The outcome of the 2020 election for the American presidency is clear. The Democratic ticket, headed by former Vice President Joe Biden and Senator Kamala Harris, is ahead in the key states of Nevada, Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Arizona. Biden does not need the electoral votes of all of them to put him over the 270 electoral votes he needs to win. It appears mathematically impossible for Trump suddenly to retake control of those states.
Tonight, with Harris beside him, Biden spoke to the nation. He acknowledged it is frustrating not to have a declared winner in the election, but urged people to be patient as election workers count every ballot: a process at the center of our democracy. He promised that he and Harris are already at work, receiving briefings on the coronavirus pandemic and the faltering economy, and that the country had its work cut out for it with those issues, along with climate change and systemic racism, but that we could solve them if we work together. Once again, he called for unity and promised to govern for everyone, not simply for those who had voted for him.
Biden had intended to make a victory speech, but the media seems oddly reluctant to call the election. That reluctance is odd enough that people are speculating as to why, suggesting that media administrators are afraid of the president’s fury or eager to milk the cliff-hanger situation for viewers. My own guess is that, with the president lashing out at what he insists without evidence is a fraudulent election, they are determined to have all the votes counted before making a final call.
For Trump is, indeed, lashing out: at his lawyers, his aides, election officials, and his opponents. He is allegedly having a hard time believing he lost. Trump’s supporters are also having a hard time believing he lost. A top campaign official used his own texting company to send out thousands of text messages telling supporters that the Democrats were stealing the election and urging them to rally in Philadelphia to protest. Two heavily armed men drove from Virginia and showed up Wednesday to attack the counting center in the city.
This election was not particularly close, but pundits warn that the fact that 70 million Americans voted for Trump and 74 million and counting voted for Biden shows that we live in two very different Americas, and that, for all his talk of unity, Biden will have a hard time finding common ground with Trump supporters.
Pundits suggest that the two different political ideologies in America are about values and principles, but it actually seems that the primary difference between the two camps is between those who are living in a fictional world, created by generations of right-wing media, and those who are living in the real world, the so-called “reality-based community.” According to political historian Rick Perlstein, a scholar of the right, talk radio host Rush Limbaugh has been telling listeners that Democrats have stolen the election, and urging his listeners to abandon the Republican establishment, which did not sufficiently back Trump.
Entertainment personality Alex Jones is more extreme. He showed up to the Maricopa County, Arizona, counting center, where he told the crowd that “The Bidens are Communist Chinese agents” and urged listeners to fight “those scumbag Nazi bastards.” Jones owns a far-right conspiracy theory website aptly named InfoWars. According to an article by Veit Medick in Der Spiegel, about two-thirds of his income comes from the merchandise he sells to combat the conspiracies he talks about.
The Republicans’ alternative reality is quite literally deadly. Although 82% of Trump voters believe the pandemic is at least somewhat under control, today America had more than 122,000 new infections, and more than 1100 people died. An analysis by the Associated Press shows that 93% of the 376 counties with the highest numbers of coronavirus cases per capita voted for Trump. That deadliness might, in the end, create common ground with the Democrats who urge mask wearing and social distancing. “I think there’s the potential for things to get less charged and divisive,” Dr. Marcus Plescia of the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials told the AP.
Addressing the right-wing media’s construction of a false narrative for its supporters seems crucial to restoring sanity to the country’s politics. How that might play out is unclear, in part because Trump’s extremism seems to be driving a wedge into the right-wing ecosystem. Limbaugh and Jones are following Trump, but QAnon, which promised that Trump and the military were in control and that Trump would ride to victory, is suddenly adrift. Believers thought he would bring “The Storm,” which would destroy the pedophile-cannibals in the Democratic Party. But now, Trump is losing and “Q” went silent after the election until tonight, when it simply told followers to stay strong.
In contrast to Trump’s true believers, Rupert Murdoch’s media empire is turning on the president. The New York Post is dismissing the Trump family’s claims of a fake election, and the Fox News Channel was the first to call Arizona for Biden on Tuesday, undercutting Trump’s ability to claim a premature victory.
Tonight, looking directly at the camera, Laura Ingraham gave a monologue on her Fox News Channel show about how Trump should leave the White House with grace and become a party kingmaker for the future. Ingraham appeared to be talking to Trump supporters, but it was clear she was talking directly to Trump himself.
Joe Biden overtook President Trump in the vote count from Pennsylvania around 9 a.m. Eastern as ballots continue to be counted from in and around Philadelphia. The race remains too close to call, but the Keystone State’s 20 electoral votes would put the Democratic nominee over the top. Earlier Friday morning, Biden also took a very narrow lead in Georgia as areas around Atlanta and Savannah reported results. A few thousand overseas, military and provisional ballots will determine whether the former vice president becomes the first Democrat to carry the Peach State since 1992.
