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      in US Politics

      The Guardian view on the election endgame: end Trump’s war on the truth | Editorial

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      Since he took office Donald Trump has posed a grave threat to democracy. His wild, relentless post-poll fight against reality this week has shown just how dangerous he can be. Designed to give his supporters a rationale for their anger over losing the popular vote, the falsehoods raised troubling questions about when, and how, Mr Trump will leave the White House.The bad news is that it won’t be anytime soon. Democracy in America is rare in giving a president more than 10 weeks of power after losing an election. Mr Trump is using this time to ratchet up the rhetoric to a fever pitch, seeding the idea that society is irreconcilably at odds with itself. This is profoundly damaging to America, a fact that cable networks have thankfully and belatedly woken up to after election day. Around the world former democracies are slipping into autocracy. The United States is not immune.The fact is Mr Trump will lose the popular vote by millions of votes and only America’s outdated electoral college has saved him from a crushing defeat. The president should be preparing to leave the White House, not be instructing his lawyers. Perhaps Mr Trump cannot afford to lose. Presidential immunity from prosecution vanishes once Mr Trump leaves office, a consideration that may weigh heavily given the ongoing investigations by the New York district attorney into reported“protracted criminal conduct at the Trump Organization”. Mr Trump denies any wrongdoing.For months it has been obvious that Mr Trump would claim victory and fraud should he lose the election. He has refused to say he would accept a peaceful transfer of power. The polls, he claimed, could not be trusted. Without a shred of shame, Mr Trump appears willing to challenge the validity of the vote in any state he loses, seeking to undermine the electoral process and ultimately invalidate it.This is a dangerous moment. There’s no evidence of widespread illegal votes in any state. Yet a fully fledged constitutional crisis over the process of counting ballots is on the cards because Mr Trump is demanding recounts and court cases while conditioning his base to view the election in existential terms. Last year, in an influential and prescient analysis, Ohio University’s Edward B Foley wargamed how a quarrel over mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania could lead to a disputed result in the 2020 presidential election.The most frightening scenario, said Prof Foley, was “where the dispute remains unresolved on January 20, 2021, the date for the inauguration of the new presidential term, and the military is uncertain as to who is entitled to receive the nuclear codes as commander-in-chief”. This ends with the US attorney general, William Barr, announcing that it is legally sound for Mr Trump to be recognised as re-elected for a second term while Democrats call for nationwide protests to dislodge the squatters in the White House. It would be better to avoid such a predicament rather than plan to get into it.Republicans must not be seduced by Mr Trump into manipulating the electoral system, through political and legal battles, to defy the popular will for partisan advantage. The Grand Old Party has profited from voter suppression and gerrymandering to keep an emerging Democratic majority at bay. But these darker impulses have given rise to Mr Trump and an unhealthy reliance on a shrinking coalition of overwhelmingly white Christian voters paranoid about losing power.Joe Biden looks to have done enough to win the White House. He will have his work cut out when he gets there, needing to rebuild the US government’s credibility after Trumpism hollowed out its institutions. That means offering hope to a country that faces a pandemic and an economic recession. He will have to reassert America’s role as the global problem-solver. Under Mr Trump the “indispensable nation” disappeared when it was needed the most. By any reasonable standard Mr Biden should not have to continue to run against Mr Trump. He must be allowed to get on with running America. More

