US elections 2020

Subterms

    More stories

    • 200 Shares159 Views

      in Elections

      The 10 swing state counties that tell the story of the 2020 election | Ben Davis

      by

      Looking at the results of the 2020 election at the more granular level of counties and precincts, it can mostly be defined by one thing: stasis. But beneath that stasis the results of this election and the changes from previous elections say an enormous amount about where the country is and is going. The counties that swung the most mostly fall into two categories: Latino areas swinging strongly towards Trump, and white-majority suburban areas swinging towards Biden. These 10 swing state counties were crucial to the final results, and help tell the story of what happened in 2020.Maricopa county, ArizonaHome of Phoenix and environs, Maricopa county is perhaps the most important individual county to the 2020 presidential election. The county makes up an absolute majority of the population of the swing state Arizona, and the winner of the state almost always wins the county. This year, Biden was able to flip Arizona by just over 10,000 votes, his margin coming entirely from winning Maricopa county by around 45,000. It was the first time the county had voted for the Democratic nominee for president since 1948. In many ways, Maricopa was a microcosm of the election: narrowly won by Trump in 2016 and Biden in 2020, containing urban and suburban areas, and having large communities of both college-educated white moderate voters and Latino voters. Maricopa was one of the linchpins of the Biden strategy of flipping white suburban voters – which he did just enough to win. Precinct results show Biden doing clearly better than Clinton in the white-majority suburban areas. They also show the result of Democrats’ failure to keep their margins among working-class Latino voters, especially in the seventh congressional district, which was carried by Bernie Sanders in the primary. Within Maricopa we can see the results of the trade-off Democrats made to win this election.Hidalgo county, TexasOn the border with Mexico, Hidalgo county, centered on McAllen, is over 90% Hispanic. Working-class and with very high rates of poverty, historically solidly Democratic Hidalgo represents the center of Biden’s failures with Latino voters and working-class voters more broadly. Hidalgo swung 23 points towards Trump, destroying any hopes Democrats had of winning Texas. Hidalgo saw a 27% increase in turnout, as Trump was able to break expectations by activating low-turnout voters to his side. Young, rapidly growing and working-class, Hidalgo is exactly the type of place Democrats need to win to enact any sort of progressive agenda in the future. For many years the conventional wisdom was that turnout in places like Hidalgo would benefit Democrats, but the consequence of Democrats’ focus on flipping white suburban voters was that these new voters were ignored by the party and Trump was able to capitalize. Like most working-class Latino areas, Hidalgo voted for socialist Bernie Sanders in the primary. Going forward, Democrats need a message of class-focused populism to build a base in communities like Hidalgo and build a progressive governing majority.Collin county, TexasThe flip side of Hidalgo county, Collin county in suburban Dallas is an example of the places that powered Biden to competitiveness in Texas and other suburb-heavy sun belt states. Collin county, like other suburbs in Texas, has long been a Republican bastion, giving enormous margins to GOP candidates up and down the ballot. George W Bush twice won Collin by over 40 points, and Mitt Romney won by over 30 in 2012. This year, however, Collin went for Trump by just four points, a 13-point swing to the Democrats from 2016. Collin and Hidalgo counties represent the twin patterns of this election: affluent white suburban areas swinging towards Democrats and working-class Latino areas swinging to Republicans.Miami-Dade county, FloridaMiami-Dade county is fairly unique politically, but you can’t tell the story of the 2020 election without talking about it. Miami and the surrounding area are heavily influenced by the politics of the Cuban diaspora, but the county is also home to many other communities. Miami-Dade saw one of the strongest swings in the country towards Trump, from going to Clinton by 30 points to Biden by just seven. While much of this was powered by Cuban-majority areas, Biden lost ground all over the county, including Black-majority areas. The immense losses in Miami-Dade are one of the biggest swings, and biggest shocks, of the election, costing two Democratic seats in the House of Representatives and putting Florida nearly out of play. The story in Miami-Dade is that the Republicans can mobilize massive numbers of working-class people who usually don’t vote. This has scrambled the entire American political landscape, and put Democrats in a precarious position going forward.Gwinnett county, GeorgiaGwinnett county, in suburban Atlanta, was key to Biden flipping Georgia. The suburbs were the first area of Georgia to support Republicans as the state moved from solidly