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      John Oliver on the US election: ‘Despair doesn’t help anything’

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      “It has been a rough week,” said John Oliver on Sunday evening, days after the majority of American voters elected Donald Trump to a second term as president, “which is, to put it mildly, not what I was personally hoping would happen. And honestly, in Trump’s victory speech, he couldn’t seem to believe it either.”Oliver played a clip from Trump’s characteristically rambling victory speech, in which he boasted: “We overcame obstacles that nobody thought possible, and it is now clear that we’ve achieved the most incredible political thing … Look what happened. Is this crazy?”“Yeah, it is crazy,” Oliver answered. “It’s really fucking crazy. He’s basically one sentence away from saying, ‘I mean, you guys saw what I did, right? And you still voted for this. That doesn’t make any sense.’“I know being a shambling verbal mess is part of Trump’s brand,” he added, “but it is still incredible to see an incoming president ad-lib a victory speech with the same energy as the best man who didn’t realize he had to give a toast.”Oliver then looked into the blame game entertained by those disappointed by Kamala Harris’s loss. “People are pointing the finger in all directions, from Latino voters to young men to Joe Rogan,” he said. “You can basically play your own ‘wheel of blame’ and generally make sure it lands on whoever you were mad at in the first place. And I’ll be honest, I get the appeal. It is fun to blame people. Trump was literally just elected president again on a platform of doing exactly that.”Oliver jokingly blamed the election on Katy Perry, citing her performance at Harris’s final rally on the eve of election day, where she covered Whitney Houston’s 1986 classic The Greatest Love of All.“Why would you try to cover Whitney Houston?!” he exclaimed, referring to the rendition as a “drunk bachelorette karaoke night performance”.Others have attributed Trump’s victory to inflation and frustration with the cost of living, even as macro indicators point to a strong economy. “It is not news that Trump’s overt white supremacy and misogyny appeal to many of his voters,” said Oliver. “It’s also not news that many like to hide that by claiming all they’re really worried about is the economy. But clearly for others, there is a willful denial going on about him. Because Trump lies so constantly, people have a sense that you can pick and choose what things he actually believes and create a version of him that suits you. And that can be the case even when his intentions are very clear.”The host then looked ahead to Trump’s second term, starting with a chart of potential Trump administration appointees that “looks like a choose your fighter screen where the only thing they’re fighting is the arc of the moral universe. It looks like an advent calendar where every circle opens up to a tiny piece of literal shit. It looks like a game board for Guess Who? Oops, all assholes.“If you are watching this right now and thinking, ‘You know what, I’m not actually ready for this either,’ I totally get it,” he said. “It is understandable not to want yet another guy in a suit doom-squawking at you. So if you are too angry, depressed or worried to watch the rest of this show, no problem. I have been in each of those places this week, and they are all a correct reaction because, look, we did a show like this after the election in 2016 when no one expected Trump to win.“This time, though, his winning felt like a real possibility all year long, lots of people mobilized to stop it, but it happened anyway, which feels somehow worse,” he continued.Trump will be sworn back into office on 20 January, and “that is very depressing”, said Oliver. “So what do the rest of us do next? Well, for the next few days, I’d say whatever you want. I am not gonna judge you for how you get through the next week.“There is no right reaction right now,” he added. “Lots of us are grieving and grief has stages. We take different amounts of time for different people. The stage I’m currently locked in is anger. I am mad for trans people who’ve been threatened. I’m disgusted at the prospect of mass deportation. I’m furious at Biden for not dropping out earlier, and that the egos and inaction of two men older than credit cards themselves have led us to this point. I’m mad that women have to hear ‘your body, my choice’ from rightwing dipshits.“I’m mad that Elon Musk is apparently sitting in on meetings with the president of Ukraine,” he continued. “I’m mad about the myriad of damage Trump will do that cannot easily be undone, like setting back efforts to fight climate change and appointing more supreme court justices. And I’m mad at the prospect of four more years of people saying, ‘So is your job like so much easier with Trump as president?’ No, it is not! No, it fucking isn’t! Fuck you so much!“So whether you’re angry right now, or despairing, or Googling ‘new country no fascists how move’, do what you’ve gotta do. But try not to completely obliterate yourself in despair,” he concluded. “Despair doesn’t help anything. If anything, it makes things worse.” Oliver did not encourage false hope, but instead counting the small victories to avoid burning out – such as Delaware’s election of the first openly trans member to the US House, or the rollback of abortion bans in several states and indicators that “Democratic policies are still popular even in a year that their candidate wasn’t”.“You might well be exhausted, confused, scared and running on fucking fumes right now,” he added. “Which is fucking understandable, but you might be surprised just how far you can still get even on fumes.” More

