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      in US Politics

      Can Biden and Harris put a bitterly divided America back together again?

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      The end of the Trump era will in theory look like this. At midday on Wednesday 21 January, Joe Biden will stand on the west front of the United States Capitol, place his left hand on a Bible, raise his right and utter 35 words: “I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of president of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the constitution of the United States.”
      With that oath of office Biden will become the 46th president and power will drain from his predecessor, who will become a common citizen, an ex-president, number 45, no longer commander-in-chief, head of state or Oval Office occupier. The moment will thrum with pomp and pageantry. There will be drums, a bugle, the Hail to the Chief anthem and a 21-gun salute. A polished choreography, originating from George Washington’s inauguration in 1789, to symbolise the continuity of democratic rule and the peaceful transition of power.
      Of course, this assumes that, despite Donald Trump challenging the results of last week’s election, Biden and Kamala Harris will be able to take office the conventional way. If that happens, millions of viewers around the world will celebrate and a socially distanced crowd on the National Mall will cheer the end of what they consider a four-year nightmare.
      And then an urgent question will crystallise: can Biden and Harris put America back together? Can they end an era of hyper-polarisation and economic inequality that has degraded democracy and turned Americans against each other; that has shredded the idea of America?
      “Many Republicans and Democrats believe the other side isn’t just mistaken but evil,” says John Pitney, a Claremont McKenna College political scientist. Cultural, ethnic, geographic and racial divisions underpin party affiliations as never before, producing ideological polarisation in Congress not seen since the civil war. More

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      in Elections

      Mitt Romney calls Donald Trump '900lb gorilla in the Republican party'

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      Donald Trump, stewing at the White House, reportedly approached by Jared Kushner about conceding the election but as yet unmoved, is “the 900lb gorilla when it comes to the Republican party”, Utah senator and 2012 GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney said on Sunday.
      The presidential election was called for Joe Biden, the Democratic candidate, on Saturday, when Pennsylvania moved into his electoral college column four days after the vote.
      Trump, who responded with defiance – and by playing golf – “will have an enormous impact on our party going forward”, Romney told NBC’s Meet the Press.
      “I believe the great majority of people who voted for Donald Trump want to make sure that his principles and his policies are pursued. So yeah, he’s not disappearing by any means. He’s the 900lb gorilla when it comes to the Republican party.”
      Romney is a relative moderate in Trump’s party and a relatively independent voice – he was the only Republican senator to vote for impeachment but he also voted to confirm Amy Coney Barrett to the supreme court with unprecedented and many say unseemly haste.
      “The presidential race,” he said on Sunday, considering Republican victories in congressional, state and local elections, “was more a matter of a referendum on a person. And that when it came to policy, we did pretty well.”
      In an interview with CNN’s State of the Union, Romney elaborated, claiming: “Republicans overall did better than Democrats overall in this election. So it comes down to a question about what does America want in terms of policy.
      “It’s pretty clear they don’t want the Green New Deal,” he said, starting to tick off progressive policy goals not necessarily shared by Biden or offered on his platform.
      “Pretty clear they don’t want Medicare for All, don’t want higher taxes, don’t want to get rid of oil and gas and coal. The American people are more conservative than they are progressive, so to speak, and any argument to the contrary I think is going to be met with a lot of resistance from the American people, and from members of Congress.”
      Regardless of such political fights to come, Trump is still claiming without evidence that widespread voter fraud meant his election defeat was rigged.
      Asked on NBC what he would like to see the president do differently, Romney said: “We’re not going to change President Trump or his nature in the waning days of the presidency. And so I don’t think I’m going to be giving him advice as to what to do.
      “Clearly, the people in the past, like myself, who lost elections, have gone on in a way that said, ‘Look, I know the eyes of the world are on us. The eyes of our own people are on the institutions that we have. The eyes of history are on us.’
      “In a setting like this, we want to preserve something which is far more important than our self or even our party. And that is preserve the cause of freedom and democracy here and around the world.
      “But the president’s going to do what he has traditionally done, what he’s doing now … and by the way, he has every right to call for recounts. Because we’re talking about a margin of 10,000 votes here, or less in some cases [in fact just Georgia]. And so a recount could change the outcome. He wants to look at irregularities, pursue that in the court.
      “But if, as expected, those things don’t change the outcome, why, he will accept the inevitable.”
      NBC host Chuck Todd did goad Romney into slightly harsher words about Trump’s behaviour.
      “I think it’s fine to pursue every legal avenue that one has,” Romney said. “But I think one has to be careful in the choice of words. I think when you say that the election was corrupt or stolen or rigged, that that’s unfortunately rhetoric that gets picked up by authoritarians around the world.
      “And I think it also discourages confidence in our democratic process here at home. And with a battle going on right now between authoritarianism and freedom, why, I think it’s very important that we not use language which can encourage a course in history which would be very, very unfortunate.” More

