Supreme Court Shuts Door On Trump Election Prospects

 

NPR

NINA TOTENBERG

BARBARA SPRUNT

The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday night rejected an eleventh hour challenge to Joe Biden's election as president. The court's action came in a one-page order, which said the complaint was denied "for lack of standing."

"Texas has not demonstrated a judicially cognizable interest in the manner in which another State conducts its elections," the court wrote.

Justice Samuel Alito, joined by Justice Clarence Thomas, wrote that in their view the court does "not have discretion to deny the filing of a bill of complaint in a case that falls within our original jurisdiction."

"I would therefore grant the motion to file the bill of complaint but would not grant other relief, and I express no view on any other issue," Alito wrote.

On Tuesday, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sued four states where Biden had been certified the winner: Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. The suit, filed directly in the Supreme Court, was styled as "an original" case, pitting one state against another.

Paxton claimed that the targeted states made changes to election procedures due to the pandemic that violated federal law. He alleged the changes enabled voter fraud. And he asked the Supreme Court to extend the Dec. 14 deadline for the Electoral College electors to cast ballots in those four states, contending that more time was needed to allow investigations of the election results.

Paxton's suit came in the face of repeated findings by state officials, including Republican state officeholders, certifying the results as well as statements by U.S. Attorney General William Barr that the Justice Department did not find evidence of widespread fraud in this year's election.

The Texas suit set in motion a cascade of legal motions at the high court. Not only did President Trump seek to join the Texas suit, so did 17 other states — all overwhelmingly won by Trump. More support would follow, including a brief filed by a majority of the GOP members of the U.S. House of Representatives.

Late Thursday the four targeted states struck back in briefs filed in the Supreme Court.

"Texas invites this court to overthrow the votes of the American people and choose the next president of the United States," wrote Georgia Attorney General Christopher Carr, chairman of the Republican Attorneys General Association. "That Faustian invitation must be firmly rejected," he said.

"Georgia did what the Constitution empowered it to do," the state's brief said. It "implemented processes for the election, administered the election in the face of logistical challenges brought on by Covid-19, and confirmed and certified the election results — again and again and again. Yet Texas has sued Georgia anyway."

Pennsylvania was equally acerbic. "The court should not abide this seditious abuse of judicial process, and should send a clear and unmistakable signal that that abuse must never be replicated," it said in its brief. And Wisconsin said the Texas bid "to nullify [Wisconsin's] choice [for president] is devoid of a legal foundation or factual basis."

It was unclear how or why Paxton, the Texas attorney general, decided to carry Trump's water in the case. Especially since all four targeted states have Republican-controlled legislatures, and to date, both state and federal courts at lower levels, including Trump-appointed judges, have found the fraud allegations baseless.

The unprecedented nature of the Paxton suit, plus the fact that the state's chief appellate lawyer, Kyle Hawkins, did not sign the Texas brief as he usually would do, has spurred speculation that Paxton is seeking a pardon. He is currently under indictment over securities fraud, and is being investigated by the FBI on bribery and abuse of power allegations.

Although the Supreme Court has jurisdiction over disputes between states, such cases are rare, and are almost exclusively confined to disputes that can't be handled by other courts, such as those over borders or water rights.

Earlier this week, the Supreme Court rejected an effort to block Pennsylvania from certifying its election results in favor of Biden. Trump distanced himself from the legal blow and hitched his wagon instead to the Texas lawsuit, calling it "the case that everyone has been waiting for."

Trump reportedly had conversations with some of the Republican attorneys general who were meeting this week in Washington, urging them to support the Texas lawsuit. And several news organization reported that Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, had agreed to represent Trump in the event the Supreme Court had agreed to hear the case.

Initial reaction to the Texas suit, however, has been dismissive at best. Sen. John Cornyn of Texas told CNN that he "frankly struggle[d] to understand the legal theory" of the suit, noting that election disputes in our system are "decided at the state and local level and not at the national level."

