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      Wisconsin’s Top Court Rejects Trump Lawsuit

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyWisconsin’s Top Court Rejects Trump Lawsuit as His Election Push FadesThe Supreme Court in the state narrowed yet another legal path for the Trump campaign as it tries to overturn his loss to Joe Biden.Observers watched last month as votes were recounted by hand in Milwaukee. The Trump campaign has pushed to invalidate ballots from the state’s most Democratic areas.Credit…Nam Y. Huh/Associated PressBy More

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      Wisconsin supreme court refuses to hear Trump's election lawsuit

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      Wisconsin’s supreme court has refused to hear Donald Trump’s lawsuit attempting to overturn his loss to Joe Biden in the battleground state, sidestepping a decision on the merits of the claims and instead ruling that the case must first wind its way through lower courts.
      The defeat on a 4-3 ruling on Thursday was the latest in a string of losses for Trump’s post-election lawsuits. Judges in multiple battleground states have rejected his claims of fraud or irregularities. Dissenting conservative justices said the decision would forever “stain” the outcome of the election.
      Trump asked the conservative-controlled court to disqualify more than 221,000 ballots in the state’s two biggest Democratic counties, alleging irregularities in the way absentee ballots were administered. His lawsuit echoed claims that were earlier rejected by election officials in those counties during a recount that barely affected Biden’s winning margin of about 20,700 votes.
      Trump had wanted the court to take the case directly, saying there wasn’t enough time to wage the legal battle by starting first with a lower court given the looming 14 December date when presidential electors cast their votes. But attorneys for the Democratic governor, Tony Evers, and the state department of justice argued the lawsuit had to start with lower courts.
      The swing justice Brian Hagedorn joined three liberal justices in denying the petition without weighing in on Trump’s allegations.
      Hagedorn said the law was clear that Trump must start his lawsuit in lower courts where factual disputes can be worked out.
      “We do well as a judicial body to abide by time-tested judicial norms, even – and maybe especially – in high-profile cases,” Hagedorn wrote. “Following this law is not disregarding our duty, as some of my colleagues suggest. It is following the law.”
      It was not immediately known if Trump would still pursue the case through lower courts. His campaign spokeswoman did not immediately return a message seeking comment. Trump filed a similar lawsuit in federal court on Wednesday.
      Chief Justice Patience Roggensack, in her dissent, said she would have taken the case and referred it to lower courts for factual findings, which could then be reported back to the supreme court for a ruling.
      The conservative justice Rebecca Bradley wrote that the court “forsakes its duty” by not determining whether elections officials complied with the law and the inaction will undermine the public’s confidence in elections.
      “While some will either celebrate or decry the court’s inaction based upon the impact on their preferred candidate, the importance of this case transcends the results of this particular election,” she wrote in a dissent joined by Roggensack and Justice Annette Ziegler. “The majority’s failure to act leaves an indelible stain on our most recent election.”
      Trump’s lawsuit challenged procedures that have been in place for years and never been found to be illegal.
      He claimed there were thousands of absentee ballots without a written application on file. He argued that the electronic log created when a voter requests a ballot online – the way the vast majority are requested – doesn’t meet the letter of the law.
      He also challenged ballots where election clerks filled in missing address information on the certification envelope where the ballot is inserted – a practice that has long been accepted and that the state elections commission told clerks was OK.
      Roggensack said the supreme court owed it to the public to determine whether that advice was correct, especially for future elections.
      “However, doing so does not necessarily lead to striking absentee ballots that were cast by following incorrect WEC advice,” she wrote. “The remedy Petitioners seek may be out of reach for a number of reasons.”
      Trump also challenged absentee ballots where voters declared themselves to be “indefinitely confined”, a status that exempts them from having to show photo identification to cast a ballot, and one that was used much more heavily this year due to the pandemic. The court in March ruled that it was up to individual voters to determine their status.
      Two other lawsuits filed by conservatives are still pending with the court seeking to invalidate ballots. In addition to Trump’s federal lawsuit, there is another one in federal court with similar claims from Sidney Powell, a conservative attorney who was removed from Trump’s legal team.
      Wisconsin this week certified Biden’s victory, setting the stage for a Democratic slate of electors chosen earlier to cast the state’s 10 electoral votes for him. More

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      Wisconsin and Arizona certify Biden wins in yet another blow to Trump