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      in Elections

      'Let us be the nation we know we can be': Biden speaks after defeating Trump – US election 2020 live updates

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      Key events

      Show

      10.17am EST10:17
      Trump goes golfing, again

      9.30am EST09:30
      Romney – Trump is ‘900lb gorilla in the Republican party’

      8.49am EST08:49
      US sees fourth consecutive record daily total of new Covid cases

      Live feed

      Show

      10.17am EST10:17

      Trump goes golfing, again

      Hello. Oliver Holmes here, taking over the live blog for the next few hours.
      ‘Surely, this election is over’, I hear millions of fatigued voices cry out. Well, yes, it is. Joe Biden is president-elect after winning the election, but the full count has still not finished and Donald Trump has hunkered down, refusing to concede.
      The latest update is that the current president appears to have gone golfing for the second day in a row. His motorcade recently arrived at Trump National Golf Club, in Sterling, Virginia, according to a White House reporter.
      A handful of demonstrators lined the sidewalks near the entrance of the club. Two signs read: “ORANGE CRUSHED” and “TRUMPTY DUMPTY HAD A GREAT FALL.”

      Updated
      at 10.19am EST

      10.00am EST10:00

      Michael Goldfarb, former London bureau chief of NPR and fellow at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, has written for us today. He says that Trump was no accident, and the America that made him is still with us.

      It’s a measure of the bizarre, outsize impact of the man that pundits are already speaking of Trumpism. Liberal leftish types anticipate his return like Brian de Palma movie devotees anticipate Carrie’s hand coming out of the grave – Trump’s coming to drag them into the darkness. Rightwing radicals – conservative doesn’t seem the right term any more — speak of Trumpism because he was the person who energised their disparate coalition in a way no other person has. I almost typed politician rather than person but Trump is not a pol. He is a “leader”, someone on whom people project their own desires.
      Trump’s presidency was the end product of two strands of American life coming together after a quarter of a century of independent development. First, the Republican party’s evolution from a bloc of diverse interests into a radical faction built around a single idea: winning absolute power and making America a one-party state ruled by people dedicated to tax cuts for the wealthy and stacking the federal courts with judges who would roll back the New Deal/civil rights-era social contract.
      The former speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich, began this process more than a quarter of a century ago. He was the first prominent Republican to see in Donald Trump the man who could fulfil the modern party’s dreams. Gingrich later wrote, in 2018: “Trump’s America and the post-American society that the anti-Trump coalition represents are incapable of coexisting. One will simply defeat the other. There is no room for compromise. Trump has understood this perfectly since day one.”

      Read more here: Michael Goldfarb – Trump was no accident. And the America that made him is still with us
      And I’m done for the day – I’ll see you again tomorrow. Oliver Holmes will be with you shorty…

      9.58am EST09:58

      You are going to see this attack line from Republicans a lot in the coming days. Here’s conservative radio and TV host Mark Simone.

