US elections 2020

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      'We couldn't stand it any more': why disaffection with Devin Nunes is growing among his constituents

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      Paul Buxman remembers how excited he was to meet his new congressman, Devin Nunes, when Nunes showed up at his organic fruit farm in California’s central valley in the early 2000s.
      Buxman assumed that Nunes, who comes from Portuguese dairy farming stock, was actually interested in sustainable land use. Maybe they’d talk about pesticides, or water, or farm labor issues in one of the world’s largest food producing regions. Maybe Nunes would ask Buxman to address the crowd he’d brought along.
      None of it happened. “I thought, this is the first farmer we’ve had as a congressman who’s come out to visit a farm,” Buxman. “But all it was was a photo op.”
      Buxman never was able to arrange a meeting with Nunes, despite making multiple overtures. Pretty soon, he stopped voting for him. Then, after Donald Trump became president and Nunes, as chair of the House intelligence committee until 2019 emerged as one of Trump’s staunchest defenders, Buxman started leaving messages with the congressman’s staffers. “You have to remember, you don’t only represent people who you agree with. At least, sit quietly and put up with us,” he’d tell them.
      Nunes paid no attention until Buxman signed a petition demanding that Nunes stop describing himself as a farmer on the electoral ballot. Nunes’s parents had long ago moved the family dairy farm to Iowa and Nunes himself had no apparent farming connection left other than a small investment in a friend’s Napa valley winery, the petition argued.
      Now, Nunes did respond – with a lawsuit, accusing Buxman of being part of a dark-money plot that threatened his good name and the integrity of the electoral process. It was one of a flurry of suits the congressman filed against critics and media organizations after facing heavy criticism for his role in Trump’s various Russia scandals.
      Lashing out at his critics in this way has not been without a political cost. Two years ago, after 16 years in Congress, Nunes faced his first significant re-election battle when a local prosecutor, Andrew Janz, came within five percentage points of unseating him. This year, small business owner and civic activist Phil Arballo could come closer still with a campaign that has focused predominantly on the local issues that many constituents accuse Nunes of ignoring. More

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      Democratic senator Doug Jones stakes re-election bid on threat to voting rights

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      Amid an unprecedented number of early votes cast in the 2020 election cycle, Alabama senator Doug Jones is staking his electoral fortunes on framing his re-election campaign around the threat to voting rights, especially in his native Deep South.Jones, a rare Democratic senator in a red southern state, has been sounding the alarm on his state’s burdensome voting restrictions. He’s been dinging his opponent over comments about a landmark voting law, and he’s arguing that in an age of high partisanship in America there’s a path for lawmakers to reinforce national voting laws.Jones, the Alabama Democrat who was elected to his Senate seat in a 2017 upset race, is also calling for a new extension of the Voting Rights Act, the set of voting protections that were gutted in a ruling by the United States supreme court seven years ago. That ruling struck down a core provision of the law which required nine states to seek federal approval before changing their election laws. Those states were required to seek federal permission because of a history of enforcing voter requirements that dramatically affected minorities.Jones has repeatedly bashed retired coach Tommy Tuberville, the Republican nominee for Jones’s seat, for failing to offer a concise position on the Voting Rights Act.“It’s not that he couldn’t articulate a stance, he couldn’t articulate what the hell it is,” Jones said in an interview with the Guardian.During a 1 September appearance with service organizations in Alabama, Tuberville was asked whether he supported extending the Voting Rights Act. His response suggested he had no idea what the law is.“You know, the thing about the Voting Rights Act it’s … you know … there’s a lot of different things you can look at it as, you know, who’s it going to help? What direction do we need to go with it?” Tuberville said. “I think it’s important that everything we do we keep secure.”Jones has been contrasting Tuberville’s remarks with his own position on the Voting Rights Act.“I think they should do everything they can to get it extended,” Jones said.Jones’s re-election campaign has also turned the clip of Tuberville’s comments into digital media ads. Jones is the heavy underdog in the race. Most polling has found Tuberville leading Jones in the traditionally conservative state by double digits. An October 11 poll conducted by Fm3 Research on behalf of the Jones campaign showing the senator leading Tuberville by 1 percentage point. Even so, Tuberville is widely expected to defeat Jones and Donald Trump is all but certain to win Alabama decisively on 3 November.I just think it took the election of Donald Trump to see how much their vote countsJones finds himself running for re-election in a year that’s seen record turnout in early voting, in part because of the pandemic. Over 66 million votes have already been cast, with no sign that that record breaking pace will let up. Jones himself benefited from high turnout in 2017 and unprecedented enthusiasm from African American voters in the state.Now, as he’s running for re-election in a year where there’s both high voter participation across the country and an active discussion about barriers to voting, Jones is sounding the alarm on Alabama’s own voting requirements.“The fact of the matter is Alabama has just a really burdensome absentee ballot process,” Jones said. “Most absentee ballots in the past have been by mail. And to do that you’ve got to get an application from the secretary of state or your local election official, fill out the application – which in and of itself is not too difficult – but then you’ve got to make a photo copy of your photo ID and send that along. Not everybody has a printer or a scanner at their home, and so that is burden number one.“Not to mention the fact that it has to go through the mails, come back to you with the ballot, and then you have to take the ballot, mark the ballot, put it in their special envelope then put that envelope in another envelope that has to be signed by you exactly the way it is on the voting rolls. Which is not necessarily your usual signature, but the way you are on the voting rolls, and then you’ve got to have two people witness it or whatever. It’s incredibly burdensome.”And, Jones said, if every step isn’t followed correctly, “that ballot is shoved aside and is likely not counted”.While high-raking state lawmakers in other states have taken steps to compensate for voting during an ongoing global pandemic, Alabama secretary of state John Merrill has refrained from easing voting restrictions although he has allowed county courthouses to take early absentee votes. But there are only two county courthouses in Jefferson county, where the senator lives, which has, Jones said, effectively acted as yet another impediment to voting.All of that, Jones continued, is an example of how unnecessarily difficult voting can be in Alabama.“And I think voting across the country needs to be a little bit more uniform. What we’re seeing in Alabama is that early voting can work if they could use the technology to streamline it and just make it early voting, I think that could help a lot. And I think that would get the numbers up, which is the goal for everybody,” Jones said.Even with all that, Jones predicted that Alabama would see “a record number of absentee ballots cast in this election”.The state has already beat previous records and there are still days before the actual election.Asked if he is surprised about the record turnout across the state and elsewhere, Jones said he is not.“I just think it took the election of Donald Trump to see how much their vote counts. I think there are so many people that stayed home, that thought that Hillary Clinton was going to win, or that their vote just didn’t count,” Jones said. “I think now what we’ve seen is an interest to make sure their votes count because it does matter.” More

