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      Republican Dave McCormick wins Pennsylvania Senate seat in key race

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      The Republican Dave McCormick won the Senate race in the battleground state of Pennsylvania on Thursday, denying the Democratic incumbent, Bob Casey, a fourth term and expanding his party’s majority in the upper chamber.When the Associated Press called the race at 4.09pm ET on Thursday, two days after polls closed in Pennsylvania, McCormick led by 0.4 points. The narrow margin raised the possibility of a recount, although his victory is expected to stand given his lead of roughly 30,000 votes.A spokesperson for Casey insisted that thousands of ballots remained uncounted, refusing to yet concede the race to McCormick.“As the Pennsylvania Secretary of State said this afternoon, there are tens of thousands of ballots across the Commonwealth still to count, which includes provisional ballots, military and overseas ballots, and mail ballots,” Casey spokesperson Maddy McDaniel said in a statement. “This race is within half a point and cannot be called while the votes of thousands of Pennsylvanians are still being counted. We will make sure every Pennsylvanian’s voice is heard.”With McCormick’s victory, Republicans have now secured at least 53 seats in the Senate, erasing Democrats’ previous majority in the chamber. Two Senate races in Nevada and Arizona remained too close to call as of Thursday afternoon.Although he fell short, Casey outperformed Kamala Harris, who lost Pennsylvania to Donald Trump by two points. Trump also won the two other “blue wall” states of Michigan and Wisconsin, but Democrats managed to hold on to both Senate seats that were up for grabs in those states.The call in Pennsylvania brought an end to a contentious and expensive Senate race that saw the two candidates trade barbed attacks on the cost of living, abortion access and McCormick’s recent residency in Connecticut. Casey attacked McCormick, a former hedge fund CEO, as out of touch while McCormick linked Casey to the “reckless” government spending of the Biden administration.At their debate last month, Casey mocked McCormick as “bought and paid for by these billionaires and corporations”. McCormick returned fire, saying: “When you don’t have a record to run on, which Senator Casey does not, you attack your opponent.”The high stakes of the race made it into one of the most expensive Senate elections in the nation, as the dueling campaigns and their allies spent more than $300m on ads. One pro-McCormick organization, the Keystone Renewal Pac, spent at least $54m on the race, making the group the highest-spending single-candidate Pac involved in a Senate race of this election cycle.Most public polls of the race showed Casey leading by several points up until recent weeks, when McCormick narrowed that gap to just a few points. Despite that trend, Casey appeared to be in a slightly stronger position than Harris, who was running neck and neck against Trump in Pennsylvania up until election day. Leaders of both parties had identified Pennsylvania and its 19 electoral votes as the potential tipping point in the presidential race.“I think both races are going to be very close, but I think the people of our state know it’s a very, very clear choice,” Casey told the Guardian in September. “It’s never been clearer.”Before election day, Democrats held a 51-49 majority in the Senate. Republicans’ victories in Montana, Ohio and West Virginia had already guaranteed control of the Senate, but McCormick’s win will give the party even more leverage to enact Trump’s agenda when the new Congress is seated in January.Read more of the Guardian’s 2024 US election coverage

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      Mississippi mayor claims bribery charges are ‘political prosecution’

