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Post by Admin on Nov 7, 2020 20:55:55 GMT
GEORGIA SENATE RACE: PERDUE, OSSOFF HEAD TO RUNOFF AFTER HIGHLY COMPETITIVE CAMPAIGN
As Biden was working to unite the Democrats following a bruising primary, the general showdown between him and Trump instantly became a referendum on the president’s handling of the pandemic and the economy, giving Biden a race he could win.
Biden spent the remainder of the spring, summer and fall continuously pillorying the president’s efforts to combat the coronavirus and revive the economy, and spelling out his proposals.
The president had been raising money for his reelection ever since he took over the White House in January 2017, and he enjoyed a massive early fundraising advantage. As Trump started airing ads on TV in the key battlegrounds, Biden remained dark. The Democrat didn’t make his first major ad buy on television until the middle of June.
But thanks in part to a surge in fundraising in late spring through summer, including record-shattering campaign cash hauls in August and September, Biden dramatically outraised the president as the general election heated up -- and he outspent Trump on TV ads the past three months. In the digital ad wars, Biden also enjoyed a slight spending advantage.
Vote count continues in Pennsylvania, other states amid legal challenges from Trump campaignVideo Biden held his own in both presidential debates – disproving the repeated attacks by Trump and his campaign questioning the 77-year old nominee’s mental acuity. And, Trump’s brief hospitalization after contracting COVID-19, as well an autumn surge in the coronavirus in key states across the country, kept the campaign’s spotlight firmly on an issue that did no favors for the president’s reelection chances.
The final stretch of the campaign saw Biden playing offense and the president on defense – with most of the campaign stops in states Trump narrowly captured in 2016.
Biden’s closing themes were the same as those he used when he announced his candidacy.
"The heart and soul of this country’s at stake,” Biden told Florida voters during a stop in Broward County last week as he promised to bring compassion and empathy back to the White House.
And, Biden continued to emphasize his goal to unite the nation, repeatedly stressing that “I’m running as a proud Democrat but I’ll govern as an American president to unite and to heal. I’ll work as hard for those who didn’t support me as those who do. That’s the job of the president: a duty of caring, caring for everyone.”
Taking aim at the president’s war of words with many of the nation’s leading public health officials, Biden highlighted that “we choose hope over fear, we choose unity over division, and we choose science over fiction, and yes, we choose truth over lies.”
Biden now has two and a half months to assemble a cabinet and top officials who instantly will have to cope with the biggest challenges ever faced by an incoming president and administration – from the worst pandemic to strike the world in a century, and the worst economic recession to grip the nation since The Great Depression eight decades ago.
Biden will be squeezed from both sides – by reeling Republicans who may look to run the same playbook that stymied President Obama and Biden as they took over in the White House in 2009. But, he’ll also face pressure from his left flank.
The left will be looking for top progressives to land leading roles in Biden’s administration, and will be pushing hard to implement their agenda on the economy, social justice, civil rights and judicial reform, and on combating climate change.
Firebrand lawmakers on the left – such as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York – kept the peace during the general election, but with the Democrats’ common foe now defeated – infighting may soon commence, with the left scrutinizing every move by a politician firmly planted in the center-left of the party.
Also hovering over Biden: questions over his durability and whether he’ll run for re-election in four years. The last thing the president-elect needs at the onset of his tenure in the White House is to be collared with lame-duck status.
Biden hasn’t ruled out seeking a second term. Asked in August if he was open to running for re-election, he said “absolutely,” in an interview with ABC News.
