US elections 2020

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      The upset of 2020? Jaime Harrison push to oust Lindsey Graham central to US Senate battle

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      Jaime Harrison, the Democratic nominee for the US Senate in South Carolina, has raised a staggering $57m in the third quarter of 2020, a new record for a single Senate race in the southern state, and anywhere else in America for that matter.But Harrison’s race is also winning attention for a host of other reasons. His opponent is incumbent Lindsey Graham, a close Donald Trump ally and vocal cheerleader for the president. In conservative South Carolina, Graham was meant to be a certainty to retain his seat, especially against a nationally little-known Black Democrat at a time when anti-racism protests have roiled America.But 2020 is anything but a normal election year. Not only has Harrison set new money-raising records, but his polling has hauled him into unexpected contention in a state no one saw as vulnerable for the Republicans. That in itself could help Democrats win a victory in the Republican-controlled Senate that few saw as likely even a year ago and radically alter the direction of America’s politics.Harrison’s candidacy is proving historic and has caught major national attention. If he beats Graham, South Carolina would become the first state with two sitting African American senators ever. The South Carolina senator Tim Scott is one of the few African American senators in the chamber, and the only Black Republican. Other states have been represented by African Americans but never at the same time. There have been 1,974 members of the US senate since it was established in 1789 – only 10 have been Black.South Carolina has emerged, surprisingly, as one of the best chances Democrats have to get the three or four seats needed to retake control of the Senate. Although there is intense interest in the race for the White House the battle to control the Senate which will also have a huge impact on the shape of the next presidency.If Trump was to win the Presidency but Republicans lose control of the Senate it would severely limit the legislation that he could get passed. Similarly, if Biden was to win the White House but the Democrats failed to win control of the Senate, it would mean that much of the new president’s legislative programme would be dead on arrival in Washington DC. As Molly Reynolds, of the DC-based think tank Brookings said recently, “The presidential race has captured most of the recent election-related headlines. But a set of key Senate races will have significant consequences for the ability of former Vice President Joe Biden to govern if he defeats President Donald Trump.”It is not too long ago that the prospects of Democrats winning control of the Senate seemed somewhat outlandish. But the shifting dynamics of the 2020 race have put the Senate into play.The influx of campaign funding that has eclipsed Republicans in South Carolina has also been mirrored elsewhere. Democratic candidates in a diverse list of states such as Maine, Montana, Colorado, Iowa and even reliably red Kansas, find themselves with healthy war chests in the last few weeks before the 3 November election.…….The 44-year old South Carolina Democrat has run in Democratic circles for years. But it didn’t start out that way. Harrison was born when his mother was 15. His father was his mother’s high school boyfriend and out of the picture for much of his childhood. His grandparents played a large role in raising him. Harrison grew up poor in Orangeburg, a town of tens of thousands, and went on to graduate from Yale University on scholarship and Georgetown University’s law school. Harrison was a teacher, served as a chairman of the South Carolina Democratic party, an aide to the South Carolina congressman Jim Clyburn, and then a lobbyist.Harrison’s association with Clyburn is a boon in South Carolina. Clyburn is the most influential African American Democrat in Congress and his endorsement was a critical point in helping resuscitate Joe Biden’s presidential campaign during the Democratic primary. Clyburn has shown cautious optimism of Harrison’s chances.“I think things are breaking in his favor. If we get the kind of turnout that we’ve been working on in South Carolina,” Clyburn said in an interview with Politico.At first, the 2020 South Carolina Senate race seemed like a long shot for Democrats. Republicans have controlled both Senate seats in the state for 15 years. But Graham’s close association with Trump and, for others, with the late Arizona senator John McCain as well as his defense of now-supreme court justice Brett Kavanaugh during the justice’s confirmation hearings are what Republicans and Democrats now attribute to strong antagonism toward the senator. Graham is also a golf buddy of Trump’s.“I think the reason we’re here is primarily twofold. One, the Democrats are just hellbent on controlling the Senate and pining for power,” said South Carolina Republican strategist Walter Whetsell, who is helping advise a Super Pac backinWhetsell said Democrats “hate Lindsey Graham for what he did on Kavanaugh. They despise this guy. They want vengeance. They want revenge. And you combine these two things and it’s like smoking in a fireworks stand. It’s going to explode, right?”……..In an interview with the Guardian Harrison pointed out that Graham’s seat is one that had been occupied by some of the most vocal segregationists in American history. It would be a dramatic contrast for an African American to inherit it.“The seat that I’m vying for also is a seat that has its own history. This is the seat of John C Calhoun, of Strom Thurmond, of a man called Ben Tillman who talked about lynching black folks on the US Senate.”With his most recent fundraising haul, Harrison will also show what a Democratic campaign in South Carolina can do with such a huge amount of money. Harrison said his campaign planned to use the money to flood the zone in an all-out effort to win the seat for Democrats.Most recent polls of the Senate race show a low-single-digit margin betweenHarrison and Graham. A New York Times/Siena College poll of the race published on Thursday found Graham leading Harrison by six percentage points.Harrison’s chances in South Carolina now rest in part on whether enough Republicans decide not to vote for Graham, either by not voting at all or backing the former Constitution party candidate Bill Bledsoe, a conservative whose name will still appear on ballots even though he dropped out and endorsed Graham. More

