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Stephen Collins on the US election – cartoon
The Stephen Collins cartoon
US elections 2020
Sat 17 Oct 2020 01.00 EDT
Last modified on Sat 17 Oct 2020 01.01 EDT
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American Crisis review: Andrew Cuomo on Covid, Trump … and a job with Joe Biden?
On Thursday, the US reported 65,000 new cases of Covid-19 and Donald Trump falsely told a television town hall 85% of people who wear masks contract the disease. With more than two weeks to the election and a record-shattering 17 million Americans having already voted, the rhythms and tropes of the past seven months will only intensify between now and 3 November.Early in the pandemic, Andrew Cuomo’s daily briefings emerged as must-see television, counter-programming to the campaign commercials that masqueraded as presidential press conferences. The New York governor was forthright and reassuring, even as the body count mounted.Covid-related deaths in the Empire State now exceed 25,000, the highest in the US. New York was both frontline and lab experiment. What happened there foreshadowed national tragedy. Red states were not immune. Right now, the plague rages in the heartland.Cuomo’s new book, subtitled Leadership Lessons from the Covid-19 Pandemic, is his effort to shape perceptions of his own performance amid the pandemic while pointing a damning finger at Trump and Bill de Blasio, New York City’s woefully inept mayor. Like the governor, American Crisis is informative and direct – but not exciting.I believe that this was on a par with the greatest failure to detect an enemy attack since Pearl HarborAndrew CuomoThe book reads like a campaign autobiography except that Cuomo, by his own admission, will never run for president. It contains its share of heroes, villains and family vignettes. Cuomo’s three daughters appear throughout.Like the governor, American Crisis is programmatic, neither poetic nor poignant. Indeed, in a final chapter tritely titled A Blueprint for Going Forward, the governor offers 28 pages of policy proposals.Covid has taken nearly 220,000 American lives. The US suffered 58,000 combat deaths in Vietnam, 116,000 in the first world war. Only the second world war, the civil war and the flu pandemic of 1918-1919 resulted in greater casualties.Not surprisingly, Cuomo saves his harshest words for the Trump administration: “New York was ambushed by Covid. I believe that this was on a par with the greatest failure to detect an enemy attack since Pearl Harbor.”On that score, Cuomo compares Trump to FDR and of course finds him wanting. The administration did deliver early warnings – to members of the financial community and Republican donors. With that in mind, Cuomo’s take is almost mild.Cuomo’s relationship with the president was already fraught. On top of Trump and congressional Republicans capping deductions for state and local taxes, the governor acknowledges fighting with the administration over “immigration policy, environmental policy, you name it”. He adds: “I found his pandering to the far right alternately disingenuous and repugnant.”American Crisis also relays a conversation with the president in which the governor urged the former resident of Queens, a borough of New York City, to invoke the Defense Production Act and mandate private industry to produce tests and personal protective equipment. Trump declined, claiming such a move would smack of “big government” – as opposed to issuing diktats to big tech, directing that companies relocate, unilaterally imposing tariffs on imports and offering private briefings to those favored by the administration.Time has passed. In the 1980s, Governor Mario Cuomo and his son Andrew were Trump allies, of a sort. Back then, Trump retained the services of twentysomething Andrew Cuomo’s law firm, in connection with commercial leases on Manhattan’s West Side. According to Trump, they were “representing us in a very significant transaction”. Not any more.The president is not the only member of the administration to come in for criticism. Mark Meadows, the latest White House chief of staff, receives a large dollop of Cuomo’s wrath. In Cuomo’s telling, Meadows conditioned assistance to New York on it conveying hospital test results for hydroxychloroquine, Trump’s one-time Covid treatment of choice.Cuomo said the state would provide the test data once it was available, not before. Meadows told him the federal government was ready to release hospital funding to states, but “strongly implied” that if the test results did not soon arrive, New York would not “receive any funding”. To Cuomo, that reeked of extortion. More
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Wide Awakes: the Lincoln-era youth movement inspiring anti-Trump protests
US politics
Wide Awakes: the Lincoln-era youth movement inspiring anti-Trump protests
In 1860, on the brink of civil war, caped young men with lanterns sought to safeguard democracy. Now, in a nation divided once more, the group has returned to the light More
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Timeline: what a normal US election looks like and what might happen in 2020
Kerem Yucel/AFP/Getty Images
1. What a normal US election looks like
Matt Slocum/AP
The first votes cast
Before election day, some states start
early voting and
mail-in voting. That’s happening in this election, as well.Paul J. Richards/AFP/Getty Images
On election day, everyone else votes
Americans go to polling places to cast their vote. This is also when mail-in ballots can be counted in most states. Once ballots are tallied, results start being released.Kevin Lamarque/Reuters
Organizations like the
Associated Press often project a winner on election night based on an analysis of votes already counted, the number of outstanding votes and the margin between the candidates.Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
The losing candidate typically concedes
This usually happens in the early hours of the next morning. A public concession makes it clear to the American people who has won. It can make everything after this feel like a formality.The results are finalized
Even if it’s clear who won local officials finish counting ballots in the days after the election and send their results to state officials. They approve the results and send them to federal officials.Election disputes need to be settled before 8 December
States need to settle any election disputes and have a winner by this date, known as the “safe harbor deadline.” Otherwise, federal law says Congress can refuse to accept the electoral votes from that state.Then states pick ‘electors’ to represent them
When Americans vote they don’t directly vote for president and vice president. Rather, they vote for their state “electors” who represent their choice.