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      India tries to shake off pro-Trump image in run-up to US election

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      At a podium in Delhi on Tuesday, the US secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, and the secretary of defense, Mark Esper, made a clear declaration of their country’s commitment to its alliance with India.“The US will stand with India in its efforts to defend its sovereignty and its liberty,” Pompeo said, emphasising the importance of the US-India relationship in countering China’s “threats”.Pompeo and Esper had travelled to Delhi this week to sign a deal for high-level intelligence sharing between the two countries. The timing – just a week before the US election – was taken by many observers to be politically strategic, giving the Trump administration a platform to increase its anti-China rhetoric and show off its close ties to India, playing to Indian-American voters.Indian ministers, however, were at pains to emphasise that Pompeo and Esper were there for diplomatic, not political, purposes – it was nothing to do with the US election.It was not the first time Indian officials had voiced concern over appearing to be partisan in the US vote. Last month, India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata party told its overseas affiliates in the US not to campaign under a BJP banner – to do so could put “deep strategic relations” at risk.The subtext was evident. With Joe Biden pulling ahead of Donald Trump in the polls, the BJP was worried its American wing had a pro-Trump image problem. “The effort in Delhi has always been to remain bipartisan and stay out of polarised US politics,” said Shivshankar Menon, a former Indian foreign secretary, national security adviser and diplomat. “But this has got more difficult in the last few years.”Certainly, Trump’s public displays of camaraderie with the Indian prime minister, Narendra Modi, have been a defining feature of US-India relations over the last four years. At the “Howdy Modi” rally, in Texas in September 2019, Trump hailed Modi as one of “America’s greatest, most devoted and most loyal friends”, while the two leaders tightly grasped each other’s hands. A similarly gushing rally was held for Trump when he visited India in March 2020.However, as the election has approached, the emphasis in New Delhi has been on bipartisanship. Since 2000 – through Democrat and Republican presidents in the US, and BJP and Congress governments in India – the alliance has largely strengthened. Whether the occupier of the Oval Office in January is Biden or Trump, India is determined to keep it that way. More

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      If Biden wins what would the first 100 days of his presidency look like?

