2020 election

Can you really blame Trump supporters for refusing to accept the election result?

It's been a week and a half since Election Day and the results are still not certified — some votes counts, like in Georgia, are close enough to require a recount, and there are numerous legal challenges put forth by the Trump campaign. Still, because the mainstream media has 'called' the race for Joe Biden, the left has arrogantly told Trump supporters to just concede already. The allegations of voter fraud, fact checkers claim, are unsubstantiated and baseless. Some of them may very well be, but it was a pretty well accepted fact in America (until Donald Trump brought it up, that is) that people cheated in elections. In fact, Biden's newly minted chief of staff, Ron Klain, tweeted in 2014 that 68 percent of people believe elections are rigged 'because they are.

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The Trumpist agenda going forward

While Donald Trump appears to have lost the 2020 presidential election, Trump’s agenda of populism focused on the working class and putting America first won, well, bigly. Contrary to the Democrats’ claim that Joe Biden’s razor-thin win gave them a mandate, the only mandate America’s voters gave this year is that they want more Trumpism. To wit, the swing of roughly the same number of voters in a handful of states by which Trump won in 2016 is the gap of Biden’s win. Going forward, Republicans must focus on maintaining that sentiment and fight off attempts by NeverTrumpers and Establishment Republicans to throw Trumpism out with Trump.

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Biden’s NeverTrump transition

Former Vice President Joe Biden hasn't yet been officially certified as the winner of the 2020 presidential election and the Trump campaign has launched numerous legal challenges to the results. Nonetheless, Biden is moving ahead with his transition team under the assumption he will be the next president. On Monday, he announced that his coronavirus task force would include Dr Rick Bright, a whistleblower from the Trump administration. Bright was a high-ranking Health and Human Services official until he was demoted in May of this year. Bright alleged in a whistleblower complaint that he was ousted because he was critical of the Trump administration's response to COVID-19 and was resistant to efforts to fast-track the distribution of hydroxychloroquine to treat the virus.

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Joe Biden’s shaky songsheet

In his victory speech on Saturday night, Joe Biden quoted the 1970s Roman Catholic hymn, ‘On Eagle’s Wings’. The President-elect said that its message helped him cope with his various personal tragedies, which are undoubtedly very real and sad. Still, Cockburn wonders whether Biden is correct in his assessment that this particular hymn ‘captures the faith that sustains’ America. If Biden is right about that, then Cockburn wonders whether the ‘battle for the soul’ of the nation was even worth having.Of course, Cockburn doesn’t pretend to be a Catholic, let alone a good one, but having borrowed a friend’s Bible, he suspects that the hymn in question — a bastardization of Psalm 91 — rather misses the point.

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The need to concede

The political and emotional climax of US presidential elections comes when the losing candidate, accompanied by a teary spouse, tersely but gamely concedes defeat and wishes the victor well. With anxiety, I worry what might happen if this little-noted but critical ritual fails to take place in 2020. No law requires a concession speech, no agreement demands it; but this informal ceremony has an essential role in confirming the paramount rule of democracy, that the losing candidates has heard and accepted the voters’ verdict. After a hard-fought, even vicious, campaign, the vanquished assures the victor he accepts the results, permitting the country to move forward.

How will the Trump presidency end?

Donald Trump will not go quietly into the good night. In fact, he seems determined to leave the office with as little dignity as possible. This is adding a great deal of uncertainty to the transfer of power. It’s entirely plausible that America will wake up on Inauguration Day with Trump still contesting his ouster. What happens then? At that point, anything is possible! Cockburn has concocted a list of potential January 20 endgame scenarios, ranked from least to most likely:1. The normal endingPresident Trump mounts some flimsy legal challenges, makes a bunch of angry tweets, but ultimately backs down and leaves office normally. He soon goes back to claiming the election was stolen, but is quickly banned from Twitter.

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green party

Was the Green party’s ballot exclusion significant?