The Texas suit had other problems. First is the question of legal standing. Essentially, how do Texas, or the states joining it, have legal standing to complain about the procedures for voting and counting votes in other states?

Next, the Texas lawsuit asked the Supreme Court to delay the vote in four targeted states, but as professor Edward Foley of the Moritz College of Law, observes, the date for electors to cast their votes is set by federal law, under the Constitution, which requires that the day "shall be the same throughout the United States."

The date chosen by Congress this year is Dec. 14.

Rick Hasen, an election law expert at the University of California, Irvine, called Paxton's lawsuit "dangerous garbage."

"This is a press release masquerading as a lawsuit," he wrote.

"It's too late for the Supreme Court to grant a remedy even if the claims were meritorious (they are not)," he wrote.

Benjamin Ginsburg, a longtime election law guru for the Republican Party, told CNN Wednesday that he didn't think "for an instant" that the Supreme Court would consider taking up the case.

That said, with three Trump appointees on the court, and a newly strengthened 6-to-3 majority of very conservative Republican-appointed justices, Trump apparently believed that the Supreme Court would view the case differently than did "election experts" and Republican officials in the targeted states.

Giuliani released from hospital after getting coronavirus treatments many are dying without

WASHINGTON POST DAILY 202

Wednesday was one of the deadliest days in American history, as the coronavirus killed 3,140 people. This is 673 more Americans than the Japanese massacred in their sneak attack on Pearl Harbor. It is more than twice the number of souls as perished aboard the Titanic.

In another record, 106,000 Americans are currently hospitalized with covid-19. President Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, is no longer among them. He flashed reporters a thumbs-up as he was driven away from MedStar Georgetown University Hospital at around 5 p.m. on Wednesday.

“Back 100% and lost little time,” Giuliani tweeted this morning.

The former New York mayor said he received remdesivir, dexamethasone and “exactly the same” treatment that Trump got in October when he was hospitalized, which the president has often credited for his speedy recovery.

“The minute I took the cocktail yesterday, I felt 100 percent better,” Giuliani said in a Tuesday afternoon interview with WABC, a New York talk radio station. “It works very quickly. Wow! … By the next morning, I felt like I was 10 years younger.”

As beds fill up, patients who need hospital care — for the virus or for something else — cannot get it. 
Many intensive care units are overwhelmed. More and more places face looming, life-and-death decisions about rationing care.

Giuliani himself acknowledged that he got “celebrity” treatment. He said the president’s doctor, apparently referring to White House physician Sean Conley, talked him into being admitted. “I didn’t really want to go to the hospital, and he said, ‘Don’t be stupid,’” Giuliani recounted. “We can get it over with in three days if we send you to the hospital.”

But the VIP treatment for Trump and his crew, including access to the best cocktails of experimental drugs, seems like an important part of the explanation for why the president and his inner-circle continue to speak so flippantly about the dangers of the virus that has now killed at least 288,000 Americans.It is not unique to this era that the rich and well-connected have better access to the highest-quality care than ordinary folks. Our system has long been hideously unequal. It is acutely bad for communities of color.

Ben Carson speaks at a rally for President Trump on Oct. 30 in Michigan. A week later, the HUD secretary announced he tested positive for the coronavirus. (John Moore/Getty Images)

The antibody drugs are complicated to make because they are created by live cells. “The manufacturing process can’t be rushed. And the drugs must be administered intravenously, creating challenges for health facilities that must set up separate infusion centers so patients with cancer and autoimmune disorders aren’t exposed to people who are infected,” Laurie McGinley and Josh Dawsey report. “Carson, Christie and Trump all got the drugs under ‘expanded access’ programs before they were authorized by the Food and Drug Administration. Health experts worried their experiences would give Americans the wrong impression about the drugs’ availability. …

“Several other people in Trump’s orbit also have had covid-19 and were offered help getting access to the drugs. One adviser who contracted the virus said the president offered to get the Regeneron drug for him. ‘It’ll make you better overnight,’ the president said,” per McGinley and Dawsey. “After the president’s hospitalization, some advisers also warned him against speaking about the coronavirus as if it were a small inconvenience after he had benefited from experimental drugs unavailable to others. Trump’s response was that he wanted to make a video telling the American people that they’d get the drugs, too, though the White House had no ability to ramp up production.”