Democratic to solidly Republican, and are now in the vanguard again as the state has moved back into the Democratic column. Gwinnett voted Republican every year between 1980 and 2012, voting for George W Bush by over 30 points twice. After going narrowly to Clinton in 2016, the county followed the pattern of suburban realignment more strongly than almost anywhere else in the country, voting for Biden by 18 points, a 75,000-vote margin. Winning big in places like Gwinnett was the key to Biden’s strategy for victory, and he was just able to do it.Lackawanna county, PennsylvaniaLackawanna county is the home of Scranton, Joe Biden’s home town, and is a longtime working-class Democratic stronghold. Lackawanna tells two stories in 2020: one of Biden doing just enough for victory and another of a permanent realignment of historic Democratic working-class areas away from the party. Lackawanna voted for Biden by eight points, a five-point swing towards native son Biden that helped push him just over the top in Pennsylvania. Biden was able to recapture enough support in north-east Pennsylvania and places like it in the midwest and north-east, combined with his increased support in the suburbs, meant that he was able to recapture the states Trump so surprisingly captured in 2016. But under the surface, the result in Lackawanna shows a long-term realignment brought about by decades of neoliberalism and declining union density and accelerated by Donald Trump. Obama was able to win Lackawanna twice by over 25 points. The 2020 result is a swing of nearly 20 points since the Obama era, despite Biden’s local connections. It is clear that many working-class regions have permanently moved away from solid Democratic status.Chester county, PennsylvaniaChester county, in suburban Philadelphia, is one of the GOP’s historical bastions, voting Republican every year but the landslide of 1964 until 2008. This year, Biden won Chester by 17 points and nearly 54,000 votes. Biden’s strength in the Collar counties around Philadelphia was crucial to his win in the state, and is the main thing keeping Democrats competitive since their collapse among voters in rural and post-industrial areas. Places like Chester form the heart of the new Democratic coalition, and Democrats will have to keep and improve Biden’s margins – and match his margins in down-ballot races – to put together governing coalitions in the future.Mahoning county, OhioMahoning county, home of Youngstown, is maybe the most powerful symbol of Democratic loss in the working-class midwest. After voting Democratic by enormous margins for decades, Mahoning went to Trump this year, the first time a Republican has won it since Nixon in 1972. Mahoning went for Hillary Clinton in 2016, Obama by over 25 points twice, and even Michael Dukakis by over 25 points. Biden’s shocking loss this year shows a combination of further erosion among white working-class voters and among black voters. Mahoning represents perhaps the final nail in the coffin of the class-based New Deal coalition that has shaped American politics since 1932.Waukesha county, WisconsinCrucial Waukesha county, in suburban Milwaukee, has long been a bastion of Republicanism. This year, however, Biden’s strength with suburban voters closed the gap just enough for Biden to win the state. While Trump won by 21 points, the swing in Waukesha and the rest of the Milwaukee suburbs was just enough for Biden to win the state by around 20,000 votes. While the movement in suburban Milwaukee and the suburbs more broadly was enough to win the election for Biden, it was not as much as many Democrats expected.Northampton county, North CarolinaNorthampton county is a strong example of a serious problem for Democrats: erosion among black voters. These losses may indeed have cost Biden the state of North Carolina. Northampton county is 60% black, and this year went for Biden by 20 points. This was a five-point swing against the Democrats, and the smallest margin for Democrats in the county since the Republican landslide of 1972. Losses among black voters this cycle should be very worrying to Democrats.While the results of the election mostly show stasis, within these results, there was some confounding of expectations. First, the sheer scale of Latino defections to Trump was shocking to many. On the other hand, the swing toward Biden was enough to win the election, but below the expectations of many Democrats, and these voters often split their ticket for down-ballot Republicans, costing the Democrats a chance at a governing majority. Furthermore, the stasis in rural, white areas was a surprise itself. Many of these areas swung dramatically towards Trump in 2016, and it was expected that Biden would rebound at least a bit as there was no more room to fall for Democrats. Instead, these areas mostly stayed the same or even swung to Trump a bit. The results of 2020 confirm the huge swings and coalitional realignment of 2016 are here to stay. We head into the future with a Democratic party weaker than ever among working-class voters of all races and more reliant than ever on a wealthier, whiter and more affluent coalition. More