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      The mayor of Mississippi’s capital city said on Wednesday that he had been indicted in an alleged bribery operation, and he said it was a “political prosecution” to hurt his 2025 campaign for re-election.“My legal team has informed me that federal prosecutors have, in fact, indicted me on bribery and related charges,” Chokwe Antar Lumumba, the Jackson mayor, said in a video statement on Wednesday, WJTV and other news outlets reported. “To be clear, I have never accepted a bribe of any type. As mayor, I have always acted in the best interests of the city of Jackson.”Lumumba, a Democrat, has been mayor since 2017. An indictment was not immediately available on Wednesday in federal court electronic records.The charges come after undercover FBI agents posing as real estate investors invited the mayor to a fundraiser in Ft Lauderdale, Florida, on 3 April, WLBT reported. The agents said they wanted to develop property in downtown Jackson and help fund the mayor’s re-election campaign.Jackson city councilmember Angelique Lee, a Democrat, resigned in August and pleaded guilty to federal bribery charges as the result of the same FBI investigation.Lumumba said his legal team will “vigorously defend me against these charges.“We believe this to be a political prosecution against me, primarily designed to destroy my credibility and reputation within the community,” he said.The Jackson city council president, Virgi Lindsay, released a statement asking Jackson residents to be patient after the mayor’s indictment, WAPT reported.“I remind myself that the presumption of innocence is a bedrock principle of our criminal justice system,” said Lindsay, a Democrat. “Therefore, I will remain steadfastly focused on the work of our city council, and trust the legal system to unfold without undue commentary from me.” More

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      Musk says Trump’s podcast appearances made ‘big difference’ in election

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      Donald Trump’s stunning election triumph was won partly thanks to his willingness to undergo freewheeling interviews with popular podcasters like Joe Rogan, the US president-elect’s most influential backer, Elon Musk, has claimed.Speaking to Tucker Carlson, Musk said Trump’s three-hour conversational encounter last month with Rogan – America’s most-listened-to podcaster – and other podcast appearances allowed listeners to decide whether he was a “good person” and was a major point of distinction from Kamala Harris.“I think it made a big difference that President Trump and soon to be vice-president Vance went on lengthy podcasts,” Musk told Carlson, who expressed agreement.“I think this really makes a difference because people like Joe Rogan’s podcast, which is great, and Lex Fridman’s and the All-In podcast. To a reasonable-minded, smart person who’s not like hardcore one way or the other, they just listen to someone talk for a few hours, and that’s how they decide whether you’re a good person, whether they like you.”Harris and her running mate, Tim Walz, each underwent several podcast interviews during the campaign, including on Call Her Daddy, in which the US vice-president talked about abortion.But she did not appear on The Joe Rogan Experience. The podcaster later said he declined her campaign’s insistence that it should last for just one hour, rather than three, and that Rogan travel to meet her, instead of his preference that it take place in his studio in Austin, Texas.Musk, who has frequently belittled Harris, claimed she had refused a three-hour sit-down because it would have exposed her supposed inability to talk in a relaxed and spontaneous manner.Read more of the Guardian’s 2024 US election coverage

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      “I actually posted on X [that] nothing would do more damage to Kamala’s campaign than going on Joe Rogan, because she’d run out of non sequiturs after about 45 minutes,” he said. “Hour two and three would be a complete melted puddle of nonsense. So, it would just be absolute game over. That’s why she didn’t go on.“But, on the other hand, Trump, he’s there, there’s no talking points. He’s just being a normal person, having a conversation and doing three hours of Rogan, no problem.”Rogan’s interview with Trump, conducted at the president-elect’s Mar-a-Lago resort, was noted for its friendly exchanges and words of praise from the podcaster, which included him lauding the then candidate’s speaking style and “comedic instincts”.“You said a lot of wild shit and then CNN, in all their brilliance by highlighting your wild shit, made you much more popular,” Rogan told Trump, explaining his ability to get more publicity than other politicians.“It’s funny. It’s stand-up. It’s funny stuff. You have, like, comedic instincts. Like when you said to Hillary: ‘You’d be in jail.’ Like, that’s great timing. But it’s like that kind of stuff was unheard of as a politician. Like, no one had done that.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe podcast host compared Trump’s behavior to the more “rehearsed” speech of other politicians – possibly implying Harris.“When you see certain people talk, certain people in the public eye, you don’t know who they are. You have no idea who they are. It’s very difficult to know,” Rogan said. “You see them in conversations. They have these pre-planned answers, they say everything. It’s very rehearsed. You never get to the meat of it.”Rogan ultimately endorsed Trump on the eve of the election after hosting another interview with Musk, who told him that X – the social media platform that the Space X and Tesla entrepreneur owns – would not be allowed to exist if Harris won the election.After being criticised early in her candidacy for avoiding challenging interviews, Harris sat for several television interrogations, including with CBS’s 60 Minutes and Bret Baier on Fox News, a pro-Trump network where she was subjected to multiple interruptions and hostile questions on rightwing talking points.Trump held more interviews but generally chose friendly settings, including Fox and Newsmax, where his views went largely unchallenged. He pulled out of an interview with 60 Minutes, which has been interviewing presidential candidates for more than half a century, after objecting to the programme’s plans to factcheck him.Shannon C McGregor, a journalism professor at the University of North Carolina, told the Hill that podcast appearances gave voters a better insight into the candidates as people than regular television interviews.“It gives listeners a better sense of what the candidates are like than the CNN interview with Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, especially for people who aren’t super interested in politics,” she said. More

