James.galbraith

Lawyers at two law firms representing Donald Trump and the Republican Party object to the vote count in several states have privately expressed concern that what they are doing is wrong.

The NYT reports: “Some senior lawyers at Jones Day, one of the country’s largest law firms, are worried that it is advancing arguments that lack evidence and may be helping Mr. Trump and his allies undermine the integrity of American elections, according to interviews with nine partners and associates, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect their jobs.”

The NYT adds that attorneys at another firm hired by the president’s team, Porter Wright Morris & Arthur, “have held internal meetings to voice similar concerns about their firm’s election-related work for Mr. Trump and the Republican Party, according to people at the firm. At least one lawyer quit in protest.”

The post Lawyers Representing Trump and GOP in Baseless Voter Fraud Lawsuits Express Private Concern That What They are Doing is Wrong appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

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The process will be slow and difficult, but starting it now will send a big message.

The drug maker Pfizer announced on Monday that an early analysis of its coronavirus vaccine trial suggested the vaccine was robustly effective in preventing Covid-19, a promising development as the world has waited anxiously for any positive news about a pandemic that has killed more than 1.2 million people. From a report: Pfizer, which developed the vaccine with the German drugmaker BioNTech, released only sparse details from its clinical trial, based on the first formal review of the data by an outside panel of experts. The company said that the analysis found that the vaccine was more than 90 percent effective in preventing the disease among trial volunteers who had no evidence of prior coronavirus infection. If the results hold up, that level of protection would put it on par with highly effective childhood vaccines for diseases such as measles. No serious safety concerns have been observed, the company said. Pfizer plans to ask the Food and Drug Administration for emergency authorization of the two-dose vaccine later this month, after it has collected the recommended two months of safety data. By the end of the year it will have manufactured enough doses to immunize 15 to 20 million people, company executives have said. [...] Independent scientists have cautioned against hyping early results before long-term safety and efficacy data has been collected. And no one knows how long the vaccine's protection might last. Still, the development makes Pfizer the first company to announce positive results from a late-stage vaccine trial, vaulting it to the front of a frenzied global race that began in January and has unfolded at record-breaking speed. Eleven vaccines are in late-stage trials, including four in the United States. Pfizer's progress could bode well for Moderna's vaccine, which uses similar technology. Moderna has said it could have early results later this month. The news comes just days after Joseph R. Biden Jr. clinched a victory over President Trump in the presidential election. Mr. Trump had repeatedly hinted a vaccine would be ready before Election Day, Nov. 3. This fall, Pfizer's chief executive, Dr. Albert Bourla, frequently claimed that the company could have a "readout" by October, something that did not come to pass.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

President Donald Trump meets with members of Congress, including Sen. Pat Toomey, at left, in the Cabinet Room of the White House in 2018. | Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images

Many Republicans are still backing Trump to the bitter end.

A group of stubborn Republican holdouts are refusing to acknowledge the reality that President-elect Joe Biden won the election — and that he did so without any impropriety.

The race had been called for Biden by all major news networks by Saturday morning, setting off a flurry of congratulations from world leaders, and celebrations in major US cities. The Biden campaign responded with victory speeches Saturday night, and began to to roll out its official transition website as well as Biden’s early executive agenda.

But a number of Republican lawmakers responded by echoing President Donald Trump’s incorrect claims that the results need to be investigated, and that Biden’s win was due to voter fraud.

Just hours after news networks called the election for Biden, Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Lindsey Graham (R-SC) promised the committee would investigate “all credible allegations of voting irregularities and misconduct.” Thus far there have been no credible claims of voter fraud.

And Sunday morning, Graham sent a message to Trump on Fox News’ Sunday Morning Futures, bringing up conspiracy theories about bad computers, and saying, “Don’t concede, Mr. President. Fight hard.”

In an interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, Sen. Roy Blunt (R-MO) refused to acknowledge that Biden is the president-elect, saying, “It’s time for the president’s lawyers to present the facts and it’s time for those facts to speak for themselves.” He went on to admit further review is unlikely to overturn the results, but said inquiries should continue to ensure “every illegal vote was challenged, and not counted.”

Sen. Pat Toomey (R-PA) took a slightly softer approach on CBS’s Face the Nation, acknowledging that his home state’s vote count — which put Biden over the threshold of 270 Electoral College votes needed to win — is “probably correct, but there’s a reason that we do the count.” But he still wouldn’t go as far as acknowledging that Biden won.

In contrast, North Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, a vocal and enthusiastic supporter of the president, alleged, as the president has, that there was widespread voter fraud. As Stephanopoulos noted in his discussion with the governor, secretaries of state across the US have repeatedly said there has been no widespread fraud — and when pushed to provide evidence otherwise, Noem could not. Instead, she brought up the minor, and common, problems that election officials deal with routinely. She too, however, refused to acknowledge the reality that Trump lost the election.

Republican congressional leaders have done little to clear up these attempts to cast doubt on the election’s results. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said Friday that “every legal vote” should be counted and “all sides must get to observe the process,” but has refused to elaborate or give further comment.

In the House, on the other hand, Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) has encouraged Republican efforts to undermine the election’s results, and suggested, without evidence, that there may have been illegal votes cast.

“What we need in the presidential race is to make sure every legal vote is counted, every recount is completed, and every legal challenge should be heard,” McCarthy told Fox’s Maria Bartiromo Sunday. “Then, and only then, America will decide who won the race.”

As Vox’s Jen Kirby has explained, only legal votes are being counted, and voter fraud is, in general, rare:

In Oregon, which has been voting by mail for about two decades, officials referred 54 cases of possible voter fraud to law enforcement in 2016. Of those, 22 people — representing just 0.0001 percent of all ballots cast that year — were found guilty of having voted in two states.

Another analysis by the Washington Post and the nonprofit Electronic Registration Information Center found officials in Colorado, Washington, and Oregon referred 372 possible cases to law enforcement of double voting or voting on behalf of a dead person, out of about 14.6 million mail-in votes in the 2016 and 2018 general elections. That comes out to about 0.0025 percent of all ballots.

A few Republicans have said it’s time to accept Biden’s victory

While many Republicans still refuse to take a stand against the president, some did make a break from the party line and acknowledged Biden as the election winner.

Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) congratulated Biden on Saturday, and said Sunday on CNN’s State of the Union that “it’s destructive to the cause of democracy to suggest widespread fraud or corruption. There’s just no evidence of that at this stage.” He went on to say the US needs to now “get behind the new president.”

Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, who hasn’t been afraid of confronting the president over his handling of the pandemic, told CNN’s Jake Tapper that he hopes the president “does the right thing and concedes.”

Perhaps most notable, however, was former president George W. Bush, who released a statement indicating that he had called the president-elect to congratulate Biden on his victory.

“Though we have political differences, I know Joe Biden to be a good man, who has won his opportunity to lead and unify our country,” Bush said. “The President-elect reiterated that while he ran as a Democrat, he will govern for all Americans. I offered him the same thing I offered Presidents Trump and Obama: my prayers for his success, and my pledge to help in any way I can.”

As Vox’s Alex Ward has explained, it does not really matter whether Trump concedes — Biden will be inaugurated, and can forcibly remove Trump from the White House at that time if need be. Nevertheless, it remains distressing that Republicans would support the president in his efforts to disrupt trust in voting, and suggest that he is correct in claiming there is something wrong with the results — when there most certainly is not.

President Trump supporters in front of the Maricopa County Election Department while votes are being counted in Phoenix, Arizona, on November 6. | Olivier Touron/AFP via Getty Images

As the media picks apart the voting trends of people of color, it must not ignore the big constant.

Americans will be dissecting the 2020 election for years to come, with analysts and ordinary voters alike parsing who voted for whom and wondering why this race was such a nail-biter. But amid all the remaining uncertainty, one thing is abundantly clear: White people, yet again, showed up for Donald Trump.

In 2016, white voters propelled Trump to the presidency, with 54 percent voting for him and 39 percent voting for Hillary Clinton, according to a 2018 Pew Research Center study. And though the end result might be different in 2020 — exit polls are by no means comprehensive or exact — early evidence shows that white people’s voting patterns look much the same: 57 percent of this group voted to reelect the president while 42 percent voted for Democratic challenger Joe Biden, according to Edison Research’s exit polls of 15,590 voters conducted outside their polling places, at early voting sites, or by phone. That makes white people the only racial group in which a majority voted for Trump, as Charles M. Blow notes at the New York Times.

But much media coverage immediately after Election Day focused on groups that made up much smaller parts of Trump’s coalition, especially Latinx voters, 32 percent of whom voted for the president, and Black voters, just 12 percent of whom did, according to the Edison Research data. News stories charged Latinx voters with helping to “sink” Biden in Florida, and journalists began to analyze Black and Latinx voting patterns region by region with the hope of figuring out why some voters from these groups turned out for Trump.

It’s true that Trump appears to have gained about 3 percentage points each with Black, Latinx, and Asian American voters since 2016 (exit polls appear not to have broken out Indigenous voters, instead lumping them into the category of “other”). And pointing out that none of these groups are monolithic is an important corrective to the inaccurate idea that “people of color” are homogenous or always vote as a bloc.

Courtney Pedroza/Getty Images

Olivier Touron/NAFP via Getty Images

But it’s also increasingly clear that Black, Latinx, and Indigenous voters were core to giving Biden an edge in key swing states like Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Arizona. And as analysts drill down into what happened on Election Day in states and counties around the country, it’s crucial not to lose sight of what’s staring us in the face: The support Trump has always received from white people.

This year, the majority of white Americans voted for Trump, even after a recession and a botched response to a pandemic that has left more than 200,000 dead. And if we simply treat this fact as obvious while Black and Latinx votes are worthy of analysis, we essentially give white voters a pass for backing a racist campaign — twice.

“White voters seem even more likely to vote for Trump in 2020 than in 2016, in large numbers in the majority,” Chryl Laird, assistant professor of government at Bowdoin College and coauthor of the book Steadfast Democrats: How Social Forces Shape Black Political Behavior, told Vox. “What does that say about the progress that we’ve made?”

In what seems like a tight race, there’s been a lot of focus on voters of color

The focus on voters of color started on election night. Trump took Florida, one of the first states to be called, creating the impression among many liberals that Biden was on the edge of losing. Many were looking for answers, and one that got a lot of attention was the fact that Biden had underperformed Hillary Clinton in Miami-Dade County, home to many Cuban-American voters.

In the last two days, we’ve seen numerous examinations of what happened in Miami-Dade, as well as lots of focus on Trump’s gains among Black men nationwide. The fact that Trump appears to have picked up votes since 2016 with every racial group except white men also got a lot of attention (though what appears to be a small gain among white women has been less remarked upon).

