The gathering of electors in all the states went smoothly despite some fears of violence and more legal wrangling. Also more GOP publicly accepted the results: The comments amounted to a notable and swift sea change in a body that for weeks has essentially refused to acknowledge the inevitable, although the shift was far from unanimous. Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, stayed conspicuously silent on Monday, declining to acknowledge Mr. Biden’s victory.
Trump announced Bill Barr’s resignation on Monday. He will stay on until December 23.
Also on Monday the first vaccines were given to the public: The day played out in a remarkable fashion as television viewers watched images of health care workers receiving lifesaving injections juxtaposed with live shots from state capitals around the country showing electors casting votes formally confirming the victory of President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Vice President-elect Kamala D. Harris.
On Tuesday McConnell did congratulate Biden from the Senate floor. Also this: A short time later, on a private call with Senate Republicans, Mr. McConnell and his top deputies pleaded with their colleagues not to join members of the House in objecting to the election results on Jan. 6, when Congress meets to ratify the Electoral College’s decision
Tuesday December 8 – safe harbor day: each state must appoint them by the safe-harbor date to guarantee that Congress will accept their credentials. The controlling statute says that if “any controversy or contest” remains after that, then Congress will decide which electors, if any, may cast the state’s ballots for president.
In the New York Times on Monday: Intensifying his efforts to undo his loss to Joseph R. Biden Jr., President Trump twice called the Republican speaker of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives in recent days to encourage challenges to the official results in the state…. Pennsylvania is the third state in which Mr. Trump is known to have reached out to top elected Republicans to try to reverse the will of voters. He earlier summoned Michigan legislative leaders to the White House, and over the weekend he pressed Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia to call upon that state’s legislature to reverse the election.
Then on Tuesday: The Supreme Court on Tuesday refused a long-shot request from Pennsylvania Republicans to overturn Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory in the state, delivering an unmistakable rebuke to President Trump in the forum on which he had pinned his hopes.
The Texas lawsuit to overturn votes in swing states that went for was released on Tuesday December 8. It asked the court to “enjoin the use of unlawful election results without review and ratification by the defendant states’ legislatures,” meaning it would allow GOP held state legislatures to appoint their own slate of electors for the Electoral College.
By Friday the Supreme Court had rejected the Texas case.
Analysis by the New York Times: The court’s decision on Friday night, an inflection point after weeks of legal flailing by Mr. Trump and ahead of the Electoral College vote for President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. on Monday, leaves the president’s party in an extraordinary position. Through their explicit endorsements or complicity of silence, much of the G.O.P. leadership now shares responsibility for the quixotic attempt to ignore the nation’s founding principles and engineer a different verdict from the one voters cast in November…. And it meant that Republican leaders now stand for a new notion: that the final decisions of voters can be challenged without a basis in fact if the results are not to the liking of the losing side, running counter to decades of work by the United States to convince developing nations that peaceful transfers of power are key to any freely elected government’s credibility.
During a Friday night, contentious Oval Office meeting Trump floated the idea of appointing election conspiracy theorist Sydney Powell to his administration, directing Homeland Security to seize voting machines, and using the military to help keep him in power. Flynn and Guilliani were present.
This Washington Post story recounts Trump attempts to overturn the election: However cleareyed Trump’s aides may have been about his loss to President-elect Joe Biden, many of them nonetheless indulged their boss and encouraged him to keep fighting with legal appeals. They were “happy to scratch his itch,” this adviser said. “If he thinks he won, it’s like, ‘Shh . . . we won’t tell him.’ ”
Bill Bar acknowledged that there was no voter fraud in the 2020 election.
Monday evening’s New York Times: President Trump’s government on Monday authorized President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. to begin a formal transition process after Michigan certified Mr. Biden as its winner, a strong sign that the president’s last-ditch bid to overturn the results of the election was coming to an end.