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      Joe Biden’s victories in the US presidential election battlegrounds of Arizona and Wisconsin were officially recognised on Monday, handing Donald Trump six defeats out of six in his bid to stop states certifying their results.The finalised vote counts took Biden a step closer to the White House and dealt yet another blow to Trump’s longshot efforts to undermine the outcome.The certification in Wisconsin followed a partial recount that only added to Biden’s nearly 20,700-vote margin over Trump, who has promised to file a lawsuit seeking to undo the results.“Today I carried out my duty to certify the November 3rd election,” Wisconsin’s governor, Tony Evers, said in a statement. “I want to thank our clerks, election administrators, and poll workers across our state for working tirelessly to ensure we had a safe, fair, and efficient election. Thank you for all your good work.”Trump is mounting a desperate campaign to overturn the results by disqualifying as many as 238,000 ballots in the state, and his attorneys have alleged without evidence that there was widespread fraud and illegal activity.Trump paid $3m for recounts in Dane and Milwaukee counties, the two largest Democratic counties in Wisconsin, but the recount ended up increasing Biden’s lead by 74 votes.Wisconsin’s Democratic attorney general, Josh Kaul, said in a statement on Monday: “There’s no basis at all for any assertion that there was widespread fraud that would have affected the results.”Kaul noted that Trump’s recount targeted only the state’s two most populous counties, where the majority of Black people live. “I have every confidence that this disgraceful Jim Crow strategy for mass disenfranchisement of voters will fail. An election isn’t a game of gotcha.”And even if Trump were successful in Wisconsin, where he beat Hillary Clinton four years ago, the state’s 10 electoral college votes would not be enough to undo Biden’s overall victory, as states around the country certify results declaring him the winner.Trump’s legal challenges have also failed in other battleground states, including Georgia, Michigan, Nevada and Pennsylvania. States are required to certify their results before the electoral college meets on 14 December.Earlier on Monday, Arizona officials certified Biden’s narrow victory in that state. Biden won by about 11,000 votes, a slim margin, although a significant victory nonetheless as in past election cycles Arizona has trended reliably toward Republicans. The 2020 election is over again, with certifications today in Arizona and Wisconsin. After last week’s certifications in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Nevada. all of the states where Trump has launched spurious claims against the outcome have now certified Biden’s victory.— Susan Glasser (@sbg1) November 30, 2020
      Arizona’s Democratic secretary of state, Katie Hobbs, and Republican governor, Doug Ducey, both vouched for the integrity of the election before signing off on the results.“We do elections well here in Arizona. The system is strong,” Ducey said.Hobbs said Arizona voters should know that the election “was conducted with transparency, accuracy and fairness in accordance with Arizona’s laws and election procedures, despite numerous unfounded claims to the contrary”.Biden is only the second Democrat in 70 years to win Arizona. In the final tally, he beat Trump by 10,457 votes, or 0.3% of the nearly 3.4m ballots cast.Even as Hobbs, Ducey, the state attorney general and chief justice of the state supreme court certified the election results, Trump’s lawyers Rudy Giuliani and Jenna Ellis met in a Phoenix hotel ballroom a few miles away to lay out claims of irregularities in the vote count in Arizona and elsewhere. But they did not provide evidence of widespread fraud.Trump phoned into the meeting and described the election the “greatest scam ever perpetrated against our country”. When he mentioned Ducey’s name, the crowd booed. He accused the governor of “rushing to sign” papers certifying Democratic wins, adding: “Arizona won’t forget what Ducey just did.”Trump also berated Ducey on Twitter, asking: “Why is he rushing to put a Democrat in office, especially when so many horrible things concerning voter fraud are being revealed at the hearing going on right now.”For his part, Ducey, who has previously said his phone’s ringtone for calls from the White House is “Hail to the Chief”, was seen in a viral video clip receiving a call with that ringtone but rejecting it without answering.Trump’s denials of political reality have left him increasingly isolated as a growing number of Republicans acknowledge the transition and Biden moves ahead with naming appointments to his administration.There is no evidence of widespread fraud in the 2020 election. In fact, election officials from both political parties have stated publicly that the election went well and international observers confirmed there were no serious irregularities.Chris Krebs, former director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, told CBS’s 60 Minutes programme on Sunday: “There is no foreign power that is flipping votes. There’s no domestic actor flipping votes. I did it right. We did it right. This was a secure election.” More