Comedian Jimmy Kimmel poked fun at Giuliani during his monologue on ABC, but then he got serious: “Why aren’t we madder about the fact that Rudy and Donnie and Jr. and all the swamp monsters pretending to be human are getting a special miracle cure nobody else seems to be able to get?”

---------------------------

• The number of new unemployment claims rose sharply to 853,000 last week, an increase of 137,000 from the week before, another sign of the toll the pandemic is taking on the labor market. An additional 427,600 claims were filed for Pandemic Unemployment Assistance, the program for gig and self-employed workers. (Eli Rosenberg)

------------------------

Hunter Biden confirms he is under federal investigation. 

“Federal prosecutors have been investigating Hunter Biden, President-elect Joe Biden’s son, to determine if he failed to report income from China-related business deals, according to people familiar with the matter — a politically explosive probe that is likely to challenge the Justice Department in the incoming administration,” Matt Zapotosky, Devlin Barrett and Colby Itkowitz report. “The investigation into the president-elect’s son began in 2018, though little could be learned immediately about what, if any, wrongdoing it had found. The existence of a tax investigation was confirmed Wednesday by Hunter Biden in a statement saying he had just been advised of it. … FBI agents had been seeking to talk to Hunter Biden as part of the case on Tuesday — though an interview has not yet been scheduled or taken place — as well as serve subpoenas on Hunter Biden and his associates. …

“Although the investigation has been ongoing for some time, it is unclear how far along prosecutors consider themselves toward building a criminal case or closing the matter … A person familiar with the case said that the investigation continued during the election year but that agents took care not to take overt investigative steps as voting neared that would have made it more widely known. Those precautions, the person said, became unnecessary once the election was over. If the investigation is continuing when Joe Biden takes office, it will mark a major test for him and his attorney general. … 

“Rep. Ken Buck (R-Colo.) quickly called for a special counsel investigation of Hunter Biden. … If Barr does not appoint a special counsel, Joe Biden’s attorney general could face pressure to do so, to help ensure the probe’s independence. Any special counsel would still answer to the attorney general. Another possibility would be for the current Delaware U.S. attorney to remain in that job to continue the Hunter Biden investigation. … A person familiar with the Hunter Biden investigation said it ‘is not connected to the attacks the Trump campaign and their allies made against Hunter during the campaign.’”

• Hunter Biden statement: “I take this matter very seriously but I am confident that a professional and objective review of these matters will demonstrate that I handled my affairs legally and appropriately.” 
• Biden transition team statement: “President-elect Biden is deeply proud of his son, who has fought through difficult challenges, including the vicious personal attacks of recent months, only to emerge stronger.” 

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON 

Today more than half of the Republicans in the House of Representatives signed onto Texas’s lawsuit asking the Supreme Court to overturn the results of the 2020 election and install Trump, rather than the legitimately elected Joe Biden, into the White House.

The story is this: Texas’s Attorney General Ken Paxton is asking the Supreme Court to hear an original case between the states—which it can do, but it’s rare—arguing that Texas was harmed by voting procedures in Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. Essentially, Paxton is arguing that mail-in voting in those states, which Democrats used more extensively than Republicans did after Trump insisted it was insecure, stepped on Texans’ rights. This will be a hard sell.

It is possible—likely, even—that Paxton is advancing this nonsense because he has been under indictment since 2015 for securities fraud, is now under investigation by the FBI for bribery and abuse of office, and is hoping to impress Trump enough to get a presidential pardon. Just today, the FBI issued at least one subpoena for records from Paxton’s office. Knowing that this lawsuit has virtually no chance of winning, he could file it and win points with Trump while also knowing it would go nowhere.

