimes unit to step down.
Calling on enablers: Trump is relying on figures such as Ken Starr; the lieutenant governor in Texas; and J Christian Adams, a former justice department official, to continue their crusade against so-called voter fraud.
Can Trump stage a coup?
Not really. Though the lawsuits continue, and the US supreme court has a conservative majority, it’s very unlikely that Trump can manipulate the levers of democracy and the safeguards in place.
As Sam Levine has written, there is a long-shot legal theory, floated by Republicans before the election, that Republican-friendly legislatures in places like Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania could ignore the popular vote in their states and appoint their own electors. Federal law allows legislatures to do this if states have “failed to make a choice” by the day the electoral college meets. But there is no evidence of systemic fraud or wrongdoing in any state, and Biden’s commanding margins in these places make it clear that the states have in fact made a choice. More on that here.
It’s more likely that Trump’s allegations will only serve to promote doubt about our electoral process, stoke more divisiveness, and encourage Republicans to resist Biden’s leadership for the next four years.
Is there any relief on the horizon?
Yes. While states have different deadlines by which they need to confirm election results, all election disputes need to be resolved by 8 December, called the “safe harbor” deadline.
On 14 December, the electors in the electoral college cast their ballots. (More about the electoral college system here.) In almost every state, the candidate with the most votes takes all the electoral votes for that state. With Biden’s lead, it’s nearly certain that he will be confirmed as president-elect.
Ready for this to be over? Here’s one thing you can do now
While all major news networks have called the election for Biden, Trump supporters have resorted to Facebook and other social media forums to spread lies about voter fraud. Be on the lookout for conspiracy theories and falsehoods attempting to undermine the election, and flag and report the posts if you choose. If you’re feeling thick-skinned and battle-ready, respond to posters with facts.
Meanwhile, you know it’s 2020 when somebody has made … a Coup-o-Meter. More - in US Politics
'Great expectations': how world leaders reacted to Biden and Harris's election win – video
Most world leaders rushed to congratulate Joe Biden on his election on Twitter, and spoke of ‘hope’ and ‘expectation’ in later statements.
Biden’s key foreign policy priorities are cooperation in the fight against coronavirus, a commitment to rejoin the UN Paris climate agreement and, more broadly, to promise a change in tone toward traditional US allies.
Russia and China are yet to congratulate the president-elect, as the outgoing president, Donald Trump, is yet to concede defeat
Russia and China silence speaks volumes as leaders congratulate Biden More - in US Politics
Republicans aren't conceding – and Democrats are bringing a knife to a gun fight | David Sirota
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 - in US Politics
Democrats got a rude awakening in rural America. Just look at Iowa | Art Cullen
Dancing in the streets was sweet after a democracy on edge reclaimed itself by virtue of its great metroplexes. Come Monday, sobriety recalled four days spent glued to TV maps of great rural swaths of America awash in red. Iowa and Ohio, which Joe Biden himself thought were in play, went red again. The blue wall barely held in Wisconsin. The Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, looms large.
Poll after poll showed dead heats between Joe Biden and Donald Trump in Iowa, and between the Republican senator Joni Ernst and Democrat Theresa Greenfield. The pandemic was worsening. The economy was not well despite massive agriculture bailouts. Ernst flubbed the price of soybeans during a debate. It appeared Iowa could swing back to the Democrats. After all, Barack Obama is not that distant a memory.
The final Iowa poll from the Des Moines Register on the Saturday before the election flummoxed Democrats when it showed Trump and Ernst with comfortable leads. The pollster Ann Selzer found a big shift among independents who wanted a GOP Senate to provide a check on the “socialists”.
Running against socialism when Trump larded $60bn on agribusiness in the past two years over disasters of his own making seemed like a thin soup. A rural electorate immersed in Fox News, Sinclair Broadcasting and Facebook lapped it up. The propaganda (Democrats eat babies – it’s right there on social media), the preachers in the pulpit damning liberal judges and politicians, and a relentless ground game that saw Iowa Republicans register 20,000 more voters than Democrats put a seemingly indelible red lock on what used to be a purple state.