    • 163 Shares189 Views

      in US Politics

      Trump agrees to begin transition as key agency calls Biden apparent election winner

      by

      The General Services Administration has declared president-elect Joe Biden the apparent winner of the US election, clearing the way for the formal transition from Donald Trump’s administration to begin after weeks of delay.
      The GSA said on Monday that it had determined that Biden was the winner of the 3 November race after weeks of Trump refusing to concede and violating the traditions of the transition of power at the White House.
      Trump said on Twitter he had directed his team to cooperate on the transition, but vowed to continue fighting the election results, despite the lack of evidence of widespread voter fraud. Hours later, he said: “Will never concede to fake ballots & ‘Dominion’.”
      Emily Murphy, who heads the GSA, said she made the determination based on “the law” and “facts.”
      “Please know that I came to my decision independently, based on the law and available facts. I was never directly or indirectly pressured by any executive branch official including those who work at the White House or GSA with regard to the substance or timing of my decision,” Murphy wrote in a letter to Biden.
      Murphy had faced growing pressure from Democrats and some Republicans to allow the transition to begin, as Trump’s efforts to challenge the results in numerous battleground states failed.
      A federal judge in Pennsylvania on Saturday tossed a Trump campaign lawsuit that sought to prevent certification in that state. And on Monday, Michigan certified Biden’s victory, despite an unprecedented push by the president last week to undermine that move to allow for an audit of ballots in Wayne county, where Biden won by more than 330,000 votes.
      GSA certification is a process that in typical election years occurs without fanfare or discussion shortly after the race is called by major news outlets.
      Murphy’s refusal to declare Biden the winner weeks after the election prevented the transition team of Biden and Vice president-elect Kamala Harris from accessing federal funding and meeting with government officials to prepare for inauguration on 20 January.
      The delay was particularly concerning given the urgent and unprecedented tasks facing the federal government amid a significantly worsening pandemic and economic crisis. The US must also begin work to prepare a national rollout of Covid-19 vaccines. There were also major concerns about the potential national security implications of a delayed transition, which blocked Biden from accessing classified briefings.
      After Murphy’s letter was made public, Trump tweeted, “We will keep up the good fight and I believe we will prevail! Nevertheless, in the best interest of our country, I am recommending that Emily and her team do what needs to be done with regard to initial protocols, and have told my team to do the same.”
      The Trump legal team dismissed the certification as “simply a procedural step” and insisted it would fight on.
      Yohannes Abraham, executive director of the Biden transition, said in a statement Monday that the move by the GSA “is a needed step to begin tackling the challenges facing our nation, including getting the pandemic under control and our economy back on track”.
      He added: “In the days ahead, transition officials will begin meeting with federal officials to discuss the pandemic response, have a full accounting of our national security interests, and gain complete understanding of the Trump administration’s efforts to hollow out government agencies.”
      With GSA permitting the formal transition to start, more Republicans started to acknowledge the reality that Biden is president-elect.
      “President Trump’s legal team has not presented evidence of the massive fraud which would have had to be present to overturn the election,” said Bill Cassidy, a Republican senator from Louisiana. “I voted for President Trump but Joe Biden won.”
      A majority of GOP senators have refused to recognize Biden’s win, arguing that Trump should be allowed to pursue his cases in court, despite the lack of evidence of any widespread fraud that would change the outcome of the race. Since the Associated Press and other news organizations across the country declared Biden the winner on 7 November, five days after polls closed, Trump and his allies have continued to spread misinformation and baseless conspiracy theories, seeking to undermine the legitimacy of mail-in voting and falsely asserting that the election was “stolen”.
      Audits, recounts and the Trump campaign’s court cases, however, have resulted in no meaningful changes to the election results, and in some cases, Biden’s lead has only increased. Judges repeatedly thr ew out the Trump campaign team’s cases.
      But the false accusations of fraud did lead some election officials to seek to delay certification of the vote. The city commissioner’s office in Philadelphia, where counting took days, reported facing death threats, and Trump supporters have staged protests outside election offices across the US.
      Murphy’s letter came on the same day that Biden announced his selection for several key cabinet roles. The president-elect said he would be nominating Tony Blinken as secretary of state, Jake Sullivan as national security adviser and John Kerry as “climate tsar”, suggesting a return to the priorities of the Obama era.
      Biden also selected Alejandro Mayorkas for homeland security secretary. If he is confirmed, he would be the first Latino and migrant to have the position. He has further chosen Avril Haines to be the first female director of national intelligence and Janet Yellen to be the country’s first female treasury secretary. More