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      Swing state voters process Trump win with hope and fear: ‘This is a powder keg moment’

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      “I am still processing my feelings, but what I do know is that my country keeps finding ways to break my heart,” said Adrienne Pickett, a 42-year-old single mother of two who lives in suburban Detroit.The Kamala Harris voter lives in one of seven states that helped decide the US presidential election on Tuesday. All appear to have voted in Trump’s favor by small but significant margins .Like many Democrats in these states, Pickett is coming to terms with a victory by Donald Trump and a new political reality for America. Republicans in these states are also looking ahead – some with excitement, but not all. We spoke with voters for both parties to hear their reactions.These are Pickett’s worries for the future: “We can expect exactly what Trump promised: mass deportations, pardoning criminals who destroyed the capitol and injured and killed police officers on January 6th, vendettas carried out against his perceived enemies, and maybe most frightening of all, a Project 2025 house of horrors brought to life.”In North Carolina, meanwhile, Jess St Louis, 34, a trans woman in Greensboro who canvassed during the election with the progressive group Carolina Federation, said she was nervous and scared about the future under a second Trump presidency. But she also drew comfort from the defeat on Tuesday night of the Republican gubernatorial candidate Mark Robinson who has been embroiled in a scandal over his alleged racist and sexist comments on a chat board, which he has denied.“It’s a mixed bag,” St Louis said. “I am scared, but I’m also proud about the governor’s race and about breaking the Republican supermajority in the North Carolina House. I can feel a rising tide of folks in North Carolina actually pushing back against hatred and extremism.”There had been fears that the devastation wrought by Hurricane Helene would suppress turnout, in the western part of North Carolina, where 23 of the 25 stricken counties were won by Trump in 2020. But record-breaking early voting and the creation of makeshift polling stations in areas devastated by floods and landslides appeared to have mitigated the problem.While Trump grew his base in North Carolina’s large rural areas, Harris failed to build on Joe Biden’s showing in 2020 in the big cities, despite significant investment in ad spending and field operations.View image in fullscreenWinning should have felt better, thought Jen Dopke, 51, a retail worker from north-east Wisconsin, as the results came in on Tuesday night. Counting still continues Thursday, but Trump has a lead of about 1% – 30,000 votes out of 3.4m cast. Dopke hopes Trump will usher in an improved economy and end American involvement in foreign wars. But she isn’t celebrating yet.“I don’t feel like this was a big win, because we’re not all on the same page,” Dopke said. She watched nervously as people in her life blocked each other on social media the day after Trump secured a second term in office. Dopke supported Trump, but her friends who voted for Harris don’t know that, and she’s wary about them finding out — worried her support for the former president could jeopardize a friendship.“I [hear] what they’re saying, and I think, ‘I just totally don’t believe the same thing, and I don’t think you’re ever going to be able to hear where I’m coming from,’” said Dopke. “It’s terrifying to me. I don’t know what we’re going to do to come together.”Georgia proved a political comeuppance for Trump on Tuesday after his razor-thin loss by 11,799 votes in 2020. This year he was winning by well over 100,000 votes at press time.Alejandro Lopez, a military veteran and social services advocate from Stone Mountain, Georgia, said he was “pissed off at the Republican party for not holding up the rule of law against one of their own,” he said.“To have seen all these members of congress in support of a felon just made me sick to my stomach. The laws created by the US congress now seem to apply to the people and not the legislators themselves.”View image in fullscreenLopez, who has been a close observer of Georgia politics for years, was also with Democrats – in Georgia the Trump campaign pitted Latino citizens against the undocumented with a deftness that went unrecognized by the Harris campaign. Nationally, too, there was a collapse in Democratic turnout and a realignment of Latino voters from a Democratic bloc to a near 50-50 split, which provided the margin of Trump’s victory in swing states even as other demographic groups largely held steady.