It’s perhaps not surprising that voters of color who cast their ballots for Trump have gotten so much focus — after all, Trump has made racism the core of his pitch to voters from the very beginning, when he called Mexicans “rapists” in his 2015 speech launching his first campaign. But as many have pointed out, there’s a lot of diversity among Latinx voters in the US — a categorization that covers almost 60 million people who represent more than 15 origin countries and encompass a range of generational, socioeconomic, and religious identities — and not all of them necessarily had Trump’s 2015 comments top of mind on Tuesday.

What’s more, Trump has made specific outreach to Cuban and Venezuelan Americans in recent weeks while the Biden campaign has been criticized for neglecting Black and Latinx voters. Analysis of their voting patterns — as well as those of Asian American and Indigenous voters — in the coming weeks could help push back against Democrats’ tendency to take these groups of voters for granted.

But an increasingly clear picture is also emerging of Black voters in Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania helping push Biden to victory — and of Latinx and Indigenous voters in Arizona and elsewhere making a big difference as well. And while much attention has been paid to the minorities of voters of color who cast their ballots for Trump, there’s been less acknowledgment that according to exit polls, the majority of those voters — 87 percent of Black voters, 66 percent of Latinx voters, and 63 percent of Asian American voters — chose Biden.

Instead, as artist and activist Bree Newsome Bass wrote on Thursday, there’s been a tendency “to scapegoat Black voters for a close election.”

While Biden ultimately defeated Trump, there have been many efforts to identify the blind spot or weakness among Democrats that led to a close election in the midst of a devastating pandemic. But the answer has always been there: White people once again largely backed a president who champions a brand of nationalism that is steeped in racism and xenophobia.

White people have always been the key to Donald Trump’s success

Despite his gains among voters of color, Trump’s base has always been white people. That didn’t change in 2020, when a majority of white voters backed him. And since white voters comprise the majority of the electorate — 65 percent according to Edison Research — they make up by far the largest bloc to support him. Black and Latinx voters, meanwhile, make up 12 and 13 percent, respectively.

Much attention has been paid to a tide shift among white people in recent months. It was just this summer that many white people were said to be experiencing a great awakening, a moment when anti-racism books were flying off the shelves and participants pledged to do better by learning about white supremacy and how to dismantle it. (But let’s face it, white people buying anti-racism books probably weren’t going to vote for Trump in the first place. After all, only 16 percent of white Republicans expressed at least some support for the Black Lives Matter movement in a September survey, down from 37 percent in June.)

A big part of progressives’ mission this year was getting more white people to vote against Trump. But the reality is grim: The presidential race was much closer than predicted, and that’s after Trump’s zero-tolerance family separation policy, after the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor that Trump did not denounce, after Covid-19 ravaged the country, and after Trump’s impeachment. There has been no widespread rejection of Trump or white supremacy among white Trump supporters or even former supporters.

Perhaps there’s been little discussion about why white people voted for Trump because America has long taken for granted that white people will vote in their best interest — and that’s voting for whiteness regardless of their socioeconomic status or the level of education they’ve attained. There’s Trump’s most hardcore base — the vast majority of whom are white Americans who see no problem with what the president has said and done from the moment he announced his candidacy. They get riled up when he says “send her back!” of a congresswoman and tells the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by” or when he implements a Muslim travel ban. “They’re aligned with him completely,” Laird told Vox.

Then there’s another group of white voters who aren’t completely aligned with Trump but look past what they dislike about him in favor of his stance on the issues that concern them the most. For example, there may be Trump voters who disagree with Trump’s racist rhetoric but don’t care enough to be dissuaded from backing him because they are pro-life or in favor of gun rights or oppose tax increases on the wealthy. They may be able to conveniently look away from his child separation policies because they like his promise to put America first. Instead of grappling with why anti-racism protests broke in small towns and cities across the nation, they just want things to go back to normal; “law and order” seems like a good solution.

Ultimately, many white voters are simply attached to what Trump represents. “These voters are very much about the idea that the status quo isn’t a problem and that we should make America great again back when we didn’t have to worry about PC culture,” Laird said. “Because when you’re in power, why would you give it up?”

Megan Varner/Getty Images

Jeff Kowalsky/AFP via Getty Images

Jeff Kowalsky/AFP via Getty Images

This includes white women, who seem to have backed Trump in similar or even greater numbers this election than they did in 2016 — 55 percent of white female voters cast their ballots for Trump, according to Edison Research exit polls, while 43 percent voted for Biden. White women’s support for Trump has historical precedent — they have long been able to gain power in a sexist society by allying themselves with white supremacy. As historian Stephanie Jones-Rogers told Vox in 2018, “White girls and women were able to exercise power in this nation, from its colonial beginnings, because of their whiteness.” Even against this backdrop, though the fact that a large share of white women seem to have voted to reelect Trump in the midst of a recession and nationwide child care crisis that have affected women most deeply is certainly deserving of scrutiny in the weeks and months to come.

Meanwhile, Trump actually lost some ground with white men in 2020 relative to 2016. However, he still captured a majority, with 58 percent of this group voting for him compared with 40 percent for Biden. There has yet to be much analysis of Trump’s losses among white men — or what role the presence of a male candidate, rather than Hillary Clinton, at the top of the Democratic ticket played in this group’s choices in 2020.

Similarly, white youth were the likeliest to support Trump, with 43 percent of white voters between ages 18 and 29 voting for Trump, according to exit poll data analyzed by the Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement. By comparison, just 9 percent of young Black voters, 13 percent of young Asian voters, and 21 percent of young Latino voters backed Trump.

White people have been privileged to evade being at the center of the identity politics debate because America normalizes whiteness. While other voters are solely discussed according to their broad-strokes racial groups, white people are free to deflect and scapegoat these other groups, especially in times of fear and uncertainty. Blatantly ignoring how white people vote proves the power structure is not willing to hold a mirror up to itself.

Biden has defeated Trump, and while there are many factors that have contributed to that victory, one of them is the high voter turnout among Black and Latinx voters. Equally important, though, is underscoring the fact that the majority of white American voters had little to do with it.

A single shot given every two months has proved to be more effective than a daily pill at preventing H.I.V. in women, researchers reported on Monday, an advance that medical experts hailed as groundbreaking in the fight against the deadly virus that causes AIDS. From a report: The finding that the long-acting drug would prevent H.I.V. in six doses taken over a year instead of the 365 required for the prevention pill currently on the market was so convincing the researchers decided to end their clinical trial of the drug early. "It's a game changer for women," said Dr. Sigal Yawetz, an expert on women with H.I.V. at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston who was not involved in the trial. Women and girls accounted for about half of all new H.I.V. infections in 2019, according to Unaids, a United Nations organization that leads the global fight against H.I.V. and AIDS. In sub-Saharan Africa, five in six new infections among adolescents ages 15 to 19 are among girls. "If we're going to get to the end of the epidemic, we have to do something to stem the tide of infection in those women," said Dr. Kimberly Smith, head of research and development at ViiV Healthcare, which manufactures the injection. "That is why this study is so important. It gives a new, incredibly effective option for women." Women have had only one approved option for pre-exposure prophylaxis, or PrEP, a course of drugs taken to prevent contracting H.I.V.: the daily pill Truvada, made by Gilead Sciences. (A second pill also made by Gilead, called Descovy, was approved in October 2019, but only for men and transgender women.)

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Damn Daniel

Control of the Senate will be decided in Georgia on Jan. 5, 2021, with a pair of runoff elections pitting Democrat Jon Ossoff against Sen. David Perdue and Rev. Raphael Warnock against Sen. Kelly Loeffler. “I don’t think it’s possible to overstate how big these races are,” the New Georgia Project’s Nse Ufot told The Washington Post.

One major question is how much either President-elect Joe Biden or Donald Trump will engage in the race. Democrats having control of the Senate would be a huge advantage for Biden, but “Some close allies” told the Post he needed to be careful about "chasing the white whales." Trump, meanwhile, is too busy having temper tantrums over his own loss for much to be known about if or how he will ultimately weigh in on the Georgia runoffs. If you live in Georgia, register to vote now and share that link with your family and friends in the state. The deadline is Dec. 7.

Let's push this one over the finish line! Can you chip in $3 each to Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock?

Republicans are trying to nationalize the Georgia runoffs with a focus on Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. Perdue and Loeffler have both put out a stream of tweets and retweets with Schumer as the bad guy, and invoking socialism.

What Perdue, at least, hasn’t done is speak to the public:

The fight is on.

As Americans go to the polls and wait in (hopefully) socially distant lines, COVID-19 continues to spread mostly unchecked. The Republican-led localities that wanted to believe major cities, frequently under Democratic leadership, were the only areas dealing with large outbreaks of the virus have been dealing with exponentially growing infection rates. States considered red are breaking daily records, while many blue states continue to try and keep their numbers manageable.

The Associated Press (AP) reports that over the weekend, Texas surpassed California to become the state with the highest number of coronavirus cases at 938,503. This number, of course, is most likely an undercount because testing in our country has continued to lag behind the spread of the virus since the beginning. And as AP explains, the coronavirus rate in Texas is far worse than California as California has 10 million more people living inside of its boundaries. 

On Mobilize America, there are hundreds of campaigns and local Democratic parties organizing (mostly virtual) get-out-the-vote activities. Find one near you, and connect with members of your community while doing work to turn out the Democratic vote!

States like Texas, Florida, and Georgia’s Republican leadership scoffed at early prevention measures like mask mandates and shutting down indoor businesses. Since the initial wave of the pandemic hit our country in February, March, and April, these states have seen exploding numbers. Over the last two weeks however, Texas has surged to a positivity rate of 10.72%. The national average is 6.6%. 

More than 29 million people live in Texas. The state’s cases per 100,000 population is 3,269.84. By comparison, California—home to more than 39 million people—has a rate of 2,371.56 cases per 100,000.

Three days ago, El Paso County Judge Ricardo Samaniego tweeted: “The County is currently working on creating more space at our Medical Examiner's Office parking lot so that we can get a 3rd mobile morgue unit. If that doesn't put our situation into perspective I don't know what will.” NPR reports that as of Nov. 3, it looks like El Paso has added a fourth “mobile morgue.” This is because as COVID-19 cases surge, death rates go up. They go up because resources and access for people become stretched thin, and Americans pay for this lack of infrastructure and leadership.

Will this reality have any effect on the close races of Republican duds like Sen. John Cornyn of Texas? It remains to be seen, but he has clearly felt the shift in his state from complacency to anger.

On Saturday, The New York Times published a thorough, exciting interview with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on the subject of running for reelection, progressives being seen as the enemy, and President-elect Joe Biden’s big win. On Sunday morning, Ocasio-Cortez appeared on CNN’s State of the Union to speak with host Jake Tapper about more of the same. The pair talked about division within the House caucus, the importance of rejecting Republican narratives about the progressive movement, and what it means to Ocasio-Cortez to see Vice President-elect Kamala Harris in the White House. Let’s check out the clips below.