      MARK SIMONE
      (@MarkSimoneNY)
      Didn’t they keep saying Russia tampered with the election, that 17 intelligence agencies, 4 committees confirmed it and all news organizations were investigating it.Now we hear there’s never been any voter fraud and it’s impossible to tamper with an election. #election

      November 8, 2020

      Donald Trump Jr made a similar point earlier.

      Donald Trump Jr.
      (@DonaldJTrumpJr)
      We went from 4 years of Russia rigged the election, to elections can’t be rigged really fast didn’t we???

      November 8, 2020

      It bears repeating that despite team Trump repeatedly dismissing it as the ‘Russian hoax’ and similar, the CIA did find in December 2016 that Russia had interfered to try and help Trump win. Here’s the details:

      Officials briefed on the matter were told that intelligence agencies had found that individuals linked to the Russian government had provided WikiLeaks with thousands of confidential emails stolen from the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and others.
      The people involved were known to US intelligence and acted as part of a Russian operation to boost Trump and hurt the chances of the Democratic candidate, Hillary Clinton. “It is the assessment of the intelligence community that Russia’s goal here was to favour one candidate over the other, to help Trump get elected,” one said.
      The emails were steadily leaked via WikiLeaks in the months before the election, damaging Clinton’s White House run by revealing that DNC figures had colluded to harm the chances of her nomination rival Bernie Sanders.
      A separate report in the New York Times, also sourced to unnamed officials, claimed US intelligence agencies had discovered that Russian hackers had also penetrated the Republican National Committee’s networks, but conspicuously chose to release only the information stolen from the Democrats.
      A third report, by Reuters, said intelligence agencies assessed that as the campaign drew on, Russian government officials devoted increasing attention to assisting Trump’s effort to win the election. Virtually all the emails they released publicly were potentially damaging to Clinton and the Democrats.

      Important to note one key thing there – the Russian interference was all about the selective leaking of stolen and hacked information to assist Donald Trump, not changing the counting of votes. There was no evidence found that Russia hacked voting machines or faked ballot papers.

      9.49am EST09:49

      Trump’s campaign staff don’t seem in any mood to concede this morning.

      Tim Murtaugh
      (@TimMurtaugh)
      Greeting staff at @TeamTrump HQ this morning, a reminder that the media doesn’t select the President. pic.twitter.com/3ACjkBhxVn

      November 8, 2020

      A reminder that as it stands, Joe Biden has won over over 75m votes, some 4.3m more than the incumbent. He is projected to win at least 290 electoral college votes, and will be the 46th president of the United States.
      In 2000, while Bush did indeed prevail after those earlier calls for Gore, the election ended up hinging on just 537 votes in Florida. In order to prevent Biden reaching the White House, the Trump campaign are going to have to proved evidence that tens of thousands of votes in multiple states should be discounted as fraudulent.
      The 45th president, meanwhile, departed the White House at 9.15 this morning. The press pool were not informed where he was headed. Yesterday’s unscheduled trip was to play golf, during which Trump was informed that he had lost. More

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      in US Politics

      The meaning of Kamala Harris: the woman who will break new ground as vice-president

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      Kamala Harris has spent her life crashing through glass ceilings and accumulating “firsts”. She was the first female district attorney of San Francisco, the first female attorney general of California, the first Indian American in the US Senate, the first Indian American candidate of a major party to run for vice-president. Soon she will become the first female vice-president. If Joe Biden only serves one term, as expected, there is a chance that in 2024 she could become the first black female president.
      The problem with phrases like “first black female president” is that they confine the California senator to the sort of boxes she has always tried to avoid. “When I first ran for office that was one of the things that I struggled with, which is that you are forced through that process to define yourself in a way that you fit neatly into the compartment that other people have created,” she told the Washington Post last year. “I am who I am … You might need to figure it out, but I’m fine with it.” She does not agonise over her identity – she simply calls herself a “proud American”.
      As with Barack Obama, there are those who have doubted Harris’s Americanness. The morning after Harris was named as Biden’s running mate, racist “birther” conspiracy theories, amplified by Donald Trump, began to circulate. Newsweek published an op-ed questioning whether Harris was “constitutionally ineligible” to become president because her parents, who met at graduate school in Berkeley, were immigrants. Her mother, a breast cancer researcher, was born in India. Her father, an economist, is black and was born in Jamaica. Harris, meanwhile, was born in Oakland, California. Which, to be very clear, means the 56-year-old is a natural-born US citizen and eligible to run for president.
      Left: Kamala Harris with her mother, Shyamala Gopalan Harris, a breast cancer researcher. Right: At her mother’s lab in Berkeley, California. More