“I just did not see the Democrats engaging the Latino community as much,” Lopez said.He fears being targeted for his sexual orientation, ethnicity and politics.… “I will keep my nose down so not to create any attention to myself.”The Associated Press has yet to project a winner in Nevada, as the state continues to tally mail-in ballots in its most populous counties. But early results suggest it may be poised to select a Republican for president for the first time since George W Bush in 2004.James, 23, who had cast a vote for Kamala Harris – unbeknownst to his family and coworkers, who are die-hard Trump supporters – said he yearned for a time when he and his loved ones could have civilized conversations about politics.“I would love to say I think things will calm down after this,” said James, who didn’t want to provide his last name so he could avoid further conflict over politics. “But I my heart I know it won’t.”“This is a powder keg moment,” he added.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn Pennsylvania, Rick Carrick, a 69-year-old retiree, was walking his dog Elvis outside the Lackwanna county courthouse in downtown Scranton as he processed the election results on Wednesday. He said he was ready to move out of the country.“I just told my daughter, I said guarantee first thing he does when he’s sworn in is he gives everybody from January 6 a full pardon,” said Carrick.Lackawanna county, home to Scranton, was one of several key areas in Pennsylvania where Donald Trump improved his performance compared with 2020. Joe Biden carried the county by eight points in 2020, Kamala Harris carried it by about three points this year. The county was once a Democratic stronghold – Barack Obama won it by nearly 28 points in 2012.Carrick said he had no idea why Trump had been able to do so well in the county.“I’m just looking at the big picture. OK, maybe Trump is better on the economy, and to be honest with you, the first time he ran I liked a lot of his ideas, like we can’t be the bank for the entire world,” he said. “But then other things that he does, it’s like he wants to be king.”Debbie Patel, a retired attorney and progressive activist from the Milwaukee area, said she sees a “dark road ahead” – “for Americans generally”.“The first targets will be the ones he’s been vocal about, and then, because he lacks the capacity to empathize with others. it’s anybody’s guess who he will go after next.”Still, Patel is hopeful about the possibility of establishing common ground among “all people”. She cited efforts by groups like Braver Angels, a nonprofit that seeks to depolarize US politics through facilitated conversations between Democratic and Republican Party voters, as exemplary models for seeking common ground.Ali Asfari, 33, lives in Dearborn, Michigan, which has a large Arab American population. The Biden-Harris administration’s response to Israel’s war on Gaza influenced his decision to vote for Trump, but that wasn’t the only issue.“When he [Trump] was in office there were no wars, and inflation nowadays is bad because of the Joe Biden administration. But hopefully now, with the promises that Donald Trump has given us, it’s going to be better,” Asfari said.“We’re going to have a better economy. We’re going to have better family values, in schools, especially. And we’re going to make this country great again. We’re going to have the entire planet to respect this country again as usual. Because with the Biden administration, nobody had respect for us.”Asfari , who voted for Biden in 2020, added:“She did a terrible job, her and Joe. Look at the wars around the world. Look at the economy over here, with inflation. You know, we middle classes, we go for groceries, everything is double the price. The jobs, we barely find jobs, they’re barely hiring and everything is expensive. Family values went down, down, down, especially in schools. You know, they want to join the boys and girls in one bathroom. They’re doing terrible stuff. So that’s why we have to end all this kind of things and go back to Republicans.”Read more of the Guardian’s 2024 US election coverage