As we know, all four members of the Squad were reelected this November, as well as Congresswoman-elect Cori Bush, a progressive activist. Bush will be Missouri’s first Black congresswoman. We also saw a rainbow wave across state and local elections, and a groundbreaking number of Muslim Americans elected to office. Certainly, all of those wins are victories to be celebrated.

That said, Democrats carry a majority in the House, but a smaller one than before. And people from all sides of the aisle have thoughts on what might have cost people votes or seats—blatant support for movements like defunding the police, Black Lives Matter, Medicare for All, and such among them. On a private call, for example, Democratic Rep. Abigail Spanberger from Virginia suggested to colleagues that "no one should say ‘defund the police’ ever again."

On Sunday morning, Ocasio-Cortez talked to Tapper about butting heads within the House and her message to her peers.

"If you look at some of these some of the arguments that are being advanced,” Ocasio-Cortez told Tapper, “that 'defund the police hurt' or that arguments about socialism hurt, not a single member of Congress, that I'm aware, of campaigned on socialism or defunding the police in this general election.” What’s a possible solution other than dropping progressive values from the campaign trail? Ocasio-Cortez suggested digital campaigning as an area where centralized democratic operations can improve, and become more resilient to Republican attacks.

“I believe that we need to really come together and not allow Republican narratives to tear us apart,” Ocasio-Cortez said on divisions within the House caucus. Noting that the House holds a narrower majority than before, the New Yorker stressed that it’s “going to be more important than ever for us to work together and not fight each other.”

Ocasio-Cortez reminded viewers of what many on the left already realize, saying that progressives have “assets to offer the party that the party has not yet fully leaned into.” She added that the conversation is deeper than simply “saying anything progressive is toxic and a losing message.”

Here are those clips.

Here is former Ohio Governor John Kasich pressing the narrative that Biden needs to listen to Republicans, as opposed to the “hard left” or “far-left,” when it comes to policy and getting things done. 

And here is Ocasio-Cortez responding to that assertion.

And on a heartwarming side, Ocasio-Cortez also talked to Tapper about what it meant to her as a woman of color to see a Black woman elected to the White House. 

“It’s really incredible,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “For so many of us, especially women, we have grown up… And I know, my entire childhood, we are told we are too emotional, and that this country would never elect, first, a Black president. And luckily, that happened, with the election of Barack Obama, but now, a woman of color, and no less, a Black woman, to the second-highest seat in the land. I mean, it’s really remarkable. You can’t be what you can’t see. That’s very often said. It’s so amazing that so many little girls are growing up with this being a norm for them.”

Earlier this week, the FCC fined T-Mobile $200 million for its abuse of Sprint's Lifeline program for low-income consumers -- the largest fine to be paid in commission history. Now, the Better Business Bureau's National Advertising (NAD) is telling T-Mobile to tone down its misleading 5G claims about having the "best 5G network." Gizmodo reports: The NAD's investigation of T-Mobile's 5G claims, reported by Android Police, concluded yesterday. While the BBB division found that some of the carrier's post-Sprint merger claims had merit, like T-Mobile's assertion that it will build the nation's largest 5G network due to the merger, it asked the carrier to change the language of some of its other misleading claims. Specifically, the NAD took issue with T-Mobile telling consumers they will get the best 5G network. NAD said that consumers could "reasonably interpret" these claims to mean T-Mobile currently provides the best 5G network and that T-Mobile customers will "imminently" have 5G coverage when that's not currently the case. "NAD determined that the challenged advertisements did not reasonably convey a present-tense message that the aspirational future benefits from T-Mobile are presently available to consumers," the group said. "NAD recommended that the challenged advertising be modified to avoid conveying such messages."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Early Friday evening, professor of law and political science at UC Irvine Rick Hasen tweeted out that “If you give money to Trump's recount/postelection litigation efforts, half of that money will go towards retiring his campaign debt instead, per the fine print.” The tweet was accompanied by a screenshot of the purported fine print on one of the Trump campaign’s fundraising emails, that said “50% of each contribution, up to a maximum of $2,800 ($5,000), to be designated toward DJTFP’s 2020 general election debt retirement until such debt is retired.” The emails have been sweatily sent out from the sinking garbage can fire called his campaign since Election Day. 

The Wall Street Journal reports that this is indeed true. In fact, the con man-to-the-end and soon-to-be former disgraced and impeached president of the United States’ “official election defense fund” might actually be more about retiring his money-laundering campaign’s debt than anything else.

According to the Journal, while some of the “protect the election” fundraising emails direct marks to pages with fine print like the one Hasen pointed out above, others send MAGA supporters to pages with different fine print: “The fine print on those solicitations says 60% of a contribution helps the campaign retire debt and 40% goes to the Republican National Committee.”

In contrast, Biden’s similar asks for money for potential legal battles surrounding this election do not have fine print about “debt retirement.” Instead, that money is mostly earmarked for the DNC, with $2,800 going to Biden’s “recount account” only after $142,000 has been allocated to the DNC. This makes sense, as usually the RNC and DNC play the main role in financing election-related legal claims and battles.

"Crooked not courageous: Adani renames Australian group Bravus, mistaking it for 'brave,'" writes The Guardian (Naaman Zhou), quoted by Victor Mair (Language Log):

Mining company Adani has changed its name to a Latin word ["Bravus"] that means "crooked", "deformed", "mercenary or assassin", after mistakenly thinking that it meant "brave"….

Dr Christopher Bishop, from the Australian National University's centre of classical studies, said "bravus" did not mean "brave" in either classical or medieval Latin….

"It is sort of a Monty Python-Latin," he told Guardian Australia. "It is that classic joke where you chuck an '-us' on to the end of anything and call it Latin."

Bishop said the closest relative to "bravus" was the medieval Latin word "bravo" – a noun meaning a "mercenary", "assassin" or "sword for hire".

How Trump's corruption and his pathologies helped lead to this ending.

Looking at Republican gains among Latinos in Florida and South Texas in isolation, you’d think Hispanic voters have discovered a newfound affinity for the GOP.

But for those who’ve been paying attention to the diverse political preferences of the Latino electorate, the outcome this week was far from surprising.

And while Democrats are taking stock of their losses in those states — even as Joe Biden inches toward victory — some are warning against pinning the blame on Latino voters.

“The overall fixation on Latinos is a scapegoat,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) said in an interview with POLITICO. “Because what's implicit in that is the assumption and the entitlement that a hundred percent of communities of color must turn out for Democrats and anything less is a failure while we just … allow us to lose vast majorities of white voters without any introspection.”

Democrats need to scrutinize why “they continue to hemorrhage white voters,” Ocasio-Cortez said. Still, the progressive congresswoman and other lawmakers agree the party should have done more to prevent Trump’s gains among segments of the Latino population in Florida and Texas. They said the campaign should have paid more attention to the wide diversity of Latinos — and tailored their message accordingly.

But as the vice president was closing in on 270 electoral college votes, his campaign was quick to defend their strategy with Latino voters, which they said reflected the nuances among different Latinos. Matt Barreto, a Biden pollster, said if the campaign absolutely had to win Florida they might have organized the campaign differently.

“I don’t see anything on our Latino strategy, for sure, where we’re looking back saying we should have done that better [or] differently,” Barreto said. “We had multiple pathways -- and Trump didn’t.”

But in more than a dozen interviews, Democratic lawmakers at the local and national level said there were lessons to be learned from Trump’s marginal increase with certain Latinos, namely among Mexican Americans in rural Texas and Puerto Ricans in Florida.

Democrats and Republicans told POLITICO Trump’s grandiose style, and what many consider a hyper masculine persona, resonated with men of all races and ethnicities — but not with Latinas. And while votes are still being counted in Nevada, it’s clear that Trump also made inroads with the Latinos there, who are majority Mexican American — a reminder for Democrats that it is not a reliably blue state.

Nationally, Biden won two-thirds of Latinos, according to exit polls, similar to Hillary Clinton's share in 2016. President Donald Trump slightly grew his share, winning 32 percent this year compared to 28 percent in 2016. But Trump made inroads along the Texas-Mexico border and grew his support among Latinos in Florida — areas that had some of the sharpest swings from Democrats to Republicans this year.

Cuban Americans in Miami who drifted towards the Democratic Party during Barack Obama and Clinton’s campaigns turned out in greater numbers for Trump this year, contributing to his win in the Sunshine State. Plus, other more-reliably Democratic Latinos in Miami moved toward Trump.

“I don't think that this is on Biden solely or specifically, I think it's an indictment of the entire Democratic Party,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “If people actually gave a damn to actually be paying attention to the Latino community in Florida over years, none of this is surprising. I don't know why anyone in this party still clings to this hope that conservative Cubans are like somehow going to break for Democrats.”

Latinos have roots in dozens of countries and can be of any race. What’s more, like most other segments of the electorate, their experiences vary widely, depending on whether they’re urban or rural, what state they live in, their class and how many generations they’ve been in the U.S. Dominicans in New York will have a different set of concerns from Cubans in Miami, or Mexican Americans in Arizona.

And those differences can play out even within the same group in the same state. For example, Trump’s “muscular leadership style” appeals to Latino men in Texas, but not to Latino women, according to an August poll from the Texas Hispanic Policy Foundation. Hispanics who speak Spanish at home tended to vote for Biden, while English speakers tilted towards Trump.

Which, says former presidential candidate Julián Castro, is all the reason to fine-tune campaign strategies to fit different demographics in different states.

“It’s a powerful demonstration of why we need to invest in a 365-day-a-year, full-court press effort to register and turn out Latino voters and to speak to them effectively wherever they are,” Castro said.

“We need higher margins.”

'We could lose folks for a generation’

Biden’s campaign countered that it prioritized Latino outreach in key battlegrounds as soon as it had the money, including expanding polling to states like Pennsylvania, where the election now hangs in the balance. And even Democrats who were frustrated by Trump’s performance in Texas and Florida said the campaign managed to boost Latino turnout, winning a majority of support in states from Arizona to Wisconsin.

In Arizona, where there was a more targeted effort to turn out Latinos, the demographic backed Biden by roughly 63 percent, matching Clinton’s 2016 number. In the three most populous counties — Maricopa, Yuma and Pima — the precincts with the highest density of Latino voters backed Biden by more than 74 percent, according to a UCLA analysis of Latino voters in the state. In Milwaukee and Philadelphia, an analysis of majority-Latino precincts by Latino Decisions showed Biden received more than 75 percent of the vote.

But the Latino vote in Texas was more of a mixed bag for Biden, a state Trump won. The vice president’s losses in Rio Grande Valley are a “conundrum,” said Rep. Joaquin Castro, head of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. But, Biden did well in Texas cities with large Latino populations like San Antonio and Houston. There, Castro said, Biden did as well or better than Clinton in 2016, proof the South Texas results were an “anomaly.”

Among all Texas voters, Biden picked up 1.34 million more votes than Clinton, cutting Trump’s margin of victory from 9 points in 2016 to 5.8 points this year. In El Paso County and Hidalgo County, the two most populous Texas border areas, Biden won nearly 30,000 more votes than Clinton. But Trump added about 67,000 voters.