States have squared off on both sides of Paxton’s lawsuit. Last night, seventeen other states supported the suit to hand the election to Trump, including Missouri, Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, and West Virginia. Later, Arizona joined them.

Twenty-three Democratic-led states and territories, along with the Republican Attorney General of Ohio, Dave Yost, today signed a brief supporting the four states Texas is attacking. The District of Columbia, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Guam, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia, U.S. Virgin Islands, and Washington all backed the states whose votes Texas is trying to throw out.

But six states—Missouri, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Utah—joined Texas’s lawsuit today. Pennsylvania’s brief notes that Trump has “flooded” the courts “with frivolous lawsuits aimed at disenfranchising large swaths of voters and undermining the legitimacy of the election.” The brief warns, “Texas’s effort to get this Court to pick the next President has no basis in law or fact. The Court should not abide this seditious abuse of the judicial process, and should send a clear and unmistakable signal that such abuse must never be replicated.”

What on earth is going on?

First: Trump is throwing at the wall anything he can in hopes of staying in office. The more chaos it creates, the happier he is. The lawsuit crisis has, for example, muted the story that at least 2,923 Americans died today of Covid-19, and 223,570 cases were reported, a 28% increase in the weekly average of cases since two weeks ago.

It has also diverted attention from the fact that there is no deal, and no real sign of a deal, on a coronavirus relief bill. A bipartisan group of senators has managed to hammer out a $908 billion deal but Republicans refuse to allow its $160 billion for aid to state and local governments and Democrats refuse to agree to shield businesses from liability for coronavirus injuries. The bipartisan group tried to put the two things together, but Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell says that’s a non-starter. Meanwhile, 26 million Americans say they don’t have enough to eat.

Second: There is a war underway for control of the Republican Party. While a losing incumbent president usually loses influence in the party, Trump intends to continue to call the shots. He wants to run again in 2024, or at least to anoint a successor, rather than letting the Republican National Committee pick a presidential candidate. There is a struggle going on to control the RNC and, as well, to figure out who gets control of the lists of supporters Trump has compiled. Trump also controls a lot of the party’s money, since he has been out front as its fundraiser without a break since he decided to run for office. He was the first president ever to file for reelection on the day of his inauguration, permitting him to hold “rallies” and to raise money throughout his presidency.

So Republican lawmakers are willing to swear loyalty to him, either because they want to attract his voters in future elections, or because they want access to the cash he can raise, or both. They no longer defend traditional policy positions; they defend Trump.

This loyalty requires contortions. In Georgia, Republicans David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, have backed it. The senators are facing a runoff election in January against Democrat challengers Jon Ossoff and the Reverend Raphael Warnock, and they need Trump’s support. So they are taking a stand against their own voters, despite the fact that this position logically would overturn their own elections.

Texas AG Sues 6 States Over their Voting Regs in Attempt to Overturn Election

 

HAETHER COX RICHARDSON

Today’s big story remains the loss of our neighbors to Covid-19. Today, our official death count passed the number of those killed in the 9-11 attacks. On that horrific day in 2001, we lost 2977 people to four terrorist attacks. Today, official reports showed 3,140 deaths from Covid-19, the highest single-day toll so far. Hospitals are overwhelmed, our health care workers exhausted.

As the country suffers, Trump has launched a new approach in his attempt to steal the 2020 election. While he has previously insisted that he actually won, and that his “win” must be recognized, this morning he tweeted simply “OVERTURN.” Republican leaders have ducked the question of Trump’s refusal to acknowledge Joe Biden’s win in the election by saying that the president has a right to challenge an election through legal means. Few of them commented on this new attack on our democracy.

Instead, the Republican attorneys general of seventeen states supported a lawsuit Texas has asked the Supreme Court’s permission to file against Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, suing them over their voting processes. A majority of voters in those four states voted for Biden, thus giving him their state’s electoral votes and the presidency. The states that want to sue are all Republican-majority states. They are hoping they can get the Supreme Court to allow them to sue, and that it will then agree with their complaint and throw out the votes from those states so the Republican legislatures there can then choose their own electors and give the win to Trump.