    • 113 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      Q&A: what does the General Services Administration's decision mean?

      by

      The US government’s General Services Administration on Monday ascertained Joe Biden is the apparent winner of the 2020 presidential election, allowing for the presidential transition to officially begin.
      Donald Trump on Monday tweeted he had directed his team to cooperate on the transition, but he vowed to continue fighting the election results.
      What does the GSA’s decision mean? And why is the step a crucial one in the transfer of power?
      What is the GSA?
      The GSA is a huge agency that keeps the federal government functioning day to day. In order for a presidential transition to officially begin, the GSA had to recognize a presidential winner – or rather, ascertain the “apparent successful candidate” in the general election. The Presidential Transition Act and other federal policies do not specify how that process should work, but the process is meant to be apolitical.
      In typical election years, it occurs without fanfare or discussion shortly after the race is called by major news outlets. In 2016, the agency began making office space available for the winning candidate’s team as early as August, and the transition was able to begin after Hillary Clinton conceded to Trump the day after the election.
      Why was the move delayed this year?
      The agency and its director, Emily Murphy, a Trump appointee, said it was important to wait to see how litigation by Donald Trump’s campaign and recounts in the days following the election could affect the election results.
      In a letter informing Biden of the agency’s move on Monday, Murphy said she “looked to precedent from prior elections involving legal challenges and incomplete counts” in imposing a delay.
      Republicans defending Murphy have pointed out that transition was delayed in 2000 as the court battle between Al Gore and George W Bush over the results in Florida played out. But Biden’s team has pointed out that in that case, only 500 votes separated the two candidates in that state. Even in states where Trump is contesting the result, Biden is leading Trump with thousands of votes.
      Before Murphy ascertained Biden the winner, House Democrats had sent her a letter asking her to clearly explain the reasons for her delay by Monday.
      What does the news mean?
      The GSA move allows Biden and his team to access classified briefings and meet with government officials. It also gives Biden officials access to office space and funds to pay the transition team. Prior to the GSA’s move on Monday, the Biden-Harris team had been raising money to fund the transition process, absent access to government-allocated funds.
      With the GSA’s approval, Biden’s team can also move over to government email and receive help from the Department of Homeland Security to protect the privacy of incoming officials as they plan out, for example, national security strategies. Until now, the team had also lacked cybersecurity support to shield email and other communication amid concerns that Russia, China, or other foreign adversaries could intercept classified information.
      Why is it so crucial?
      The Biden administration will face a host of urgent and unprecedented challenges when taking office on 20 January, as coronavirus cases across the US rise and Congress has not agreed on a relief package to mitigate the economic impact of the pandemic.
      Biden had warned last week that “because of the lack of ascertainment by the GSA, my transition team hasn’t been able to get access to the information we need to be able to deal with everything from testing and guidance to the all-important issue of vaccine distribution and vaccination plan”.
      Last week, as the Biden-Harris team attempted to begin the transition process despite the GSA holdup, they reached out to Trump administration officials who had recently left their posts, in an attempt to glean key information while being locked out of official briefings. More

    • 213 Shares189 Views

      in US Politics

      Trump has tested the limits of the US constitution – but it's still holding | Simon Jenkins