Based on preliminary precinct numbers, it's clear Trump saw marked improvement in Texas’s majority Latino counties along the US-Mexico Border. For example, Trump lost Starr County by about 5 percent of the vote — boosting his numbers in the county by 55 percent compared to 2016.

“I do think unless the Democratic Party as a whole really begins taking seriously this flight of Latinos from Democratic Party to the Trump party we could lose folks for a generation,” said Democratic Rep. Veronica Escobar, who was reelected on Tuesday in her El Paso district.

Escobar and other Texas Democrats said that winning votes in border communities requires considerable resources, but it’s an investment, they argue, that will help national candidates make gains in Latino communities.

Democratic Texas Rep. Vicente Gonzalez in Hidalgo County, which had been one of the fastest growing counties in Texas until recently, said he took a 7-point hit in his reelection bid, which he attributes to the presidential race. (He still won.)

“We had 49,000 new voters come out in my district that didn't vote in 2016. Trump brought enthusiasm to young Latinos to put a Trump flag in the back of their pickup truck and drive around town,” Gonzalez said.

But Barreto, Biden’s pollster, said viewing the uptick of Latino support for Trump in the Rio Grande Valley as a bellwether for Latinos, or Texas, is misguided.

The Rio Grande Valley is “its own region and it's only 15 percent of the Latino vote” in Texas, Barreto said. If people think Latinos in the Rio Grande Valley delivered Texas to Trump, Barreto added, they aren’t doing the math correctly. The “biggest place we underperformed as a party was in white rural and white exurbs”

“Do not pin this on [Latinos],” he said. ”We expanded Democratic margins in the cities.”

The Biden campaign, like most national campaigns, chose to focus their resources in Pennsylvania, Arizona and Michigan, spending in Texas only in the final days. Jill Biden and Kamala Harris made one stop each in the state in the final stretch. But the Trump campaign and Texas Republican candidates visited the area, organizing Trump events in the valley and along the Texas-Mexico border over the summer. And Republicans who campaigned along the border saw the growing enthusiasm for Trump.

“I visited Eagle Pass over 20 times,” said Republican Tony Gonzales, who defeated Democrat Gina Ortiz Jones on Tuesday for a congressional seat that includes a large swath of the Texas-Mexico border. “There’s no doubt that the enthusiasm for the president specifically along the border was real. I mean people were energized and excited. Here you had first generation Hispanics wearing MAGA hats. It was very real.”

'It was the red wedding'

In Florida, Democrats and strategists across the state knew the race between Biden and Trump would be tight. Latino Democratic leaders spotted red flags in 2018 when Republicans labeled Democrats socialists and radicals to help secure the governorship. But they didn’t think the president would perform as well as he did with Latinos in 2020.

Biden won Cuban-heavy Miami-Dade County by just 7.3 percentage points, after Clinton had won it in 2016 by almost 30 points. Trump also performed better than expected in heavily Venezuelan and Colombian precincts of South Florida — making double-digit gains compared to his 2016 performance.

Trump also was able to chip at the margins of Puerto Rican voters' support for Biden. While there aren't solid numbers yet, Trump did 7 points better than he did in 2016 in Osceola County, a Puerto Rican-heavy county in Central Florida. He also performed better in neighboring Orange County.

As for heavily-Cuban precincts in Miami, Trump won as much as 70 percent of the total Cuban vote there, when strategists had been projecting he’d receive much closer to 60 percent.

However, veteran strategists and pollsters in Florida argued Latinos weren’t the reason Biden lost the state. Trump won Florida by more than 370,000 votes, and Democratic strategists are estimating that Trump will have won 120,000 more Cuban Americans than Biden.

“Biden got 38% of the white vote in FL. He was polling at an avg of 42% in Oct. Had that white support held, he would’ve won FL,” Carlos Odio, co-founder of Democratic firm Equis Research, wrote on Twitter.

Still, high turnout for Trump caused Democratic losses down the ballot. Rep. Debbie Mucarsel Powell, the first immigrant from South America to be a member of the U.S. House, was ousted by Republican Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos Gimenez. In an unexpected loss for Democrats, Rep. Donna Shalala lost to GOP’s Maria Elvira Salazar.

Shalala said the entire Democratic establishment, not just Biden, must improve the party’s strength in Miami-area districts like hers. “This administration's been working the Latino electorate since day one when they arrived.”

When Puerto Ricans migrated en masse from the island after Hurricane Maria, Ocasio-Cortez said, “we didn't invest in educating those voters, finding them, organizing them and making the case for them to become Democrats for the rest of their lives.”

“There's no Democratic Party in the Island of Puerto Rico. There's no Republican party in the Island of Puerto Rico. It's a completely different political spectrum,” she added. “When we rely only on just pictures of Trump throwing paper towels as us being our case for why the Latino community should support the Democratic Party, you're not going to win.”

Democrats needed more radio ads and more door knocking. And they should have started sooner, Ocasio-Cortez said.

“It was the red wedding,” said a Miami Democratic operative, who spoke on the condition of anonymity over concerns of antagonizing fellow Democrats in the state. “It was truly the culmination of four years of anti-socialist messaging on behalf of the Trump campaign.”

“We were late to putting people on the ground. No question about it,” the operative added. The small Democratic footprint, the operative said, “sets Democrats in South Florida two decades.”

Local Democrats acknowledge they saw the signs when Republicans turned out in massive numbers for early voting in South Florida. But early on, some pushed the Biden campaign and Florida Democratic Party to step up their game with more money and a full-fledged ground game.

Biden’s campaign defended their Florida strategy. Campaign Manager Jen O’Malley Dillon told reporters the Biden team canvassed “in person to 10s of millions of voters in the last weeks of the election alone.”

“We made sure that we were not putting our volunteers or any voters at risk,” she said.

O’Malley Dillon acknowledged Trump over-performed his numbers with Cuban Americans but said the campaign had a “robust” and “customized program” across the key battlegrounds to engage Latinos.

Democrats said they hope the outcomes force the party to rethink its long-term messaging and strategy for Latinos — one more tailored to the unique experiences of Puerto Ricans, Mexicans, Venezulans, Cubans and more. Still, they insist, Latino turnout for Biden was largely a success.

“The totality of the entire Latino story illustrates the promise and the peril of the Latino vote and why Democrats have to make a long-term commitment to further understanding the nuance of this community,” said Stephanie Valencia, co-founder of the Latino-run Democratic firm Equis Research.

Still, Ocasio-Cortez said, things are not beyond repair for Democrats.

Though she hopes the party takes time after the election to evaluate the changes in the Rio Grande Valley and Miami-Dade, to avoid a future “generational shift,” the congresswoman warned her party and its leaders against missing the more glaring problem in front of their noses.

“This is also indicative of that failure of whiteness and the overwhelming whiteness of just Democrats in our institutions in general,” she added. “That there's so much finger pointing and trying to examine the fact that you may have lost like 20% or 30% of an electorate ... as opposed to looking at the obvious question [that] white support for Trump went up."

Trump won a majority of white voters and white women, according to exit polls, despite multiple polls in the battleground leading up to the election forecasting a greater erosion for the president with white women.

“That is the failure. That is the story," Ocasio-Cortez said. "And there's no amount of Latinos that will be able to make up for that if that trend continues.”

As the 2020 presidential votes are being counted, Georgia has two Senate races headed to a runoff election on Jan. 5, 2021. Nothing less than the majority of the United States Senate is on the line. Jon Ossoff wasted no time kicking off his reenergized campaign as Democrats seem to have some wind at their back in the Peach State.

At an outdoor rally in Atlanta on Friday, Ossoff said plainly, “Change has come to Georgia. Change is coming to America.” With an enthusiastic crowd around him, Ossoff made the case that Georgia is tired of the blatant corruption of David Perdue, saying, “He sells access to his home for corporate money. He sells lavish retreats on private islands to lobbyists for corporate PAC money, but he hasn’t seen fit to come out in the public and defend his record or answer questions from the people at a public town hall meeting in six years.”

Game on. Video and full transcript are below.

We don't have much time, and Republicans know the stakes just as well as we do. Donate $3 right now to help Democrats win the overtime Senate races of 2020!

It’s gonna be an uphill fight every single step of the way, like everything else over the last four years. 

“Thank you all so, so much for being here. It means the world to me to see y’all here.  

“Most of all, I want to thank the amazing people of this state. The millions of Georgia voters who have stood up in record-shattering numbers to demand change for our state and change in this country. “When Congressman Lewis marched across that bridge 55 years ago to demand the sacred right to vote for all Americans, it was so that we the people could decide who represents us, could demand that our interests, our health, our prosperity, our rights, be upheld, respected, and expanded, so that we could have moments like this one, where Georgians in their millions have said, ‘enough.’ Enough incompetence, deceit, corruption, division. “Change has come to Georgia. Change is coming to America. “And retirement is coming for Senator David Perdue, because the majority of Georgians have stood up to reject his request for a second term — a senator who saw fit to continue to attack our health care in the midst of a pandemic. A senator who told us that this disease that's taken a quarter of a million American lives was no deadlier than the ordinary flu — while he looked out for himself. “A senator who has shown no spine and no independence, who has sold out our values and our interests to his donors and to this president. “Retirement is coming for Senator David Perdue. “See, Senator Perdue feels entitled to this U.S. Senate seat. This is the guy who hasn't held a single public town hall meeting in six years as our senator. Just imagine being a sitting United States Senator, and he happily will sell meetings for corporate PAC checks. “He sells access to his home for corporate money. He sells lavish retreats on private islands to lobbyists for corporate PAC money, but he hasn't seen fit to come out in public and defend his record or answer questions from the people at a public town hall meeting in six years. And then when it comes time for Senator Perdue to answer some questions in public, when it comes time for Senator Perdue to debate his opponent, he doesn't take kindly to being asked tough questions. “And he refuses to debate in an open forum, because Senator Perdue cannot defend the indefensible, he cannot defend attacking our health care in the midst of a pandemic. He cannot defend misleading us so profoundly about a threat to our health and our prosperity, that's taken such a human tragedy. He cannot defend being such a weak enabler of this president, who doesn't deserve his loyalty or our support. “See, what we're demanding, what we deserve from our leaders, what we deserve from our government, it's not that complicated. It's not mysterious. We believe that every single Georgia family should have access to affordable housing, affordable health care, education without debt, dignified work that pays a living wage, equal justice under the law regardless of race, and regardless of class. “It’s not that complicated. We expect our leaders to unite us to confront threats like this pandemic, to appeal to us to see what brings us together, rather than drives us apart, to remind us, y’all, that we're all Americans, we’re all in this together. We rise or we fall together. This isn't about red versus blue. This isn't about party labels. This is about human lives, human decency, human rights, the human consequences of elections. “So now this race is headed to a runoff. And the people of Georgia will decide on January 5th, 2021, who represents us in the United States Senate. We have all the momentum. We have all the energy. We’re on the right side of history. Y’all ready to work? “We’re just getting started. Thank you so much for being here, I appreciate it.”