The Secret Service is ramping up protection for Biden in anticipation that he will declare victory and may soon be considered the president-elect. A squad of agents was deployed overnight to Wilmington, Del., to reinforce the bubble around Biden after his campaign alerted the agency that he could make a major speech later today.
Against this backdrop, elected Republicans can be grouped into three categories: Those who embrace Trump’s baseless claims of election fraud, those who embolden him by staying silent and those who defend the integrity of the American system by speaking out. Right now, that last group is the smallest.
This is a testament to the degree to which most Republican lawmakers continue to live in fear of drawing Trump’s ire, even as many privately expect him to lose. The pervasive feeling on Capitol Hill is that neither Trump nor Trumpism will go away, even if Biden becomes president in January. Few ambitious Republicans have been willing to risk getting crosswise with the president’s diehard supporters, and none of them want to be on the receiving end of a Twitter jeremiad.
A handful of the usual suspects put out strongly worded statements Thursday night after Trump assailed the vote-counting process as systematically corrupt and rigged against him in a grievance-filled speech from the White House briefing room that fact checkers are calling the most dishonest of his presidency.
Fox News host Sean Hannity asked Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) whether Pennsylvania’s GOP-controlled legislature should “invalidate” the results and hold a “do-over” election. “Look, that’s exactly right,” Cruz replied. “Now, that’s a big cannon to use. I can tell you during Bush v. Gore we were having very explicit conversations about that.”
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) told Hannity that he is donating $500,000 from what’s left in his reelection campaign coffers to Trump's legal defense fund. Asked about invalidating the election results and having the legislature award Pennsylvania’s electoral votes to Trump, Graham told Hannity: “Everything should be on the table.”
Graham’s announcement about chipping in half a million bucks to back the president’s legal challenges to the results came a few hours after Donald Trump Jr. criticized him. Someone on Twitter had accused Graham of being silent, and the president’s eldest son tweeted back, “No one is surprised.”
Trump Jr. also tweeted Thursday at 3:48 p.m.: “The total lack of action from virtually all of the ‘2024 GOP hopefuls’ is pretty amazing. They have a perfect platform to show that they’re willing & able to fight but they will cower to the media mob instead.” (Eric Trump also tweeted: “Where is the GOP?! Our voters will never forget.”)
Trump Jr., who has encouraged speculation in recent weeks that he wants to run for president in 2024, followed up on his initial post to thank two Republicans. At 3:50 p.m., Trump Jr. added that “one notable exception seems to be Ron DeSantis.” The president’s eldest son said Florida’s GOP governor “has been active and vocal.”
The implicit threat from Trump’s team is that he will come after Republicans who don’t have his back right now. “If you want to win in 2024 as a Republican,” former Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale tweeted, “I would probably start saying something. Just saying.”
In a 2016 interview with The Washington Post, Trump said: “Real power is, I don’t even want to use the word, ‘Fear.’”
This Machiavellian view – that it is better to be feared than loved – has been a hallmark of his governing style. Trump has scared his adopted party into submission by being willing to go after apostates. The departures of independent-minded conservative senators like Jeff Flake from Arizona and Bob Corker from Tennessee had a chilling effect on those who remained.
Each time Trump has avoided any consequences for norm-busting or worse, whether the Ukraine affair or the 10 episodes of possible obstruction of justice outlined in special counsel Bob Mueller’s report, he has appeared to become more emboldened to keep pushing the limits to see how much he can get away with.
If Trump loses, it seems a safe bet that he will at the very least encourage speculation that he might run again in 2024 to set up a rematch with Biden. And he could spend his days throwing spitballs from Trump Tower.
In a striking editorial decision, the country’s three leading television news networks cut away from Trump’s misinformation-heavy address. NBC, ABC and CBS all initially aired the White House briefing before cutting away to scrutinize his false claims, per Jeremy Barr. On CNBC, former Fox News anchor Shepard Smith also cut off the president, saying, “There has not been one scintilla of truth in anything he has said.” CNN contributor Rick Santorum, a former GOP senator from Pennsylvania, said: “I hope that Republicans will stand up at this moment and say to Trump what needs to be said.”
ABC News contributor Chris Christie was the most prominent Trump ally to publicly decry the president’s speech. “If you’re gonna say those things from behind the podium at the White House, it’s his right to do it … but show us the evidence,” the former New Jersey governor told George Stephanopoulos. “We heard nothing today about any evidence. This kind of thing, all it does is inflame without. And we cannot permit inflammation without information.”
Judges in two states reject Trump campaign lawsuits.