Republicans gained seats in the Iowa house and senate, which they already controlled. The governor, Kim Reynolds, is Republican. Dubuque, where union jobs drained south of the border steadily through the decades, used to be a blue bulwark on the banks of the Mighty Mississippi. Dubuque county voted for Trump at 51% last week. The incumbent US representative Abby Finkenauer, a Democratic daughter of a Dubuque union household, was defeated by the TV news anchor Ashley Hinson, a Republican who supported Trump. The Finkenauer defeat and Ernst victory were devastating blows to a Democratic party that has lost its way along the country blacktop roads.
The urban-rural divide is vivid as ever. If it can’t be narrowed, American democratic liberty remains challenged. A palpable resentment among those left behind from the coastal economic juggernauts finds its expression in people dressed in Hawaiian shirts planning to kidnap the governor of Michigan and execute her to start a civil war. Believe it. Most of us are not ready to pick up a gun. But it keeps racism bubbling. It erodes trust in institutions, like our courts or elections. It prevents us from solving existential crises like the pandemic or, even more threatening, global heating.
John Russell knows the back roads. He was Elizabeth Warren’s rural Iowa coordinator, a thirtysomething reared around Wellsville, Ohio, population 3,500, nestled in the corner of Appalachia that touches Pennsylvania and West Virginia. Like Dubuque, the Ohio River Valley used to be union country – steel, autos, kilns, dirty hands. Those jobs are lost and the unions busted by President Reagan; no Mexican immigrant engineered it. Eight years ago, the Democratic state legislator from Russell’s county got 51% of the vote. This year, the Democrat got 26%. The margins were the same in rural Iowa. Turnout in rural precincts blew out the metros.
While in Iowa, Russell lived upstairs from a biker bar in Webster City, a typical county seat town of about 7,800 people that never really recovered from the farm crisis that snuffed out a generation of vitality in the 1980s. The Electrolux vacuum cleaner factory was moved to a maquiladora in Mexico. Retail trade bleeds to Amazon.com. Meantime, a new pork plant opened up nearby where the workforce is overwhelmingly Latino. Starting pay: $16 an hour, just enough to get by if you scrimp. More - in US Politics
Latinos could swing Georgia. Don't repeat the mistakes of Florida and Texas | Chuck Rocha
In less than eight weeks, voters of the now-blue state of Georgia will head to the polls to vote in the Senate runoff election on 5 January 2021 to decide if the Rev Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff will join their Democratic colleagues in Congress. These two seats are crucial to deliver the mandate needed by Joe Biden to enact his ambitious vision for America’s future.
With the Democratic party’s hopes and dreams resting on Georgia’s shoulders, it would be a costly misstep to overlook a key demographic: Latinos. There are nearly a million Latinos living in Georgia, the majority of whom live in and around the Atlanta metro area. About 300,000 persuadable Latino voters who are registered to vote identify as neither Democrat nor Republican. These voters represent a small but decisive 5% of the electorate. In a world in which races are won on razor-thin margins, that 5% is a crucial swing vote.
In the days leading up to the 2020 general election, I watched my colleagues’ hopes rise at the sight of a string of polls showing Biden with the lead in Florida and record-breaking early voter turnout in my home state of Texas. These hopes were quickly dashed. In the wake of defeat, my phone started to buzz with people asking, urgently: what went wrong with the Latino vote? It was the first time in my 30 years of political experience that the nation finally learned a truth that Latino organizers have been trying to convey for ages. We are not a monolith and you must ask us for our vote if you want to earn our vote.
Let’s set the record straight: President-elect Joe Biden won Latino voters. He spent more money engaging with Latino voters in his 2020 campaign than either Barack Obama or Hilary Clinton. This investment paid off for Biden, with decisive Latino victories in the states he focused on competing in, including Florida.
By now, we have all heard about the heroine of Georgia’s historic blue shift. Stacey Abrams’ unprecedented grassroots voter registration and mobilization efforts have unequivocally proven that the antidote to poisonous voter suppression tactics and lagging voter engagement involves two key ingredients: both statewide and community-led operations.
