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      Armed Trump supporters gather outside vote count centre in Arizona – video

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      Supporters of Donald Trump, some of whom are armed, have continued to mass outside an election counting centre in Phoenix on Friday, as Joe Biden’s lead narrows slightly in the state of Arizona. The Trump campaign is angry that the state was called for Biden by media organisations including Fox News and Associated Press, despite thousands of ballots still to be counted. Biden led by around 29,000 on Friday night, down from 47,000, but is still expected by most observers to win.
      US election live updates: Joe Biden edges toward victory with leads over Donald Trump in Pennsylvania and Nevada More

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      in Elections

      Senator Lindsey Graham backs Trump, echoing baseless claims of election fraud – video

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      Republican senator Lindsey Graham has defended the Trump campaign’s baseless claim of irregularities during the election, saying the president’s team deserves the opportunity to make the case. “Democracy depends upon fair elections. President Trump’s team is going to have a chance to make a case regarding voting irregularities,” he said. “I’m going to stand with President Trump.” Graham’s comments come as presidential candidate Joe Biden took a lead over Trump in battleground Pennsylvania and Georgia, as ballots continue to be counted
      Trump campaign vows to keep fighting: ‘This election is not over’
      US election live updates: Biden edges toward victory with leads over Trump in Nevada and Pennsylvania 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

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      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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      Steve Bannon banned by Twitter for calling for Fauci beheading

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      Twitter has banned the account of the former Donald Trump adviser and surrogate Steve Bannon after he called for the beheading of Dr Anthony Fauci and the FBI director, Christopher Wray, and the posting of their heads outside the White House as a “warning”.
      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.
      There has been mounting concern over the risk of violence following this week’s US elections, amid highly inflammatory rhetoric from Trump and his allies, who have falsely said Democrats are trying to “steal the election”.
      Philadelphia police arrested two men allegedly involved in a plot to attack the Pennsylvania Convention Center on Thursday night. Police were tipped off, possibly from a concerned family member of one of the men, who had driven 300 miles from Virginia.
      The moves against Bannon came hours after Facebook banned “Stop the Steal”, a group involved in organising protests this weekend throughout the US against the presidential vote count.
      One post, shared by the Center for Countering Digital Hate, declared: “Neither side is going to concede. Time to clean the guns, time to hit the streets.”
      The increasingly heated language around the election has also included interventions from more mainstream figures, including the former Republican House speaker Newt Gingrich, who appeared to call for election workers in Pennsylvania to be arrested.
      [embedded content]
      Speaking to Sean Hannity on Fox News, Gingrich amplified Trump’s false complaints of election rigging and mused about what he believed was the solution.
      “My hope is that President Trump will lead the millions of Americans who understand exactly what’s going on,” Gingrich said. “The Philadelphia machine is corrupt. The Atlanta machine is corrupt. The machine in Detroit is corrupt. And they are trying to steal the presidency. And we should not allow them to do that.”
      “First of all, under federal law, we should lock up the people who are breaking the law,” he continued. “You stop somebody from being an observer, you just broke federal law. Do you hide and put up papers so nobody can see what you’re doing? You just broke federal law. You bring in ballots that aren’t real? You just broke federal law.” More

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      Georgia announces recount after presidential race too close to call

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      Election officials in Georgia announced a recount on Friday after the presidential race was deemed “too close to call” in that state.
      Joe Biden overtook Donald Trump in Georgia, historically a Republican stronghold, at around 4.30am ET to secure a lead of 1,579 votes.
      Trump and Biden were locked in a tight contest on Friday, with the Democrat edging ahead, to get the 270 electoral votes needed to win the presidency. For Trump, Georgia is a state he must win.
      But with such a razor-thin margin, Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, said ballots will undergo a recount.
      “Right now, Georgia remains too close to call. Of approximately 5m votes cast, we’ll have a margin of a few thousand,” he said in a press conference. He added: “With a margin that small, there will be a recount in Georgia.”
      If Biden goes on to win Georgia, it would mark a major victory for the Democrats – and a huge upset for the Republicans – in a state that has been reliably Republican for decades.
      The last time a Democratic presidential nominee won in the state was Bill Clinton in 1992. In 2016, Trump beat Hillary Clinton in Georgia by five percentage points.
      Raffensperger acknowledged that Georgia’s result has “huge implications for the entire country” and officials said the unofficial tally could be completed by the end of the weekend.He added: “The stakes are high and emotions are high on all sides. We will not let those debates distract us from our work. We will get it right, and we will defend the integrity of our elections.”
      Georgia does not run automatic recounts, but candidates can request them if the margin is within 0.5%.
      The announcement of a recount came after a judge dismissed a lawsuit from the Trump campaign over the state’s handling of absentee ballots in Chatham county.
      The Trump campaign has launched a swath of legal cases across the country, which are largely intended as a distraction and are founded on weak legal arguments, experts say.
      Matt Morgan, general counsel for the Trump campaign, said on Friday: “Georgia is headed for a recount, where we are confident we will find ballots improperly harvested, and where President Trump will ultimately prevail.”
      Gabriel Sterling, Georgia’s voting system implementation manager, dismissed allegations of fraud, saying: “We’re not seeing any widespread irregularities.”Sterling said that 4,169 ballots, most of which were absentee, were left to be counted from four counties, including Gwinnett county, which includes Atlanta suburbs and in recent years has shifted towards Democrats. The state also has an unknown quantity of military and overseas ballots and an unknown number of provisional ballots to be “cured”.
      Biden’s strength in Georgia is the result of strong turnout among Black voters in the Atlanta suburbs, which have become younger and increasingly diverse.
      The Black Voters Matter Fund, a non-profit that advocates for increasing voter registration and access, hailed the impact of Black voters in Georgia, who they said “saved the election”.
      They said more than a million Black voters cast their ballots early in the state – exceeding 2016 numbers – and reported a “surge” in registration and turnout among young Black voters.
      Co-founders LaTosha Brown and Cliff Albright said: “A new south is rising, and Georgia is the beacon … Georgia is at the epicenter of this country right now and we are claiming victory.”
      It is also a product of the work of figures such Stacey Abrams, who since losing the state’s 2018 race for governor has thrown her efforts into Fair Fight, an organization she founded that focuses on combating voter suppression.
      The recount could also have significant implications for the fight for control of the US Senate, with one – possibly two – Senate races heading for a runoff.
      According to electoral research by the Associated Press, there have been at least 31 statewide recounts since 2000, of which three changed the outcome of an election. But in those the initial margins were even slimmer – in the low hundreds rather than thousands.
      Many analysts believe Georgia’s shift to becoming a swing state is almost inevitable – an assessment that is reflected in the energies invested into the state by the Biden campaign.
      In the final weeks before the election, Biden, his running mate Senator Kamala Harris and former president Barack Obama have all paid visits. Trump has also rallied there.
      “Can you believe it? Two days from now, we’re going to win this state again and we’re going to win four more great years in the White House,” Trump told supporters in the Georgia city of Rome on Sunday. More