“In Georgia, a local judge in Chatham County, home of Savannah, denied the Trump campaign’s effort to disqualify about 50 ballots that a Republican poll watcher claimed may have arrived after the 7 p.m. deadline on Election Day. In court, the poll watcher offered no evidence that the ballots had arrived late, and county election officials testified that they had arrived on time. And in Michigan, a Court of Claims judge said she would deny the campaign’s request for an emergency halt to the counting of votes in the state. She noted that the request made little sense, given that the counting has essentially been finished in the state, with Biden ahead by about 150,000 votes,” Amy Gardner, Jon Swaine, Michelle Ye Hee Lee and Emma Brown report.
“Meanwhile, the Trump campaign announced its intent to file a lawsuit in another state where counting is continuing apace: Nevada. At a chaotic news conference in Las Vegas, campaign officials said that they plan to file a suit in federal court to stop the counting of what they called ‘improper votes.’ [They offered no evidence.] … The campaign also joined in a lawsuit against Maricopa County, home of Phoenix, claiming that large numbers of Republican ballots were invalidated after voters used Sharpie pens to mark their choices. … The Maricopa County attorney’s office wrote to the state attorney general’s office Thursday saying that no ballots were rejected at the county’s voting centers. …
“The president’s allies touted a minor legal victory in Pennsylvania, where a state appeals court on Thursday allowed GOP poll watchers to observe the counting of ballots from six feet away. … The Trump team is engaged in half a dozen lawsuits in Pennsylvania, including those seeking to halt the counting of a small number of mail ballots whose voters were given the opportunity to correct errors. A new suit filed late Thursday seeks to disqualify 600 ballots in Montgomery County that had no secrecy envelopes as required by law. The president sought to intervene in a Pennsylvania case already filed at the U.S. Supreme Court seeking to reverse a state court’s decision to extend the deadline for receiving mail ballots from 8 p.m. on Election Day to 5 p.m. Friday.”
“The legal team driving the efforts under the leadership of deputy campaign manager Justin Clark includes longtime Trump loyalists and the president’s personal attorneys. Among them: Jay Sekulow, the conservative lawyer who defended the president during the special counsel probe and the impeachment process, and William Consovoy, an experienced Supreme Court litigator who has led the efforts in New York courts to withhold the president’s tax returns from investigators,” Rosalind Helderman, Josh Dawsey and Elise Viebeck report. “In public, the legal maneuvers are being touted by some of the president’s most combative and unpredictable allies, including former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski and Richard Grenell, Trump’s former acting director of national intelligence, as well as by Trump’s son Eric, an executive at his father’s development company, and former Florida attorney general Pam Bondi.”
Trump is pulling out a playbook perfected by Russian President Vladimir Putin and other authoritarians.
“It relies on sowing doubt about the institutions of law and government, spreading misinformation or outright lies that serve a leader’s political ends, and relying on a cadre of loyal supporters to believe what they are told, Putin scholars said. Trump’s attempts to brand legal election practices as fraud and to use the courts — one pillar in the nation’s democratic architecture — to intervene in the counting of votes — another pillar — are the latest examples of what has long been his malleable view of the democratic system,” Anne Gearan reports. "Like Putin, Trump takes a selective approach to the rule of law that shifts to suit his perceived advantage, said Georgetown University professor Angela Stent, author of ‘Putin’s World: Russia Against the West and with the Rest.’ …
“Consistency is irrelevant to Putin and other authoritarians accustomed to controlling the levers of government by diktat, said Evelyn Farkas, a senior Defense Department specialist on Russia and its region under [President Barack] Obama. … Trump has similarly conditioned his supporters to accept his claims at face value, Farkas said, or to regard some of his outlandish suggestions as entertainment. ‘Cherry-picking your facts,’ isn’t a new idea with Trump, Farkas said. ‘He did learn something from Putin.’”
An angry dispute erupts among House Democrats.
Centrist members blasted their liberal colleagues during a private conference call, which lasted more than three hours, for pushing far-left views that cost the party at least half a dozen seats. “The explanation laid out by centrists, according to multiple people who were on the call and spoke on the condition of anonymity, is that Republicans were easily able to paint them all as socialists and radical leftists who endorse far-left positions such as defunding the police,” Rachael Bade and Erica Werner report. “‘We need to not ever use the word ‘socialist’ or ‘socialism’ ever again. . . . We lost good members because of that,’ Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D-Va.), who narrowly leads in her reelection bid, said heatedly. ‘If we are classifying Tuesday as a success … we will get f---ing torn apart in 2022.’ … Rep. Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, a Florida Democrat who suffered an unexpected loss to a Republican challenger, argued through tears that the party’s infighting on Twitter needs to stop.
"Liberals, meanwhile, fired back. Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), co-chairman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, argued that Democrats shouldn’t single out people and ideas that energize the party base. Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), a self-described democratic socialist, grew angry, accusing her colleagues of only being interested in appealing to White people in suburbia. ‘To be real, it sounds like you are saying stop pushing for what Black folks want,’ she said. Democrats are poised to hold the smallest majority in 18 years, undercutting [Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s] leverage. … During the call, Pelosi sought to reassure her members that the election wasn’t as bad as it seemed. … Majority Whip James E. Clyburn (D-S.C.), however, cautioned that if Democrats run on socialized medicine and defunding the police, ‘we’re not going to win’ those races. …
Democrats could win Senate control with two Georgia runoffs on Jan. 5.