Let them try to stonewall his Cabinet; he has options to work around them.

The backlash to these popular election memes suggests none of us are ready to “try to get along.”

In the wake of the 2016 election, messages of unity proliferated on the internet. Bountiful social media posts promoted the idea of being stronger together, urging those across the political divide to move past their minor (or major) disagreements.

Particularly memorable was the “Bob and Sally” meme, which originated in January 2017 and swiftly gained popularity alongside Trump’s inauguration the same month. The image, which showed stick figures of a man and a woman holding hands and wearing wide smiles, could be found in abundance on bipartisan Facebook feeds. The meme proclaimed that even though one had voted Democrat (for Hillary Clinton) and one had voted Republican (for Donald Trump, who won), “Bob and Sally are still friends, because Bob and Sally are both adults.”

At the time, this meme received plenty of derision, mainly from leftist voters who believed it trivialized the many issues they had with a Trump presidency. It also spawned lots of mocking spinoffs and long, incensed Facebook and Twitter comment threads. After all, as many were quick to point out then, it’s easy to get along when you’re not directly impacted by the more dangerous aspects of Trump’s presidency — as many white people aren’t:

In 2020, as the meme makes the rounds once again following an even more polarized election season, it’s clear that the last four years have only heightened these ideological tensions — and that there’s no clear consensus from anyone on how to move forward as a united nation, regardless of politics.

The “let’s try to get along” memes have proliferated during election season

There weren’t just two different political platforms at odds in the 2020 election, there were fundamentally different views of America. At the center of those polarized sides — one staunchly in support of the Trump administration, one staunchly opposed — remains the idea that after the election is over, we can all move on and be friends again.

And what better way to convey this notion in 2020 than flimsy social media posts:

The “we can still get along” mantra has long been a popular way to try to get past a polarizing election, but over the course of this year, the atmosphere felt much different. Calls for compromise poured in before Election Day itself, as did blowback against them. In September, fierce backlash hit CNN’s attempt to joke about the nation’s polarized status. Its “Any room in the middle?” promotion drew scorn from its audience.

A meme mocking the idea of “compromise” posted in response to CNN’s ill-fated tweet gained particular traction. But it was just one of an overwhelming number of replies pointing out that there’s not much middle ground to be found between a fair and just society and an administration fueling white supremacy.

The ridicule the CNN tweet received should have served, perhaps, as a warning to anyone looking to try this sort of argument closer to the election, but it seems many people (and corporations) didn’t get the memo. As election week neared, examples of this type of point-missing were plentiful:

Among the latest, most quickly notorious instances of failed middle-ground-seeking was a now-deleted Gap tweet that stressed, “The one thing we know, is that together, we can move forward.” Attached to the tweet was an image of a (really ugly) varsity-style hoodie, half-red and half-blue, emblazoned with the Gap logo, zipping both sides up together. (The Gap later admitted that the hoodie design was not actually a real Gap product.)

The Gap/Twitter

Criticism came swiftly. Gap’s mistake: using the inanity of a hoodie to express such a complicated and polarizing idea, as well as attempting to commodify and capitalize upon election-related emotions.

One would think that, considering the potential for blowback, people would be discouraged from posting these pleas for compromise. But people with varying degrees of influence and visibility continue to post this type of compromise-peddling meme online, spawning heated reactions in response.

After having lived through a tense and divisive four years, many people no longer see compromise and unity as a desirable outcome. The backlash over social media pleas for agreement reflects as much. And it’s the Bob and Sally meme in particular that seems to have re-emerged as a conduit through which this conflict has played out.

For many on social media, “Bob” and “Sally” have become ironic symbols for denial, indifference, and privilege

The age-old push to find a middle ground has been an ongoing theme throughout the Trump administration. In one such plea, self-declared Bernie Sanders supporter and urban fantasy writer Connie Huth used the Bob and Sally meme as a starting point in a 2017 Medium post. “Crazy thought,” she wrote. “Sally and Bob could both sit down and actually talk about what the election meant to them beyond the superficial level thrown out as truth by the mainstream media and come to the understanding that both sides want the best for our country.”

But the basic belief underpinning Huth’s argument — that “it’s not you vs me, but We the People vs Elected Officials who are taking great advantage of the fear and hate in this country” — seems to be increasingly in question. The extremities of the Trump era affect many people on a personal level, from citizens impacted by escalations in hate crimes and violence under his presidency to LGBTQ minorities threatened by his policies to people battling Covid-19 in red states that have done relatively little to blunt the spread of the virus. Many of the rebuttal variants to the Bob and Sally meme stress this by pointing out that Bob the Republican has implicitly supported some policies most Americans find abominable.

Bob isn’t just supporting a traditional candidate; he voted for one who’s advanced causes that make life difficult for many sectors of society:

Facebook

Of course, this idea often generated pushback of its own:

As the 2020 election neared, many people continued to greet the resurfacing Bob and Sally meme with overt hostility. The dismissive attitude behind it, critics implied, was part of the reason the era of Trump had been so divisive.

Memes reflect the times that we’re in, so it’s helpful to understand the many memes peddling the idea of “just getting along” as a crucial part of the ongoing gaslighting of American citizens. That might sound to some readers like exactly the type of hyperbolic rhetoric that got us into this mess, but I mean it very literally. Not only does Trump engage in gaslighting techniques, but, more broadly, there’s no longer a clear consensus about what is true, what American values are, or what things we should care about. This is the kind of gaslighting that arguably began with the presidential lie that led to the Iraq War and has continued ever since, as conservatives increasingly seem to embrace fundamentalist and regressive ideas about human rights.

And if there are many of us who can’t forget and forgive, say, when we see Ellen DeGeneres hanging out with George W. Bush, there are even more of us who are simply at a loss when confronted with the blatant racism, science denial, censorship, and authoritarianism of Trump and his administration.

Loren Piretra, whose quote about rejecting attitudes of compromise went viral on Instagram, suggested that much more was at stake in this election than policy. “What this election has exposed is the stark difference in fundamental values between those who supported Trump’s hateful, divisive rhetoric and those of us who voted for the future of society and its civility and betterment,” she told Vox in an email.

“While this administration’s reign will eventually end, it will be a greater challenge to forget those of our friends and relatives, whom we thought we knew and held to a higher moral standard, who ultimately voted against humanity. We always knew Trump lacked scruples; we didn’t expect to personally know people who unabashedly and at times even proudly shared those same ideals.”

The possibility of compromising with people who voted for Trump, especially in 2020, isn’t always feasible. A tweet from Hannah Chase, a 20-year-old college student from Ohio, went viral on Election Day for suggesting as much:

“This election is historically nothing like the last,” Chase told Vox. “Donald Trump has been hateful to every group you could categorize yourself in.”

“He has made derogatory remarks toward the disabled, the late John McCain who was a veteran, the Black, Latino, LGBTQ+, Muslim communities, I could go on forever. People who support this man and think they can be friends with me, the daughter of a Mexican woman who had to teach herself English at 5, are delusional. This election is too personal, and Donald Trump made it personal.”

To Chase, supporting Trump is a deal-breaker. ”I have had to cut people off because of their political views this election and it’s quite sad, honestly,” she told me. “Some of these people I grew up with, some even related. But my sister is African American, my brother is a little brown boy. So I feel when people praise Trump, they are discriminating [against] us all.”

She pointed out that the Bob and Sally meme and its ilk trivialize the high stakes of this election. “It’s hard for people to understand,” she said. “They make memes and make it a joke. Eighty percent of those people have never had to live through oppression. I’m sure they have all had their difficulties, as life is never easy. But a lot of them have never been mistreated for the color of their skin.”

But not everyone takes a scorched-earth approach with Trump supporters. Dylan, a Biden supporter who asked that I not reveal their real name out of privacy concerns, told me that shunning Republican voters won’t make the problems we’re currently facing go away.

“There’s such a balancing act right now,” Dylan said. “Folks in one camp saying, rightly, ‘white people need to address the issue of other white people,’ and folks in the other saying, also with good reason, ‘there is no point in talking to white Trump voters, they won’t change.’ Seems like a disconnect that will come back to bite us if we don’t address it?”

Dylan, who spent years working as a mediator in divorce settlements, described the process of mediating a divorce in a way that sounded awfully similar to the process of trying to talk politics in 2020:

“Everyone often starts out unhappy,” they said. “Everyone thinks they are not only right but right in such a way that if they don’t get what they want, everything will fall apart. Everyone is coming from a place of deeply felt emotion.”

To Dylan, meeting people where they’re at is crucial to changing minds — and changing minds is crucial to the future. “Scorn notwithstanding, if we want to effect change in future elections, we will have to change the minds of some voters.” Dylan especially stressed that the onus is on white voters to speak to white relatives and friends, to do the work on behalf of marginalized people with more at stake in the conversation.

Chase agreed — up to a point. “After this election, a lot of conversation needs to take place,” she said. “If the people we have had to remove from our lives are willing to listen, that changes things.”

Chase told me that there are plenty of things she’s willing to agree to disagree about, like gun control, tax plans, the economy, even social issues like health care, immigration, and police brutality. But the bottom line for her — and for many of us — is human rights:

“When you say a woman does not have a choice in what happens to her body, when you lock children up or kill them based on their skin color, when you discriminate against people based on who they choose to love, it’s a deal-breaker.”

In short, compromising is complicated. And even as the presidential election result reveals that Joe Biden won, the tension over these issues continues to stay high. It looks like Bob and Sally won’t be getting together for a pleasant afternoon of tea and community bonding anytime soon.

On Wednesday, the total number of new cases of COVID-19 in the United States exceeded 100,000 for the first time. Which was a shocking total … until Thursday, when the total passed 120,000 cases. With that number, even the seven-day moving average of new cases is now over 100,000. This isn’t a “spike,” or a “surge”—it’s a tsunami. 

But even though the flood of new cases is sweeping across the whole nation, driving up hospitalizations and bringing more than 1,000 deaths a day, it’s not sinking everyone equally. Because even a cursory review of the information shows that both the counties where the coronavirus is spreading most rapidly and the counties where there are more cases by population are counties that voted for Donald Trump. And a new study makes it clear that this isn’t coincidental. It’s also not a matter of some factor that lies outside of human control. The reason that red states and Trump-supporting counties are getting COVID-19 at a higher rate is specifically because they are populated by Trump supporters. And it’s killing them.

As the Associated Press reports, the data available from Johns Hopkins, WorldOMeters, and other tracking sites makes it clear that the highest level of COVID-19 is not where a casual observer might expect. The worst locations aren’t in high-density cities, or in areas where there’s a high level of travel. They are small, rural counties. In fact, most of them are rural counties in rural states like Iowa, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Wisconsin. 