Within the last year, election officials and judges in a few key swing states reduced the Green party’s erstwhile ballot access to write-in only. They likely intended to reduce the Greens’ vote share to the benefit of Joe Biden and the Democratic party.Voters in Arizona, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin might have noticed the unusual absence of the Green party’s presidential ticket from their 2020 ballots. Democrat-controlled courts and Democratic election officials denied Green presidential candidate Howie Hawkins and his VP pick Angela Walker a place on those states’ ballots.

Joe Biden: let this grim era of demonization in America begin to end

My fellow Americans, the people of this nation have spoken. They have delivered us a clear victory. A convincing victory. A victory for 'We the People.'We have won with the most votes ever cast for a presidential ticket in the history of this nation — 74 million. I am humbled by the trust and confidence you have placed in me.I pledge to be a President who seeks not to divide, but to unify. Who doesn’t see Red and Blue states, but a United States. And who will work with all my heart to win the confidence of the whole people. For that is what America is about: The people. And that is what our administration will be about.I sought this office to restore the soul of America. To rebuild the backbone of the nation — the middle class.

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Trump should concede — with a caveat

The networks have made official what seemed to have occurred when Georgia flipped from red to blue: Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election. We can spend the next few months analyzing why Donald Trump lost as I started to do on Friday, but fundamentally few of the voting irregularities cited by the Trump campaign appear to be widespread enough to reverse one, let alone several, of the states Trump would need to flip to get to 270 electoral votes. That doesn’t, of course, mean the Democrats in the big cities didn’t engage in shenanigans. It simply means it will be hard to prove what they did after the fact.

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Why did Florida’s Cubans vote for Trump?

At its narrowest point, the Florida Straits is only 93 miles wide. You could swim it, if you were exceptionally motivated and athletic. I remember the first time I landed at Miami airport. I was struck by the amount of Spanish being spoken, and the signs advertising Cuban coffee. I immediately understood the dynamic that led to southern Florida jokingly being dubbed ‘Northern Cuba’.As one of the earliest states to announce its results, Florida crushed Biden supporters’ hopes for a landslide early in the night. Trump’s victory has been attributed to the Cuban vote. Comedian Jaboukie Young-White tweeted ‘the kkkubans came out in full force’ after Trump’s victory in Florida was announced.

Why Trump lost

With the last dominoes of Georgia and Pennsylvania falling, there is now clarity on the 2020 election cycle. Based on all of the data available at the time and, more fundamentally, the political antennae cultivated over the last three decades, I predicted Donald Trump would be reelected with a 305 to 233 electoral vote victory. My presidential tally was wrong. Joe Biden will secure at least 306 electoral votes, assuming North Carolina also doesn’t fall when final numbers are released next week.But (there is always a but), in my defense, I was also right.

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Richard Nixon took the high road in 1960. Donald Trump should now

‘You gotta swallow this one, they stole it fair and square.’ That’s a Republican hack speaking to Richard Nixon, as fabricated in Oliver Stone’s 1995 biopic about our nation’s 37th president. The reference is to the 1960 election, in which Nixon’s opponent John F. Kennedy prevailed by 303 electoral votes to his opponent’s 219, although the popular margin was a scant 113,000, or about 0.16 percent, out of 68,837,000 ballots cast.

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Joe Biden wins the presidency

Joe Biden will become the 46th president of the United States. Decision Desk HQ, a non-partisan election results site, declared that Biden had won the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, and therefore the presidency, at 8:50 a.m. ET on Friday morning. AP, CNN, ABC, NBC, Reuters, CBS and the New York Times called Pennsylvania for Biden at 11:30 a.m. ET Saturday morning. A win in Pennsylvania takes Biden to 273 Electoral College votes, past the threshold of 270 needed to secure the White House. The Democratic candidate then won Arizona, Georgia and Nevada, putting him at 306 electoral votes. The Associated Press and Fox News both called Arizona for Biden earlier in the week. Fox's decision is said to have incensed Trump senior advisers.

