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#ElectionResults2020 - #Biden Takes Lead In #Pennsylvania, #Georgia

 

Democratic Party candidate Joe Biden has gained razor thin leads over President Donald Trump in Georgia and Pennsylvania, as vote counting continues Friday.

The Trump campaign continues to dispute the results, however, saying in a statement Friday the “this election is not over,” and claiming the president will ultimately win after expected recounts in close state races. The Trump campaign has also filed legal challenges over unsubstantiated allegations of vote fraud and irregularities. 

Biden currently leads in the popular vote as well as the Electoral College count, 253-214, with a majority of 270 needed to claim the presidency for a four-year term.  
 
Biden has moved ahead of Trump in both Georgia and Pennsylvania on the strength of mail-in ballots that were cast in reliably Democratic areas such as the cities of Atlanta and Philadelphia.

In Pennsylvania, Biden overtook Trump by 5,587 votes Friday morning, and in Georgia, he now has a 1,097-vote lead. Both margins were expected to increase as additional ballots continue to be counted.  

Biden would be the first Democrat to win Georgia since Bill Clinton in 1992.

In the U.S. Electoral College system, the popular vote winner in each state — with two exceptions, Maine and Nebraska — receives all of that state’s electoral votes, which are allocated on the basis of population. 

Meanwhile President Trump, without evidence, Thursday accused Democrats of engineering massive fraud and irregularities to prevent him from winning reelection as president.  

“This is a case where they are trying to steal an election, they’re trying to rig an election, and we can’t let that happen,” said Trump during a news conference.   

In contrast, Biden earlier in the day urged patience while states tabulate the record number of votes, more than 150 million, cast in this year’s election.  

“Each ballot must be counted. And that’s what we’re going to see going through now. And that’s how it should be. Democracy sometimes is messy,” Biden said during a briefing.  

Counting under way

If Biden holds his vote leads in Arizona, with its 11 electors, and Nevada with six, he will reach the 270 Electoral College majority and become the country’s 46th president at his inauguration in January, no matter the outcome in Georgia and Pennsylvania.   

Trump needs to hold all the states he has been leading in and pick up either Nevada or Arizona, in each of which Biden is currently leading.  

The Biden campaign had urged supporters to vote by mail to stay safe during the coronavirus pandemic, while Trump has, without evidence, denounced mail-in voting as fraudulent and a scam.  

Trump cited the disproportionate number of late votes being won by Biden as possible vote interference by what he called the corrupt voting apparatus of states with Democratic governors.  

“We were winning in all the key locations by a lot, actually, and then our numbers started miraculously getting whittled away in secret,” Trump said on Thursday. 

Twenty electoral votes are at stake in Pennsylvania. Trump has more comfortable leads in two other states that have not yet been called: Alaska and North Carolina. 

Biden leads the national popular vote 73.5 million to 69.5 million, but it is the Electoral College that will determine the winner after a contentious, months-long campaign.   

On Twitter, Trump demanded that the vote count be stopped. But if the vote count were frozen in its late Thursday morning state, Trump would lose, becoming the third U.S. president in the last four decades to lose reelection after a single term.

Lawsuits

Trump on Thursday also cited irregularities, such as state officials barring his campaign from observing the vote count, called mail-in voting a “corrupt system” that lacks “any verification measures,” and said he expects contested election litigation to end up in the Supreme Court.

The vote count across the U.S. has been slowed by the vast number of mail-in ballots — about two-thirds of the more than 101 million ballots cast before Tuesday’s official Election Day — and which are taking longer to count. Many people who voted by mail said they wanted to avoid long lines at polling stations on Tuesday and coming face to face with others amid the country’s unchecked coronavirus pandemic.   

Biden’s campaign urged voting by mail, and the result is that his vote count has swelled in numerous states as those ballots are tallied. Trump mostly urged Election Day in-person voting by Republicans, claiming without evidence that mail-in voting would lead to an election rigged against him. Those ballots were generally counted earlier. 

Trump’s lawyers also called for a recount in the Midwestern state of Wisconsin, where Biden was projected the winner of the state’s 10 electors on Wednesday. They contended that there were irregularities at some voting stations.  

Trump claimed victory in the early hours of Wednesday, but Biden has stopped short of saying he has won. 

