joe biden Archives

Saturday

November 7, 2020

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.

Kate Andrews

Joe Biden wins the election

From our UK edition

Four days after a (much closer than predicted) election, American networks have called the race for Joe Biden, who has secured more than the 270 electoral votes needed to win the race. CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox News (and now the BBC) project Joe Biden will become the 46th President of the United States, as vote counting in Pennsylvania gave the Vice President a big enough lead for them to say with confidence he had won. The additional 20 electoral votes from the swing state bring Biden to a total of 273. Based on current projections, Biden only needed one of the outstanding states (including Georgia or Nevada) to cross the finish line. In addition to the networks, Joe Biden is now also declaring victory.

Matt Mayer

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.

Kate Andrews

What will Boris make of a Biden win?

From our UK edition

President Donald Trump sees himself as a great friend to the UK: he backed Brexit, likes Boris, and has personal ties to Britain as well. He’s proud of his Scottish heritage, and long before he was running the nation, he was running golf courses in his mother’s home country. But it’s not obvious the UK government always appreciates the President’s expressions of support. The Johnson team made nothing of Trump’s endorsement for the Tory candidate during the 2019 general election. The government is notably squeamish whenever the President lavishes his praises.

Friday

November 6, 2020

Matt Mayer

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.

Matt McDonald

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.

Meghan Murphy

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.

Daniel DePetris

Joe Biden should prepare for gridlock

From our UK edition

The Democratic Party was anticipating a blue wave this fall, a victory of such magnitude that Republicans would be spending the next two years fighting amongst themselves rather than controlling the purse strings. Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the top Democrat in the House of Representatives, was so confident of this blue wave scenario that she sent a memo to her Democratic colleagues outlining a list of bold policy proposals that unified Democratic government in Washington could achieve in the first several months. At the top of that list: a new coronavirus relief package and defending – and building on – the Affordable Care Act. Pelosi, however, got ahead of her skis.

Kate Andrews

Trump doubles down on unfounded election claims

From our UK edition

Tensions over the election outcome are escalating in the United States, as President Donald Trump repeated unsubstantiated claims of election fraud. Nearly a day and a half after Trump prematurely declared victory, he took to the stage at a press conference held in the White House and did so again, arguing 'if you count the legal votes, I easily win. If you count the illegal votes, they can try to steal the election from us.' He also used the opportunity to double down on his assertions of foul play: 'they’re trying to rig an election. They’re trying to steal an election,' he said. Team Trump has not provided evidence for these serious allegations.

Thursday

November 5, 2020

Freddy Gray

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.

Freddy Gray

Trumpism hasn’t been defeated

From our UK edition

It’s all over, bar the litigation. Without some mind-blowing legal reversal in the coming days, Joe Biden will be the 46th president of the United States of America. Donald Trump must be extracted from the White House in the coming weeks, though if he is unwilling to leave nobody is quite sure how he’ll be removed. Trump believes the election has been stolen from him — so do many of the 70 million Americans who voted for him. Trust is a vanishingly rare commodity in American democracy. But Trump started crying foul weeks, even months ago. ‘This is a fraud on the American public,’ he declared in the early hours of Wednesday. ‘We were getting ready to win this election. Frankly, we did win this election.

Wednesday

November 4, 2020

Jacob Heilbrunn

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.

Daniel McCarthy

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.

Andrew Bacevich

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.

Tuesday

November 3, 2020

Heather Robinson

Pre-election perspectives from Pittsburgh

Pittsburgh On the eve of the 2020 election, as President Trump and former VP Joe Biden are neck-in-neck, Pennsylvania is emerging as the most significant state. Pollsters and pundits predict that, as this crucial swing state goes, so will the nation. On Saturday, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the city’s leading local newspaper, endorsed Donald Trump, the first time it has endorsed a Republican presidential candidate since 1972. Four years ago, talking with Western Pennsylvanians at random revealed unlikely pockets of support for Trump. Synthesizing interviews, voter registration patterns and breaking news, I speculated Pennsylvania would pivot red — and it did.

Monday

November 2, 2020

Mark Gettleson

Why the Democrats are still haunted by Florida

From our UK edition

As we get closer to the American election, Democrats in swing states like Pennsylvania and Arizona are sounding notes of cautious optimism. Others, in Texas and Georgia, are daring to dream that Joe Biden’s national poll lead (mainly driven by suburban women) might flip those consistently red states to their column. In Florida, on the other hand, the mood is one of cautious pessimism. As it always is. Democrats are still haunted by Al Gore’s loss in 2000, when the Supreme Court halted a recount in Florida, delivering the presidency to George W Bush. In 2018, the polls showed that Democrats were on course to win Senate and Governor candidates in Florida, but they lost both, by 0.1 and 0.4 points respectively.

Bill Scher

Why Joe Biden will win tomorrow

Joe Biden is going to win. I have been wrong before. I will be wrong again. And maybe I’m wrong today. But we do not have any significant data to suggest Donald Trump was ever in a position to win reelection, or that he is closing the campaign with any sort of momentum needed for a come-from-behind victory. Four years ago, we did have such data. In the RealClearPolitics national polling average, Hillary Clinton’s lead shrunk nearly six percentage points between October 18 and November 3, before ticking up a bit at the end. Her share of support throughout the duration of the general election campaign never reached 50 percent, an indication of soft support.

Heather Mac Donald

Will America succumb to safetyism?

The outcome of Tuesday’s presidential election will reveal whether the feminized, therapeutic culture of the university has become the dominant force in the American psyche.During the last eight months of coronavirus panic, a remarkable number of Americans have deliberately — one might even say, ecstatically — embraced fear over fact. They have shut their ears to the data, available since March, showing how demographically circumscribed the lethal threat from coronavirus infection is: concentrated among the very elderly and those with multiple and serious preexisting health conditions. A remarkable number of Americans have voluntarily cowered in their homes despite the lack of a scientific basis for doing so.

Saturday

October 31, 2020

Damian Thompson

The Pope really doesn’t like Republicans

Last week we learned that Pope Francis has torn up the Catholic Church’s teaching that same-sex civil partnerships are gravely immoral. This week he will be rooting for the pro-abortion candidate in the US presidential election. These two surreal developments are causing distress bordering on spiritual despair to conservative American Catholics. Whether you feel any sympathy for them depends on your point of view. The Pope, it is safe to say, is unlikely to lose any sleep over the matter. Francis dislikes the United States in general and its president in particular. That’s not surprising; so do most Argentinians. What is surprising is the depth of his contempt for conservative American Catholics.

Friday

October 30, 2020

Matt Mayer

Trump has the momentum in the final week

I don’t believe in astrology, but, if I did, I’d have to say the stars are aligning for Donald Trump in the last 10 days of this tumultuous election. Beginning with the second presidential debate where Trump finally displayed presidential behavior and Joe Biden expressly proclaimed his goal to transition away from oil (i.e., kill it), virtually every unfolding event has aided Trump’s cause for reelection. Though he still might not win, the momentum is clearly behind Trump as Election Day nears.First, Biden’s comment on energy at the last debate certainly hurt him with energy industry workers and their families in western Pennsylvania, eastern Ohio, Texas, New Mexico and Colorado.