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      in Elections

      From abortion to minimum wage: other measures the US voted on

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      Away from the presidential and congressional races, at least 124 statutory and constitutional questions were put to voters in 32 US states and the District of Columbia, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL).The pandemic dampened grassroots enthusiasm for circulating petitions to get measures on the ballot, as citizen-led initiatives this year dropped to 38, from 60 in 2018 and 72 in 2016, the NCSL said. But the 2020 crop of ballot measures still covered a wide array of issues, from election laws to abortion rights to worker rights and taxes. Here are some of key results:MarijuanaVoters in New Jersey, Arizona, South Dakota and Montana approved measures to legalise marijuana for recreational use, and South Dakota and Mississippi approved the drug’s use for medical purposes. Since 1996, 33 other states and the District of Columbia have allowed medical marijuana, 11 had previously approved its recreational use and 16, including some medical marijuana states, have decriminalised simple possession, according to the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws.Psilocybin (magic mushrooms)Psilocybin, a hallucinogen also known in its raw form as magic mushrooms, was approved by Oregon voters for therapeutic use for adults. Backers of the Psilocybin Services Act cited research showing benefits of the drug as a treatment for anxiety disorders and other mental health conditions. The approved measure sets a two-year schedule to review the matter and create a regulatory structure for its sale.In a related measure, Washington DC voters approved Initiative 81, which directs police to rank “entheogenic plants and fungi,” including psilocybin and mescaline, among its lowest enforcement priorities.Minimum wageVoters in Florida approved a measure to amend the state constitution to gradually increase its $8.56 per hour minimum wage to $15 by 30 September 2026.California gig workersCalifornia voters approved a measure that would exempt ride-share and delivery drivers from a state law that makes them employees, not contractors. The measure, Proposition 22, is the first gig-economy question to go before statewide voters in a campaign. Backers including Uber and Lyft spent more than $190m on their campaign, making it the costliest ballot measure ever, according to the NCSL.AbortionColorado voters rejected a measure to ban abortions, except those needed to save the life of the mother, after 22 weeks of pregnancy. In Louisiana, voters approved an amendment that makes clear that the state constitution does not protect abortion rights or funding for abortions. The amendment clears the way for the state to outlaw abortion if the US supreme court overturns the landmark Roe v Wade decision that protects abortion rights under the US constitution.ElectionsRanked-choice voting, which lets voters select state and federal candidates in order of preference, was rejected by Massachusetts voters. Only Maine lets its voters use the method statewide. A citizen-initiated measure on the issue was also on the ballot in Alaska, but results there were incomplete. California approved a measure to restore the right to vote to parolees convicted of felonies.TaxesIn California, a proposal to roll back a portion of the state’s landmark Proposition 13 law limiting property taxes was too close to call on Wednesday. The measure, Proposition 15 on the state’s 2020 ballot, would leave in place protections for residential properties but raise taxes on commercial properties worth more than $3m. More