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      Trump's hopes fade in Wisconsin as 'greatest economy' boast unravels

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      Coarse, cruel, chaotic. Donald Trump has been called a lot of things. Even some of his supporters have had a hard time embracing the darker aspects of his personality. Until recently they have, however, trusted the president on one one vital issue: the economy.But with just 16 days to go until the election, there are clear signs that Trump’s claims to have created the “greatest economy we’ve ever had in the history of our country” are unravelling.Perhaps nowhere is that more worrying for Trump than in Wisconsin.Losing Wisconsin ended Hillary Clinton’s presidential chances in 2016. Famously she didn’t campaign there, presuming a win that was snatched from her by Trump’s promises to end unfair trade practices that had hurt the state’s dairy industry and to bring back manufacturing jobs.Until February, Trump could have confidently boasted that he had made good on his promises. Unemployment had fallen to record lows in the state, manufacturing was coming back – albeit at the same, snail-paced crawl that it had under Obama. The headline figures looked good. Then came the coronavirus – a disease that is now ravaging the state and has, in its wake, exposed the fault lines beneath those headline figures.The virus and the economy now seem to have morphed into some hideous hybrid, and the fragile recovery that followed the first peak in infections is now being threatened by new spikes in infections. Last week Wisconsin reported 3,747 cases in one day, its highest level since the outbreak, and more than California’s daily average, a state with six times Wisconsin’s 5.8 million population.“The economy is always big. It’s just this year it is so intertwined with the pandemic that is hard to separate them,” said Mark Graul, a Republican strategist who ran George W Bush’s re-election race in Wisconsin in 2004.Had the pandemic never happened and the economy been humming along, “that’s all President Trump would be talking about” – but now all anyone is talking about is the virus and what it is doing to the economy.A recent CNN poll found Trump and his rival, former vice-president Joe Biden, tied among registered voters at 49% apiece on who would handle the economy better. Back in May, 54% of registered voters said Trump would handle the economy better, compared with 42% for Biden.Graul expects a close race. Trump beat Clinton in Wisconsin by just 0.77% in 2016. The polls currently have Biden ahead by a clear 6.5% in the state, but in a year that feels like no other anything can happen between now and 3 November.In this volatile environment, progressives have been making gains with voters, reflecting on the fragility of the economy Trump had hoped would re-elect him.Earlier this month, the advocacy group Opportunity Wisconsin held a town hall with Wisconsinites from around that state, who talked about how they see Trump’s economy. It wasn’t a pretty picture.For an hour on Zoom, the Democratic senator Tammy Baldwin led a discussion with dairy farmers and cheese makers talking about friends and neighbors going out of business even before the pandemic began. University of Wisconsin history professor Selika Ducksworth-Lawton spoke powerfully about how the virus has devastated communities of color in the state. “For marginalized communities, this has been awful. There have been some people who have referred to it almost as an ethnic cleansing,” she said. “We have failed at the most basic requirements of a nation state.”But perhaps the clearest example of the problems that preceded the pandemic, and have been sadly highlighted by it, came from Kyra Swenson, an early childhood educator from Madison. “I’m a teacher, I’m not a business owner. I don’t have a lot of wealth. It’s just me and my husband trying to make life swing for ourselves and our two kids,” said Swenson.Even before the pandemic, she said she felt she was getting very little help. Early childhood educators make about $10 an hour in Wisconsin and receive no benefits. “We don’t get a retirement account. We don’t give two hoots about what Wall Street is doing. We are not investing in that. We are trying to pay our rent, pay for food.”A third of Wisconsin’s early childhood educators are on federal assistance “because that is how hard it is for us to make it.”Trump’s biggest policy achievement – a $1.5tn tax cut that was billed as a “middle-class miracle” – actually increased her family’s taxes, she said. “It didn’t benefit us. That’s the reality.”And the Trump administration’s response to the pandemic has been “terrifying”, she said. She thinks it is no coincidence that Wisconsin’s rates have spiked since children and college students went back to school – a move that came after Trump said children could not spread the coronavirus, an opinion that has been widely debunked. “It didn’t have to be this bad,” she said.Changing mindsOpportunity Wisconsin, aided by the progressive advocacy organization the Hub Project, has had remarkable success turning opinion around on Trump’s economic success through targeted messaging. But it has had big obstacles to overcome, not just because changing opinions is notoriously hard.The Republicans have been remarkably successful in their economic messaging, not least in Wisconsin. Since Ronald Reagan, the Republican party has promulgated the idea that there is a simple formula for economic success: lower taxes, less regulation and smaller government. That message, repeated over and over for 40 years, helped Wisconsin shift from a bastion of progressive politics to a union-bashing laboratory for rightwing economic experiments led by Scott Walker, the former governor, and Paul Ryan, the former House speaker, and backed by the Koch brothers. More