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      Biden promises smooth transfer of power to Trump in White House address

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      Joe Biden promised a smooth transfer of power to Donald Trump in an address to the nation on Thursday, as he implored Americans to “bring down the temperature” of partisan divisions and keep their faith in democratic systems following Kamala Harris’s loss in the presidential race.“For over 200 years, America has carried on the greatest experiment in self-government in the history of the world,” Biden said in the White House Rose Garden on a sunny morning, the weather ill-fitted to the mood among Democrats. “The will of the people always prevails.”Biden noted he spoke with Trump on Wednesday to congratulate the president-elect on his victory and promise his administration’s full cooperation to “ensure a peaceful and orderly transition”.“That’s what the American people deserve,” Biden added.Biden delivered his remarks to a crowd of senior administration officials and family members, including his granddaughter Finn, who all greeted him with an extended round of applause as he approached his podium. In a speech that combined reflectiveness with surprising optimism, Biden suggested the end of one of the most bitter presidential contests in US history should serve as an opportunity for building unity among the American people.“Campaigns are contests of competing visions. The country chooses one or the other, and we accept the choice the country made,” Biden said. “Something to hope we can do, no matter who you voted for, is see each other not as adversaries but as fellow Americans – bring down the temperature.”After Harris’s devastating defeat that left many of her supporters distressed over the trajectory of the nation, Biden took a moment to commend his vice-president on an exemplary campaign. Harris had roughly 100 days to win the White House, after Biden withdrew from the presidential race in July. Although she fell short, Harris offered an important example of true public service, Biden said.Read more of the Guardian’s 2024 US election coverage

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      “She ran an inspiring campaign, and everyone got to see something that I learned early on to respect so much: her character,” Biden said. “She gave her wholeheart[ed] effort, and she and her entire team should be proud of the campaign they ran.”The president similarly applauded the thousands of poll workers who ensured a safe and smooth election day, pointing to their work as an example of the country’s “honest”, “fair” and “transparent” election system. Trump and his allies have repeatedly raised baseless doubts about the integrity of the US election system, although they were notably quiet on that subject after Republicans’ strong performance on Tuesday.Biden did not shy away from addressing Democrats’ disappointment and sorrow over the election results, which gave Republicans control of the White House and the Senate. The House of Representatives remained too close to call on Thursday afternoon, but Republicans expressed confidence that they would maintain their narrow majority in the lower chamber.Biden commended his administration on a “historic presidency” that included the passage of several landmark bills addressing infrastructure, the climate crisis and healthcare. Those laws would continue to reap benefits for the American people for years and even decades into the future, Biden said on Thursday.“I know it’s a difficult time. You’re hurting. I hear you and I see you,” Biden told his colleagues. “But don’t forget. Don’t forget all that we accomplished.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTurning his attention to the final weeks of his presidency, Biden pledged to continue doing the work of the American people over the next 74 days.“Setbacks are unavoidable, but giving up is unforgivable,” Biden said. “We all get knocked down, but the measure of our character, as my dad would say, is how quickly we get back up.”Biden, who has repeatedly asserted that America’s best days are still ahead, leaned on his trademark optimism to offer a pep talk to the nation. History is long, Biden reminded his country, and Trump’s victory serves as only one chapter in a much more expansive story.“A defeat does not mean we are defeated. We lost this battle. The America of your dreams is calling for you to get back up. That’s the story of America for over 240 years and counting,” Biden said.“The American experiment endures. We’re going to be OK, but we need to stay engaged. We need to keep going. And above all: we need to keep the faith.”Read more of the Guardian’s 2024 US election coverage

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      Here’s how the American press can survive four years of Trump | Margaret Sullivan