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      Trump didn’t just win. He expanded his voter base | John Zogby

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      Donald Trump defied the polls and pundits and received both a majority of the popular vote and of the electoral college. His margin of 3.4 percentage points (thus far) was well beyond anything that anyone projected and it is the first time a Republican candidate for president received a majority of popular votes since 2004. It is probably safe to say that even his own pollsters did not see this tornado coming, otherwise the president-elect’s team would not have issued statements earlier in the day attacking voting irregularities and election tampering. Certainly not if you are expecting to win.Published polls and the television network-sponsored exit polls both revealed some new truths that help explain what really happened and must be studied by winners and losers, academics and both political strategists and junkies.For starters, Trump has built on his coalition of angry and disaffected voters. The Maga movement (“Make America great again”) was once the exclusive club of angry white voters, conservatives who wanted to win, people filled with status anxiety – the fear of losing their middle-class status – and folks deeply concerned about the loss of traditional values like hard work, the nuclear family, frequent church attendance, marriage of only men and women, and heterosexuality. They also feared that the day had arrived when America lost its standing in the world. To be sure, the doors to this movement were not-so-subtly opened to white nationalists and supremacists. Their standard bearer was seen only as an aberration, and protest against Hillary Clinton, who represented government paternalism and patronage and a candidate not to be trusted.But 2024 exit polling has clearly shown that Maga has expanded beyond its original base. Trump outperformed his previous runs by substantial numbers among men and women, particularly young men; Black people, Latinos, Asian/Pacific Islanders; and suburban voters. He grew his support among voters in every state.There are lessons to be learned here. Democrats have targeted demographic groups by using one-dimensional definitions and messages. This view suggests that Black people are mainly concerned about civil rights. Latinos are obsessed about immigration and women are defined by second-class status and reproductive rights. Following the successful playbook of Barack Obama in 2008, Democrats bought into the idea of a coalition of young voters, particularly young women, along with people of color and suburbanites that would only produce a winning formula for the ages. Two authors, John Judis and Ruy Teixeira even wrote the manual for the party The Emerging Democratic Majority, in which they argue that these groups were growing in numbers and thus constituted the future. Both authors have since repudiated their own argument because, while it worked for Obama again in 2012, it failed miserably in most off-year elections and fell short in the 2016 Trump/Clinton election when key elements of the coalition chose to not vote.The election of 2024 put the final nail in the coffin of that theory. While there was a 21-point gender gap with men overwhelmingly choosing Trump and women supporting Kamala Harris, Trump won a majority of men and women in the suburbs. He received 50% of the vote among those earning less than $100,000 last year, compared with 46% voting Harris. He also won 21% of Black men and 55% of Latino men and 66% of voters with less than a college degree. Even though the president-elect has made several controversial statements about combat veterans, he won the vote of veterans by 26 points (65% for him, 34% for Harris).The vice-president managed to win only 17% of those who identify as born-again/evangelical Christians, even though every Democratic candidate since Barack Obama had won at least 30% of this group.Pre-election polls showed the race too close to call. Our John Zogby Strategies poll showed a 3.7 -point margin for Harris as of Sunday with minor candidates in the mix. Our simple head-to-head brought Harris’s “lead” down to 2.4 points. We all caught the anxiety over the economy, the threat to American democracy, the loss of reproductive rights, immigration and the security of the southern border, and crime. We also showed a majority with a negative view of Trump.But he still won – and convincingly. At a moment when the sitting president has a 40% approval rating and about seven in 10 voters feel that things in the US are headed in the wrong direction, voters wanted change. Now Trump will have to steer the ship of state during turbulent times. He will have to govern. That is the hard part.