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      in Elections

      Donald Trump's malignant spell could soon be broken | Jonathan Freedland

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      Barring a twist inconceivable even by the standards of 2020, we will soon know the result of the US presidential election – and it will almost certainly be a cause for rejoicing. Donald Trump, the man who has haunted the world’s dreams and sparked a thousand nightmares, has all but lost. On 20 January 2021, he will probably leave the White House – or be removed if necessary. The Trump presidency, a shameful chapter in the history of the republic, will soon be over.
      True, it is taking longer than we might have liked. There was to be no swift moment of euphoria and elation, an unambiguous landslide announced on election night with a drumroll and fireworks display. Instead, thanks to a pandemic that meant two in three Democrats voted by slower-to-count mail-in ballots, it’s set to be a win in increments, a verdict delivered in slow motion. Nor was there the hoped-for “blue wave” that might have carried the Democrats to a majority in the US Senate (though there is, just, a way that could yet happen). As a result, it will be hard for Joe Biden to do what so urgently needs to be done, whether that’s tackling the climate crisis, racial injustice, economic inequality, America’s parlous infrastructure or its dysfunctional and vulnerable electoral machinery. And it is glumly true that even if Trump is banished from the Oval Office, Trumpism will live on in the United States.
      And yet none of that should obscure the main event that has taken place this week. It’s a form of progressive masochism to search for the defeat contained in a victory. Because a victory is what this will be.
      Recall the shock and disgust that millions – perhaps billions – have felt these past four years, as Trump sank to ever lower depths. When he was ripping children from their parents and keeping them in cages; when he was blithely exchanging “love letters” with the murderous thug that rules the slave state of North Korea; when he was coercing Ukraine to dig up dirt on Biden, or else lose the funds it needed to defend itself against Vladimir Putin, the high crime for which he was impeached; when he was denying the reality of the coronavirus, insisting it would just melt away, thereby leaving more than 235,000 Americans to their fate and their deaths – when he was doing all that, what did his opponents long for? The wish, sometimes uttered to the heavens, was not complicated: they wanted Trump’s defeat and ejection from power. Few attached the rider that it would only count if the Democrats could also pick up a Senate seat in North Carolina.
      Nor does it seem as though any defeat for Trump will be tentative or partial, even if the delayed result might make it feel that way. Joe Biden crushed him in this contest. He beat him in the popular vote by a huge margin, four million at last count, with that figure only growing as the final result is tallied. Yes, in a high-turnout election, Trump got more votes than he did in 2016 – but Biden got more votes than any presidential candidate in history, more even than the once-in-a-generation phenomenon that was Barack Obama.
      What’s more, Biden looks to have done something extremely difficult and vanishingly rare, taking on and defeating a first-term president. That would ensure that Donald Trump becomes only the third elected president since Herbert Hoover in 1932 to try and fail to win re-election. Trump would take his place alongside Jimmy Carter and George Bush the elder in the small club of rejected, one-term presidents. As it happens, both those men were gracious in defeat and admirable in retirement, but Trump won’t see them that way. He’ll regard them as stone-cold losers. And he’s about to be one of them, his place taken by a decent, empathic man with the first ever female vice-president at his side.
      It’s worth bearing all that in mind when you hear the predictable complaints that Biden was too “centrist”, or that Bernie Sanders would have done better. It could be argued that Biden outperformed the rest of his party, pulling ahead even as Democrats lost seats in the House and failed to make great gains in the Senate. Note that Trump’s prime attack line – that “far left” Democrats were itching to impose “socialism” on America – cut through in this campaign, clearly alarming Cuban and Venezuelan voters in Florida, for example. But it was a hard label to stick on a lifelong pragmatist like Joe Biden: most Americans just didn’t buy it.
      What it adds up to is not perhaps the across-the-board repudiation of Trump and the congressional Republicans who enabled him these past four years. But it does count as an emphatic rejection of what Trump did as a first-term president – and, if it holds, the prevention of all the horror he would have unleashed if he had won a second.
      It means that a majority of Americans have said no to the constant stream of insults, abuse and lies – more than 22,000 since Trump took office, according to the Washington Post. They have said no to a man who was a misinformation super-spreader, who called journalists “enemies of the people” and denounced inconvenient truths as “fake news”. They have said no to a man who suggested people should guard against Covid by injecting themselves with disinfectant; who dismissed science in favour of Fox News; who dismissed the word of his own intelligence agencies, preferring conspiracy theories picked up on Twitter.
      They have said no to a president who saw white supremacists and neo-Nazis march in Charlottesville in 2017, and declared that they included some “very fine people”. They have said no to a man who referred to one black congresswoman as “low IQ” and suggested four others, all US citizens, should “go back home”. They have said no to the man who refused to disavow the far-right groups who worship him, telling those racist extremists instead to “stand back and stand by”. They have said no to the man who trashed America’s allies, who withdrew the US from the Paris climate agreement, and who grovelled to every strongman and dictator on the planet.
      The next few weeks will be perilous. Trump will not concede; he will continue to deny the legitimacy of this result. His performance on Thursday night was perhaps his lowest and darkest yet, groundlessly telling Americans they could have no faith in their most solemn democratic rite: the election of a president. As he leaves, he will scorch the earth and poison the soil.
      But all of that is to remind us why it was so essential, for America and the world, that he be defeated. And why, even though it may have arrived slowly and without the fanfare so many of us wanted, this will be a moment to savour. A dark force is being expelled from the most powerful office in the world – and at long last, we can glimpse the light.
      • Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist More