“I’m not here to declare that we’ve won,” Biden said Wednesday. “But I am here to report that when the count is finished, we believe we will be the winners.” 

https://www.eurasiareview.com/06112020-biden-takes-lead-in-pennsylvania-georgia/

#ElectionResults2020 - Opinion: Is America Becoming a Failed State?

By Paul Krugman 

  As I write this, it seems extremely likely that Joe Biden has won the presidency. And he clearly received millions more votes than his opponent. He can and should claim that he has been given a strong mandate to govern the nation. But there are real questions about whether he will, in fact, be able to govern. At the moment, it seems likely that the Senate — which is wildly unrepresentative of the American people — will remain in the hands of an extremist party that will sabotage Biden in every way it can. Before I get into the problems this confrontation is likely to cause, let’s talk about just how unrepresentative the Senate is. Every state, of course, has two senators — which means that Wyoming’s 579,000 residents have as much weight as California’s 39 million. 

The overweighted states tend to be much less urbanized than the nation as a whole. And given the growing political divide between metropolitan and rural areas, this gives the Senate a strong rightward tilt.

An analysis by the website FiveThirtyEight.com found that the Senate in effect represents an electorate almost seven percentage points more Republican than the average voter. Cases like Susan Collins, who held on in a Democratic state, are exceptions; the underlying right-wing skew of the Senate is the main reason the G.O.P. will probably retain control despite a substantial Democratic victory in the presidential popular vote.

But, you may ask, why is divided control of government such a problem? After all, Republicans controlled one or both chambers of Congress for three-quarters of Barack Obama’s presidency, and we survived, didn’t we?

Yes, but.

In fact, G.O.P. obstruction did a lot of damage even during the Obama years. Republicans used hardball tactics, including threats to cause a default on the national debt, to force a premature withdrawal of fiscal support that slowed the pace of economic recovery. I’ve estimated that without this de facto sabotage, the unemployment rate in 2014 might have been about two percentage points lower than it actually was.

And the need for more spending is even more acute now than it was in 2011, when Republicans took control of the House.

Most immediately, the coronavirus is running wild, with new cases exceeding 100,000 a day and rising rapidly. This is going to hit the economy hard, even if state and local governments don’t impose new lockdowns.

We desperately need a new round of federal spending on health care, aid to the unemployed and businesses, and support for strapped state and local governments. Reasonable estimates suggest that we should spend $200 billion or more each month until a vaccine brings the pandemic to an end. I’d be shocked if a Senate still controlled by Mitch McConnell would agree to anything like this.Even after the pandemic is over, we’re likely to face both persistent economic weakness and a desperate need for more public investment. But McConnell effectively blocked infrastructure spending even with Donald Trump in the White House. Why would he become more amenable with Biden in office?

Now, spending isn’t the only form of policy. Normally, there are many things a president can achieve for good (Obama) or evil (Trump) through executive action. In fact, during the summer a Democratic task force identified hundreds of things a President Biden could do without having to go through Congress.

But here’s where I worry about the role of a heavily partisan Supreme Court — a court shaped by McConnell’s norm-breaking behavior, including the rushed confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett just days before the election.Six of nine justices were chosen by a party that has won the popular vote only once in the past eight elections. And I think there’s a substantial chance that this court may behave like the Supreme Court in the 1930s, which kept blocking New Deal programs until F.D.R. threatened to add seats — something Biden wouldn’t be able to do with a Republican-controlled Senate.So we are in big trouble. Trump’s defeat would mean that we have, for the moment, avoided a plunge into authoritarianism — and yes, the stakes are that high, not just because of who Trump is, but also because the modern G.O.P. is so extremist and anti-democratic. But our skewed electoral system means that Trump’s party is still in a position to hobble, perhaps cripple, the next president’s ability to deal with the huge epidemiological, economic and environmental problems we face.

Put it this way: If we were looking at a foreign country with America’s level of political dysfunction, we would probably consider it on the edge of becoming a failed state — that is, a state whose government is no longer able to exert effective control.

Runoff elections in Georgia may yet give Democrats Senate control; barring that, Biden might be able to find a few reasonable Republicans willing to pull us back from that brink. But despite his apparent victory, the Republic remains in great danger.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/05/opinion/joe-biden-senate-mitch-mcconnell.html