      John Zogby is senior partner at the polling firm of John Zogby Strategies and is author of Beyond the Horse Race: How to Read the Polls and Why We Should (Rowman & Littlefield) More

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      Not changing course on Gaza was a colossal mistake by Kamala Harris | Moustafa Bayoumi

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      Could Kamala Harris have won the election if she had promised to change course in Gaza? It’s impossible to know, of course, but there’s reason to think so. Instead, Harris hewed far too closely to Biden’s position, alienating large numbers of voters along the way. The result? We can expect the catastrophe for the Palestinian people to continue, while we learn to live with a much more dangerous Donald Trump, a man whose far-right agenda threatens many of us in and out of the United States.What seems to have doomed Harris most was not so much traditional Democrats casting votes for the Republican Trump, though there was some of that. In fact, party loyalty, at around 95% for both parties, was basically the same as in 2020. Rather, Harris’s shortcomings point to the rank-and-file of the Democratic party not coming out to vote and to more first-time voters casting Republican ballots. We don’t have the final voter tally yet, but so far Harris has amassed just over 68m votes, compared with Trump’s 72m. Biden, by contrast, earned over 81m votes in 2020. By the time the final numbers are in, it’s likely that Trump will have won more than the 74m votes he had in 2020, and Harris will have been the first Democrat to lose the popular vote in 20 years.Some of those lost votes surely must be attributable to Harris’s weak position on Palestine. A significant majority of young people sympathize with Palestinian rights, according to the Pew Research Center, and young people are also highly critical of Biden’s policies on Palestine. Meanwhile, reporting from around the nation indicates that voter turnout among young people in this election was low. The Chicago board of elections noted that 53% of registered voters between the ages of 18 and 24 cast a ballot, well below the city’s average turnout of 58%. And compared with the 2020 election, Trump doubled his support from first-time voters there.In Dearborn, Michigan, where 55% of the population is of Middle Eastern descent, Trump scored a victory over Harris, an upset considering Biden won Dearborn with almost 70% of the vote in 2020. And while Black voters continued to overwhelmingly support Harris, their numbers also dropped, reflecting a lack of excitement for the vice-president. Christopher Shell, a scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told Foreign Policy magazine that “it’s hard to ignore the impact of US war-making under the Biden-Harris administration and the administration’s inconsistent stance on issues like the Israel-Palestine conflict, which likely deflated enthusiasm for Harris among the influential Black voting bloc”.If you’re wondering what such inconsistencies regarding Gaza could be, you can watch a report by CNN that aired on 1 November, which showed how the Harris campaign aired two completely different ads about their position. One ad, aimed at Arab American voters in Michigan, shows Harris speaking from a podium. “What has happened in Gaza over the past nine months is devastating,” she says. “We cannot allow ourselves to become numb to the suffering, and I will not be silent.” Meanwhile, in another ad, this time aimed at Jewish voters in Pennsylvania, she says: “Let me be clear. I will always stand up for Israel’s right to defend itself, and I will always ensure Israel has the ability to defend itself, because the people of Israel must never again face the horror that a terrorist organization called Hamas caused on October 7.”It gets worse. In the Pennsylvania ad, the campaign also spliced together two parts of a Harris speech, which enabled them to cut out the part where Harris talks about ending the suffering in Gaza so that “the Palestinian people can realize their right to dignity, security, freedom and self-determination”. CNN’s Andrew Kaczynski sums this all up understatedly. “Here you have two entirely different constituencies,” he says, “and they are getting two entirely different messages.”I realize I sound like I’m Monday-morning quarterbacking, but many thousands of people – myself included – had been warning the Democrats for months that they had to take a stand against the wholesale slaughter of innocent people if they wanted to earn our trust, let alone earn our vote. Instead, not only did the Harris campaign refuse to let a Palestinian American on stage during their national convention in August and not only did they remove an Arab Muslim Democrat from a rally in late October, but they also decided in their wisdom to trot out two different messages to two different communities, thinking no one would notice. It seems they believed that Democrats would not vote for Trump in any large number, but how did they not realize that if you are repeatedly ignored, insulted and slighted by your party, then you just might not come out to vote.Obviously, Gaza was not the only issue in this campaign, and voters had multiple reasons for their choices, including the economy and concerns over asylum policies, among others. But conventional wisdom already seems to be lining up to say that Gaza played no discernible role in Harris’s defeat, pointing out that the margins in Trump’s victories in swing states such as Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Georgia appear to be greater than any measurable voter discontent over a largely US-funded genocide, the term, incidentally, that prominent experts increasingly use to describe Israel’s actions in Gaza.But much of that post-election analysis is based on exit polling, and exit polling, as far as I know, does not aim to capture why people did not come out to vote in the first place. Why Democratic voters didn’t show up is the crucial question that must be posed. And the answer, I suspect, is abundantly clear. Not changing course on Gaza was a colossal mistake on the part of the Harris campaign, a fatal error certainly for Palestinians and quite likely, as we now see, for Americans, too.