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      Arizona and Wisconsin Certify Biden’s Wins: ‘The System Is Strong’

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      Arizona and Wisconsin on Monday certified President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. as the winner in their presidential elections, formalizing his victory in two additional battleground states as President Trump’s effort to overturn the results of the election continued to fall short.Such certifications would be an afterthought in any other year. But in a political environment where Mr. Trump’s false claims of sweeping voter fraud have created an alternate reality among his die-hard backers in the West Wing and beyond, the results have closed off yet another path to victory for him.Although Mr. Trump has infused daily drama into the normal postelection bureaucratic process by urging his Republican allies to push to block the certification of results or to overturn them entirely in battleground states won by Mr. Biden, the proceedings on Monday were staid affairs.In Arizona, Katie Hobbs, the Democratic secretary of state, formalized her state’s results while sitting at a long table with three Republicans who signed the election documents: Gov. Doug Ducey; the state’s attorney general, Mark Brnovich; and the chief justice of the Arizona Supreme Court, Robert M. Brutinel.Ann Jacobs, the chairwoman of the Wisconsin Elections Commission, signed a document during a three-minute video conference in which she narrated herself certifying Mr. Biden’s victory.“I am now signing it as the official state determination of the results of the Nov. 3, 2020, election and the canvass,” Ms. Jacobs said before holding the document up to the camera. Later Monday afternoon, Gov. Tony Evers of Wisconsin, a Democrat, announced that he had signed the state’s Certificate of Ascertainment appointing Mr. Biden’s slate of electors to represent Wisconsin at the Electoral College.Mr. Trump, buoyed by his legal team and supporters in the conservative news media, has held out hope that he could somehow prevail in Wisconsin and Arizona, as well as Georgia, where Republican officials on Monday firmly refused to challenge Mr. Biden’s victory there. In all three states, along with Michigan and Pennsylvania, the other two states that flipped from voting for Mr. Trump in 2016 to Mr. Biden this year, the Trump campaign has sought to undermine the results through legal and public relations efforts aimed at delivering the president Electoral College votes.But as has been the case elsewhere, elections officials from both parties in Arizona and Wisconsin declined to undercut their state laws to overturn the popular vote in their states.“We do elections well in Arizona,” Mr. Ducey said on Monday as he signed documents certifying Mr. Biden’s Arizona victory and awarding him the state’s 11 Electoral College votes. “The system is strong.”In Wisconsin, Ms. Jacobs chose to certify Mr. Biden’s victory there one day before the state’s Dec. 1 deadline to do so.Ms. Jacobs’s certification followed the conclusion of recounts, requested and subsidized with $3 million from Mr. Trump’s campaign, in Dane and Milwaukee Counties that found Mr. Biden had added 87 votes to his statewide margin.Ms. Jacobs, a Democrat from Milwaukee, said that certifying the result of the presidential election came at her discretion and that she expected the move to kick-start legal challenges from the Trump campaign.“The power to do this is vested solely in the chair,” Ms. Jacobs said in an interview on Monday.All states must exhaust legal challenges by Dec. 8. Electoral College delegates will meet in their states on Dec. 14, sending the results to Congress, which is scheduled to resolve any final disputes and certify the Electoral College vote on Jan. 6.Unlike in other states where the Trump campaign has claimed, without producing any evidence, that widespread fraud led to Mr. Biden’s victories, Mr. Trump’s legal strategy in Wisconsin is predicated on an effort to throw out hundreds of thousands of absentee ballots on what amounts to a technicality.The Trump campaign has argued in its recount petition that all ballots cast at in-person absentee voting sites before Election Day should be disqualified. The campaign claimed incorrectly that those absentee ballots had been issued without each voter submitting a written application requesting the ballot, but the top line of the absentee ballot applications that voters filled out at early voting sites read: “official absentee ballot application/certification.”That argument would throw out hundreds of thousands of ballots across Wisconsin, including those cast by prominent Trump supporters, such as several state legislators and a top lawyer for the president in Wisconsin, Jim Troupis, according to The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.On Twitter on Monday, Mr. Trump called for Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia, a Republican, to “overrule” Brad Raffensperger, the Republican secretary of state. The president also claimed baselessly that there had been “total election corruption” in Arizona. The Trump campaign has yet to identify any systemic voter fraud in its court challenges.Ms. Jacobs’s certification of the Wisconsin results represents the opening of a window for legal challenges from the Trump campaign, which has argued that the president should have carried the state and its 10 Electoral College votes despite the fact that he lost to Mr. Biden there by 20,682 votes.Two weeks ago, the Trump campaign requested recounts in Dane and Milwaukee, the state’s two largest and most Democratic counties, in an effort to build a legal case against Mr. Biden’s statewide victory. The Trump campaign is also likely to sue to challenge Ms. Jacobs’s certification.Republicans on Wisconsin’s six-member bipartisan elections commission had said that they hoped Ms. Jacobs would wait to certify the presidential election results until after the Trump campaign had exhausted its legal challenges. But the Trump campaign has not filed any lawsuits in Wisconsin; it had nothing to challenge until Ms. Jacobs certified the results of the election.The Trump campaign and Wisconsin Republicans are also expected to challenge Ms. Jacobs’s authority to certify the election results on her own. State law gives her, as the elections commission chair, clear authority and responsibility to certify the election, though other parts of the Wisconsin elections code mention the entire six-member bipartisan commission certifying presidential election results.Glenn Thrush contributed reporting. More