For example, if Joe Biden wins Michigan this year, the state’s 16 allotted electors would be Democrats. They represent the state at the
electoral college meeting on 14 December, where electors meet at their respective state capitols to elect the president and vice-president.Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
The winning candidate is sworn into office
On 20 January, or 21 January if it’s on a Sunday, the constitution says the presidential term is over and the new president is inaugurated.Ron Adar/SOPA Images/REX/Shutterstock
2. In 2020, things might be different
The weeks before election day
By early October,
6.6 million Americans had already voted, largely because of a surge in mail-in voting. Trump has said
mail-in voting is rigged against him, and his allies
have helped sow doubt in the election.
Democrats tend to be more likely to vote by mail, according to
research by election scholars Edward Foley and Charles Stewart. That means Democrats will gain more votes as mail ballots are counted, but it might also mean they are less represented in the in-person voting that happens on election day. More - in US Politics
For Australia's sake, I hope Trump's climate science denialism loses | Michael Mann
Anyone in Australia who witnessed the Black Summer bushfires (as I did), and anyone in the US who experienced the thick smoke from our western wildfires (as I have), knows how much damage climate change is already doing. The stark reality is that worldwide efforts to avert ever-more catastrophic climate change impacts lie in the balance in the 2020 US election.Donald Trump will go down in history bearing substantial responsibility for the deaths of over 200,000 Americans due to his rejection of the advice of public health experts and his refusal to endorse policies such as social distancing and mask-wearing that could have saved many thousands of lives. But his rejection of the science of climate change sets the stage for a far greater toll. Far more human lives will be lost from the impacts of climate change if we fail to act.Whether or not Trump gets re-elected – and how other countries like Australia respond to the outcome of the US election – could determine the fate of our planet. Indeed, I’ve stated that a second Trump term might well be “game over for the climate” if it leads to the collapse of international efforts to act.The damage caused by Trump’s climate denial is painfully visible within the US as we endure climate change-fuelled extreme weather events, including unprecedented wildfires in the west and unprecedented hurricanes in the east. But the damage can be felt around the world. Trump has proudly, and shamelessly, trumpeted his climate denialism on the global stage, joining with petrostates such as Russia, Saudi Arabia and Brazil in opposing international climate efforts.Indeed, Trump’s actions have emboldened Australia to be less ambitious on climate too, prime minister Scott Morrison following Trump’s lead in promoting climate denial, coddling fossil fuel interests and blocking efforts to support a clean, renewable energy transition.By pulling the US out of the Paris agreement (one of the first and only campaign promises he kept) Trump ceded America’s leadership on the defining challenge of our time. Thus far, other countries have fortunately filled the leadership void, at least temporarily. The EU and China, with its new net-zero pledge, have stepped up to the plate, recognising that they will benefit from the opportunities of a clean energy economy and better protect their citizens from dangerous climate change impacts.But nobody stands to benefit more from climate action, or lose more if we fail to act, than Australia. Having spent a sabbatical leave down under earlier this year, aimed at collaborating with scientists in Australia to study the impact of climate change on extreme weather events, I instead witnessed those impacts first-hand. I saw the muted beauty of the Blue Mountains when shrouded in wildfire smoke. If Trump is re-elected, and we collectively continue down a path of insufficient climate action, it may not be long before those fires rage year-round, and the Blue Mountains are lost in a perpetual grey and dismal haze.It’s the same with the vibrant sea life of the Great Barrier Reef, which I was fortunate enough to witness with my family during my time in Australia. The delicate ecosystems of the GBR are already on the ropes, with fossil fuels pushing up temperatures in the ocean to the point where bleachings occur with such frequency and ferocity that corals simply cannot recover. Research released this week found that the reef has lost half its coral, largely due to warming oceans caused by climate change. Add the impact of ocean acidification from increasing carbon emissions, and we could sadly, within a decade or two, be reading the GBR’s obituary for real.It doesn’t have to be like that. For one thing, renewable energy costs are plummeting while the technology just keeps getting more efficient and better, so dirty energy no longer makes economic sense. For example, on one recent Sunday, all the electricity demand for the entire state of South Australia was met by solar power alone, and every state and territory in Australia has committed to go carbon neutral by 2050. Here in the US, we’ve seen a record number of cities and states stepping up on climate goals too, knowing clean energy is good for their communities’ health, resilience and prosperity.Policymakers must accelerate the shift