Astonishingly, this argument comes from the party that claims to oppose “judicial activism.”

The states that have declared their support for Texas’s lawsuit are: Missouri, Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, and West Virginia. They are essentially asking the Supreme Court to disfranchise the majority in the United States and to let them put their chosen president in the White House. This assault on American principles is breathtaking.

Trump has also filed a motion to join Texas’s lawsuit in his personal capacity as a presidential candidate. His lawyer says that he “seeks to have the votes cast in the Defendant States unlawfully for his opponent to be deemed invalid.” Tonight, at a White House Hanukkah party, Trump told the crowd that with the help of “certain very important people, if they have wisdom and if they have courage, we are going to win this election.” The attendees chanted “four more years.”

Legal experts say this case is a non-starter. University of Texas Law Professor Steve Vladeck writes, “It is lacking in actual evidence; it is deeply cynical; it evinces stunning disrespect for both the role of the courts in our constitutional system and of the states in our elections; and it is doomed to fail.”

But the fact that Republican leaders have accepted, rather than condemned, this attempt to overturn a legitimate election says they are willing to destroy American democracy in order to stay in power. On CNN tonight, former Ohio Governor John Kasich, a Republican himself, called the lawmakers supporting Trump’s attack on democracy “morally and ethically bankrupt.”

Republicans might be stoking attacks on our electoral system because they know the courts will shut them down. After all, Trump’s lawyers are currently 1-51 in court, and it is unlikely the Supreme Court will take up Texas’s lawsuit. So siding with Trump is a cheap way for leaders to avoid alienating his voters when they will want those voters in 2022.

But they are playing a deeply cynical and wildly dangerous game. Yesterday, the official Twitter account of the Arizona Republican Party asked followers if they were willing to die to overturn the election, then posted a clip from the film “Rambo” in which the main character is threatening someone’s life, saying “This is what we do, who we are. Live for nothing, or die for something.”

Today, talk show host Rush Limbaugh told his listeners that they are, in fact, still a majority but they are plagued with “RINOs” who are selling them out. “I actually think that we’re trending toward secession,” he said. “I see more and more people asking what in the world do we have in common with the people who live in, say, New York? What is there that makes us believe that there is enough of us there to even have a chance at winning New York? Especially if you’re talking about votes….” (New York City has more people than 40 of the 50 states.) He went on: “There cannot be a peaceful coexistence of two completely different theories of life, theories of government, theories of how we manage our affairs. We can’t be in this dire a conflict without something giving somewhere along the way.”

The theme of civil war, and of America tearing itself apart, was one pushed hard by Russian operatives in 2018. On Twitter, “Civil War” trended today. An actual civil war is highly unlikely, but the unwillingness of leaders to stop this language is already leading to death threats against election officials. The longer they permit it to go on, the worse things will get.

Republicans are working to undermine the incoming Democratic administration in other ways, too. Last week, Attorney General William Barr announced that he appointed U.S. Attorney John Durham as special counsel in October to investigate the FBI agents who worked on the investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. While the law about special counsels says they must come from outside the government, Barr claims to have found a loophole in that rule. Durham can be fired only for specific reasons such as conflict of interest or misconduct. Senate Judiciary Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-SC) applauded the appointment and the continuation of the investigation.

Today Biden’s son Hunter told the media that he has just learned that he is under investigation by the Department of Justice for tax issues, although CNN suggested it is a much wider financial investigation than that, and that it began in 2018. The Justice Department is also investigating a company related to Joe Biden’s brother James. While the DOJ is supposed to be independent of the president, these investigations echo Trump’s own calls for such investigations. Immediately Representative Ken Buck (R-CO) called for a special counsel to investigate Hunter Biden, and tonight, Trump tweeted that “10% of voters would have changed their vote if they knew about Hunter Biden…. But I won anyway!”