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      in Elections

      Trauma and triumph: the 10 moments that made Joe Biden

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      Joe Biden was born on 20 November 1942, in Scranton, Pennsylvania. He was the oldest of four children in a Catholic family; his mother, Jean, had Irish roots. The family’s economic fortunes were up and down, with Biden’s father, Joseph, later becoming a successful car-tyre salesman. At school Biden was class president, although his grades were unremarkable.
      Childhood, stutter and early career More

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      in Elections

      Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez ends truce by warning ‘incompetent’ Democratic party

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      Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has criticised the Democratic party for incompetence in a no-holds-barred, post-election interview with the New York Times, warning that if the Biden administration does not put progressives in top positions, the party would lose big in the 2022 midterm elections.
      Signaling that the internal moratorium in place while the Democrats worked to defeat Donald Trump was over, the leftwing New York representative sharply rejected the notion advanced by some Democrats that progressive messaging around the Movement for Black Lives and the Green New Deal led to the party’s loss of congressional seats in last week’s election.
      The real problem, said Ocasio-Cortez, was that the party lacked “core competencies” to run campaigns.
      “There’s a reason Barack Obama built an entire national campaign apparatus outside of the Democratic National Committee,” she told the Times’ Astead Herndon. “And there’s a reason that when he didn’t activate or continue that, we lost House majorities. Because the party – in and of itself – does not have the core competencies, and no amount of money is going to fix that.”
      Ocasio-Cortez, who defeated a longtime Democratic politician in 2018 and who won re-election in her Bronx district by more than 50 points, endorsed the Vermont senator, Bernie Sanders, over Joe Biden in the Democratic presidential primary.
      Since then, Ocasio-Cortez and her closest allies in Congress – a four-woman group known as “the squad” who all won reelection last week – toed the party line while calling on grassroots activists to boost Biden and Democrats down-ticket.
      The truce is over. The failure of the party to operate an online strategy “in a real way that exhibits competence”, Ocasio-Cortez told the Times, made it hypocritical for the party to advance criticism of progressive messaging.
      “If I lost my election, and I went out and I said: ‘This is moderates’ fault. This is because you didn’t let us have a floor vote on Medicare for all.’ And they opened the hood on my campaign, and they found that I only spent $5,000 on TV ads the week before the election?” Ocasio-Cortez said. “They would laugh. And that’s what they look like right now trying to blame the Movement for Black Lives for their loss.”
      Grassroots activism that produced large turnout in Detroit, Philadelphia and Georgia was crucial to Biden’s win, and if the Democratic party fails to recognise that and incorporate the grassroots, the party disintegrates at the ballot box, Ocasio-Cortez said.
      “It’s really hard for us to turn out nonvoters when they feel like nothing changes for them. When they feel like people don’t see them, or even acknowledge their turnout,” Ocasio-Cortez said.
      “If the party believes after 94% of Detroit went to Biden, after Black organisers just doubled and tripled turnout down in Georgia, after so many people organised Philadelphia, the signal from the Democratic party is the John Kasich won us this election? I mean, I can’t even describe how dangerous that is.”
      Kasich is a former Republican governor of Ohio who campaigned for Biden, endorsing him as a centrist that moderate Republicans could get behind. Such an appeal might have had traction in some places, such as northern Michigan and western Omaha. But Trump beat Biden in Ohio by eight points and half a million votes.
      The Ocasio-Cortez interview is full of frank impressions freely shared. Asked what her “macro takeaway” was from the election, she said: “Well, I think the central one is that we aren’t in a freefall to hell anymore.” Asked whether there was anything about the election that surprised her, she said: “The share of white support for Trump. I thought the polling was off, but just seeing it, there was that feeling of realising what work we have to do.”
      While there were concerns about the reliability of exit polls this year with so much voting happening over mail and the failure of polls generally, Trump appeared to have won white voters in 2020 by about as much as he did in 2016 – 15 points.
      The coming period of presidential transition and the Biden administration’s early days will be crucial to determining whether the Democratic party will incorporate in a permanent way its grassroots progressive engine – or veer off down a path toward defeat, Ocasio-Cortez said.
      “So I need my colleagues to understand that we are not the enemy,” she said. “And that their base is not the enemy. That the Movement for Black Lives is not the enemy, that Medicare for all is not the enemy. This isn’t even just about winning an argument. It’s that if they keep going after the wrong thing, I mean, they’re just setting up their own obsolescence.”
      Appearing on CNN later in the day, Ocasio-Cortez said: “Progressives have assets to offer the party that the party has not yet fully leaned into… Every single swing seat member that co-sponsored Medicare for All won their re-election, and so the conversation is a little bit deeper than saying anything progressive is toxic.” More