“As the dust settled on almost every race, Republicans have secured 48 seats in next year’s Senate and hold steady leads in two other contests but need to win at least one of the two races in Georgia to land a clear majority of 51 seats,” Paul Kane reports. “That leaves Democrats, with a caucus of 48 senators so far, one last chance to reclaim the majority by trying to secure a double victory in what used to be a conservative Republican stronghold. If successful, and if Biden secures the White House, the 50-50 Senate would tilt to the Democrats once Harris is sworn in as vice president. … All four campaigns, and their various outside supporters, expect to try to nationalize the race and focus their messaging on the impact that victories could have for each side, with Democrats trying to achieve a historically high Black turnout normally associated with a presidential race.
“Raphael Warnock, seeking to become the first elected Black Democratic senator from the Deep South, faces Sen. Kelly Loeffler (R) in a race that was long expected to go to a runoff because it is a special election to fill the remainder of the term won four years ago by Johnny Isakson (R). Loeffler was appointed to the seat after Isakson resigned for health reasons at the end of last year. But by Thursday afternoon the state got the double-bonus when Sen. David Perdue (R), running for a second term, fell below the 50 percent threshold that is required by Georgia law to win a Senate race. If his share of the vote remains below that marker, Perdue would face Democrat Jon Ossoff, a documentary filmmaker running his first statewide race. Ossoff’s campaign expressed confidence even as Perdue was likely to finish this round about two percentage points ahead. … Republicans are ready to paint the races as securing a GOP majority to shore up the conservative bulwark against liberal Democrats, particularly if there is an incoming Biden administration.”
The polls fell short again this year, raising red flags for future contests.
“Democrats endured the second polling shock in four years, with election returns frequently coming in more favorable to Trump than in public surveys, in some cases outside the margin of error,” Michael Scherer reports. “The underestimation of Trump’s turnout and support in many places, after similar issues in 2016, has raised again questions about the reliance of campaigns, the press and the public on surveys to shape the race. … Although the degree of polling misses is not yet clear as states continue to count mail-in ballots, a review of polling in 10 key states with more than 85 percent of the vote counted finds that public polls underestimated Trump’s vote margin by about 4.5 percentage points on average, similar to the size of errors in key states four years ago."
Small protests flare as tensions grow over the count.
“Various groups across the country pledged to continue protests outside ballot-counting locations in Phoenix, Philadelphia, Las Vegas, Atlanta and Detroit,” Robert Klemko, Hannah Knowles, Mark Berman and Abigail Hauslohner report. “On Thursday evening, a text message circulated in the Philadelphia area urging Trump supporters to demonstrate in front of the city’s downtown convention center, where ballots were still being tallied. ‘Radical Liberals & Dems are trying to steal this election from Trump!’ the text read … In the early evening, a couple hundred Trump supporters gathered at the Clark County Election Headquarters in Las Vegas, waving American flags and carrying ‘Trump 2020’ banners. They held signs reading ‘Don’t steal my vote’ and ‘Count all Legal Votes.'"
The U.S. economy added 638,000 jobs in October, the latest sign that the economic recovery has slowed compared to earlier in the summer. The unemployment rate fell to 6.9 from 7.9 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Meanwhile, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said the pace of the economic recovery is slowing and cautioned that the surge in cases is “particularly concerning.” (Eli Rosenberg)
Health care is strained across America.
“Nationally, the mortality rate from covid-19 has declined, in part because doctors have learned to use medications such as the steroid dexamethasone and techniques such as proning — laying patients on their stomachs to ease their ability to breathe. But increases in deaths lag behind rises in the case count by several weeks. Authorities expect that to occur again in November and December, and mortality rates could rise if hospitals are overwhelmed,” Lenny Bernstein, Joel Achenbach, Alexandra Hinojosa and Carolyn Johnson report. “Janis M. Orlowski, chief health-care officer for the Association of American Medical Colleges, said ‘in those areas where there’s an explosion, like Utah, like Nebraska, like in the Dakotas, like Colorado, we are seeing what we saw in the South at the end of the spring and the beginning of the summer. . . . The hospitals are overrun. There are no ICU beds.’ Health-care workers are taking off work because they are sick, burned out or have child-care problems, she said. … One bright spot is the effort to develop vaccines and therapeutics, which continues to plow ahead at a record pace, though neither will be widely available soon enough to blunt the surge of cases this winter. Two companies, Eli Lilly & Co. and Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, have developed laboratory-brewed antibody drugs that show promise in protecting recently infected people from developing severe disease.”