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      Recount in two Wisconsin counties reinforces Biden’s victory.

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      Wisconsin’s two largest counties have concluded recounts requested by the Trump campaign, with the results slightly increasing Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s margin of victory and reaffirming his win over President Trump in this month’s election.Dane County certified its election results on Sunday, and Milwaukee County certified its totals on Friday. The Wisconsin Elections Commission is scheduled to meet on Tuesday.The conclusion of the recount adds yet another loss in the Trump campaign’s effort to upend Mr. Biden’s win. The president’s team has been dealt a series of losses in court in several key states, including Pennsylvania and Michigan.As Mr. Trump continued to propagate baseless claims of voter fraud in Wisconsin and across the country, his campaign requested recounts in two heavily Democratic counties. But it had little effect on the final results.In Milwaukee County, Mr. Biden’s ticket received 317,527 votes. Mr. Trump’s ticket received 134,482, according to county results. Both totals increased slightly compared with an earlier count, and Mr. Biden gained 132 votes.Dane County, which includes the city of Madison and the flagship campus of the University of Wisconsin, found that 260,094 votes were cast for Mr. Biden, while 78,754 were cast for Mr. Trump. Compared with earlier results, the final tally included 91 fewer ballots for Mr. Biden and 46 fewer for Mr. Trump — a net gain of 45 for Mr. Trump.Before the recount totals were announced, Mr. Trump signaled that he would continue to fight the results. “The Wisconsin recount is not about finding mistakes in the count, it is about finding people who have voted illegally, and that case will be brought after the recount is over, on Monday or Tuesday,” he wrote Saturday on Twitter. “We have found many illegal votes. Stay tuned!”The Wisconsin Elections Commission has estimated that a statewide recount would cost $7.9 million. Milwaukee County estimated that its recount would cost about $2 million, and Dane County estimated about $740,808. According to state law, Mr. Trump’s team will be expected to foot the bill because the margin between the candidates exceeded 0.25 percent.Both Milwaukee County and Dane County live-streamed their recounts. Mr. Trump has insisted that his campaign observers were unable to watch vote counts, a claim that has been disputed. More

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      Joe Biden gains votes in Wisconsin county after Trump-ordered recount