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Post by Admin on Nov 7, 2020 23:35:56 GMT
A tie in the Electoral College is one way the 2020 election could end up with Congress. In the extremely unlikely scenario that both Joe Biden and Donald Trump get 269 electors, the election would be thrown into the House. A more likely scenario is that the Trump campaign’s litigation winds up getting Congress involved in the 2020 election. Though courts will decide specific questions of legal interpretation in voting disputes, they do not want to be perceived as deciding the 2020 election result, as the Supreme Court did in 2000. Where possible, judges will decline to hear lawsuits that ask big political questions and leave these issues for the political system to resolve. Enter Congress. If neither candidate gets to 270 electors due to disputed ballots, the House would have to decide the election. Though the House has a Democratic majority, such an outcome would almost certainly benefit Trump. Here’s why: In a concession to small states concerned their voices would be marginalized if the House was called upon to choose the president, the founders gave only one vote to each state. House delegations from each state meet to decide how to cast their single vote. That voting procedure gives equal representation to California – population 40 million – and Wyoming, population 600,000. This arrangement favors Republicans. The GOP has dominated the House delegations of 26 states since 2018 – exactly the number required to reach a majority under the rules of House presidential selection. But it’s not the current House that would decide a contested 2020 election; it is the newly elected House, and many Nov. 3 congressional races remain undecided. So far, though, Republicans have retained control of the 26 congressional delegations they currently hold, and Democrats have lost control of two states, Minnesota and Iowa. Evenly divided delegations count as abstentions, and Republican gains in Minnesota and Iowa are moving these states from Democratic to abstentions. Perhaps the most relevant precedent for a contested 2020 election that winds up in the House is the 1876 election between Democrat Samuel Tilden and Republican Rutherford B. Hayes. That election saw disputed returns in four states – Florida, South Carolina, Louisiana and Oregon – with a total of 20 electoral votes. Excluding those 20 disputed electors, Tilden had 184 pledged electors of the 185 needed for victory in the Electoral College; Hayes had 165. Tilden was clearly the front-runner – but Hayes would win if all the contested votes went for him. Because of a post-Civil War rule allowing Congress – read, Northern Republicans worried about Black voter suppression – to dispute the vote count in Southern states and bypass local courts, Congress established a commission to resolve the disputed 1876 returns. As Michael Holt writes in his examination of the 1876 election, the 15-member commission had five House representatives, five senators and five Supreme Court justices. Fourteen of the commissioners had identifiable partisan leanings: seven Democrats and seven Republicans. The 15th member was a justice known for his impartiality. Hope of a nonpartisan outcome was dashed when the one impartial commissioner resigned and was replaced by a Republican judge. The commission voted along party lines to give all 20 disputed electors to Hayes. To prevent the Democratic-dominated Senate from derailing Hayes’ single-vote triumph over Tilden by refusing to confirm its decision, Republicans were forced to make a deal: Abandon Reconstruction, their policy of Black political and economic inclusion in the post-Civil War South. This paved the way for Jim Crow segregation.
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Post by Admin on Nov 8, 2020 4:06:58 GMT
Meghan McCain has been on maternity leave from The View for the past six weeks or so, which means viewers of that show have been spared her opinions on the 2020 presidential election and its already ugly aftermath. But while her Twitter feed has been a confusing stream of messages that has included congratulating her late father’s friend Lindsey Graham for his Senate victory, giving her mother Cindy McCain credit for helping Joe Biden win her native Arizona, and blaming “defund the police” messaging for hurting down-ballot Democrats, she really outdid herself Friday morning with a tweet that has since been deleted. “I’m not convinced Trump has a claim about illegal voting and ballots but I interviewed Stacey Abrahams like 8 times on @theview the past few years discussing her ‘voter fraud’ and Hillary still hasnt conceded her election…” McCain tweeted, adding, “This narrative is one that has been full throttle.” After a barrage of tweets highlighting the multiple lies contained in that single tweet, she quickly deleted it. When people weren’t correcting her spelling of former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, they pointed out that she has fought against voter suppression, not voter fraud. According to IMDb, Abrams has appeared on The View four times over the past two years, most recently in June when she calmly schooled McCain on the ways her former opponent Brian Kemp has tried to prevent people of color from voting, first as Georgia’s secretary of state and now as its governor. McCain's claim that Hillary Clinton never conceded to Donald Trump was even more outrageous and demonstrably false.
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Post by Admin on Nov 10, 2020 6:37:12 GMT
Won’t somebody think of the in-person voters? That’s the crux of a federal suit President Donald Trump’s campaign filed Monday to try and stop Pennsylvania from certifying ex-Vice President Joe Biden the winner of the swing state’s 20 electoral votes—asserting that voting by mail is much easier, and harder to regulate, than voting in person.
The lawsuit points to the Supreme Court’s notorious 2000 decision that effectively awarded the White House to then-Texas Gov. George W. Bush by halting county-level recounts in Florida, on the grounds the localities had inconsistent practices which the majority of justices argued gave preference to some voters over others. “In a rush to count mail ballots and ensure Democrat Joe Biden is elected, Pennsylvania has created an illegal two-tiered voting system for the 2020 General Election, devaluing in-person votes,” the lawsuit reads.
The lawsuit rehashes other past complaints about the process in Pennsylvania, including about postal voters being allowed to correct errors by casting provisional ballots, about Secretary of the Commonwealth Kathy Boockvar’s guidance to county election officials allegedly usurping authority that rightfully belonged to the Republican-controlled state legislature, and about Trump campaign observers only being allowed to watch the counting of votes from several yards away due to COVID-19 restrictions. The campaign briefly obtained a favorable ruling from a state court on the last matter, but the judge’s order was stayed after Philadelphia city officials and the Pennsylvania Democratic Party appealed.
The latest federal lawsuit followed the Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s decision Monday to hear the Philadelphia appeal, and GOP state Senate Majority Leader Jake Corman signaling he would not intervene to hand Pennsylvania’s electors to Trump. Although the Trump campaign filed this suit against Boockvar, the state’s mail-in ballot procedure is largely the product of fraught negotiations between the Republican statehouse and Gov. Tom Wolf.
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