      by

      Slowly, painfully, alarmingly, Donald Trump has been conceding the US presidency to Joe Biden. Over the weekend his close friend Chris Christie called his delay “a national embarrassment”, joining judges, aides and other Republican politicians. Meanwhile the world has erupted in a chorus of derision at the state of American democracy, polluted by corruption, fake news and money. Countries whose leaders would not dream of risking an open election, let alone conceding one, mimic Moscow in ridiculing “the obvious shortcomings in the American electoral system”. Beijing celebrates by preparing to jail a clutch of Hong Kong democrats.
      The reality is the opposite. The late American historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr pointed out that the US constitution regularly takes its grand coalition of diverse peoples to the brink of disintegration, shows them disaster and pulls them back. Trump in 2016 was a populist candidate who ran for election on a pseudo-revolutionary ticket against the Washington establishment. Though he won fewer votes than his opponent, Hillary Clinton, an electoral college biased to protect the interests of small states against big ones gave him the presidency. In office he ran up huge debts, was a bully and a xenophobe, and relentlessly attacked all centres of establishment power. The economy boomed.
      American political participation soared. At this month’s presidential election, turnout at 67% was the highest for a century. Biden’s popular lead over Trump was not so much bigger than Clinton’s in 2016, and the college tilted his way rather than against. But Trump’s popular vote actually rose and did so among surprising groups, including Hispanic, black and female voters. In effect, his “outsiders” stuck with him and told him to finish the job.
      What helped to give Biden victory, according to exit polls, was increased support among white men. Many of them were, in effect, saying that they had got the point of Trump and now wanted rid of him. The fact remains that almost as large a group was warning that it felt ignored and alienated, and that no one should take democracy for granted. It has now flashed that warning not once but twice. And Trump may yet return.
      Of all the great political unions that emerged from the age of empire, the US has proved the most robust (with a hesitant nod towards India). Such unions are seldom entirely stable. Their survival requires constitutions able to accommodate disparate peoples, regions and interests – and do so at peace. The US constitution, so baffling to outsiders, was designed in the 18th century to bind together a union rightly seen as vulnerable. Yet it built what became the world’s dominant great power, recently delivering leaders as diverse as George W Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump. It has survived them all.
      Few would contend that Trump has been anything other than an aberration. But if he was testing the US constitution to destruction, it passed the test. Biden should now receive every support in restoring his country’s dignity and good faith. Meanwhile other unions – not least that of the United Kingdom – should look to their own. They all have their Trumps in waiting. All have lessons to learn.
      Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist More

    • 163 Shares189 Views

      in Elections

      Trump campaign cuts ties with attorney Sidney Powell after bizarre election fraud claims

      by

      Perhaps Sidney Powell has gone too far even for Rudy Giuliani this time.
      The Trump campaign’s legal team has moved to distance itself from the firebrand conservative attorney after a tumultuous few days in which Powell made multiple incorrect statements about the election voting process, unspooled complex conspiracy theories and vowed to “blow up” Georgia with a “biblical” lawsuit.
      “Sidney Powell is practicing law on her own. She is not a member of the Trump legal team. She is also not a lawyer for the president in his personal capacity,” Giuliani and another lawyer for Trump, Jenna Ellis, said in a statement on Sunday.
      Trump himself has heralded Powell’s involvement, tweeting last week that she was part of a team of “wonderful lawyers and representatives” spearheaded by Giuliani.
      There was no immediate clarification from the campaign and Powell did not immediately return an email seeking comment.
      The statement hints at chaos in a legal team that has lost case after case in its efforts to overturn the results of the 3 November election. Law firms have withdrawn from cases, and in the latest setback, Matthew Brann, a Republican US district court judge in Pennsylvania, threw out the Trump campaign’s request to disenfranchise almost 7 million voters there.
      “This claim, like Frankenstein’s Monster, has been haphazardly stitched together from two distinct theories in an attempt to avoid controlling precedent,” he wrote in a damning order, issued on Saturday. On Sunday afternoon, the Trump campaign filed an appeal against Brann’s ruling in Pennsylvania.
      It came after similar failed court bids in Georgia, Michigan and Arizona to prevent states from certifying their vote totals.
      The statement on Powell was the latest sign of wariness over her approach even within some conservative circles. Fox News host Tucker Carlson said on his show last week that his team had asked Powell for evidence to support her claims, but that Powell had provided none.
      Powell made headlines with her statements at a Thursday news conference where, joined by Giuliani and Ellis, she incorrectly suggested that a server hosting evidence of voting irregularities was located in Germany, that voting software used by Georgia and other states was created at the direction of late Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez and that votes for Trump had probably been switched in favour of Biden.
      However, her contributions that day were largely overshadowed by Giuliani’s hair dye malfunction.
      In a subsequent interview with Newsmax on Saturday, she appeared to accuse Georgia’s Republican governor, Brian Kemp, and its Republican secretary of state of being part of a conspiracy involving a voting-system contract award that she contends harmed Trump’s re-election bid.
      “Georgia’s probably going to be the first state I’m going to blow up and Mr Kemp and the secretary of state need to go with it,” she said, later adding that a lawsuit she planned to file against the state would be “biblical”.
      The status of that lawsuit was unclear on Sunday night.
      Powell, a former federal prosecutor, took over last year as the lead lawyer for Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn, who pleaded guilty in special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation.
      Since then, a federal judge has rejected her claims of prosecutorial misconduct and has responded quizzically to some of her arguments, including her suggestion at a hearing several weeks ago that her conversations with Trump about the Flynn case were privileged.
      She has supported a Justice Department motion to dismiss the prosecution, a request that remains pending before US district judge Emmet Sullivan. More