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      Traitor review: American perfidy, from Benedict Arnold to Donald J Trump

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      One of the most important qualities a good reporter can have is a very low threshold for outrage. Useful, critical coverage of your subject becomes impossible once nonchalance or indifference has inured you to scandal.This has become a huge problem during Donald Trump’s presidency. Inside the souls of far too many Washington reporters, a never-ending wave of scandals, crimes, indictments and assorted obstructions of justice has washed away this essential capacity for indignation – just when the republic needs it most.That’s why a book like David Rothkopf’s Traitor still serves a vital purpose, even after dozens of other books and thousands of articles about the president’s felonious behavior. A former senior official in the Clinton administration and editor of Foreign Policy who has taught at Columbia and Georgetown, Rothkopf still has all of the anger a good chronicler of the Trump administration requires.“Trump is despicable,” he writes. “But beyond his defective or perhaps even non-existent character, there are the near-term and lasting consequences of his actions. We must understand these to reverse them, and we must understand how easily Russia achieved its objectives in order to prevent such catastrophes in the future.”Our president is the literal Manchurian Candidate, without the denouement which made the movie feel more like a cautionRussia’s success in putting Trump in office, he writes, “has to be seen as perhaps the most successful international intelligence operation of modern times”. Rothkopf is implying that our president is the literal Manchurian Candidate, without the denouement which made the movie feel more like a caution than a foreshadowing.Drawing on the Mueller report, assorted congressional investigations and the work of the capital’s still-functioning reporters, Rothkopf provides an important roadmap through the massive evidence of collaboration between the Trump campaign and the Russian secret services – including 272 contacts between “Trump team members and Russian-linked individuals, in almost 40 meetings”, noting that “at least 33 high-ranking campaign officials, and Trump advisers” were aware of these contacts, including, of course, Trump himself.In between detailing Trump’s transgressions at the beginning and the end of this compact volume, Rothkopf provides a brisk history of many other Americans rightly or wrongly accused of treason, from Benedict Arnold and Aaron Burr to Robert E Lee and Alger Hiss. He drops in plenty of of interesting historical tidbits, like the fact Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis were born a hundred miles and less than a year apart.He’s particularly good on John Brown, the violent abolitionist who was convicted of treason against the state of Virginia. Victor Hugo called him a hero and predicted that if he wasn’t pardoned, it would “certainly shake the whole American democracy”. But instead of a pardon, there was a prompt hanging – witnessed by both Walt Whitman and John Wilkes Booth. And of course Brown’s death also inspired the writing of what eventually became The Battle Hymn of the Republic. When it was first sung by Union soldiers during the civil war, the essential lines were “John Brown’s body lies a mouldering in the grave, His Soul’s marching on!”Back on the main subject, of our modern traitor, Rothkopf is appropriately harsh about the shortcomings of Robert Mueller, including his failure as special counsel to secure an in-person interview with the president and his refusal to indict the president for any of the crimes his report describes, including as many as 10 counts of obstruction of justice.Mueller was relying on a famous justice department memo of 2000 which rules out the indictment of sitting presidents, but which has never been litigated in federal court.“There is no question in my mind that the memo is wrong,” writes Rothkopf, whose view is shared by the Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe. “But what is salient here is that by embracing its views, Mueller was relieved of the obligation to do what prosecutors do, and that is to make a charging decision.” More