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      in US Politics

      Was Libertarian candidate Jo Jorgensen a 'spoiler' for Trump?

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      When it became increasingly clear that a handful of battleground states would decide the winner in 2020’s US presidential election, many were struck by the razor-thin margins that emerged.
      The results also revealed a striking data point: Libertarian candidate Jo Jorgensen’s share of the vote in some of these states was higher than margins between Joe Biden and Donald Trump.
      Before Biden became president-elect, this breakdown of ballots prompted questions whether Jorgensen – a third-party candidate who did not have a serious chance of winning in 2020 – drew votes away from Trump.
      In the Republican stronghold of Georgia, which will award 16 electoral college votes, Biden presently bests Trump by fewer than 8,000 ballots. The percentage-based breakdown puts this into sharp relief: Biden has won 49.5% of the votes compared to Trump’s 49.3%.
      Jorgensen has won the remaining 1.2% – which now totals 61,792 votes. That number is more than seven times the Trump-Biden split there. The Associated Press has not yet called Georgia’s results. On Friday, state officials announced a recount.
      Numbers from Arizona, which the AP has already called in favor of Biden, are also noteworthy. With 90% of the vote counted, Biden holds 1,626,943 votes to Trump’s 1,606,370 – a 49.6 to 48.9% divide. Jorgensen has landed 49,182 votes, or 1.5%. Arizona awards 11 electoral college votes.
      In Wisconsin, which Trump won by 22,748 votes in 2016, Biden has been called as the winner, with 1,630,570 votes compared to his opponent’s 1,610,030. Jorgensen got 38,415 votes, which is more than the difference between these candidates. Wisconsin has 10 electoral college votes.
      That said, a vote for Jorgensen is not by any means necessarily a vote that Trump would have otherwise won.
      Jorgensen herself doesn’t believe she is responsible for Republicans’ losses, and that the party’s candidates are to blame.
      “They should be mad at those candidates for not following through on their campaign promises,” Jorgensen told the Greenville News, which is in her home state of South Carolina, earlier this week. She reportedly said that many of her supporters were “recovering Democrats” who want US troops brought home from abroad, as well as Republicans tired with federal spending.
      “If I can get Republicans to start acting like Republicans and cutting the deficit. And if I can get the Democrats to go back to being the party of peace, bringing our troops home, and giving the average individual their rights? Then yes, I would be very pleased,” she told the newspaper.
      “In the personal conversations I had [on the campaign trail] a lot of people would say, ‘Yeah, in 2016 I voted for Trump. I was so excited and then he didn’t follow through on his promises.’”