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      If Joe Biden wins the 2020 US election against Donald Trump next week, the new president-elect will face enormous pressures to implement a laundry list of priorities on a range of issues from foreign policy to the climate crisis, reversing many of the stark changes implemented by his predecessor.
      But Biden’s first and most pressing task for his first 100 days in the White House would be to roll out a new nationwide plan to fight the coronavirus crisis, which has claimed more than 220,000 lives in the US and infected millions – more than any other country in the world – as well as taking steps to fix the disastrous economic fallout.
      And, while the new president might be fresh from victory, the moderate Biden will also have to wrangle with his own side – a Democratic party with an increasingly influential liberal wing, hungry for major institutional changes to try to answer some of the most urgent questions over the country’s future.
      “He basically has to do something historic,” said Saikat Chakrabarti, a Democratic activist and former chief of staff to the progressive New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. “He’s being handed a depression, a pandemic, and he’s being elected on a mandate to actually solve this stuff and do something big.”
      In the best-case scenario for Biden, he would be elected in a landslide, and the Democrats would flip the Senate, taking control of both chambers of Congress. If that happens, Biden and his team could enact their most ambitious plans for a presidency with the same feel as Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s, which saw the sweeping New Deal recovery and relief programs in response to the economic crisis of the 1930s.
      “In many ways, they’re going to be stepping in the same situation that we stepped in in 2009. But in some ways worse,” said the former Obama administration deputy labor secretary Chris Lu, who ran the 44th president’s transition team in 2008. “We came in during the Great Recession, they’re going to be taking over within a recession as well. They have the added and much more difficult challenge of dealing with a public health crisis as well.”
      By the time of the inauguration in January 2021, more than 350,000 Americans could have died from coronavirus, according to projections that assume current policies and trajectories are maintained.
      Biden’s “first order of business” in office would probably be aimed at containing the death toll and addressing the economic damage, said Neera Tanden, who was director of domestic policy for the Obama-Biden presidential campaign, and went on to be senior adviser at the Department of Health and Human Services (DHS). More

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      Trump says Covid numbers 'way down' as US passes 226,000 deaths – video

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      President Donald Trump says Covid-19 cases in the US are ‘way down’ despite nearly half a million people contracting the virus in the country over the last seven days, according to a Reuters tally. Speaking one week out from the election at a campaign rally in Wisconsin, Trump made a baseless prediction that the media would say the country was doing ‘extremely well’ one day after the election
      Voter participation poised to soar as more than 70m vote early – live More

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      We thought Reagan was the devil – then came Trump. America, we're rooting for you

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      Dear America,
      HEY! How you guys doing? Longtime British Americanophile “reaching out” across the Atlantic. I’m here to heart you, USA. I’m like “hope the hurting stops soon” (strong-arm mid-tone emoji).
      I guess you’re all making a list of The Worst Things Trump Did, then checking it twice because really, who’d believe it. And I know he’s primarily your monstrous problem. But even Brits are citizens of what we used to call “the free world”. Your president was once the leader of it. And one of the very worst things Trump’s done is to make Ronald Reagan look like an intellectual giant. Simply by comparison, Trump has humanised Reagan and elevated his memory to sainthood.
      I’m currently researching the Gipper for a project and honestly, next to Trump he genuinely seems like … not the good guy, exactly? But definitely presidential. “Let’s make America great again” was Reagan’s slogan, of course. It was about “American values”, making America great in the world again. Trump’s slogan initially stood for rebuilding economic power. Now it’s shorthand for “let’s win the culture war I relentlessly inflame and sure, bring on an actual armed civil war if I lose the election”.
      Of course, Trump’s humanity is at such undetectable levels he makes literally anyone else look like St Francis of Assisi. Infuriatingly, even deadweight predecessors like the Bush dynasty look competent. But Reagan? Along with millions of others in the 1980s, I was there at marches and demonstrations, noisily railing against hated neoliberal Raygun, his nuclear missiles, his utterly insane space force. Oh how we disdained him, this doddery warmonger, this huckleberry clown of a politician. It never occurred to us that 40 years on we’d be contemplating someone so much more clueless, so very much stupider, than Reagan.
      None of my business, dear Americans, I know. You’re absolutely right. It’s not my country, it’s yours. You’re the ones pledging allegiance from sea to shining sea. I should butt out. And yet. All this used to be my business, back in the day when Potus was de facto leader of “the west” and led the forces of laissez-faire capitalism against the Evil Empire of Communism. “Ideology”, we used to call it. Man, we thought Reagan was the devil incarnate 40 years ago. Now the news is basically “Self-Satirising Human Cronut Yesterday On Twitter Said …”
      As I write this letter of solidarity, I’m watching the televised presidential debate for election 1980, 40 years ago. Jimmy Carter the bruised defender, looking for a second term. Reagan the interloper, the disrupter, landing blow after blow on Carter – the failing economy, the Tehran hostages, the correct pronunciation of “nuclear”. Reagan was the older man but he sounded younger. What is frankly astonishing is the dignity of the debate itself. Here were political enemies – diametrically opposed on every issue – politely disagreeing, listening, yielding when time ran out. Basic human respect. And you stop and think – how is this normal, being nostalgic for normality itself? More