Fair Fight Action was responsible for the registration of over 800,000 voters in Georgia – a force to be reckoned with in the once reliably red south. This level of mobilization, focused on Latinos, will be critical to swing the Georgia special election toward Democrats and clinch these two remaining Senate seats.
Every 30 seconds in America, a Latino turns 18 and becomes eligible to vote. Over half of Georgia’s Latino population is under the age of 18. This means there are thousands of Latino youth in Georgia who will turn 18 on or before 5 January who qualify to register to vote in the Senate elections. This is in addition to hundreds of thousands of Latinos already over the age of 18 who are currently unregistered to vote.
The registration deadline for all Georgians who wish to vote in the runoff elections is less than a month away, on 7 December. These next three weeks present a small window of opportunity for Democrats to expand their electorate. Emerging Latino populations can and will tip the balance in this election.
Latino organizers and groups on the ground such as Galeo, a non-profit that helps register new Latino voters across Georgia, need funding and resources right now in order to mobilize Latinos in large enough numbers to swing the state. Over the past four months, Nuestro Pac – now the largest Latino-focused Super Pac, which I helped found – spent over $5m to galvanize Latino voters for Biden in swing states like Arizona, Michigan, Nevada and Pennsylvania. These efforts helped deliver the margins of victory for Biden in many of the states he won.
Georgia presents an enormous opportunity for Democrats, in part because the unique nuances of Latino voters in Texas and Florida, who are culturally distinct from elsewhere, are not present to the same extent in Georgia. The most pressing issue for Latinos in Georgia – and Latinos in general – is Covid relief funds, which are currently being held hostage by the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell. Healthcare is a similarly critical issue for Latinos in Georgia – yet the Republican party has voted over 50 times to strip Americans of health protections provided by the Affordable Care Act, and are trying to defeat it through the supreme court.
Through the appointment of a new and diverse Covid-19 taskforce, Biden has already taken a crucial first step to instill confidence in these voters. Now it is time for investment in grassroots organizing so that Latinos can deliver Biden a mandate.
Chuck Rocha is the president of Solidarity Strategies and the founder of Nuestro Pac. He was a senior adviser to the Bernie Sanders campaign More - in US Politics
Uber bought itself a law. Here's why that's dangerous for struggling drivers like me | Cherri Murphy
Last week, Uber bought itself a law.Along with Lyft, Instacart, DoorDash and Postmates, app companies spent more than $200m – the most spent on any ballot campaign in US history – to bankroll Proposition 22 in California. With its passage, the law will now exempt drivers like me from basic protections afforded to most other workers in the state.And in the aftermath of their bought-and-paid-for victory, these companies are promising to roll out this model nationwide, foretelling a grim future for gig workers across the US.But let’s be absolutely clear: Prop 22 is a dangerous law. Voters in California, inundated with ads promising drivers a “living wage”, flexibility and greater benefits, believed they were ensuring drivers a better future in the middle of a pandemic and recession.But voters were hoodwinked. Drivers are now neither employees, guaranteed rights and benefits such as healthcare, nor true independent contractors, since we can’t set our own rates, choose our own clients, or build wealth on the apps.Instead, Prop 22 promises substandard healthcare, a death sentence to many in the middle of a pandemic. We’re promised a sub-minimum wage in the middle of a recession that an independent study showed would be as low as $5.64 an hour – not the eventual $15 state minimum. We’re given no family leave, no paid sick days and no access to state unemployment compensation. Most importantly, while we’re already prevented from unionizing under federal law, the measure also makes it nearly impossible for California to pass laws protecting drivers who organize collectively, a fundamental right that companies undermine to silence worker power. More
- in US Politics
'Whatever it takes': how Black women fought to mobilize America's voters
[embedded content]
Even before networks projected the presidential race for Joe Biden last Saturday, Wanda Mosley, a 50-year-old organizer based in Atlanta, Georgia, began to prepare to mobilize voters for her state’s two critical Senate runoff elections on 5 January.