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      in US Politics

      Five US election headlines you may have missed

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      The presidential election contest between Joe Biden and Donald Trump has got the world’s attention, but some other notable events happened as a result of Tuesday’s elections, including:FirstsNew Mexico became the first state to elect all women of color to represent it in the House of Representatives. The congressional delegation includes two Democrats: Deb Haaland, a Laguna Pueblo member, and Teresa Leger Fernandez. The third member of the delegation is Republican Yvette Herrell, who is Cherokee. She beat the Democratic incumbent Xochitl Torres Small for the seat.The 117th Congress will have a record number of Native American women because of the wins for Herrell and Haaland, as well as for Sharice Davids, a Ho-Chunk Nation member representing Kansas.Other election firsts included Ritchie Torres and Mondaire Jones becoming the first openly gay Black members of Congress; Black Lives Matter activist and nurse Cori Bush becoming the first Black woman elected to Congress in Missouri, and Sarah McBride of Delware will be the first openly transgender state senator in US history.District attorney oustedGeorgia voters ousted a prosecutor who was criticized for her office’s response to the fatal shooting of Ahmaud Arbery, the 25-year-old Black man who was killed in February by a white father and son who armed themselves and pursued him as he ran through their neighborhood.The prosecutor, Jackie Johnson, refused to allow police officers who responded to arrest the two men, and two months passed before they were charged with felony murder and aggravated assault. As district attorney, Johnson had one of the most powerful jobs in the region’s justice system.District attorneys are rarely ousted, even if they have been accused of misconduct, according to the Washington Post, but a movement to remove them from office has gained steam because of Black Lives Matter.Sheriffs oustedIn a similar vein, South Carolina voters ousted 14 sheriffs after the local paper, the Post and Courier, exposed a series of unethical or potentially illegal behavior, leading to indictments against sitting sheriffs.Criminal justice advocates have encouraged voters to pay attention to local election races for district attorney and sheriffs, who can have an outsized influence on local law enforcement and are usually easily re-elected. And at a time when the local news business is struggling, South Carolina voters were able to respond to government misconduct thanks to the Post and Courier’s investigation.Drugs winIn the country which declared a “war on drugs” in 1971, it was decided on Wednesday that “drugs won” after a majority of voters in several states backed efforts to decriminalize or legalize some drugs. Four states voted to legalize recreational cannabis and two voted to legalize it for medical use.The most dramatic step was taken in Oregon, which decriminalized hard drugs such as cocaine, heroin, oxycodone and methamphetamine and legalized psychedelic mushrooms. Proponents hope the Oregon measures will reduce overdose deaths and racial disparities in drug sentencing and arrests.Another win for the Fight for $15Florida voters decided the state minimum wage should increase to $15 an hour over the next several years. The state’s current minimum wage is $8.56 and the approved ballot measure would increase it each year to hit $15 by September 2026. Workers will see the first increase next September, when it is raised to $10.A UC Berkeley study published last year said a $15-an-hour minimum wage helps reduce poverty and does not, as is often said, slash jobs in low-income areas.If you have 20 minutes to read about the nuances of the Fight for $15, read this. More

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      in US Politics

      Rudy Giuliani: from hero of 9/11 to leader of Trump's last stand

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      On election night, as it started to become clear that the presidency was slipping away from Donald Trump, his son-in-law and senior aide Jared Kushner was looking for a hero.He wanted someone like James Baker, the New York Times reported, the former White House chief of staff, Treasury secretary and secretary of state, who led George W Bush’s legal team during the Florida recount in 2000 in a role that won him praise as a strategic and diplomatic genius.He got Rudy Giuliani.A fortnight ago, Giuliani was angrily defending himself after a clip from the new Borat film showed him apparently fiddling with his crotch as he lay on the bed in a hotel room where he had gone for a drink with a young woman who was posing as a Kazakh television journalist. “I was tucking in my shirt,” he explained later. He denied any wrongdoing and described the footage as “complete fabrication”.Now the president’s personal attorney is accusing his opponents of being “an embarrassment to our reputation throughout the world” and leading Trump’s last stand, helming the legal effort to keep Joe Biden out of the White House.On Wednesday afternoon he tweeted that he was “en route to Philadelphia with legal team” to challenge what he called – without offering any evidence – “massive cheating”. Since then, six of his tweets have been flagged by Twitter as containing misleading information.At a press conference on Thursday, he gave a speech in which he claimed – again without providing evidence – that one person could have voted 100,000 times. Giuliani, with no neck and a pocket square, declared his interest in launching a nebulous “national lawsuit” to challenge the results. “Do you think we’re stupid?” he asked. “Do you think we’re fools?” His attempts to keep Trump in the White House, if they result in failure as most experts seem to think they will, may mark some sort of end point for the 76-year-old Giuliani, once a fearless criminal prosecutor and hero of 9/11 who few people disputed had earned his honorary knighthood and the title of America’s Mayor.Three months after the twin towers fell, he completed his term in New York and embarked on a highly lucrative career on the speaking circuit, commanding as much as $200,000 per engagement, for each of which his contract demanded transportation in the form of a private jet that “MUST BE a Gulfstream IV or bigger”. More

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      in Elections

      When will we know the US election result – and why the delay?