      Several experts do not believe Jorgensen was a Trump “spoiler” in 2020.
      The Cato Institute’s David Boaz, who has penned books on Libertarianism, told Reuters earlier this week: “We just don’t know what would have happened if the Libertarians had not run a candidate.”
      He added: “Libertarians also get votes of people who just would not bother voting if they didn’t have another choice.”
      Moreover, it’s unclear which party is more heavily affected by Libertarian votes.
      Kenneth Mayer, American politics professor at the University of Wisconsin, told Reuters earlier this week: “It’s possible she played a role, but there is no way to know, and it doesn’t matter. The results of the election are the results of the election.”
      Third-party candidates rarely impact overall election results. The 2000 Presidential election – where Ralph Nader won 97,000 votes in Florida, and George W Bush won this state by 537 votes – is a rare exception, Mayer rsaid.
      Neither Jorgensen nor the Libertarian party immediately responded to requests for comment. More

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      in US Politics

      Democrats left to sift through aftermath of ‘blue wave’ that never crested

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      Joe Biden secured a historic presidential victory on Saturday yet some Democrats have spent the tense days since the election engulfed in recriminations, finger-pointing and infighting as they sift through the aftermath of expectations of a “blue wave” that never crested.
      Long-simmering tensions between moderate Democrats who represent conservative districts and progressives who have massive online followings erupted into public view, after a series of unexpected losses in parts of the country where the president proved surprisingly resilient.
      Once united behind the shared priority of removing Donald Trump from office, swaths of Democrats are now racked with anxiety and uncertainty over a path forward.
      Moderates accused liberals of embracing “socialism” and supporting leftwing proposals to “defund the police”, which Republicans weaponized against vulnerable Democrats. Progressives argue that the base powered many of the party’s biggest victories and that it was the lack of an inspiring message – and not their politics – that hurt members. Meanwhile, Democrats were alarmed by Trump’s apparent success with Hispanic voters in some battleground states.
      In the weeks before the election, Democrats had begun to imagine the legislative agenda their party could deliver with an undivided Congress and a new Biden administration. House Democrats anticipated expanding their majority by a significant margin – potentially even double digits. In the Senate, Democratic challengers, fueled by a historic wave of donations, appeared poised to knock off enough Republican incumbents to take the gavel from Mitch McConnell, even in states such as Iowa and South Carolina where Democrats rarely win statewide.
      As Democrats engage in what has become a ritualistic practice of soul-searching, there are unlikely to be any easy answers. The election delivered a mix of successes and disappointments for both parties, raising complex questions about their coalition and their message.
      For now, Democratic leaders are trying to keep the focus on their victories – Biden defeated Donald Trump, they will retain their majority in the House and control of the Senate will be decided by a pair of runoff elections in Georgia in January.
      “This has been a life‑or‑death fight for the fate of our democracy,” the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, told reporters on Friday, with tens of thousands of votes still uncounted. “We did not win every battle in the House, but we did win the war.”
      Tensions came to a head during a private conference call with House Democrats on Thursday, part of which was made public by the Washington Post, when the congresswoman Abigail Spanberger, a freshman who narrowly held on to her seat in a conservative-leading Virginia district, accused her liberal colleagues of costing the party seats by referring to themselves as “socialists”.
      “If we are classifying Tuesday as a success,” she added, using an expletive, the party will get “torn apart in 2022”.
      Republicans struggled to portray Biden, whose reputation as centrist, bipartisan dealmaker was forged over the course of his decades-long political career, as a captive of the radical left. But there was evidence the attacks were more effective on Senate and House candidates, particularly those running in a forbidding environment.
      Moderates have pointed to Nebraska’s 2nd congressional district, which Biden flipped but where Democratic candidate Kara Eastman, a progressive who supported Medicare for All, lost.
      “The whole ‘progressivism is bad’ argument just doesn’t have any compelling evidence that I’ve seen,” the New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who identifies as a democratic socialist, wrote on Twitter. She added that such attacks by Republicans are about “racial resentment” and “you’re not gonna make that go away.” More