      Moustafa Bayoumi is a Guardian US columnist More

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      in Elections

      Arizona attorney general says she won’t drop Trump fake electors case

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      Allies of Donald Trump who were charged in Arizona for illegally trying to overturn the 2020 election can still expect to face justice despite his return to the White House, the state’s attorney general has said.Kris Mayes told MSNBC on Sunday that she had “no intention” of dropping the criminal case against defendants including the former Trump lawyers Rudy Giuliani and Christina Bobb, his former chief of staff Mark Meadows and senior officials of the Arizona Republican party such as the former chair Kelli Ward and state senators Anthony Kern and Jake Hoffman.A grand jury in April indicted 18 people in a “fake electors” scheme that sought to falsely declare Trump the winner in the crucial swing state instead of Joe Biden. Most pleaded not guilty in May to felony charges of fraud, forgery and conspiracy.The fates of various criminal cases pending against Trump and his allies were left uncertain after his defeat of Kamala Harris in the 5 November election.For instance, the US justice department is winding down its criminal cases in federal court against Trump.And, in New York, state court judge Juan Merchan is preparing to rule on whether Trump’s conviction on charges of criminally falsifying business records to cover up hush-money payments to the adult film actor Stormy Daniels should be tossed out.But Mayes has said she intends to stay the course with her office’s case.“I have no intention of breaking that case up. I have no intention of dropping that case,” Mayes, a Democrat, told MSNBC’s Ali Velshi.“A grand jury in the state of Arizona decided that these individuals who engaged in an attempt to overthrow our democracy in 2020 should be held accountable, so we won’t be cowed, we won’t be intimidated.”In August, Loraine Pellegrino, the former president of a Republican women’s group, became the first of the defendants convicted when she pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of filing a false document.Another of those accused, Jenna Ellis, a former Trump lawyer, agreed to cooperate with prosecutors, including sitting for interviews and handing over documents, in exchange for having her charges dismissed.At the time, Mayes said Ellis’s insights were “invaluable and will greatly aid the state in proving its case in court”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAlso in August, the Arizona superior court judge Bruce Cohen denied a request by the remaining defendants to have the charges dismissed as “politically motivated” and set a provisional trial date for January 2026.As a state case, anybody who is convicted in Arizona cannot be pardoned by Trump, who was referred to throughout the charging documents as an unindicted co-conspirator and as the “former president of the United States who spread false claims of election fraud following the 2020 election”.The Arizona fake electors scheme was replicated in a number of swing states that ultimately all certified Biden’s victory. The most prominent took place in Georgia, where Trump is one of the defendants, although two charges against him were thrown out in September – and some of the 17 others originally charged have accepted plea deals in return for giving evidence to prosecutors.Fani Willis, the Fulton county prosecutor who brought the Georgia case, was re-elected on 5 November. But no trial date has been set, and there is doubt over its timing given that Trump will be back in the White House in January.The other defendants in the Arizona case include Kelli Ward’s husband, Michael; Robert Montgomery, former head of the Cochise county Republican party; Tyler Bowyer, the Republican national committee’s Arizona representative; Greg Safsten, former executive director of the state Republican party; and activists Samuel Moorhead and Nancy Cottle, who allegedly agreed to act as fake electors. More

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      First came the bots, then came the bosses – we’re entering Musk and Zuck’s new era of disinformation | Joan Donovan