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      Donald Trump’s repeated claims to have won the US presidential election while votes remain to be counted have focused the spotlight once more on one of the big uncertainties of the 2020 race: when will we know the final result?
      It could take days, weeks or even months, depending on what happens.

      What usually happens?
      US presidential elections are not won by the national popular vote. The winner in each state collects its electoral college votes – and needs a total of 270 to take the White House.
      In most elections the result is clear – although not officially confirmed – by the end of the night. Major American media outlets “call” each state for one of the candidates. While not based on the final vote count, that projection is almost invariably accurate.
      This means an accurate tally of electoral college votes can be made and a winner declared. In 2016, that happened at 2.30am in Washington when Trump reached the required 270.
      Why is that not happening this time?
      Mainly because of the Covid-19 pandemic, large numbers of voters – about 68% of the total, compared with 34% in 2016 – cast their ballots early, including by post.
      Counting postal votes is slower because voter and witness signatures and addresses must be checked, and ballots smoothed out before being fed into counting machines. Some states start that verification process long before election day, meaning the count itself can get under way as soon as polls close.
      There was no early processing in multiple key battleground states this year, however, because Republican-led state legislatures refused urgent requests from local elections officials to pass new laws to allow extra time for ballot processing. Such a refusal in Pennsylvania produced enormous backlogs in cities such as Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, which has gone from counting about 6,000 mail-in ballots in 2016 to more than 350,000 this year.
      Which states are we talking about?
      Five states have yet to be called: Alaska, Georgia, Nevada, North Carolina and Pennsylvania. Several news organizations, including the Associated Press and Fox News’ decision desk, have called Arizona for Joe Biden. The Trump campaign is arguing, however, that call was made too early.
      Alaska will end up in the Republican column with near certainty.
      The race is extremely tight in Georgia. Biden pulled ahead of Trump by 1,097 votes on Friday morning, with 99% of votes reported, according to Edison.
      The Democratic challenger is ahead in Nevada, with only Democratic-leaning late postal ballots left to tally. But by state law, ballots postmarked on election day can be counted as long as they are received by 5pm on 10 November, which means counting in the state could continue through the weekend.
      In North Carolina, while Trump is the clear favourite, the state accepts postal ballots until 12 November – although that is expected to make little difference. State officials have said a full result would not be known until next week.
      Biden took the lead in Pennsylvania on Friday morning. He’s been winning the mail-in ballot counts by huge margins, and could very well take the state. Pennsylvania officials say they expect most votes will be counted by later on Friday.
      What else is complicating matters?
      Roughly half of all states will accept postal votes that arrive after election day as long as they carry a postmark of no later than 3 November, so postal delays may mean some ballots are not processed until days later: Pennsylvania has said results will not be considered complete until the deadline of Friday.
      There has also reportedly been an increase in the number of provisional ballots cast by people who asked for a postal vote but then decided to go to the polling station in person instead. These need careful checking to make sure no one has voted twice.

      The really big unknown: a disputed result
      In the 2000 race, the Democratic candidate, Al Gore, famously lost Florida by just more than 500 votes out of a total of nearly 6m, costing him the election. After a disputed recount and a supreme court ruling, George W Bush was declared the winner.
      More than 300 lawsuits have already been filed over alleged breaches of electoral law in the 2020 election, according to reports, and more can be expected over accusations of postal voting irregularities and changes to voting rules due to the pandemic.
      Trump and his campaign have this week already sued to halt vote-counting in Pennsylvania and Georgia (which have not yet been called by Associated Press) and Michigan, which the AP called for Biden. Judges in Georgia and Michigan quickly dismissed the campaign’s lawsuits on Thursday.
      Trump’s campaign has also requested a recount in Wisconsin, which AP called for Biden.
      There is no evidence the campaign’s legal challenges will have a bearing on the election result under the law. More

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      in World Politics

      How Will Joe Biden Mansplain His Mandate?