    • 175 Shares109 Views

      in US Politics

      Gary Younge on minority voters and the future of the Republican party – podcast

      by

      A look at the history of US voting rights and what the changing demographics of the country mean for Republicans

      How to listen to podcasts: everything you need to know

      Black and Latino voters overwhelmingly favoured the Democrats in the 2020 US election. Without their huge margins in key states, Joe Biden could not have won, the journalist Gary Younge tells Anushka Asthana. By 2045, white voters will be in the minority. These changing demographics are a concern for the Republican party. In 2013, just a year after turnout rates for black voters surpassed those for white voters for the first time, the supreme court gutted the Voting Rights Act, which affected poor, young and minority voters. It’s important to remember, Gary tells Anushka, that the US was a slave state for more than 200 years; and an apartheid state, after the abolition of slavery, for another century. It has only been a non-racial democracy for 55 years. And that now hangs in the balance. If Biden does not produce something transformative, the disillusionment among voters may grow and people may once again look for someone who can disrupt the status quo, which is how Donald Trump won in 2016. • Read Gary Younge’s piece: Counted out: Trump’s desperate fight to stop the minority vote More

    • 150 Shares159 Views

      in Elections

      Trump faces pressure from Republicans to drop 'corrosive' fight to overturn election

      by

      Donald Trump faced growing pressure from Republicans on Sunday to drop his chaotic, last-ditch fight to overturn the US presidential election, as victor Joe Biden prepared to start naming his cabinet and a Pennsylvania judge compared Trump’s legal case there to “Frankenstein’s monster”.Despite Republican leadership in Washington standing behind the president’s claims that the 3 November election was stolen from him by nationwide voter fraud, other prominent figures, including two of his former national security advisers, were blunt.Former Trump national security adviser John Bolton said that Biden would be sworn in in January and added: “The real question is how much damage Trump can do before that happens.”The president’s efforts were designed mainly to sow chaos and confusion, he told CNN’s State of the Union show, as a demonstration more of “raw political power” than a genuine legal exercise.Bolton noted that the Trump campaign has so far lost all but two of more than 30 legal challenges in various states.“Right now Trump is throwing rocks through windows, he is the political equivalent of a street rioter,” Bolton said.And another former Trump administration national security adviser, HR McMaster, told CBS’s Face the Nation that Trump’s efforts were “very corrosive” and warned that his actions were sowing doubt among the electorate.“It’s playing into the hands of our adversaries,” he said, warning that Russia, for example, “doesn’t care who wins” as long as many Americans doubt the result, undermining US democracy.On Sunday evening, hours after former New Jersey governor and adviser to the president Chris Christie said Trump’s legal team was a “national embarrassment” the campaign issued a statement distancing itself from lawyer Sidney Powell, who has been a prominent figure arguing the Trump case that the election was fraudulent, while positing wild theories but no evidence.Meanwhile, Maryland governor, Larry Hogan, another Republican, said he also was confident Biden would be sworn in on schedule on 20 January and said “I’m embarrassed” at the lack of party leadership speaking out to recognize the election result.Hogan added that he thought Trump’s pressuring last week of state legislators “to somehow try to change the outcome” was “completely outrageous”.The US used to supervise elections around the world but was now “beginning to look like we’re in a banana republic,” Hogan told CNN’s State of the Union politics show.Hogan later tweeted, in response to a critical tweet from Trump, who had gone to the golf course for the second time this weekend: “Stop golfing and concede.”If you had done your job, America’s governors wouldn’t have been forced to fend for themselves to find tests in the middle of a pandemic, as we successfully did in Maryland.Stop golfing and concede. https://t.co/tCXO8etxge— Governor Larry Hogan (@GovLarryHogan) November 22, 2020