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The subtle sexism of ‘feminist’ Democrats

Over the past five years, we’ve seen an endless stream of hand-wringing and hysteria around the misogyny of Donald Trump. The President is the White Patriarchy epitomized: a man who believes women are objects for his grabbing, useless unless they are pretty to look at or satisfying their husbands. What a jerk!To be fair, Trump is a jerk. And, in my opinion, a misogynist. But he’s not the only one. There’s a group that prides itself on #MeTooing the world, tweeting the words cishetero patriarchy as much as possible in an effort to really stick it to the man (Jack Dorsey must be tormented) and repeating, ad nauseam, that Trump’s win is proof that Americans just loooove their bigotry. Yet they don’t seem to have much respect for women themselves.

Is America a banana republic?

Is it all over bar the litigation? Joe Biden is six Electoral College votes shy of victory, unless Arizona flips. The Trump campaign will contest to death. They’ll claim voter fraud in Michigan, Nevada, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania — or any state they have narrowly lost. Those claims may have legitimacy; it’s too early to tell. But nobody said democracy was fair. The pursuit of power is a grubby business. With an electorate as big as America’s there will always be shadiness around the edges. We all knew that a late and vast blue mail-in surge was coming. We just didn’t know it would be this late. Donald Trump will cry foul. He has been suggesting that the election would be rigged for years. Mail-in voting is indeed open to all sorts of abuses.

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Why did Trump lose support among white men?

As of Wednesday morning, Joe Biden seems to have the easiest path to victory in the presidential election. He currently holds leads in Arizona, Nevada, Michigan and Wisconsin with most of the remaining votes being mail-ins that should break in his favor. If Biden does pull it off, he may owe a big thank you to white men. Democrats claimed in 2016 that Trump’s shock victory was the result of white grievance politics. The President’s base, they said, was made up of white working-class voters railing against changing demographics in their country and getting payback for the country electing its first black president. Van Jones famously called it a ‘whitelash’.

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While Trump ran a good campaign, Biden ran an even better one

Give Donald Trump credit for waging a shrewd reelection campaign in the face of the pandemic, a tanking economy and racial strife. But does this mean that he’s a lock to win the presidency itself? Not a chance.Prognostications that Joe Biden would earn a crushing victory proved to be quite wrong and, for what it's worth, I'm eating a good slice of humble pie. But the election has not yet been won by Trump. Quite the contrary. Biden may well win. The reason will be that while Trump ran a good campaign, Biden ran an even better one. Democratic bed wetters, and they are legion, needed to install extra plastic sheets last night, but it’s starting to look like Biden is on a roll.Here’s why. Biden kept his cool. He didn’t travel to Texas. He flipped Arizona.

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Has Ben Sasse won it for Joe Biden?

Will a Republican senator from Nebraska be the man who hands Joe Biden the White House? Ben Sasse has tried his best to do that. Sasse easily won reelection in the safe red state of Nebraska on Tuesday, leading his Democratic opponent by nearly 30 points with 85 percent of the vote in. But President Trump has not fared so well; in fact, he lost the vote in Nebraska’s Second Congressional district. Since Nebraska, like Maine, divides its Electoral College votes by district, that means Joe Biden gets an elector from Nebraska. And for that, Biden can thank Sasse, who next to Mitt Romney is the sitting Republican senator who has been most outspokenly critical of President Trump.

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The integrity of the Constitution must be protected

As I write this, the outcome of the US presidential election remains undecided. To judge by media reports, it may take days to determine who the winner is. A few quick observations: The pollsters got it wrong again. Forty-eight hours ago, the chatter was all about a Democratic landslide. Observers were confidently speculating about who would land the top jobs in a Biden administration. I don’t pretend to understand the science of polling. But I know a bankrupt enterprise when I see one. Many observers worried about a close election with no clear outcome leading to a constitutional crisis of some sort. The wilder and more irresponsible speculation imagined US troops being summoned to intervene and sort matters out. It grieves me to say that such scenarios remain possible.

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