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      I’m a researcher of media manipulation, and watching the 2024 US election returns was like seeing the Titanic sink.Every day leading up to 5 November, there were more and more outrageous claims being made in an attempt across social media to undermine election integrity: conspiracy theories focused on a tidal wave of immigrants plotting to undermine the right wing, allegations that there were millions of excess ballots circulating in California, and rumors that the voting machines were already corrupted by malicious algorithms.All of the disinformation about corrupt vote counts turned out not to be necessary, as Donald Trump won the election decisively. But the election proved that disinformation is no longer the provenance of anonymous accounts amplified by bots to mimic human engagement, like it was in 2016. In 2024, lies travel further and faster across social media, which is now a battleground for narrative dominance. And now, the owners of the platforms circulating the most incendiary lies have direct access to the Oval Office.We talk a lot about social media “platforms”. The word “platform” is interesting as it means both a stated political position and a technological communication system. Over the past decade, we have watched social media platforms warp public opinion by deciding what is seen and when users see it, as algorithms double as newsfeed and timeline editors. When tech CEOs encode their political beliefs into the design of platforms, it’s a form of technofascism, where technology is used for political suppression of speech and to repress the organization of resistance to the state or capitalism.Content moderation at these platforms now reflects the principles of the CEO and what that person believes is in the public’s interest. The political opinions of tech’s overlords, like Musk and Zuckerberg, are now directly embedded in their algorithms.For example, Meta has limited the circulation of critical discussions about political power, reportedly even downranking posts that use the word “vote” on Instagram. Meta’s Twitter clone, Threads, suspended journalists for reporting on Trump’s former chief of staff describing Trump’s admiration of Hitler. Threads built in a politics filter that is turned on by default.View image in fullscreenImplementing these filtering mechanisms illustrates a sharp difference from Meta’s embrace of politicians who got personalized white-glove service in 2016 as Facebook embedded employees directly in political campaigns, who advised on branding and reaching new audiences. It’s also a striking reversal of Zuckerberg’s free speech position in 2019. Zuckerberg gave a presentation at Georgetown University claiming that he was inspired to create Facebook because he wanted to give students a voice during the Iraq war. This historical revisionism was quickly skewered in the media. (Facebook’s predecessor allowed users to rate the appearance of Harvard female freshmen. Misogyny was the core of its design.) Nevertheless, his false origin story encapsulated a vision of how Zuckerberg once believed society and politics should be organized, where political discussion was his guiding reason to bring people into community.However, he now appears to have abandoned this position in favor of disincentivizing political discussion altogether. Recently, Zuckerberg wrote to the Republican Jim Jordan saying he regretted his content moderation decisions during the pandemic because he acted under pressure from the Biden administration. The letter itself was an obvious attempt to curry favor as Trump rose as the Republican presidential candidate. Zuckerberg has reason to fear Trump, who has mentioned wanting to arrest Zuckerberg for deplatforming him on Meta products after the January 6 Capitol riot.X seems to have embraced the disinformation chaos and fully fused Trump’s campaign into the design of X’s content strategies. Outrageous assertions circle the drain on X, including false claims such as that immigrants are eating pets in Ohio, Kamala Harris’s Jamaican grandmother was white, and that immigrants are siphoning aid meant for Fema. It’s also worth noting that Musk is the biggest purveyor of anti-immigrant conspiracy theories on X. The hiss and crackle of disinformation is as ambient as it is unsettling.There are no clearer signs of Musk’s willingness to use platform power than his relentless amplification of his own account as well as Trump’s Twitter account on X’s “For You” algorithm. Moreover, Musk bemoaned the link suppression by Twitter in 2020 over Hunter Biden’s laptop while then hypocritically working with the Trump campaign in 2024 to ban accounts and links to leaked documents emanating from the Trump campaign that painted JD Vance in a negative light.Musk understands that he will personally benefit from being close to power. He supported Trump with a controversial political action committee that gave away cash to those who signed his online petition. Musk also paid millions for canvassers and spent many evenings in Pennsylvania stumping for Trump. With Trump’s win, he will need to make good on his promise of placing Musk in a position on the not-yet-created “Department of Government Efficiency” (Doge – which is also the name of Musk’s favorite cryptocurrency). While it sure seems like a joke taken too far, Musk has said he plans to cut $2tn from the national budget, which will wreak havoc on the economy and could be devastating when coupled with the mass deportation of 10 million people.In short, what we learn from the content strategies of X and Meta is simple: the design of platforms is now inextricable from the politics of the owner.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThis wasn’t inevitable. In 2016, there was a public reckoning that social media had been weaponized by foreign adversaries and domestic actors to spread disinformation on a number of wedge issues to millions of unsuspecting users. Hundreds of studies were conducted in the intervening years, by internal corporate researchers and independent academics, showing that platforms amplify and expose audiences to conspiracy theories and fake news, which can lead to networked incitement and political violence.By 2020, disinformation had become its own industry and the need for anonymity lessened as rightwing media makers directly impugned election results, culminating in January 6. That led to an unprecedented decision by social media companies to ban Trump, who was still the sitting president, and a number of other high-profile rightwing pundits, thus illustrating just how powerful social media platforms had become as political actors.In reaction to this unprecedented move to curb disinformation, the richest man in the world, Musk, bought Twitter, laid off much of the staff, and sent internal company communications to journalists and politicians in 2022. Major investigations of university researchers and government agencies ensued, naming and shaming those who engaged with Twitter’s former leadership and made appeals for the companies to enforce its own terms of service during the 2020 election.Since then, these CEOs have ossified their political beliefs in the design of algorithms and by extension dictated political discourse for the rest of us.Whether it’s Musk’s strategy of overloading users with posts from himself and Trump, or Zuckerberg’s silencing of political discussion, it’s citizens who suffer from such chilling of speech. Of course, there is no way to know decisively how disinformation affected individual voters, but a recent Ipsos poll shows Trump voters believed disinformation on a number of wedge issues, claiming that immigration, crime, and the economy are all worse than data indicates. For now, let this knowledge be the canary warning of technofascism, where the US is not only ruled by elected politicians, but also by technological authoritarians who control speech on a global scale.If we are to disarm disinformers, we need a whole of society approach that values real Talk (Timely, Accurate Local Knowledge) and community safety. This might look like states passing legislation to fund local journalism in the public interest, because local news can bridge divides between neighbors and bring some accountability to the government. It will require our institutions, such as medicine, journalism, and academia, to fight for truth and justice, even in the face of anticipated retaliation. But most of all, it’s going to require that you and I do something quickly to protect those already in the crosshairs of Trump’s new world order, by donating to or joining community organizations tackling issues such as women’s rights and immigration. Even subscribing to a local news outlet is a profound political act these days. Let that sink in.Joan Donovan is the founder of the Critical Internet Studies Institute and assistant professor of journalism at Boston University More