      On Friday, the president met withRepublican leaders from Michigan at the White House in a wild attempt to sway them and leaders in other battleground states in the electoral college to set aside the will of the people and declare Trump the winner, despite officials at local and federal level declaring it the most secure election in American history.In the latest setback to Trump’s efforts, Matthew Brann, a Republican US district court judge in Pennsylvania, threw out the Trump campaign’s request to disenfranchise almost 7 million voters there.“This claim, like Frankenstein’s Monster, has been haphazardly stitched together from two distinct theories in an attempt to avoid controlling precedent,” he wrote in a damning order, issued on Saturday.It came after similar failed court bids in Georgia, Michigan and Arizona to prevent states from certifying their vote totals.Ruling that Pennsylvania officials can certify election results in the state, where Biden has a lead of more than 80,000 votes, Brann said the Trump campaign presented “strained legal arguments without merit and speculative accusations… unsupported by evidence” in its attempt to challenge a batch of thousands of votes.Brann also suggested that the Trump campaign’s case demonstrated a failure to understand the US constitution, writing: “Plaintiffs seek to remedy the denial of their votes by invalidating the votes of millions of others. Rather than requesting that their votes be counted, they seek to discredit scores of other votes, but only for one race. This is simply not how the constitution works.”For Trump to maintain any hope of staying in the White House, he would need to eliminate Biden’s 81,000-vote lead in Pennsylvania. The state is due to start certifying its results on Monday – as is Michigan.Kristen Clarke, president of the lawyers’ committee for Civil Rights Under Law, said of the Pennsylvania result and forthcoming result certification: “This should put the nail in the coffin on any further attempts by President Trump to use the federal courts to rewrite the outcome of the 2020 election.”On Sunday afternoon, the Trump campaign filed an appeal against Brann’s ruling in Pennsylvania.But Christie agreed that it was time for the president to concede and said the legal team fighting to overturn the election was “a national embarrassment”.Last week, lawyers Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell represented the Trump campaign in court and held a long press conference side by side at the Republican National Committee headquarters that was characterized by lies and wild claims about a fraudulent election, without presenting credible evidence.Then the Trump election campaign abruptly issued a statement on Powell.“Sidney Powell is practicing law on her own,” Trump campaign lawyers Rudy Giuliani and Jenna Ellis said in the Sunday evening statement. “She is not a member of the Trump Legal Team. She is also not a lawyer for the President in his personal capacity.”Powell recently represented Michael Flynn, who was briefly Trump’s national security adviser before he was fired and prosecuted, in his tangled criminal case.Biden has garnered the most votes of a presidential winner in history, recording 6 million more votes than Trump. More

    • 163 Shares129 Views

      in US Politics

      Joe Biden’s begging bowl demeans the world’s most powerful post | Kenan Malik

      by

      ‘Here’s the deal: Because President Trump refuses to concede and is delaying the transition, we have to fund it ourselves and need your help. If you’re able, chip in to help fund the Biden-Harris transition.” So tweeted Joe Biden last week. His campaign has also sent out emails begging “grassroots supporters like you… to power us through this critical moment”. There is something absurd about the president-elect grifting from car workers and nurses to help him move to the White House.
      Normally, the process is federally funded. This time, the money – $10bn – has been blocked because the General Services Administration (GSA), the organisation responsible for handing it out, has refused to recognise Biden’s victory. The begging bowl approach has become common practice in recent years – Donald Trump raised $6.5m in 2016. The Biden campaign has apparently already solicited $8m from corporate backers. It’s a questionable development.
      Such pleading erodes the distinction between campaigning and governance. It provides partisan funding for what is part of the state. At a time when America is so polarised, such funding makes it more difficult to be a “president for all Americans”. It further privatises governance, leverages the power of lobbyists and special interests and undermines the authority of the president-elect: the most powerful figure in the world begging for your loose change.
      Trump’s refusal to accept the election result and the farcical conspiracy theories peddled by his lawyers are undermining US democracy, but in the long term there is something deeply corrosive about turning transition into a crowd-funded partisan process.
      • Kenan Malik is an Observer columnist More