Mr. Trump had been resisting any move toward a transition. But in conversations in recent days that intensified Monday morning, top aides — including Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff; Pat A. Cipollone, the White House counsel; and Jay Sekulow, the president’s personal lawyer — told the president the transition needed to begin. He did not need to say the word “concede,” they told him, according to multiple people briefed on the discussions.
Since the race was called Trump has made three televised appearances, none about the election. He has mostly addressed the country through Twitter: Since Nov. 3, he has posted some 550 tweets — about three-quarters of which attempted to undermine the integrity of the 2020 election results.
Legal Challenges
Then late Monday night Trump tweeted: Will never concede to fake ballots & “Dominion”.
Trump fired a member of his administration responsible for election security on Tuesday. Chris Krebs “had systematically disputed Mr. Trump’s false declarations in recent days that the presidency was stolen from him through fraudulent ballots and software glitches that changed millions of votes.”
Legal Challenges
Lindsey Graham has been calling election officials trying to get them to toss out legal ballots: he suggested to the Georgia Secretary of State “had the power to toss out all of the mail-in votes from counties with high rates of questionable signatures on ballots”
Trump fired the Secretary of Defense on Monday: Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, called Mr. Esper five minutes before the president’s Twitter post to tell him he had been fired. Mr. Esper was still at the Pentagon cleaning out his desk on Monday afternoon when Mr. Miller arrived, administration officials said.
Trump official Emily W. Murphy, the administrator of the General Services Administration, has refused to issue a letter of “ascertainment,” which allows Mr. Biden’s transition team to begin the transfer of power. An official “said it would be strange for President Trump to send some kind of a signal to allow the transition to start while he is still engaged in court fights.”
Habberman writes in the Friday New York Times: “He knows it’s over,” one adviser said. But instead of conceding, they said, he is floating one improbable scenario after another for staying in office while he contemplates his uncertain post-presidency future. There is no grand strategy at play, according to interviews with a half-dozen advisers and people close to the president. Mr. Trump is simply trying to survive from one news cycle to the next, seeing how far he can push his case against his defeat and ensure the continued support of his Republican base.
Also in the New York Times: “The first small cracks have begun to appear in the Republican wall of support for President Trump and his unfounded claims of voter fraud in the 2020 election, with a growing number of elected officials and party leaders signaling on Thursday that they would indulge Mr. Trump’s conspiracy theories for only so long. A few were willing to openly contradict him.” These include the Governor of Ohio, Carl Rove, Grassley, and John Bolton.
Edsal: Many of those I questioned see this discrepancy as stemming from Trump’s individual personality and characterological deficiencies — what they call his narcissism and his sociopathy. Others offer a more starkly political interpretation: that the refusal to accept Biden’s victory stems from the frustration of a Republican Party struggling to remain competitive in the face of an increasingly multicultural electorate. In the end, it appears to be a mixture of both.
Legal Challenges
Leading Republicans rallied on Monday around President Trump’s refusal to concede the election, declining to challenge the false narrative that it was stolen from him or to recognize President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory.
President Trump suffered multiple legal setbacks in three key swing states on Friday, choking off many of his last-ditch efforts to use the courts to delay or block President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory.
Tom Nichols on Never Trumpers: I believe that if all of us had caved, Trump would now be much closer to victory, not just at the polls, but over the Constitution itself. Many of us instead held firm and made the case for democracy and the rule of law from the right flank against our own tribe…. when Trump is gone (whether after this election or in 2024), I will continue to oppose everyone who had anything to do with inflicting this scar on American history, long after the members of the Trump family are finally bankrupt, in rehab, in jail, or living in seclusion in Manhattan among the neighbors who already despise them.
Current and former Trump Administration officials reach out to Ron Suskind to share their concerns anonymously: They are worried that the president could use the power of the government — the one they all serve or served within — to keep himself in office or to create favorable terms for negotiating his exit from the White House. Like many other experts inside and outside the government, they are also concerned about foreign adversaries using the internet to sow chaos, exacerbate divisions and undermine our democratic process…. They are loath to give up too many precise details, but it’s not hard to speculate from what we already know. Disruption would most likely begin on Election Day morning somewhere on the East Coast, where polls open first. Miami and Philadelphia (already convulsed this week after another police shooting), in big swing states, would be likely locations. It could be anything, maybe violent, maybe not, started by anyone, or something planned and executed by any number of organizations, almost all of them on the right fringe, many adoring of Mr. Trump. The options are vast and test the imagination.