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      In a New York Times article that appeared just before this week’s interminable presidential cliff-hanger of an election, Lisa Lerer pondered how things might unfold after a Biden victory. She and the rest of the US punditry thought at the time that it might be decisive enough to define the future of the nation. Lerer cites Representative Pramila Jayapal’s speculation that Biden’s triumph could inaugurate an era of spectacular reform: “A White House victory would give Mr. Biden a mandate to push for more sweeping overhauls.”

      What Will a Post-Trump America Look Like?

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      As a member of the small group of progressives in the House of Representatives, Jayapal desperately wanted to promote the idea the Biden campaign hinted at months ago that would boldly step up to govern as a latter-day Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the president who changed American history and American capitalism with his New Deal in the 1930s. Jayapal supports the Green New Deal. The pundits had announced that the expected “blue wave” would reinforce the party’s majority in the House and give it control of the Senate. Whatever Biden ended up standing for, that reconfiguration of power implied a mandate for change.

      Here is today’s 3D definition:

      Mandate:

      The traditional idea, inherited from an earlier epoch of history, that has been emptied of content since that moment in the late 20th century when the science of political marketing determined that any promises made during campaigns would be designed for the sole purpose of inciting specific demographic groups to vote and have nothing to do with defining a viable legislative program.

      Contextual Note

      A little more than a year ago, The Daily Devil’s Dictionary, offered its initial definition of “mandate” in a different context. Referring to events in Israel at the time, we defined the word in these terms: “Permission to play the role as a legitimate authority even when legitimacy has never been clearly established.”

      Both today’s and last year’s definitions are valid, underlining the fact that vocabulary always derives its meaning from context. No dictionary definition can exhaust the full sense of what any item of vocabulary represents for real human beings. The very idea of a dictionary definition of any word should be seen as a myth. It may offer comfort to some parents and teachers, who can send children to a book they deem authoritative, but it is in contradiction with the reality of language.

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      What does that imply concerning the idea of a mandate in the days following this November’s historic US presidential election? In The Times article, Lisa Lerer went on to quote another Democratic politician, Henry Cuellar, a moderate from south Texas. Cuellar better reflects the rhetoric of the Biden campaign in its later stages and apparently expresses Lerer’s own sentiments: “If liberals had a mandate, then Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren would have won the primary. The mandate of the American public was to have somebody more to the center.”

      The Democratic Party under Biden proudly embraced the idea of pushing its agenda further to the center as the key to electoral success rather than wasting time on analyzing the needs of a nation in crisis and proposing remedies. In the later stages of the campaign, Biden insisted more strongly than ever on his credentials as a centrist by claiming, consistently with Cuellar’s remarks, that his greatest achievement in the primaries had been to defeat the socialist, Bernie Sanders. 

      That boast was something of an exaggeration. It wasn’t Biden who eliminated Sanders. In February, the “no malarkey” candidate was practically down and out, trailing in all the early primaries and penniless. That was until Barack Obama, working in the wings, stepped in to organize the defeat of Sanders, who had been riding a wave of momentum. Everything changed on the Monday before Super Tuesday. 

      As NBC News reported after the event, “there appears to be a quiet hand behind the rapid movement: former President Barack Obama.” He put pressure on the majority of remaining primary candidates to coalesce behind Biden. A month later, Glenn Thrush summed up the denouement of the primary fight in a New York Times article, noting how “with calibrated stealth, Obama has been considerably more engaged in the campaign’s denouement than has been previously revealed.”

      Historical Note

      After Super Tuesday, it was clear that Biden owed one to Obama, his former boss, who had not only ensured his survival but guaranteed his emergence as the “presumptive nominee,” a term that amused many commentators, who understood that though the primaries were not over, they had been “decided” by other people than the voters themselves. After overturning Sanders’ early momentum, could the idea take hold that Biden was a candidate with a mandate? As he hid in his basement during the lockdown and avoided the media, nobody could answer that question.