After one of the most turbulent presidential elections in US history, the two races in the battleground state will determine if the balance of power in Washington will fall to the president-elect once he is sworn into office. Georgia has yet to be called for Biden, a Democrat, though he currently leads Donald Trump, which motivates organizers such as Mosley who until early December will continue to register voters planning to vote in the January runoffs.
“We understand fully how important these races are,” says Mosley, the senior state coordinator for Georgia’s Black Voters Matter, a nonprofit dedicated to voter engagement.
“We’re still here. We’re still working,” Mosley said.
Democrats have long pointed to Black voters, more specifically, Black women, as a crucial voting bloc, decisive to elections since former president Bill Clinton’s victories in the 1990s. But this November, successfully flipping the southern, Republican-led state of Georgia to the Democrats for the first time in 28 years has drawn attention to the organizational power of Black women, whose large-scale mobilization efforts appear to have resulted in massive turnout among people of color in those cities, experts say.
“What might have been different is the greater role of on the ground mobilization and voter registration efforts in states like Georgia, and I think that that was the effort that was largely built by Stacey Abrams and others on the ground,” said Jamil Scott, an assistant professor in the government department at Georgetown University.
Rather than rely on outside political consultants swarming into battleground states, Abrams, who lost to the Republican Governor Brian Kemp in 2018, led that charge in Georgia this year, says Aimee Allison, the founder of She the People, a national network advocating for women of color in politics. There was a 69% increase in voter turnout among women of color in Georgia this year compared to 2016, according to Allison, who cites data She the People analyzed from progressive data firm Catalist.
“You have a group of voters of Black women who are the most effective organizers on the ground because they are trusted voices and are working in organizations year round. They don’t come in six weeks before and kind of rent out a storefront, they’re actually invested in, long-term, empowering the community through civic and political action,” she said.
In America, this election year has not played out in a vacuum. Rather, it has been met with – and compounded by – America’s year of reckoning with police brutality and systemic inequality, which has driven even more people to vote.
Thousands of Americans took to the streets to protest against police brutality in the wake of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor’s deaths earlier this year as the Black community also shouldered the disproportionate impact of Covid-19. The meeting of those moments spurred political mobilization among Black voters, says Tim Stevens, the CEO of Pittsburgh’s Black Political Empowerment Project, a non-profit voting rights organization based in Allegheny county, Pennsylvania, where Trump was swiftly defeated last week.
“The tragedies … made what was already present in the heart of Black people and people of color even more evident and more urgent,” said Stevens.
Those mobilization efforts were evident as ballots were counted in diverse urban centers in key states such as Wisconsin, Michigan, Georgia and Pennsylvania where large populations of Black voters in Milwaukee, Detroit, Atlanta and Philadelphia helped push Biden towards victory.
Then there were a number of prominent Black women in leadership roles – like Abrams, Nikema Williams, who took on John Lewis’s congressional seat and is chair of Georgia’s state Democratic party, and Atlanta’s mayor, Keisha Lance Bottoms – helped fuel mobilization efforts among Black women this election, suggests Dianne Pinderhughes, a professor of political science and the chair of the department of Africana studies at the University of Notre Dame.
One organizer in Pennsylvania points to the most prominent: the first Black and south Asian American vice-president-elect, Kamala Harris. “We had the same feelings we had when Obama was first elected,”says Brittany Smalls, the Pennsylvania state coordinator for Black Voters Matter. “We just never thought we would see the day that a woman in leadership looks like us.”Kamala Harris
(@KamalaHarris)
I want to speak directly to the Black women in our country. Thank you. You are too often overlooked, and yet are asked time and again to step up and be the backbone of our democracy. We could not have done this without you.November 9, 2020
Now, as Americans across the country shift their attention away from the presidential race and to the runoff elections in Georgia, organizers like Mosley say they are keen to build on their success, in an election that could ultimately determine what kind of presidency Joe Biden will have.
“This is the culmination of years and years and years of work, when other people didn’t think it was possible,” said Mosley. “We know how important the Senate is, and so if we can play a role in getting one – or possibly two seats – to try to shift that balance of power, you need to understand that Black women will do whatever it takes.”
This piece was published in partnership between the Guardian and The Fuller Project. More