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) told Fox News Channel personality Laura Ingraham today that Representative Eric Swalwell (D-CA) should be “removed from Congress” after an Axios report that a Chinese intelligence operative had worked to ingratiate herself with California lawmakers between 2011 and 2015. The operative targeted a number of politicians, including Swalwell, and she fundraised on his behalf, but there is no evidence she broke any laws. In 2015, FBI officers alerted Swalwell, who immediately cut all ties to her. He was never accused of any wrongdoing. The operative left the country unexpectedly during the FBI investigation.

Although the Axios story was about Chinese espionage, right-wing media is aflame with attacks on Swalwell in what seems an attempt to discredit a Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee. Don Jr. tweeted that Swalwell “was literally sleeping with a Chinese spy,” an allegation that is nowhere in the story, although the story mentions that two unidentified midwestern mayors had affairs with her.

The White House appears to be trying to sabotage the Biden administration not only by keeping the Biden team from information it needs, but by tying its hands and slowing it down. The day after the election, the Trump administration proposed a new rule requiring the new Department of Health and Human Services appointees to review most of the department’s regulations by 2023. The rule would automatically kill any regulations that haven’t been reviewed by then. This would mean that, just as the new administration is trying to fight the coronavirus, it would be slammed with administrative paperwork. The department’s chief of staff denies the unusual move is political, saying that a review is necessary because one hasn’t been done for 40 years.

Now that the transition process has finally started, Trump loyalists are blocking meetings, or sitting in on them to monitor what is being said, especially at the Environmental Protection Agency. At Voice of America, Trump’s appointed head, Michael Pack, has refused to give meetings or records to Biden’s team. For their part, Biden’s transition folks are avoiding fights in order to get whatever information they can.

Republican senators are also signaling that they intend to delay confirmations on Biden’s nominees, although in the past 95% of Cabinet nominees have had hearings before an inauguration, and 84% of those were approved within three days. Senator John Cornyn (R-TX), for example, questioned the experience of Biden’s nominee for Secretary of Health and Human Services, Xavier Becerra. Becerra is the Attorney General of California, and he sat on the House Committee on Ways and Means, which oversees health issues, during his 24 years in Congress. “I don’t know what his Health and Human Services credentials are,” Cornyn told The Hill. It’s not like [Trump’s HHS Secretary] Alex Azar, who worked for pharma and had a health care background.”

Trump Caves to Reality

 

Why Did So Many Americans Vote for Trump?

To the dismay of Democrats, the president’s strategy of ignoring the pandemic mostly worked for Republicans.




NY TIMES

President Trump’s disastrous mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic probably cost him re-election. Yet it seems mind-boggling that he still won more votes than any incumbent president in American history despite his dereliction of responsibility at a time of a once-in-a-century health crisis and economic devastation.

Why are President-elect Joe Biden’s margins so thin in the states that clinched his victory? And why did the president’s down-ticket enablers flourish in the turbulent, plague-torn conditions they helped bring about?

But Democrats should understand that there was really no way to avoid disappointment. Three factors — the logic of partisan polarization, which inaccurate polling obscured; the strength of the juiced pre-Covid-19 economy; and the success of Mr. Trump’s denialist, open-everything-up nonresponse to the pandemic — mostly explain why they didn’t fare better. This shocking strategy worked for Republicans, even if it didn’t pan out for the president himself. Moreover, it laid a trap that Democrats walked into — something they should understand and adjust for, as best they can, as they look ahead.


Mr. Trump has a knack for leveraging the animosities of polarized partisanship to cleave his supporters from sources of credible information and inflame them with vilifying lies. This time, it wasn’t enough to save his bacon, which suggests that polarization hasn’t completely wrecked our democracy’s capacity for self-correction: Sweeping a medium-size city’s worth of dead Americans under the rug turned out to be too tall an order.