to clean energy that is already under way. As we’ve learned in the Trump-era, some fossil fuels are too far gone for even the most determined polluter-in-chief to save. Though another term would give Trump time to defend his environmental rollbacks in court and solidify his dirty energy policies, he has already failed to save coal from market forces, and another four years isn’t going to reverse the long-term decline of the industry.This is a cautionary tale for Australia. In both the US and Australia, conservative politicians seem more eager to bail out dirty polluters than protect the public, denying politically inconvenient science in order to offer lavish payouts to help unprofitable fossil fuel companies.If we are to avert catastrophic warming, we must do just the opposite, providing financial incentives for renewables and disincentives for fossil fuels. That will level the playing field, and accelerate the clean energy transition.We must take the earliest exit possible off the fossil fuel highway. By trying to squeeze out the last drop of fossil fuel industry profits, the Morrison government could well be on its way to bleaching the life from Australia’s coral reefs and blighting the blue of its mountains.There is some good news, however. Regardless of whom Americans vote for – and for the sake of the planet, I hope it’s Joe Biden and the Democrats – Australians can still work together for structural change at home. You can’t solve it alone, but we also can’t solve it without you. Australia has seen that the sun can power an entire state’s electricity for a day. Now it’s time to make that happen every day.Australia must distance itself from the handful of bad petrostate actors who have sabotaged global climate action and rejoin the coalition of the willing, when it comes to the battle to save our planet.• Michael E. Mann is distinguished professor of atmospheric science at Pennsylvania State University. He is author of the upcoming book The New Climate War: The Fight to Take Back Our Planet, due out in January (Public Affairs Books) More
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Trump condemned for QAnon dodge as Biden town hall wins TV ratings battle
Donald Trump
President refused to disavow baseless QAnon conspiracy theory
TV figures show rival Biden event drew about 1m more viewersPlay Video
2:21
Trump grilled on white supremacy, QAnon and his taxes by Savannah Guthrie – video
Joe Biden beat Donald Trump in their TV ratings battle from their duelling town hall events, figures showed Friday, while the president faced condemnation over his failure to disavow the QAnon conspiracy theory.
Biden, the Democratic challenger, attracted almost 1 million more viewers, according to Nielsen, even though Trump’s event was shown on more channels.
The figures from the TV events late on Thursday will probably enrage the ratings-obsessed president, who told aides he hoped to beat Biden and then use the numbers to humiliate him.
Biden’s town hall on ABC averaged 13.9 million viewers, CNN reported, citing Nielsen, while Trump’s audience was about 13 million cross three channels. The president’s responses to questions about QAnon were drawing condemnation on Friday.
QAnon’s followers believe that Trump is trying to save the world from a cabal of satanic paedophiles that includes Democratic politicians and Hollywood celebrities. It has been linked to several violent acts since 2018 including at least one alleged murder.
The US president has praised QAnon adherents including a congressional candidate. At a televised “town hall” on Thursday, he repeatedly claimed to be ignorant of the movement, considered by the FBI as a potential domestic terror threat.
“I know nothing about QAnon,” he told NBC’s Savannah Guthrie in Miami, Florida. ‘I do know they are very much against paedophilia. They fight it very hard. But I know nothing about it … I just don’t know about QAnon.”
Guthrie forcefully interjected: “You do know!”
But Trump said: “I don’t know. No, I don’t know.”
There was a widespread backlash. Ben Collins, a journalist at NBC News, tweeted: “Outside of a straight up endorsement, this is about as about as close to a dream scenario for QAnon followers as is humanly possible.”
The fresh controversy came as millions of people vote early, ahead of the 3 November presidential election, and the coronavirus surges again with 38 states reporting rising cases.
Trump and Biden held simultaneous town halls with voters on rival TV networks in lieu of their second presidential debate, cancelled after the president contracted the coronavirus and refused to debate virtually. Although both candidates are white men in their 70s, it proved to be a split screen for the ages, radically divergent in both style and substance.
Speaking in Philadelphia, Biden offered long, detailed answers and promised to follow the science in combating the pandemic. “The words of a president matter,” he told host George Stephanopoulos on ABC. “No matter whether they’re good, bad or indifferent, they matter. When a president doesn’t wear a mask, or makes fun of folks like me when I was wearing a mask for a long time, then people say it mustn’t be that important.”
The former vice-president conceded mistakes in a 1994 crime law that led to the mass incarceration of African Americans and promised to take a firm position on whether to expand the supreme court, saying people “do have a right to know where I stand. And they will have a right to know where I stand before they vote.”