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

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

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      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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      Los Angeles: progressive challenger ousts top prosecutor Jackie Lacey

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      [embedded content]
      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, as of Friday morning. Black Lives Matter LA and other activist groups played a major role in the heated contest, having protested against Lacey’s policies for years.
      An emotional Lacey conceded the race on Friday, saying that while 791,000 ballots remained to be counted in Los Angeles county, her consultants advised her that she would not be able to close the gap enough to claim victory. She suggested that unprecedented amounts of money poured into the race contributed to her defeat, as well as the nationwide protests that erupted over the summer following the high-profile police killings of Black civilians.
      “The circumstances surrounding the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery gave breath to an in-progress discussion around racism, policing and criminal justice reform,” she said. “These incidents were painful and exposed an issue that existed in this country for years: racism. Our nation is going through a reckoning and what happened in my election may one day be listed as a consequence of that. It may be said that the results of this election may be the result of our season of discontent and our demand to see a tsunami of change.”
      Lacey was the first woman and first African American to serve as the Los Angeles DA. In her second term, Lacey faced intensifying scrutiny over her refusal to prosecute police officers who kill, her close ties with law enforcement unions and her continued use of the death penalty.
      Gascón, who was endorsed by political heavyweights such as Kamala Harris and Bernie Sanders, is part of a wave of liberal, reform-minded DA candidates across the US who have pledged to undo some of the harms and racial inequities of policing and prisons.
      BLM and other activist groups have increasingly put pressure on elected district attorneys, who are some of the most influential and least accountable players in the US criminal justice system.
      Los Angeles’ prosecutorial office is the largest local prosecutor’s office in the country. The Los Angeles DA’s office oversees 1,000 lawyers, funnels defendants into the world’s largest jail system and reviews police violence cases in a county that has some of the highest number of police killings in the nation. LA prosecutors are also responsible for investigating misconduct in the LA sheriff’s department, which has been plagued by recent scandals, including controversial killings and alleged gangs of deputies engaged in criminal behavior.
      Gascón gained traction and celebrity support amid national protests against police killings and racial inequality following the death of George Floyd in May. He has pledged to hold police accountable for brutality, promising to reopen specific cases of killings by police that Lacey had previously cleared.
      In an interview with the Guardian last month, Gascón said he would stop using a number of “tough-on-crime” laws that have contributed to mass incarceration and California’s prison overcrowding crisis: “We can see incarceration and safety are not necessarily synonymous, and the fact that this is becoming more obvious to many, it’s very, very energizing to me.”
      As DA, he said he would not fight to keep people in prison when they are up for parole, not transfer teens to adult court, won’t pursue the death penalty and won’t use “gang enhancements”, which have long been used in racially discriminatory ways.
      Lacey disappointed progressive groups during her tenure, including by sending 23 people to death row, more than any other county in the US in recent years. All but one sentenced to death were people of color. Despite hundreds of killings by police, she only brought charges in one case.
      Gascón also faced progressive protests when he was San Francisco DA, stemming from his refusal to prosecute police in a number of high-profile killings. Melina Abdullah, the co-founder of Black Lives Matter LA, who has long rallied against Lacey, noted that she would probably end up protesting Gascón, too, once he is DA, given the nature of the prosecutor’s office.
      Gascón is expected to make his first public remarks on Friday afternoon. More