However, Mr. Trump’s relentless campaign to goose the economy by cutting taxes, running up enormous deficits and debt, and hectoring the Fed into not raising rates was working for millions of Americans. We tend to notice when we’re personally more prosperous than we were a few years before.

But the president’s catastrophic response to Covid-19 threw the economy into a tailspin. Mr. Trump abdicated responsibility, shifting the burden onto states and municipalities with busted budgets. He then waged a war of words against governors and mayors — especially Democrats — who refused to risk their citizens’ lives by allowing economic and social activity to resume.

He spurred his supporters to make light of the danger of infection, made the churlish refusal to wear masks into an emblem of emancipation from the despotism of experts and turned public health restrictions on businesses, schools and social gatherings into a tyrannical conspiracy to steal power by damaging the economy and his re-election prospects.

He succeeded in putting Democrats on the defensive about economic restrictions and school closures. As months passed and with no new relief coming from Washington, financially straitened Democratic states and cities had little choice but to ease restrictions on businesses just to keep the lights on. That seemed to concede the economic wisdom of the more permissive approach in majority-Republican states and fed into Mr. Trump’s false narrative of victory over the virus and a triumphant return to normalcy.

But Democrats weren’t destined to get quite as tangled in Mr. Trump’s trap as they did. They had no way to avoid it, but they could have been hurt less by it. They allowed Republicans to define the contrast between the parties’ approaches to the pandemic in terms of freedom versus exhausting, indefinite shutdowns.

Democrats needed to present a competing, compelling strategy to counter Republican messaging. Struggling workers and businesses never clearly heard exactly what they’d get if Democrats ran the show, and Democrats never came together to scream bloody murder that Republicans were refusing to give it to them. 

Democrats needed to underscore the depth of Republican failure by forcefully communicating what other countries had done to successfully control the virus. And they needed to promise to do the same through something like an Operation Warp Speed for testing and P.P.E. to get America safely back in business.

Instead, they whined that Mr. Trump’s negligence and incompetence were to blame for America’s economic woes and complained that Mitch McConnell wouldn’t even consider the House’s big relief bill. They weren’t wrong, but correctly assigning culpability did nothing to help working-class breadwinners who can’t bus tables, process chickens, sell smoothies or clean hotel rooms over Zoom.

The Republican message couldn’t have been clearer: Workers should be able to show up, clock in, earn a normal paycheck, pay the rent and feed their kids. Democrats were telling the same workers that we need to listen to science, reopening is premature, and the economy can’t be fully restored until we beat the virus. Correct! But how does that help when rent was due last week?

Make no mistake, it was unforgivably cruel of Republicans to force blue-collar and service workers to risk death for grocery money. Yet their disinformation campaign persuaded many millions of Americans that the risk was minimal and that Democrats were keeping their workplaces and schools closed, their customers and kids at home, and their wallets empty and cupboards bare for bogus reasons.

The president’s mendacious push to hastily reopen everything was less compelling to college-educated suburbanites, who tend to trust experts and can work from home, watch their kids and spare a laptop for online kindergarten. Mr. Trump lost the election mainly because he lost enough of these voters, including some moderate Republicans who otherwise voted straight Republican tickets.

Democrats need to rethink the idea that these voters would have put Democratic House and Senate candidates over the top if only Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez were less radiantly socialist. They need to accept that they took hits on the economy by failing to escape the trap Republicans set by doggedly refusing to do anything about the uncontained contagion destroying it.

And they need to understand how Mr. Trump saved his party by weaponizing polarization. Conservatives....steadied themselves by reaffirming their loyalty down the remainder of the ballot. They were voting against a personal crisis of identity, not the Green New Deal

Democrats might have done better had sunny polls and their own biased partisan perceptions not misled them into believing that backlash to indisputably damning Republican failure would deliver an easy Senate majority — but not much better. Until the mind-bending spell of polarization breaks, everything that matters will be fiercely disputed and even the most egregious failures will continue to go unpunished.