      Obama may have had his own idea of that mandate. It would be the Democratic version of “Make America Great Again.” The former greatness to be aspired to this time could be defined as simply a return to the Obama years, but with one singular innovation: masks to fend off the coronavirus.

      Beyond the triviality of hiding from contamination, the new Democratic agenda also meant turning the ship of state starboard to embrace the moderateness not just of mainstream Democrats and Obama loyalists, but also centrist Republicans. They called themselves anti-Trumpers and engineered The Lincoln Project. 

      The campaign’s essential and unique promise evolved into veering away from both Sanders populists on the left and Trump populists on the right. Instead of ideas for governing, it proposed a team of “trusted” political moderates, from Larry Summers to John Kasich, culled indifferently from the two dominant parties. When that is all a party can do, the very idea of trust becomes distorted and any hope of defining the terms of a mandate undermined.

      The Democrats long ago stopped trusting the voters. That may be why voters have stopped trusting Democrats. Even Kamala Harris failed to earn any trust from the voters in the primaries, although she was initially touted as the ideal Democratic candidate. She was one of the first to drop out of the race for fear of being humiliated in the actual primaries. The early primaries actually did show a movement toward trust on the part of the voters: Masses of voters expressed their trust in Sanders. It wasn’t so much trust of the man as trust in his ability to fashion a program that could define a mandate for the next president, whoever that might be. That changed as soon as Obama stepped in to restore order.

      Embed from Getty Images

      In his article on Fair Observer yesterday, “Can America Restore Its Democracy?” John Feffer wrote: “Unlike 2008, the Democrats will be hard-pressed this time to claim an overwhelming popular mandate after such a close election.” Even after a landslide victory and the conquest of the Senate, it is far from certain that Biden would have understood that the voters had given him a mandate for anything more than imposing the wearing of masks in public.

      The final irony is that, if confirmed, Biden will be the president to have culled the greatest number of votes in the history of the nation thanks to a record turnout of nearly 67% of eligible voters. That kind of enthusiasm to go out and vote — or, in times of pandemic, “stay in and vote” — should logically reflect an enthusiasm for a political program in times of crisis when serious change has become an absolute necessity. Not this time. Neither Trump nor Biden had anything to propose that could translate into a mandate to govern. Three days after the polls closed, we still don’t know who won in a contest between two candidates with nothing to offer. That tells us a lot about the state of US democracy today. 

      In an article in The Guardian, Columbia University Professor Adam Tooze assesses the obstacles in Biden’s path if he seeks to achieve anything Republican Senate majority leader might oppose. He concludes that “this election threatens to confirm and entrench the poisonous status quo.” In some sense, that makes Biden’s mandate easier. Like Obama, who quickly lost his congressional majorities, he will be able to say that it’s the Republicans who are preventing him from responding to the real needs of the people and a nation in crisis. And the status quo will carry on with business as usual.

      *[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      in Elections

      CNN’s John King and his ‘magic wall’ keep viewers entranced

      by

      As the US election has dragged on and people remain glued to their screens, a new type of celebrity has emerged: the results analyst. And none has been more popular than CNN’s John King.
      King, CNN’s chief national correspondent since 2005, has been a nearly constant presence for viewers, fronting the broadcaster’s “magic wall” tirelessly through the week.
      With the coronavirus pandemic leading to vastly more postal votes, which take longer to process than in-person ballots, analysts such as King and MSNBC’s Steve Kornacki have become the must-watch stars of the small screen. The Los Angeles Times has said King’s indefatigable efforts and insight have made him the election’s “MVP”.
      King, who said he managed just two-and-a-half hours’ sleep on election night and four hours on Wednesday, has fronted The Wall at every election since 2008. A giant interactive touchscreen that allows CNN anchors to see up-to-date voting detail by district and to analyse every possible voting permutation, The Wall has come into its own as this year’s vote count drags on.
      The 59-year old has fronted The Wall for 12- to 14-hour shifts on-screen, dissecting updates county by county and state by state, and informing viewers of the changing “pathways” for Donald Trump and Joe Biden to reach the 270 electoral votes needed to make it to the White House. More