We are awaiting calls and results from states like Arizona, Nevada and Georgia. But…. Pennsylvania!! And don’t underestimate how difficult Joe Biden’s feat was. He needed to prevail in a two front war against an incumbent president using every dirty trick presidential power allows AND a conservative media ecosystem arrayed against him.
Makes you appreciate the forces arrayed against Hillary, btw. But Biden was disciplined and had the secret weapon of decency. And this time, it was enough.
That Jonathan Swan tweet is why Donald Trump went out at 6:30 pm in a nationally televised rant to claim the election was fraudulent.
Trump breaks silence in statement full of falsehoods.
President Trump broke a two-day silence with reporters to deliver a brief statement filled with egregious falsehoods and smears about the election process as workers in a handful of states continued to tabulate votes.
The president painted the election results so far as part of a broad conspiracy to deprive him of a second term by Democrats, election officials in various cities and the news media.
“If you count the legal votes, I easily win,” Mr. Trump began when he took the podium in the White House briefing room, a false statement that cast aspersion on the rest of the election. He offered no evidence; instead, he listed a series of conspiracy theories about why ballots arrived late in some places.
And so did ABC, NPR and other outlets. Finally.
And all of that led to this:
And this:
(stage whisper: hive sea knee off)
Nate Cohn/Upshot:
Why Has The Times Not Called Arizona?
Other outlets feel they’re sure, but we’re not certain enough about the votes that remain to be counted.
The Associated Press and Fox News have called Arizona for Joe Biden. The New York Times has not.
In most races, The Times automatically accepts the race calls made by The A.P. But in the most important races, we independently evaluate whether to accept an A.P. call, based on our own analysis.
The main reason we have not yet accepted the call in Arizona? We do not believe there’s solid enough data on the votes that remain to be counted after Election Day. The data we do have suggests that President Trump could fare well. Mr. Biden was and is still favored in our view. But on Tuesday night and afterward, there was no way to preclude, based on hard evidence, the possibility that Mr. Trump could win. That’s what a race call means to us.
As of 1:30 p.m. Eastern time Thursday, CNN, NBC News, ABC News, CBS News, DecisionDesk HQ and Reuters had not called Arizona.
Tom Nichols/Atlantic:
A Large Portion of the Electorate Chose the Sociopath
America will have to contend with that fact.
The moment every Donald Trump opponent has been waiting for is at hand: Joe Biden seems to be taking the lead. So why am I not happy?
I am certainly relieved. A Biden victory would be an infinitely better result than a Trump win. If Trump were to maintain power, our child-king would be unfettered by bothersome laws and institutions. The United States would begin its last days as a democracy, finally stepping over the ledge into authoritarianism.
A win for Biden would forestall that terrible possibility.
But no matter how this election concludes, America is now a different country. Nearly half of the voters have seen Trump in all of his splendor—his infantile tirades, his disastrous and lethal policies, his contempt for democracy in all its forms—and they decided that they wanted more of it. His voters can no longer hide behind excuses about the corruption of Hillary Clinton or their willingness to take a chance on an unproven political novice. They cannot feign ignorance about how Trump would rule. They know, and they have embraced him.
As someone noted,Trump tweets have more warnings than a pack of cigarettes.
WaPo:
Black voters could save Biden’s campaign once again
For the second time in Joe Biden’s presidential bid, his campaign is on the brink, as razor-thin margins separate him and President Trump in battleground states where votes are still being counted.
And for the second time this election cycle, it could be Black voters who propel the Democrat to victory — just as they resuscitated Biden in the South Carolina primary.
Tim Alberta/Politico magazine:
Three Reasons Biden Flipped the Midwest
Trump gave away his gains with key groups from four years ago and Biden reclaimed lost Democratic ground.
1) Biden kept Trump from running up the score with working-class whites
2) Biden peeled away Trump’s support in conservative suburbs
3) Biden got Black voters to turn out in big numbers
Jack Jenkins/Religious News Service:
How Trump’s strong play for Hispanic evangelicals helped him stun Biden in Florida
‘I think the Biden campaign is going to say, ‘We blew it: we took for granted the Latino vote and the evangelical vote,’’ said the Rev. Tony Suarez, vice president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference
One answer, said the Rev. Gabriel Salguero, founder of the National Latino Evangelical Coalition and Florida resident, is religion.
“It confirmed what I’ve been saying for about three or four election cycles: that Latinos are not a monolith writ large, and that Hispanic evangelicals are quintessential swing voters,” said Salguero, who served on the White House’s Advisory Council on Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships under former President Barack Obama.
Salguero pointed to two major Hispanic voting blocs in the state: ones with ties to Cuba, which President Donald Trump carried with 55%, according to NBC exit polls, and others with ties to Puerto Rico, only 30% of whom backed the president.
Cubans and Puerto Ricans, Salguero noted, represent roughly the same percentage of the Florida electorate — around 29% and 27%, respectively, according to Pew Research. But Hispanic evangelicals, while a small group overall, overlap with both groups and tend to be swayed by issues rather than loyalty to one party.
“You have those very close races, and who’s going to make the difference? Probably the quintessential faith voter in Orlando, in Tampa and in Miami.”
Brandon Sanchez/Commonweal:
The Complicated Case of Hispanic Voters
‘The Hispanic Republican’[The historian Geraldo] Cadava helpfully looks beyond the “anti-Castro Cuban” archetype in favor of a more expansive view of who constitutes the Hispanic electorate, encompassing immigrants who fled conflict in Mexico and Central America. Ronald Reagan, in particular, was seen as an anti-communist cowboy. During his reelection campaign, U.S. Treasurer Katherine Ortega, a prominent Hispanic Reagan-Bush supporter, told crowds that the Carter-Mondale administration’s weak leadership had “‘left the door open’ to Communist threats far and near.”
But what was the substance of this American mythology? For Hispanic Republicans, it most of all has been the idea that hard work would lead to success—the promise of upward mobility. And if you consider yourself a hard worker deserving of wealth and status, you’ll always be able to find a scapegoat to deem undeserving and less hardworking: a drain on resources. Cadava is most persuasive whenever he tentatively edges toward the importance of anti-Blackness to the story he tells, hinting at the importance that the architecture of whiteness—and the yearning for proximity to whiteness—plays in American politics.
Tom McTague/Atlantic:
The President Confirms the World’s Fears
Trump railed baselessly against fraud and laid claim to an election whose result remains in doubt.
Before today, the American president himself could be loathed or ridiculed, the nature of American power challenged, and even the corruption of American politics debated. Yet few doubted the strength of America’s constitutional nature, the foundation upon which it built its republic. There have been disputed elections before—hanging chads and worse—but Trump’s comments, made before all the votes have been tallied nationwide and with multiple states up for grabs, signaled a break. This is no constitutional crisis, yet, but a president laying claim to an office he has not won (albeit one he might) is a crisis of its own.
Discussion about this post