Biden's Win Shows Rural-Urban Divide Has Grown Since 2016

 

NPR

"There's this sense that decisions about the pandemic are being made in cities and kind of imposed on rural spaces," said Kathy Cramer, an expert on the rural-urban divide at the University of Wisconsin.

JamesBrey/Getty Images
President-elect Joe Biden will be taking over a country that is even more sharply divided on urban-rural lines. One of the biggest reasons why the divide got bigger in 2020 may be the coronavirus pandemic.

SHOTS - HEALTH NEWS

Coronavirus Is Surging: How Severe Is Your State's Outbreak?

ELECTIONS

How Biden Won: Ramping Up The Base And Expanding Margins In The Suburbs

Rural Republicans mostly spurned the COVID-19 business shutdowns. Many Democrats called them essential to protect public health. While some in America blasted the president's chaotic pandemic response and his spreading of racist conspiracy theories, Trump racked up wins in some rural counties by even bigger margins than in 2016.

"There's this sense that decisions about the pandemic are being made in cities and kind of imposed on rural spaces," said Kathy Cramer, an expert on the rural-urban divide at the University of Wisconsin. "That doesn't sit well with a lot of folks and may have driven them further from the Democratic Party."

Wisconsin was a flashpoint for divisions over coronavirus policy. Even as many rural counties saw alarming spikes in cases and hospitalizations leading up to the election, Cramer says Trump was able to capitalize on rural resentment. There tends to be mistrust in government authority in rural America, and a proud tradition of individualism when it comes to mask mandates and social distancing laws. Trump also sent billions in subsidies to farmers.

"People who have been following Trump, supporting Trump, have been told, 'you're right, they don't care about you and they're not paying attention to you,'" Cramer says.

SHOTS - HEALTH NEWS

Getting Health Care Was Already Tough In Rural Areas. The Pandemic Has Made It Worse

BUSINESS

Trump Launched A Trade War Against China. Don't Look To Biden To Reverse It

So can a President Biden make inroads into Trump's red America in 2021? The new administration's agenda will face big obstacles especially in the Senate, which gives disproportionate power to rural states. The Democratic rural dean of that chamber, Sen. Jon Tester of Montana, is trying to stay optimistic.

"If he gets a good person in as the secretary of [agriculture], and he's willing to listen first, and, as I say, react to what you're hearing, I think we'll be in fine shape," Tester says.

Tester, a farmer, says Republicans have been winning in the heartland lately on what he calls hot button issues. But he faults both parties for mostly shunning rural America and its complex problems that aren't solvable over one election cycle.

"The American family farmer and rancher are going away and the party that can figure out how to stop that from happening will win rural America," Tester says.

Analysts say the rural-urban divide is sharpest in the middle of the country, which has been hit especially hard economically and where many small towns are losing population. Democrats like Tester see an opening in the West though, where in 2021 the party will control all the Senate seats in New Mexico, Nevada, Arizona and Colorado for the first time since 1941.

"I think rural America is literally up for grabs," Tester says.

The 2020 election also exposed vulnerabilities for Republicans in states like Colorado. Like in a lot of the country, the GOP lost even worse than it did in 2016 in Colorado's cities and suburbs and also its rural counties with ski resorts and tourist-dependent economies.

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"There was a lot of frustration going into this election," says Rose Pugliese, a Republican commissioner in the longtime conservative stronghold of Mesa County, Colo.

Pugliese says her region picked up some big wins during the Trump era, especially with oil and gas development on public land, including a large natural gas pipeline project connecting western Colorado to the Oregon coast.

Pugliese is skeptical about what a Biden administration will mean for rural economies. But she's eager to listen.

"I mean, really when we talk about what's important to all parties, and all political persuasions, they want to make sure they have economic opportunities," Pugliese says. "So it'll be interesting to see how he talks about rural America and our economic opportunities."

For now, Pugliese says rural counties like hers are mostly worried about the potential for more lockdowns due to coronavirus. She says she hopes the new administration will continue to leave those decisions to states and local jurisdictions.