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      Facebook says it rejected 2.2m ads seeking to obstruct voting in US election

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      A total of 2.2m ads on Facebook and Instagram have been rejected and 120,000 posts withdrawn for attempting to “obstruct voting” in the upcoming US presidential election, Facebook’s vice president Nick Clegg has said.In addition, warnings were posted on 150m examples of false information posted online, the former British deputy prime minister told French weekly Journal du Dimanche on Sunday.Facebook has been increasing its efforts to avoid a repeat of events leading up to the 2016 US presidential election, won by Donald Trump, when its network was used for attempts at voter manipulation, carried out from Russia.There were similar problems ahead of Britain’s 2016 referendum on leaving the European Union.“Thirty-five thousand employees take care of the security of our platforms and contribute for elections,” said Clegg, who is vice president of global affairs and communications at Facebook.“We have established partnerships with 70 specialised media, including five in France, on the verification of information”, he added. AFP is one of those partners.Clegg added that the company also uses artificial intelligence that has “made it possible to delete billions of posts and fake accounts, even before they are reported by users”.Facebook also stores all advertisements and information on their funding and provenance for seven years “to ensure transparency,” he said.In 2016, while he was still deputy prime minister, Clegg complained to the Journal du Dimanche that Facebook had not identified or suppressed a single foreign network interfering in the US election.On Wednesday, Trump rebuked Facebook and Twitter for blocking links to a New York Post article purporting to expose corrupt dealings by election rival Joe Biden and his son Hunter in Ukraine.A day earlier Facebook announced a ban on ads that discourage people from getting vaccinated, in light of the coronavirus pandemic which the social media giant said has “highlighted the importance of preventive health behaviours”. More

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      Women march against Trump and Republicans in major US cities

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      Thousands of mostly young women in masks rallied on Saturday in Washington DC and other US cities, exhorting voters to oppose Donald Trump and his fellow Republicans in the 3 November elections. The latest in a series of rallies that began with a massive women’s march the day after Trump’s January 2017 inauguration was playing out during the coronavirus pandemic. Demonstrators were asked to wear face coverings and practice social distancing. Rachel O’Leary Carmona, executive director of the Women’s March, opened the Washington event by asking people to keep their distance from one another, saying the only superspreader event would be the recent one at the White House. She talked about the power of women to end Trump’s presidency. “His presidency began with women marching and now it’s going to end with woman voting. Period,” she said. More