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      Black women on what Harris’s loss says about the US: ‘Voters failed to show up for her’

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      In the hours after Joe Biden’s decision to end his re-election bid and endorse Kamala Harris as the democratic nominee for president, 40,000 Black women – leaders in politics, business and entertainment – met on a Zoom call to rally around the vice-president.“We went from that call to organizing our house, our block, our church, our sorority, and our unions,” said Glynda C Carr, president and co-founder of Higher Heights, an organization that works to help Black women get elected to political office. “That is what we did for the 107 days that she ran for office. Black women used our organizing power around a woman that we knew was qualified, that had a lived experience.”View image in fullscreenFor many, Harris seemed to be the one woman to break the glass ceiling of reaching the highest office in the US. Harris, a graduate of Howard University, a historically Black college in Washington DC and a member of the country’s oldest Black sorority Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority Inc (AKA), who had become the first Black female vice-president after spending a career as a prosecutor, California’s attorney general and senator, had reached a point where voters would welcome a woman – many deemed to be beyond qualified – versus Donald Trump, an embattled former president then awaiting sentencing on more than three dozen felony convictions.“Here is a woman that has had access to be able to build upon legacies and blueprints,” Carr said. Harris’s candidacy was so exciting because “she literally embodies Black excellence for Black women.”Harris’s 107-day campaign to become president began in a year of recognizing the anniversaries of pivotal advancements for Black people during the Jim Crow era and Civil Rights movement – 70 years after Thurgood Marshall, Constance Baker Motley and the NAACP dismantle school segregation; 60 years after Fannie Lou Hamer spoke at the 1964 Democratic national convention; and 52 years since Shirley Chisholm became the first woman and first Black to run for president.“It gave so much hope,” said Christian F Nunes, president of the National Organization for Women and part of generation X, who never thought she’d see a Black president – let alone a Black woman president. “It was like the opportunity and manifestation of our ancestors’ wildest dreams. That’s what I thought to myself like, if she is elected, this is what our ancestors have dreamt about, and women, and Black women have dreamt about our entire lives.”It was that hope that fueled a wide-range of support from Democratic leadership, including former president Jimmy Carter who cast his ballot for Harris weeks after turning 100. Republicans such as former congresswoman Liz Cheney and her father, Dick Cheney, who served as vice-president in the George W Bush administration. Bipartisan support, an aggressive and energized campaign with a huge funding arm from several groups supporting Harris wasn’t enough to overcome the second election of Trump, who saw growth in his voting base among Black and Latino voters. Trump garnered more than 75m votes as of Sunday evening, and won the popular vote for the first since he began his ascension to the White House.“Harris’s candidacy was working for unity and democracy and protecting freedom,” Nunes, 46, said. “Then we had another candidate who basically ran on a campaign to take away freedoms. I felt that this loss was not a reflection of her ability to lead. I felt like it was a reflection of voters who said that they would show up for her, but failed to show up for her. And also, people’s inability to trust women and stand up for women – particularly, especially a Black woman. And I feel like this continuously resonates and shows up in so many spaces and I think that’s the part that was hurtful.”View image in fullscreenTrump’s victory came from voters who were so put off by the US’s trajectory that they welcomed his brash and disruptive approach. About three in 10 voters said they wanted total upheaval in how the country is run, according to AP VoteCast, a sweeping survey of more than 120,000 voters nationwide. Even if they weren’t looking for something that dramatic, more than half of voters overall said they wanted to see substantial change.Both nationwide and in key battleground states, Trump won over voters who were alarmed about the economy and prioritized more aggressive enforcement of immigration laws. Those issues largely overshadowed many voters’ focus on the future of democracy and abortion protections – key priorities for Harris’s voters, but not enough to turn the election in her favor.Rarely has ethnicity, race or gender been mentioned in many after-election interviews, as reasons for not supporting Harris’s bid for president or why they preferred Trump, but some Harris supporters believe they were an underlying reason many will not admit to.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionShavon Arline-Bradley, president and CEO of the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW) said Harris’s campaign of inclusion and strong support from the Democrats’ most loyal voting block – Black women – could not withstand “the wall of white nationalism and racism and classism and sexism and misogyny”.“It could not withstand the wall of an electorate that used class, race and gender to block the opportunity for an all-inclusive society that our country is so-called built on,” she said. “This idea of womanhood in leadership still becomes unfathomable for many.”New Orleans resident Laureé Akinola-Massaquoi is the mother of a two -year-old daughter, and said that Harris being the Democratic nominee for president, meant a more equal, progressive future for all of America, not just for Black people, but for everybody.But when Akinola-Massaquoi, 36, woke up on 6 November and saw that Trump had won the election, she was “disgusted, disappointed, just annoyed, really annoyed”.“Nowhere else can other people do the things he does or say the things he does, or have the record he has and become president of the United States. I just don’t even know how he even got this far,” she said. More