But the sober policy discussion on ABC was often overshadowed by Trump’s characteristically vague answers to questions that no other American president in modern times would even be asked.
He became visibly agitated when pressed by Guthrie on his views on white supremacy and his retweeting of a conspiracy theory that Osama bin Laden might still be alive. And pushed on whether he owes money to any foreign bank or entity, Trump replied: “I will let you know who – who I owe whatever small amount of money.
“When you look at vast properties like I have – and they’re big and they’re beautiful and they’re well located – when you look at that the amount of money, $400m is a peanut. It’s extremely under-levered. And it’s levered with normal banks – not a big deal.”
Much criticised for his handling of the Covid-19 pandemic, Trump claimed: “What we’ve done has been amazing, and we have done an amazing job, and it’s rounding the corner.” But more than 63,500 new cases were reported in the US on Thursday, the highest number since July.
Trump also misrepresented a recent study to make the false claim that 85% of the people that wear masks catch the virus. “That’s what I heard and that’s what I saw.”
Biden holds a commanding lead over Trump in opinion polls and fundraising. Trump’s campaign, along with the Republican National Committee and related groups, raised $247.8m in September, well short of the $383m raised by Biden and the Democratic National Committee in the same period.
Recovered from the virus, Trump has entered a frenzied spell of campaign rallies in critical swing states but continues to show little message discipline. On Thursday he renewed his attacks against Gretchen Whitmer, branding the Democratic Michigan governor a “dictator” even as authorities announced charges against a 14th suspect in a plot to kidnap her.
Whitmer responded on Twitter: “One week after a plot to kidnap and murder me was revealed, the president renewed his attacks. Words matter. I am asking people of goodwill on both sides of the aisle – please, lower the heat of this dangerous rhetoric.”
Democrats are taking nothing for granted, however, following Trump’s stunning upset victory over Hillary Clinton in 2016.
John Zogby, a Democratic author and pollster, said: “I think Trump is in bad shape. It’s very hard to see a path to victory. But as I say those words. I recall hearing them and maybe even saying them exactly four years ago. I’m not ready to subscribe to the landslide yet.”
Wall Street is preparing for a likely Biden victory, however. Shares of the gun makers Smith & Wesson and Sturm Ruger have both rallied around 8% since late September. Experts predict a surge of gun sales if Democrats win control of the Senate from Republicans, giving them majorities in both houses of Congress and making it easier to approve gun control legislation.Topics
Donald Trump
US elections 2020
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- in Elections
Biden says he'll lay out stance on expanding supreme court before election
Joe Biden said at a town hall event on Thursday night that he would announce before election day whether he favors expanding the supreme court.Biden has repeatedly declined to lay out a stance on the issue amid an ongoing Republican sprint to install a third justice nominated by Donald Trump before the election, in what critics have called a naked power grab.The Senate judiciary committee appeared poised to approve and hand off the nomination of Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the full Senate next week.Barrett’s installation on the court would make for the most dramatic ideological realignment on the court in decades. In part that’s because she would replace a liberal justice, the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg.But the conservative court coup would also be the result of a successful plot by the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, to hold open a supreme court seat for almost a year in 2016 so that Trump could fill it instead of Barack Obama.That fact, combined with similar maneuvering by McConnell at the district and appeals court levels, have led Biden backers to express outrage that the candidate’s unwillingness to stake out a position on so-called “court-packing” would create controversy.The court has already been packed, Biden supporters say, by Trump, McConnell and their Republican surrogates and outside accomplices.In a town hall in Philadelphia on Thursday night, Biden sought to hold the focus on the Republicans’ conduct, telling host George Stephanopoulos that “no matter what answer I gave you” on court packing, “if I say it that’s going to be the headline tomorrow.’”As Stephanopoulos insisted on knowing whether Biden would encourage Congress to pass legislation to expand the court – all of this in the hypothetical instance in which Democrats win the White House in November, hold the House of Representatives, flip the Senate and then make court-packing a legislative priority – Biden said people would know how he felt “before they vote”.Barrett’s likely confirmation would establish a solid 6-3 conservative majority on the court that could last decades. Some progressives have called on the next Democratic president and Congress to add seats to the court, which would change the norm of nine seats that has been in place since 1869. Other activists have called for term limits for judges to increase court turnover.But none of those measures would be effective in the long term so long as Republicans in the Senate, whenever in the majority, refuse to fill court vacancies with judges appointed by a Democratic president and then pump those vacancies full when a Republican president takes over. More
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How Native Americans’ right to vote has been systematically violated for generations
Native Americans
In the new book Voting in Indian Country, Jean Reith Schroedel weaves together historical and contemporary voting rights conflicts as the election nears More