The F.B.I., meanwhile, is bracing for huge challenges. “We are all-hands-on-deck for the foreseeable future,” the F.B.I. official I mentioned earlier told me. “We’ve been talking to our state and local counterparts and gearing up for the expectation that it’s going to be a significant law-enforcement challenge for probably weeks or months,” this official said. “It feels pretty terrifying.”
Echoing this, Trump said on a rally on Saturday: “We’re going to be waiting. Nov. 3 is going to come and go, and we’re not going to know. And you’re going to have bedlam in our country.”
Pre-Election Day
Here is a round up of election street action that started over the weekend, including Trump carvans block traffic in New York and New Jersey on Sunday.
An early voting rally in North Carolina was pepper sprayed by police, including children and elderly.
In Pennsylvania, more liberal counties say they will start counting mail in ballots as soon as the law allows, which is early Election Day morning, while conservative counties say they will wait to even start until after Election Day.
About the “poll watchers” Trump’s team has been coaching: If the president decides to contest the election’s results, his campaign could let loose a blizzard of misleading, decontextualized video clips as “proof” that the vote can’t be trusted…. But the poll watchers’ real influence may not be felt until they go home and start uploading their videos. Three Democratic strategists who are involved in post-election “scenario planning” told me that—barring a blowout on Election Night—Americans should expect a last-ditch disinformation blitz from Trump and his allies to create the impression of wide-scale cheating.
Election Night
Trump’s first statement came at 12:44am Wednesday morning: We are up BIG, but they are trying to STEAL the Election. We will never let them do it. Votes cannot be cast after the Poles are closed!
The map was static from mid-day Wednesday through Saturday morning.
Around 4am Friday morning Biden overtook Trump in Georgia, though the margins are so close the race could take weeks before a final call.
Trump gave remarks Thursday evening from the briefing room of the White House.
This from the fivethirtyeight liveblog, posted after Trump’s speech, seems to be true for most news orgs this week: one part of Trump’s reelection strategy has been actively trying to delegitimize the result for weeks, months now (even dating back to 2016, when he won). The outcome of the 2020 presidential election is not yet known, and it won’t become clear until we have results in Pennsylvania and Arizona, but since Trump made it clear that he would take this route, we talked over how we would handle things in the FiveThirtyEight newsroom.
Here’s where we landed: If Trump falsely or prematurely declares victory or tries to delegitimize the result … our priorities would be (i) don’t let Trump’s false/premature claim dominate our coverage or alter our framing of the night, while (ii) still making clear to readers why the claim is false/premature and carries no legal power. Those continue to be our guiding principles.
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.
Tom Nichols: 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.
November 7
Saturday at 11:24am CNN became the first network to call Pennsylvania and the Election for Biden.
Trump was golfing at his Virginia course when the news broke. He neglected to offer a concession all of Saturday.
Celebrations erupted all over the country, and the world.
Here is the Time’s account of Trump reaction to the news on Saturday.
Nate Silver’s take: just because of that blue shift — and the red shift that occurred in states where mail votes were counted first — that doesn’t mean the presidential race was all that close in the end. Joe Biden’s win was on the tighter side of the likely range of outcomes suggested by polls, but it was a thoroughly convincing one judged on its own merits.
Barrett was voted on and sworn in on Monday evening.
DHS is expelling unaccompanied migrant children to Mexico in violation of our agreements with Mexico: Rumors of children from other countries being expelled into Mexico have swirled among nonprofit workers advocating for child welfare in Mexico and the United States. But locating any such children has been difficult because of spotty reporting from Mexican government authorities.