And 93% of the counties with the worst rates of coronavirus infection voted for Donald Trump. In fact, they voted overwhelmingly for Trump. And the worse the infection, the more dire the local situation, the more likely they were to vote for Trump.

All of this may seem extremely counterintuitive. But that’s because the lens the AP presents is somewhat looking at the data backwards. It’s not that counties are voting for Trump because they have a higher rate of COVID-19. It’s that these counties have a higher rate of COVID-19 specifically because they support Trump.

In a paper published in Nature just before the election, researchers from Yale and New York University approached the problem from a different direction. Using data from the 2016 election, they looked at how people in Trump counties were behaving versus the people in Clinton counties. What they found was a stark difference that explains the AP results. 

Trump counties practiced less social distancing. People in those counties were also less likely to wear masks. And, again mirroring the AP data, the more a county supported Trump, the worse it was on these safety measures. People in Trump counties were more likely to ignore stay-at-home orders. They were more likely to ignore mask mandates. They were less likely to practice safe social distancing. And even as the disease was spreading, this partisan divide was getting worse.

And there was one other factor: 

“Additionally, county-level consumption of conservative media (Fox News) was related to reduced physical distancing.”

COVID-19 is worse in Trump counties … because they are Trump counties. Listening to Trump, watching Fox News, believing the messages that the conservative media spreads, is not just sickening; it’s deadly.

“… the observed partisan differences in distancing were associated with subsequently higher COVID-19 infection and fatality growth rates in pro-Trump counties.”

Gritty is your 2020 meme queen. | Facebook/Courtney Griffiths

With Trump’s electoral hopes foundering on the shores of Philadelphia, the hockey mascot takes center stage.

Philadelphia — and I say this with great affection for a city I adore, where I have many friends and where I have had many amazing visits — is the city God coughed up.

Again, I mean that as a sort of compliment.

Scrappy and rough around the edges, Philadelphia is also central to the story of America’s founding. It’s the city of Benjamin Franklin and the Liberty Bell and Independence Hall. It’s also the city of Gritty, about as perfect a stand-in for a city as a sports mascot could possibly hope to be — and to be clear, Philadelphia is already home of the Phillie Phanatic (of baseball’s Philadelphia Phillies), so the city knows from good mascots.

Giant, orange, and furry with wild googly eyes, Gritty is the monster of Philly’s dreams. He reps the Philadelphia Flyers, the city’s NHL franchise, and when he debuted in 2018, he swiftly became a meme beloved by the internet’s many memesters, after a short early period where people were like, “The fuck is this???”

What’s more, Gritty was embraced by many leftists as an example of the chaotic good energy they hope to bring to the political conversation and/or world. As I wrote in 2018:

You can never quite predict when or how, but sometimes, these empty spaces open up in our collective subconscious, and something shows up to occupy them. Suddenly, a thing is there, and it fits the shape of a void you hadn’t previously noticed. You might characterize Gritty as gross or bizarre or horrible to behold. You might think he is fun meme material. You might admire him as a triumph of personal design smuggled into a corporate context. You might believe he is an advocate of the proletariat. He might be all of these things or none of these things.

But there is a chaos to Gritty that speaks to something in our culture right now. That chaos will be different for me than it is for you. But we are both feeling it, yes? Things weren’t supposed to be this way. But also, things don’t have to be this way.

But even if Gritty is a monster who has been embraced by the world at large and the left in particular, he is Philly’s mascot at his core.

Philadelphia has proven central to Joe Biden’s Electoral College victory in the state of Pennsylvania, which led to his victory in the presidency. What’s more, Biden is a Democrat, and the American left has mostly united behind him in the name of defeating Donald Trump. (Whether that alliance will hold in the years ahead remains to be seen.)

So, yeah, Gritty memes are back, baby.

The above meme — which blends Gritty with the Game of Thrones character Olenna Tyrell, who uses her last moments alive to let one character know she was behind the murder of another — was created by Facebook user Courtney Griffiths (a Californian living in London, per Insider) and has become the perfect example of the idea that Gritty himself, in all his Philadelphia freedom, ended the reign of Donald Trump.

Predictably, the Gritty memes and Twitter jokes did not stop there (though the Game of Thrones example is by far the most popular).

And more than a few of the memes leaned into Philadelphia’s reputation for being a city full of scrappers:

Did Gritty save democracy, as these memes might suggest? Of course not. The media’s tendency to treat election coverage as a horse race creates the false idea that Biden “came from behind” to win, when the truth is that Philadelphia’s votes just took longer to count than votes in other parts of Pennsylvania, because it has so many more votes.

But you know what? I’m going to give Philly this one. Congrats to Gritty, a new American revolutionary.

If you incite a riot, that’s a crime. If you suborn perjury, that’s a crime. And if you participate in a multi-state conspiracy to engage in election fraud … that’s definitely a crime. On Thursday evening, it became clear that Trump’s campaign had attempted to get Wisconsin voters to contact Trump supporters in Pennsylvania with the apparent goal of adding late submissions to the stack of mail-in ballots. It seems like a pointless effort, as ballots postmarked after Election Day are not valid. Unless, of course, the goal was really just to throw another monkey wrench into Pennsylvania’s counting by claiming that election authorities are not properly filtering out late ballots.

But if that seems a little too complicated, this isn’t: Trump campaign officials and Minnesota Republicans are encouraging Trump supporters to make claims about ballot fraud, even when they have no evidence of ballot fraud, with promises that the campaign and the RNC will back them up.

As the Minnesota Reformer reports, Minnesota GOP chair Jennifer Carnahan appeared on an invite-only Zoom meeting with Republican activists on Thursday night, and told them that the party would back their play if they made claims of ballot fraud, even if there was no basis for those claims. And Carnahan made it clear she didn’t mean just local support. In fact, she told the Trump activists, this wasn’t a Minnesota thing, but a plan from Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel.

According to Carnahan, McDaniel put out a request for “GOP officials around the country” to recruit Republicans to make false claims of ballot fraud. She made it clear the party would amplify any claims of ballot fraud, as part of a plan to back Trump’s false claims. 

Trump’s loss in Minnesota was huge—over 230,000 votes—so any claims of ballot fraud there might not directly suggest a change in the outcome. But it would help to promote Trump’s false claims of fraud in other areas. And, as Carnahan made clear, this same call was going out to Trump activists in other areas with the goal of creating a chorus of false claims.

The Zoom call took place as the numbers in Pennsylvania were shifting rapidly. With Trump’s early lead vanishing as mail-in ballots were added to the totals, and it was clear that Joe Biden was about to tip over the 270 electoral vote threshold. Unknown to Republican officials, a reporter for the Minnesota Reformer became aware of the Zoom call, registered for the meeting, and listened in to the entire appeal.

Attempting to vote multiple times is fraud. Attempting to alter ballots is fraud. Deliberately discarding submitted ballots is fraud. But claiming that election fraud occurred when it did not is also election fraud. And encouraging thousands of activists across the nation to engage in deliberately fraudulent conspiracy puts the RNC and chair Ronna McDaniel at the center of a genuine “vast right-wing conspiracy” that demands to be given swift attention by both state and federal law enforcement.

President Trump leaves after a press conference on November 5. “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 said. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Even Fox News isn’t really buying it.

It appears President-elect Joe Biden will win at least as many electoral votes as Donald Trump did in 2016 — a result Trump advisers touted as a landslide at the time. But even with that outcome no longer in doubt, the Trump campaign is making a last-ditch effort to keep the president in power by attempting to delegitimize the whole election.

Their strategy is to make allegations first and hopefully find evidence for them later. This state of affairs was thrown into stark relief late Friday morning during a Fox News interview with RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel. During it, Fox News hosts appeared to be out of patience with her evidence-free insinuations that the election was somehow stolen from Trump.

“We just haven’t seen it. It hasn’t been presented. There’s all kinds of stuff flying on the internet, but when we look into it, it doesn’t pan out,” anchor Bret Baier told McDaniel, as she failed to explain how her technical gripes about election observers in Michigan could possibly affect the result in a state Biden appears poised to win by well over 100,000 votes.

Later Friday, the Minnesota Reformer broke news that McDaniel is pressuring state-level Republicans in Minnesota and elsewhere to echo her baseless public relations campaign about election fraud in hopes of creating the perception that Trump was somehow wronged.

The Trump campaign is employing a similar throw-stuff-against-the-wall strategy. Consider the statement they released shortly after Vox and a number of other media outlets called the presidential race for Joe Biden on Friday morning.

“This election is not over,” it began, before going on to make a number of specific allegations of irregularities.

These claims, however, suffer from the same basic problem as McDaniel’s — they can’t withstand scrutiny.

The Trump campaign is throwing a bunch of stuff against the wall and hoping something sticks

Trump’s statement claims that in Georgia, where Biden leads pending a recount, “We are confident we will find ballots improperly harvested.” But Georgia has a Republican governor and secretary of state, and there’s no evidence of improper harvesting.

It goes on to complain about Pennsylvania election officials preventing “our volunteer legal observers from having meaningful access to vote counting locations,” but that argument has already been dismissed as a reason to stop the vote count in a federal court. Even a Republican leader in Pennsylvania acknowledged during a Fox News appearance on Friday that there’s no evidence of election “misdoing” in the state.

In another state Trump is likely to narrowly lose, Nevada, the campaign statement alleges that there were “thousands of individuals who improperly case mail ballots.” But reporters pressed the Trump campaign for evidence to back up this claim on Thursday, and officials didn’t have any.

Trump, meanwhile, took to Twitter and implied that there’s something nefarious going on with unreturned military ballots in Georgia, even though news reports indicate the process is working as it should.

Beyond the lack of evidence, the idea that officials would rig the election against Trump while denying Democrats a majority in the Senate and costing them seats in the House is absurd on its face, and Trump defenders are resorting to increasingly far-fetched arguments about the possibility of irregularities surfacing during recounts.

While the courts and even Fox News don’t really seem to be buying what Trump is selling, the president does retain loyalty from key elected Republicans. In the hours following a Thursday press event in which the president undermined US elections by making baseless allegations of fraud, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and Senators Lindsey Graham and Ted Cruz went on Fox News and indicated they’ll stand by Trump as he fights it out to the bitter end.

That Republican support may be politically significant, but barring some actual evidence of systemic irregularities that seems unlikely to be forthcoming, it won’t help Trump stay in office. Trump lost the election and, in the end, it wasn’t particularly close. All the spin in the world can’t change that.

America’s boyfriend is back to rekindle the nation’s crush on him (and explain the final 2020 Senate races).

There are very few instances in which I, a young person, will choose to watch network television. The exception, as of late, is to follow election coverage: During the presidential contest, my eyes stayed glued to MSNBC’s flashing graphics as journalist Steve Kornacki zoomed in and out on an oversize map, doing hypothetical math to calculate the candidates’ odds of reaching 270 electoral votes. The good news for Kornacki fans is that he’s back — this time to explain the results of the Georgia runoff elections.