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      Everything we know about the next US president suggests that the press in America will be under siege in the next four years as never before.After all, Donald Trump has portrayed the media as the “enemy of the people”, has suggested that he wouldn’t mind seeing journalists get shot, and, in recent months, has sued CBS News and the Pulitzer prize organization.Now, with what he considers a mandate, he’ll want to push harder.“He’ll use every tool that he has, and there are many available to him,” predicted Marty Baron, the former executive editor of the Washington Post and the author of Collision of Power: Trump, Bezos, and the Washington Post, published last year.Baron told me on Wednesday that the president-elect had long been on a mission to undermine the mainstream media, and that he would be more empowered in a second term.Every would-be autocrat sees to it, after all, that an independent press doesn’t get in his way. Often, it’s one of the first democratic guardrails to be kicked down as a nation moves in an authoritarian direction.“Trump is salivating at the chance to sue a journalist for a leak of a classified document,” Baron said, perhaps using the century-old Espionage Act to exact a harsh punishment, even a prison term.With an aggressive attorney general – more combative than Jeff Sessions, whom Trump criticized for not being tough enough – that may be doable.And if even more source material is deemed classified, almost any story based on a leak can be depicted as a threat to national security.Another tactic: Trump’s allies will bankroll legal actions against the press, as the tech investor Peter Thiel did in a lawsuit against Gawker in 2016, forcing the media company into bankruptcy while portraying himself as a champion of quality journalism.Baron also sees Trump and friends threatening advertisers whose revenue keeps media companies in business – “and they will run for cover”.Then, if media outlets become sufficiently weakened, his allies may buy them and turn them into propaganda arms.Another likely move is to stonewall the press, making the job of informing the public much harder.Trump’s true believers, installed throughout the government, from the intelligence agencies to the IRS to the defense department, will anticipate what Trump wants and be hostile to reporters, Baron predicted. “Journalists will hit roadblocks constantly.”Toward the same end, legislation that weakens the Freedom of Information Act – which allows the press and the public the right to see much of what their government is doing – would be easy enough to enact with a Trump-friendly Congress.How to defend against all this?Baron hopes that media lawyers are already working on contingency plans to combat these moves, and that the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press will have the resources it needs to help as challenges arise. The non-profit provides pro bono legal representation to news organizations, reporters, documentary film-makers and others; and often contributes court documents to support journalists’ fights to protect their newsgathering.On Wednesday, the Reporters Committee sent out a fundraising email with a dire message beginning: “We won’t mince words – the next Trump administration poses a serious threat to press freedom.”I spoke on Thursday with Bruce Brown, the non-profit’s longtime executive director, who told me it will be important “to separate the daily indignations from the true legal threats” that are likely on their way. But, he said: “We have to prepare and be clear-eyed and get ready to act.”The organization is ready, though, with 20 lawyers on staff, many who worked on these issues during the first Trump administration. “In 2016, we were a third the size we are now, and we have lawyers with vastly more experience.”Major media organizations, he said, “need to stick together and not let him peel them off one by one”.More broadly, Marty Baron believes that the mainstream press needs to work on its trust problem.It needs to improve how it presents itself to the public, given that so many people are willing to believe that today’s journalism is part of the problem rather than a pillar of democracy.Bezos’s decision to quash a Post endorsement of Kamala Harris certainly didn’t help with enhancing trust, though the owner claimed he was motivated by wanting his paper to appear non-partisan; about 250,000 subscribers disagreed, cancelling in anger or disgust.Baron (who was critical of the decision to yank the editorial) urges the press to be “radically transparent” with the public.For example, journalists should provide access to full versions of the audio and video that their stories are based on, and should allow people to examine original documents or data sets.“The message,” he said, “should be ‘check my work’.”Baron also believes “the press has a lot to learn about what people’s genuine concerns are,” and should try harder to reach audiences of all political stripes.Trump’s messages about immigration, he believes, have found such fertile ground partly because of people’s worries, whether evidence-based or not, about jobs and salaries.Rebuilding trust is a long-term project. But the Trump-induced challenges are immediate.To survive them, the press needs to get ready now.

      Margaret Sullivan is a Guardian US columnist writing on media, politics and culture More