But an email from the U.S. Border Patrol’s assistant chief, Eduardo Sanchez, obtained by The New York Times, makes it clear that such transfers have not only occurred, but that they are a clear violation of U.S. policy.
New York Times reports on Barr’s DOJ giving preferable treatment to a Turkish bank with ties to Jared Kushner.
Election 2020
The Supreme Court ruled that Wisconsin cannot extend the deadline for receiving ballots from November 3 to November 6. The case was decided by the 5 conservative justices. The argument seems to be that they don’t want single judges–a federal appeals court judge in this case–changing election rules while the election is ongoing. Gorsuch: “No one doubts that conducting a national election amid a pandemic poses serious challenges. But none of that means individual judges may improvise with their own election rules in place of those the people’s representatives have adopted.”
Last week the court deadlocked, with Roberts on the liberal side, on a similar case in Pennsylvania. Roberts explains the distinction: “While the Pennsylvania applications implicated the authority of state courts to apply their own constitutions to election regulations, this case involves federal intrusion on state lawmaking processes. Different bodies of law and different precedents govern these two situations and require, in these particular circumstances, that we allow the modification of election rules in Pennsylvania but not Wisconsin.”
Kavanaugh’s portions of the rulings are raising eyebrows.
The Supreme Court ruled Wednesday to allow the extension of the deadline for return of ballots in Pennsylvania.
Edsall in the Times: The reality is that in order to remain competitive, the party has been forced to adopt policies and strategies designed to restrict and constrain the majority electorate: voter suppression, gerrymandering, dependence on an Electoral College that favors small, rural states, and legislation designed to weaken and defund the labor movement.
In this context, it’s not a surprise that Trump and his partisan allies would be guided by an “anti-democracy attitude” that “has so taken hold that it could actually undo a presidential election.” What is more surprising is that it possibly could succeed.
Examples of voter suppression measures in Pennsylvania.
Frum writes this week: We are hearing louder and louder voices on the Republican side questioning whether universal voting rights should even theoretically be guaranteed by the American constitutional system…. The U.S. Constitution in many ways protects minorities against majorities. In the Trump era, we see instead politicians like Lee trying to pretend that minorities are majorities—and to grab the powers that legitimately belong to majorities away from them.
That’s the thing that needs to stop. That’s the thing that needs to change. And if Trump and his allies seem in these final days to act more frantically, more abusively, than usual, perhaps it is because they sense that the change is coming.
A new report on Child separation says that 545 children have been permanently separated from their parents.
Election 2020
The Supreme Court deadlocked 4-4 allowing Pennsylvania to count ballots received until November 6. Roberts sided with the liberals: In its Sept. 17 ruling, the divided state Supreme Court said ballots must be postmarked by the time polls close and be received by county election boards at 5 p.m. on Nov. 6, three days after the Nov. 3 election.
There is some reporting this week about Russia hacking into American election systems: The discovery of the hacks came as American intelligence agencies, infiltrating Russian networks themselves, have pieced together details of what they believe are Russia’s plans to interfere in the presidential race in its final days or immediately after the election on Nov. 3. … American officials expect that if the presidential race is not called on election night, Russian groups could use their knowledge of the local computer systems to deface websites, release nonpublic information or take similar steps that could sow chaos and doubts about the integrity of the results, according to officials briefed on the intelligence. Such steps could fuel Mr. Trump’s unsubstantiated claims that the vote is “rigged” and that he can be defeated only if his opponents cheat.
Barrett was voted on and sworn in on Monday evening at a White House event that was turned into a campaign ad for Trump.
DHS is expelling unaccompanied migrant children to Mexico in violation of our agreements with Mexico: Rumors of children from other countries being expelled into Mexico have swirled among nonprofit workers advocating for child welfare in Mexico and the United States. But locating any such children has been difficult because of spotty reporting from Mexican government authorities.
But an email from the U.S. Border Patrol’s assistant chief, Eduardo Sanchez, obtained by The New York Times, makes it clear that such transfers have not only occurred, but that they are a clear violation of U.S. policy.