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      A recount in Wisconsin’s largest county demanded by President Donald Trump’s election campaign ended on Friday with the president-elect, Joe Biden, gaining votes.After the recount in Milwaukee county, Biden made a net gain of 132 votes, out of nearly 460,000 cast. Overall, the Democrat gained 257 votes to Trump’s 125.Trump’s campaign had demanded recounts in two of Wisconsin’s most populous and Democratic-leaning counties, after he lost Wisconsin to Biden by more than 20,000 votes. The two recounts will cost the Trump campaign $3m. Dane county is expected to finish its recount on Sunday.Overall, Biden won November’s US presidential election with 306 electoral college votes to Trump’s 232. Biden also leads by more than 6m in the popular vote tally.After the recount ended, the Milwaukee county clerk, George Christenson, said: “The recount demonstrates what we already know: that elections in Milwaukee county are fair, transparent, accurate and secure.”The Trump campaign is still expected to mount a legal challenge to the overall result in Wisconsin, but time is running out. The state is due to certify its presidential result on Tuesday.On Friday, Trump’s legal team suffered yet another defeat when a federal appeals court in Philadelphia rejected the campaign’s latest effort to challenge the state’s election results.Trump’s lawyers said they would take the case to the supreme court despite the Philadelphia judges’ assessment that the “campaign’s claims have no merit”.Judge Stephanos Bibas wrote for the three-judge panel: “Free, fair elections are the lifeblood of our democracy. Charges of unfairness are serious. But calling an election unfair does not make it so. Charges require specific allegations and then proof. We have neither here.”Trump continued to maintain without evidence that there was election fraud in the state, tweeting early on Saturday: “The 1,126,940 votes were created out of thin air. I won Pennsylvania by a lot, perhaps more than anyone will ever know.”Meanwhile, Trump’s baseless claims of electoral fraud in Georgia are increasingly worrying his own party. Republicans are concerned that the chaos caused by Trump’s stance and his false comments on the conduct of the election in the key swing state, which Biden won for the Democrats, could hinder his party’s efforts to retain control of the Senate.A runoff for the state’s two Senate seats is scheduled for early January and if the Democrats clinch both seats, it will give them control of the upper house as well as the House of Representatives.When asked about his previous baseless claims of fraud in Georgia during a Thanksgiving Day press conference, Trump said he was “very worried” about them, saying: “You have a fraudulent system.” He then called the state’s Republican secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, who has defended the state’s election process, an “enemy of the people”.Such attacks have Republicans worried as they seek to motivate Georgia voters to come to the polls in January, volunteer for their Senate campaigns and – perhaps most importantly of all – dig deep into their pockets to pay for the unexpected runoff races.In particular Trump’s comments have spurred conspiracy theories that the state’s electoral system is rigged and prompted some of his supporters to make calls for a boycott of the coming vote – something that local Georgia Republicans desperately do not want. “His demonization of Georgia’s entire electoral system is hurting his party’s chances at keeping the Senate,” warned an article published by Politico.With Reuters and Associated Press More

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

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      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

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      Covid rampages across US, unifying a splintered nation as cases surge

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      The Disunited States of America are united once more. After a brutal election that exacerbated bitter partisan divisions and left the country feeling as though it had been torn in two, it has at last been thrown back together.For all the wrong reasons.The great leveler is coronavirus. Covid-19 is rampaging across the US as though it were on a personal mission to unify the splintered nation in an unfolding catastrophe. Of the 50 states of the Union, all but one – isolated Hawaii – is seeing alarming surges in new cases. The virus is on the rise so uniformly across the vast landmass of the US, that records are being shattered daily.Almost 12m cases have been recorded. In just one day the US notched up 184,000 new cases – six times the total number of infections in South Korea since the pandemic began.Almost 80,000 Americans are currently in hospital fighting for their lives, and the death rate is soaring inexorably towards 2,000 a day – close to the peak reached in April.This week the country passed the grimmest landmark so far: 250,000 dead Americans. And already the total has gone up significantly beyond that tragic milestone.As Michael Osterholm, a member of the coronavirus advisory team assembled by Joe Biden, put it: “We are in the most dangerous public health period since 1918.”The result of this terrifying march of untrammeled disease is that panic has begun to set in at state level. Governors and mayors from coast to coast have been scrambling to batten down the hatches, from New York City where the country’s largest public schools system was closed on Thursday barely two months after it reopened, to California where governor Gavin Newsom announced he was “pulling the emergency brake”.It is in the heartland states that the true horror of the current crisis is unfolding. Here Donald Trump’s historic mishandling of the pandemic is coming home to roost.Across the midwest, Trump’s playbook towards Covid-19 has been avidly embraced by Republican governors, from Kristi Noem in South Dakota, to Pete Ricketts in Nebraska, Kim Reynolds in Iowa, and Mike Parson in Missouri. They have mimicked the president’s relentless downplaying of the virus, lying about the pandemic being under control, and spurning of mask wearing.The results are now plain to see – runaway infection levels, staggering positivity rates and hospitals at breaking point.Only now, when the virus is pummeling the midwest like a tornado, have some of the Republican governors begrudgingly begun to change tack. Take Reynolds, the pro-Trump governor of Iowa. More