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      in Elections

      What is voter certification – the process that Trump targeted in 2020?

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      With voting completed in the US presidential election, election officials across the country will now turn to certifying the results before the electoral college meets in December and Congress certifies the vote in January.Until the 2020 election, few paid attention to certification, which was seen as a bureaucratic way of officializing the results of the election. But after 2020, Donald Trump and allies, who questioned the election results, targeted the certification process as a way of causing confusion. In advance of the presidential election, there were deep concerns that the former president and allies would try and block certification of the election results, starting at the local level.Trump’s victory in the election means that there likely won’t be an effort to block certification of the presidential results. But there still are some close US Senate and House races that could prompt battles over certification. Experts say it is clear that certification is not discretionary and those who refuse to certify could face criminal penalties.What is certification?Certification refers generally to the process of making the election results official. The process works differently in each state. Election results are unofficial until they are certified.It takes place after a canvass, the process that takes place after every election to aggregate all of the ballot totals, resolving outstanding disputes over challenged or provisional ballots and reconciling any discrepancies or inconsistencies. Officials investigate any discrepancies, if they exist, in vote totals. The process varies by jurisdiction, but there is usually a board of people which then votes to certify the election. Various state laws make it clear that this is a ministerial responsibility and that officials cannot refuse to do so.For a statewide election, results are certified at both the local and state level.Is certification when disputes over election results are resolved?No. The canvass and certification process is aimed at reconciling vote totals and getting an official count. The process may identify abnormalities that could become the basis for an election contest or challenge later. State laws allow for separate legal processes outside of the certification process to challenge election results. These typically take place in the courts.What happens if an official or a board refuses to certify?Most boards certify the vote on a majority vote, so a single member refusing to certify wouldn’t block certification.But if a majority of the board refuses to certify, a secretary of state or election watchdog group would likely sue them to get a court to force them to certify. Watchdog groups have already warned that those who refuse to certify will face criminal charges.Could an effort to block certification actually work?No. If there were substantial irregularities in an election that could affect the outcome, it would be resolved in court. Experts are confident that the winners of elections will be the ones seated.Despite that confidence, there’s still concern that refusals to certify will allow people to continue to question the election results and seed further doubt about the election.What happens after certification?In a presidential election, there are additional steps after states certify the vote.In nearly every state, the winner of the statewide vote gets all of the state’s electors to the electoral college. A new law, the Electoral Count Reform Act, requires the governor of each state to certify the list of their state’s electors no later than six days before the electoral college meets. This year, that means the electors will be finalized by 11 December and the electors will meet in state capitols across the country on 17 December.Once the electors meet and cast their votes, they transmit them to the National Archives in Washington. Congress will oversee the counting of the vote on 6 January 2025 to make the results official. The constitution says that the president of the Senate – the vice-president – will oversee counting of the votes. That means that Kamala Harris will oversee the counting of the vote this year. Harris, who conceded the election to Trump on Wednesday, said in her concession speech that she “will engage in a peaceful transfer of power”. More