New York Times reports on Barr’s DOJ giving preferable treatment to a Turkish bank.
Election 2020
The Supreme Court ruled that Wisconsin cannot extend the deadline for receiving ballots from November 3 to November 6. The case was decided by the 5 conservative justices. The argument seems to be that they don’t want single judges–a federal appeals court judge in this case–changing election rules while the election is ongoing. Gorsuch: “No one doubts that conducting a national election amid a pandemic poses serious challenges. But none of that means individual judges may improvise with their own election rules in place of those the people’s representatives have adopted.”
Last week the court deadlocked, with Roberts on the liberal side, on a similar case in Pennsylvania. Roberts explains the distinction: “While the Pennsylvania applications implicated the authority of state courts to apply their own constitutions to election regulations, this case involves federal intrusion on state lawmaking processes. Different bodies of law and different precedents govern these two situations and require, in these particular circumstances, that we allow the modification of election rules in Pennsylvania but not Wisconsin.” Kavanaugh’s portions of the rulings are raising eyebrows.
Edsall in the Times: The reality is that in order to remain competitive, the party has been forced to adopt policies and strategies designed to restrict and constrain the majority electorate: voter suppression, gerrymandering, dependence on an Electoral College that favors small, rural states, and legislation designed to weaken and defund the labor movement.
In this context, it’s not a surprise that Trump and his partisan allies would be guided by an “anti-democracy attitude” that “has so taken hold that it could actually undo a presidential election.” What is more surprising is that it possibly could succeed.
The Supreme Court ruled Wednesday to allow the extension of the deadline for return of ballots.
Frum writes this week: We are hearing louder and louder voices on the Republican side questioning whether universal voting rights should even theoretically be guaranteed by the American constitutional system…. The U.S. Constitution in many ways protects minorities against majorities. In the Trump era, we see instead politicians like Lee trying to pretend that minorities are majorities—and to grab the powers that legitimately belong to majorities away from them.
That’s the thing that needs to stop. That’s the thing that needs to change. And if Trump and his allies seem in these final days to act more frantically, more abusively, than usual, perhaps it is because they sense that the change is coming.
Closing Arguments & Predictions:
Tom Nichols on Never Trumpers: I believe that if all of us had caved, Trump would now be much closer to victory, not just at the polls, but over the Constitution itself. Many of us instead held firm and made the case for democracy and the rule of law from the right flank against our own tribe…. when Trump is gone (whether after this election or in 2024), I will continue to oppose everyone who had anything to do with inflicting this scar on American history, long after the members of the Trump family are finally bankrupt, in rehab, in jail, or living in seclusion in Manhattan among the neighbors who already despise them.
Current and former Trump Administration officials reach out to Ron Suskind to share their concerns anonymously: They are worried that the president could use the power of the government — the one they all serve or served within — to keep himself in office or to create favorable terms for negotiating his exit from the White House. Like many other experts inside and outside the government, they are also concerned about foreign adversaries using the internet to sow chaos, exacerbate divisions and undermine our democratic process…. They are loath to give up too many precise details, but it’s not hard to speculate from what we already know. Disruption would most likely begin on Election Day morning somewhere on the East Coast, where polls open first. Miami and Philadelphia (already convulsed this week after another police shooting), in big swing states, would be likely locations. It could be anything, maybe violent, maybe not, started by anyone, or something planned and executed by any number of organizations, almost all of them on the right fringe, many adoring of Mr. Trump. The options are vast and test the imagination.
The F.B.I., meanwhile, is bracing for huge challenges. “We are all-hands-on-deck for the foreseeable future,” the F.B.I. official I mentioned earlier told me. “We’ve been talking to our state and local counterparts and gearing up for the expectation that it’s going to be a significant law-enforcement challenge for probably weeks or months,” this official said. “It feels pretty terrifying.”
Echoing this, Trump said on a rally on Saturday: “We’re going to be waiting. Nov. 3 is going to come and go, and we’re not going to know. And you’re going to have bedlam in our country.”