Kornacki is not the only map dude on air (he’s a national political correspondent during non-election times), but according to the internet and my colleagues at The Goods, he is the most attractive to watch. And on the night of November 3 — in which I needed as much comfort as possible — I switched streams from NBC (sorry not sorry, Chuck Todd) to MSNBC without a second thought. Now, during the races that will determine whether Republicans or Democrats hold the majority in the US Senate, Kornacki will once again deliver assurance to those who seek it.

In November, as the hours of election night dragged on, viewers began pointing out how Kornacki’s nerdishly disheveled energy was oddly soothing. He was always present even during breaks, on the corner of the screen dubbed the “Kornacki Cam.” His resilience was so astounding that people began to develop an unforeseen crush on the 41-year-old, whom some fans jokingly dubbed “Map Daddy,” as Kornacki engaged in the most unsexy activity of all time: explaining electoral math for hours on end. And in the rosy afterglow of the election, Kornacki was offered (and accepted) a gig analyzing NFL playoff scenarios for NBC Sports.

As a society, we have loved watching conventionally attractive people onscreen since the advent of films, but Kornacki doesn’t look like your typical movie star. His on-air outfit is similar to that of a college professor who’s just made tenure: white dress shirt with rolled-up sleeves, glasses, khakis, and striped tie. Under regular circumstances, Kornacki’s wonky aura might fade against the likes of David Muir and Anderson Cooper, broadcasters with chiseled jaws and distinguished features. This was election night, though, and Steve Kornacki was the reliable man many turned to for the most up-to-date information on the state of the race.

That infatuation only magnified in later days, as viewers anxiously awaited vote updates from key battleground states. On Twitter, fans put together Kornacki fancams — short, pink-hued videos of the journalist in action overlaid with sparkle effects and catchy pop tracks. CNN’s John King was another favorite, but more viewers seemed to consider him a benevolent father type rather than an out-and-out thirst object. The two men fast-tracked their way to internet fame by virtue of explaining electoral maps to a very confused, very anxious public.

Some have argued that this collective Kornacki obsession is reflective of our anxiety-ridden reality: People have developed a mild crush on this bespectacled 41-year-old gentleman (who happens to be gay) as a sort of emotional coping mechanism for 2020’s political turbulence. For some, that crush remained dormant. The Georgia runoffs likely won’t take as long to be called as the presidential race, and as the moment of national uncertainty likely begins to abate, so too will our fleeting feelings for Kornacki. Perhaps he’ll return to be Twitter’s boyfriend in another four years’ time, but until then, let’s hope Kornacki gets some actual rest and relaxation.

Racist lawmakers built Georgia’s election system, and now it’s affecting the balance of the Senate.

America still doesn’t know which party will control the next US Senate — all due to Georgia’s peculiar election system rooted in the Jim Crow era.

How that system works: In Georgia, no candidate can advance through a primary or a general election system without first earning more than 50 percent of the votes. If no one does, the top two vote getters advance to a runoff election, ensuring that one will earn the majority of votes cast.

This election cycle, the state’s two Senate races — one regular, the other a special election to fill the remainder of a retired senator’s seat — have gone to January 5 runoffs. The regular election race is between Republican Sen. David Perdue and Democrat Jon Ossoff; the other is between Republican Sen. Kelly Loeffler and Democrat Rev. Raphael Warnock.

Georgia voters who are heading to the polls Tuesday — and the more than 3 million voters who have already voted early — won’t just be choosing their two representatives in the upper chamber. They’ll also, as Vox’s Ella Nilsen explained, be determining “whether Democrats can take control of the Senate — and, therefore, political power in Washington.”

At first glance, Georgia’s law requiring majorities for an outright victory seems inoffensive — the person who wins has to be chosen by most of the people who cast their votes. In theory, this would force candidates to appeal to more voters instead of winning with a large plurality of votes while holding views anathema to the majority of the electorate.

But Georgia’s runoff system has a darker origin: Many historians say it was designed to make it harder for the preferred candidates of Black voters to win, and to suppress Black political power.

The history of Georgia’s runoff system

The origin of Georgia’s runoff system is a little complicated.

It effectively began in 1962, when the Supreme Court struck down Georgia’s old electoral system. That older system, called a “county-unit system,” was created 45 years prior to amplify rural voters’ power while disadvantaging Black voters’, and was “kind of a poor man’s Electoral College,” University of Georgia political science professor Charles Bullock told Vox.

Forced to come up with a new system, Georgia created one intended to continue undermining Black voters’ influence. That was the runoff system, whose origins were detailed in a 2007 Interior Department report:

In 1963, state representative Denmark Groover from Macon introduced a proposal to apply majority-vote, runoff election rules to all local, state, and federal offices. A staunch segregationist, Groover’s hostility to black voting was reinforced by personal experience. Having served as a state representative in the early 1950s, Groover was defeated for election to the House in 1958. The Macon politico blamed his loss on “Negro bloc voting.” He carried the white vote, but his opponent triumphed by garnering black ballots by a five-to-one margin.

Groover soon devised a way to challenge growing black political strength. Elected to the House again in 1962, he led the fight to enact a majority vote, runoff rule for all county and state contests in both primary and general elections. Until 1963, plurality voting was widely used in Georgia county elections...

Essentially, Groover wanted to stop Black Georgians from voting as a “bloc” — that is, overwhelmingly for one candidate or party — while white Georgians split their votes among many candidates. In a plurality system, if Black voters were able to keep a coalition behind one candidate, they wouldn’t need the support of many white voters for their preferred candidate to win elections.

The method was popular across the former Confederacy: Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Texas all have primary election runoffs. As the Washington Post reported, just two non-Southern states have runoff rules, and those “almost never matter”:

In South Dakota, candidates for U.S. Senate, U.S. representative and governor must compete in a runoff if no one reaches 35 percent of the vote. In Vermont, a runoff is ordered if two candidates finish with the same number of votes.

There are some, like Bullock, who don’t believe this was designed to be a racially discriminatory institution, pointing out that the use of runoffs began at a time when Black voters had already been largely eliminated from the voter rolls. Others have said there were good governance reasons for implementing the runoff system.

However, Cal Jillson, a professor at Southern Methodist University, told the Washington Post that most of the states that adopted runoff systems did it to “maintain white Democratic domination of local politics. Letters and speeches that survive from the period show race was very much on the minds of those Democrats who advocated the primary-runoff process. “People had no misgivings about stating their real intentions and stating them in racial terms,” Jillson told the paper.

Moreover, arguments about good governance and race neutrality are hard to square with Groover’s blatant racism as well as the context in which these decisions were being made — a time when Georgia and other Southern states were fighting to maintain white supremacy in voting institutions.

As if to simplify the historical record, decades after Groover fought to institute runoff elections, he admitted: “I was a segregationist. I was a county unit man. But if you want to establish if I was racially prejudiced, I was. If you want to establish that some of my political activity was racially motivated, it was.”

Groover also confirmed that he “used the phrase ‘bloc voting’ as a racist euphemism for Negro voting.” A DeKalb County representative who supported Groover “remembered Groover saying on the House floor: ‘[W]e have got to go the majority vote because all we have to have is a plurality and the Negroes and the pressure groups and special interests are going to manipulate this State and take charge if we don’t go for the majority vote.”

So that all seems pretty clear.

The potential effect overturning Georgia’s runoff system could have on Black political power

But did these efforts actually work as intended?

The 1990 Justice Department seemed to think so. That year, the DOJ sued to overturn the runoff system. Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights John R. Dunne told the Los Angeles Times at the time that the runoff system has had “a demonstrably chilling effect on the ability of blacks to become candidates for public office,” and called the requirement “an electoral steroid for white candidates.”

The Justice Department cited elections in more than 20 Georgia counties “where at least 35 black candidates won the most votes in their initial primaries, but then lost in runoffs as voters coalesced around a white opponent.” The Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights praised the suit contemporaneously, favorably comparing the George H.W. Bush DOJ with the Reagan administration. The American Civil Liberties Union, which had also unsuccessfully filed suit to discard the majority-vote requirement, applauded the lawsuit.

But there was real dissent around what eliminating this system would have done.

Thirty years ago, University of Virginia political scientist Larry Sabato told the Los Angeles Times that “the Republican Justice Department in the name of minority rights is pursuing policies that will help Republicans.”

The logic here is that if the runoff system is eliminated, Black candidates in Democratic primaries are more likely to make it to the general election. Some observers believed that white Democrats were harder to defeat than Black Democrats. Therefore, the argument goes that while eliminating the runoff system could help Black candidates advance to the general election more often, Republicans would have an easier time beating them when they got there than their white counterparts.

The DOJ’s lawsuit was eventually consolidated with Brooks v. Miller, where 27 Black voters unsuccessfully challenged the majority-vote requirement. In 1998, the 11th Circuit Court found that the plaintiffs were unable to prove that changing the runoff system would increase the number of Black elected officials. They also found that “discrimination was not a substantial or motivating factor behind enactment of the majority-vote provision.”

The court agreed that “the virus of race-consciousness was in the air” when majority voting was instituted but that the plaintiffs failed to prove that the majority-vote requirement was “infected thusly.”

The only large data set presented in the case came from the state of Georgia’s expert witness. He looked at Georgia’s primary elections from 1970 to 1995 and found that there were 278 runoffs involving a Black candidate running against a white candidate. In 85 of these cases, the candidate who won the plurality of votes in the initial primary lost in the runoff. 65 percent of those cases featured a Black candidate losing in the runoff after their initial victory. However, the defendants convinced the court that “the disparity of outcomes ... was attributable to the relative strength of individual candidates,” not due to the unfairness of the runoff system.

It’s obvious that a lot of racist people wanted to dilute Black voting power in 1960s Georgia. Many of these people were in favor of eliminating the plurality system and instituting runoffs.

However, it’s difficult to know how this rule has affected Black representation and political potency in the state, since it’s impossible to determine the counterfactuals. For instance, in a world without a looming runoff system, Republican Rep. Doug Collins or Loeffler might have withdrawn from the “jungle primary” to ensure Warnock couldn’t win in a plurality election. Who knows?

But all things equal, without Georgia’s runoff system, Raphael Warnock would already be in the US Senate.

As would David Perdue.

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Correction: This article has been updated to correctly state that Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Texas all have primary election runoffs, not general.

Facebook plans to put the name of the winner of the US presidential election at the top of Facebook and Instagram once it's been projected by a majority of media outlets, the company says. From a report: The company also will label presidential candidates' posts with a link to its voting information center, according to Facebook spokesperson Tom Reynolds. The company plans to "show the candidate's name in notifications at the top of Facebook and Instagram that say 'A Presidential Winner Has Been Projected -- is the projected winner of the 2020 US Presidential Election,'" Reynolds explained in an email to The Verge. Facebook will rely on "a majority opinion from Reuters as well as independent decision desks at major media outlets, including ABC News, CBS News, Fox News, NBC News, CNN, and The Associated Press to determine when a presidential winner is projected," Reynolds says.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Forget the blame game: It was completely predictable that Democrats in Republican-leaning districts would lose.