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      US presidential election updates: Trump demands Senate streamline his cabinet picks as recruitment begins

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      President-elect Donald Trump has demanded the incoming Republican leader in the Senate streamline the temporary approval of his cabinet appointees, as his team begins assembling the incoming White House team.Three Republicans are vying to replace incumbent majority leader Mitch McConnell ahead of a party vote on Wednesday. Senator Rick Scott of Florida has earned endorsements from Trump’s Maga camp, including from Robert F Kennedy Jr, Elon Musk and Marco Rubio – each of whom has been speculated to be among Trump’s top team.“Any Republican Senator seeking the coveted LEADERSHIP position in the United States Senate must agree to Recess Appointments,” Trump posted on social media, referring to a controversial measure that would put his cabinet picks in office while temporarily sidestepping a lengthy Senate confirmation process.

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      The president-elect also announced he was bringing back hardline immigration official Tom Homan to oversee the country’s borders and deportation efforts in the incoming administration, labelling Homan “the border czar”. Trump is meeting with potential candidates to serve in his administration and has charged his longtime friend Howard Lutnick with recruiting officials who will deliver, rather than dilute, his agenda.Here’s what else happened on Sunday:US presidential election news and updates

      Trump spoke with Vladimir Putin on Thursday and advised him not to escalate the war in Ukraine, reminding him of “Washington’s sizeable military presence in Europe”, the Washington Post reported on Sunday. The US president-elect expressed interest in follow-up conversations on “the resolution of Ukraine’s war soon”, the Post reported. Trump also spoke with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz on Sunday evening, agreeing to work together towards peace in Europe.

      Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he has had “good and very important conversations” with Trump, speaking three times since Tuesday’s election, according to Reuters. “We see eye to eye on the Iranian threat in all its components, and the danger posed by it,” Netanyahu said. In the US, the anti-war Uncommitted movement plans to continue its activism and has blamed Trump’s win on Democrats’ handling of conflict in the Middle East.

      Trump was declared the winner in Arizona, completing the Republicans’ clean sweep of the so-called swing states and rubbing salt in Democrats’ wounds as it was announced that the president-elect is scheduled to meet with Joe Biden at the White House on Wednesday to discuss the presidential handover.

      Republicans on Sunday appeared close to clinching control of the US House of Representatives, after Republican Eli Crane won reelection to a US House seat representing Arizona’s second congressional district late on Saturday.

      Bitcoin soared to a new record high, passing $80,000 for the first time in its history shortly after 7pm ET, according to Agence France-Presse. The cryptocurrency has kept climbing since Trump’s victory.

      Trump’s talk of revoking broadcast licenses and jailing journalists could undermine press freedom, advocates have warned. The president-elect’s campaign was marked by hostile rhetoric towards journalists and calls for punishing television networks and prosecuting journalists and their sources.

      Some companies have been moving factories from China to Southeast Asia, anticipating Trump could slap high tariffs on Beijing when he returns to the White House, industrial park developers in the region say.

      Bernie Sanders said he opposes any move to urge the senior liberal justice on the US supreme court to step down for a younger liberal replacement before Biden’s term ends. Sonia Sotomayor, 70, is known to suffer from health issues, and some Democrats fear Trump could have the opportunity to nominate a new justice and further shore up the top court’s conservative bent.

      Sanders also defended his comments that Democrats abandoned working-class voters, after Nancy Pelosi slammed Sanders for his statement, telling the New York Times, “I don’t respect him [for] saying that that”. The party is grappling with the implications of its electoral defeat and faces a likely brutal civil war over the best way forward.
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