Ransomware gangs that steal a company's data and then get paid a ransom fee to delete it don't always follow through on their promise. From a report: The number of cases where something like this has happened has increased, according to a report published by Coveware this week and according to several incidents shared by security researchers with ZDNet researchers over the past few months. These incidents take place only for a certain category of ransomware attacks -- namely those carried out by "big-game hunters" or "human-operated" ransomware gangs. These two terms refer to incidents where a ransomware gang specifically targets enterprise or government networks, knowing that once infected, these victims can't afford prolonged downtimes and will likely agree to huge payouts. But since the fall of 2019, more and more ransomware gangs began stealing large troves of files from the hacked organizations before encrypting the victims' files. The idea was to threaten the victim to release its sensitive files online if the company wanted to restore its network from backups instead of paying for a decryption key to recover its files.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

President Trump during his inauguration ceremony on January 20, 2017. | Jim Bourg/Getty Images

The Trump show has been canceled.

Most people who lose their jobs get to do so privately. But there are a few exceptions. Contestants on The Apprentice and Celebrity Apprentice got fired on national TV. And so did President Donald Trump, who was able to ride a lifelong preoccupation with image and branding to the White House, but not to a second term.

If a celebrity is “a person who is known for his well-knownness,” then Donald Trump was the equivalent for wealth. He was not the richest person in the world, or even the country; he came in at 339th on Forbes’s most recent US wealth rankings. His businesses are not the most famous or most successful; unlike Jeff Bezos, he does not run the most popular store in the world, and even in the hotels business, the Trump Organization was a much smaller presence than Marriott or Hilton or Hyatt.

But perhaps no wealthy person in America was better at projecting an image of wealth and extravagance than Trump. When rappers from Raekwon to Cam’ron to Mac Miller wanted to brag about their wealth and power, they didn’t reference Bezos or Bill Gates; they referenced Trump. When reality show producer Mark Burnett needed a human embodiment of financial success to helm a new business-themed reality show, he enlisted Trump.

“I bet you when Donald Trump makes a decision, he thinks to himself, ‘What would a cartoon rich person do?’” the comedian John Mulaney joked all the way back in 2008.

The eventual punchline was, of course, “run for president.”

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The White House during Trump’s term often looked more like a TV network trying to get a ratings boost than an administration trying to lead a country. That’s true both literally — Trump harped on TV ratings of his appearances and those of his enemies long after taking office — and metaphorically. Desperate to stay on TV, Trump made a habit of calling in to Fox & Friends many mornings. He turned internal administration conflicts into public, Apprentice-style dramas about whom he’ll fire next. He introduced Poochie-style short-lived surprise characters, like “The Mooch.” Park police tear-gassed protesters to give Trump a nice photo op at a church by the White House.

And most toxically, instead of using his authority as president to actually fix the pandemic, he instead poured his efforts into building a false reality where the pandemic was not a problem, where the country could reopen instantly and safely, where the deaths of more than 230,000 people were minimized rather than mourned.

Behind the scenes, Trump used the trappings of the White House to scam the public. He stayed in his own hotels and resorts on taxpayers’ dime, and made the Secret Service do so too. His children and son-in-law combine positions of real policy and political influence in Trump’s White House with myriad property holdings and deals that create obvious conflicts of interest.

Trump can fairly be understood as one of the most inept presidents in American history, someone whose inability to control a natural pandemic cost hundreds of thousands of his citizens their lives, a death toll higher than all American combat deaths in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq combined. Calling it inept is perhaps too forgiving. Trump’s presidency was characterized by a pervasive attitude of indifference and cruelty that shaped real policy, especially where nonwhite Americans were concerned.

The reality of Trump’s record

On January 20, 2017, Trump took office with an inaugural address that consciously rejected the hopeful, sweeping precedent of Lincoln’s “malice toward none” address or Franklin Roosevelt’s admonition that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” Instead, he described an America with “rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation” and “crime and gangs and drugs that have stolen too many lives” but promised “this American carnage stops right here and stops right now.”

Former President George W. Bush, whose own disastrous presidency would come to be eclipsed by Trump’s in the public imagination, turned to Hillary Clinton at the event and remarked, “That was some weird shit.”

Indeed, the years that followed did not feel like a normal presidency. Past Republican administrations had indulged in racist appeals and policies before, but Trump made them more explicit, and brought in advisers on the outskirts of the alt-right, like Stephen Miller and Steve Bannon, who were united in a conviction that the mainstream right was too indulgent of immigrants, of African American criminals, of Muslims.

This had major, highly visible policy consequences, from the administration’s abhorrent treatment of migrants and especially migrant children to its indulgence of white nationalist figures and movements.

But what has sometimes been obscured by his abnormal behavior as president was that Trump governed in many ways like a typical Republican president.

Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images

J. Scott Applewhite/AFP/Getty Images

Chris Kleponis/Getty Images

His administration pursued deregulation across the board, especially on the environment and climate change; among other moves, he moved to withdraw the United States from the Paris climate accord. His abandonment of Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria, leading to some 5,000 deaths, echoed Bush’s disastrous response to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Trump’s first legislative initiative was an effort to fulfill longstanding Republican ambitions to repeal and replace Obamacare, only to find himself foiled by a last-minute defection by Sen. John McCain (R-AZ).

Trump and his allies succeeded, though, in slashing the corporate tax rate from 35 to 21 percent, and more mildly cutting income taxes (especially for top earners), in December 2017. The promised effects on business investment did not come to fruition.

And — perhaps of greatest interest to conservatives — Trump validated Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s plan to keep Antonin Scalia’s Supreme Court seat in Republican hands by appointing Neil Gorsuch in 2017, and turned the Court rightward again by replacing the retiring Anthony Kennedy with the more conservative Brett Kavanaugh. Gorsuch and Kavanaugh, like Trump’s final nominee, Amy Coney Barrett, were conventional picks that any Republican president would have made.

Foreign affairs were a more complicated story. Trump was less hawkish than some of his advisers, like former National Security Adviser John Bolton, who left the administration frustrated that Trump would not engage in military strikes against North Korea and Iran. But Trump was no dove either, engaging in limited strikes against Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad in retaliation for chemical weapons attacks, assassinating Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani, and dramatically increasing civilian deaths from American raids and airstrikes in Afghanistan and in the drone war (especially in Somalia).

Trump’s highly public entreaties to North Korea, including the first American presidential visit to the country, resulted in no progress toward denuclearization or normal relations. His decision to withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal was followed by Iran rapidly increasing its stocks of enriched uranium.

The reality of Trump’s corruption

Much of Trump’s presidency was dominated by questions about his relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The conclusion of former FBI director Robert Mueller, who was eventually brought in as special counsel to investigate the matter, was “that the Russian government tried to help Trump win, that the Trump campaign was eager to benefit from hackings targeting Democrats, that Trump’s campaign advisers had a host of ties to Russia, and that President Trump tried again and again to try to impede the Russia investigation,” as Vox’s Andrew Prokop has summarized. But Mueller stopped short of recommending Trump be impeached for obstruction of justice.

When Trump eventually was impeached in December 2019, it was not for actions regarding Russia. It was for actions regarding Ukraine, specifically his attempts to get a Ukrainian prosecutor to pursue Hunter Biden, the son of his eventual general election opponent. That was easily enough to get House Democrats to impeach him, but the Senate, controlled by his allies, predictably voted to acquit.

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Drew Angerer/Getty Images

But the impeachment and Russia dramas only scratched the surface of the Trump administration’s culture of corruption, which was so pervasive it invited frequent comparisons to the Harding administration, the previous high watermark of blatant White House graft.

Trump’s failure to divest from his hotel business has made them a lucrative cash cow. Trump has directed at least $2.5 million to his properties through his and his children’s travel, which entails bringing Secret Service agents along and having them pay for rooms. That’s pocket change compared to what domestic allies and lobbyists and foreign governments have paid Trump, through his businesses, to get a seat at the table.

Along the way, he’s repeatedly demanded that the Justice Department prosecute his political enemies, purged inspectors general investigating his administration, and launched an investigation into the investigation of his ties to Russia, a meta-investigation so blatantly politicized that Trump’s attorney general demanded results in time for the election.

Throughout it all, Trump maintained a constant commitment to posting on Twitter. When Barack Obama tweeted, it was to send out anodyne best wishes and carefully massaged statements. When Trump tweeted, it was unpredictable, at odd intervals, and often to amplify his most bigoted supporters or to assail enemies from the Federal Reserve to Jeff Bezos to the NFL. The president’s … unorthodox communications style helped feed the constant feeling of political crisis throughout his presidency, even when the actual policy stakes were normal for a president.

The reality of Covid-19

It was an eventful presidency, but one that, heading into 2020, presided over a thriving economy (overseen by Trump’s excellent, loose-money Fed chair pick, Jerome “Jay” Powell, whom Trump pushed to be even looser) and no catastrophes on the scale of the Iraq War costing hundreds of thousands of lives.

As recently as February 2020, unemployment was at a mere 3.5 percent, its lowest point in over 50 years. Wage growth was strong, especially for the lowest-income workers. In normal times, with a normal president, that could be a recipe for an easy reelection. This being Trump, he was nonetheless struggling in public polling; leading economic indicators were already starting to slow through 2019, further complicating his path.

Then the situation got much worse for him in March, as the Covid-19 pandemic reached the United States.

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Alex Brandon/AP

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Trump failed to coordinate a national policy to respond to the pandemic. He announced restrictions on entry to the US from China that were, in practice, extremely porous (thousands of people still entered) and beside the point, as community spread in the US had already started. As the country faced a shortfall of personal protective equipment, his administration inexplicably did not use the means at its disposal to address the problem — even refusing a firm’s offer of 1.7 million masks per week back in January because it thought it unnecessary. Trump’s overall attitude was indifferent and pollyannaish, declaring the virus “very much under control” in late February, as its spread had only just begun.

Trump did one big thing right, signing a massive stimulus package in March to address the economic crisis that lockdowns throughout the country had precipitated. But even that was not an unqualified triumph — he let the stimulus expire at the end of July, and did not push for more until it was too late. More important, his administration failed to contain the virus in the intervening time, all but guaranteeing its resurgence even as millions continued to be devastated by the economic crisis. That the country now heads into a lame-duck season with the pandemic raging as fiercely as ever — with little hope of passing new stimulus for struggling Americans — is a devastating failure of governance.

Throughout the crisis, Trump was always more interested in projecting an image of a thriving economy rather than actually making the hard choices to deal with the pandemic that was strangling the economy. From the beginning, he was obsessed with “reopening” the economy and tried to rush through lockdowns, stay-at-home orders, and other necessary measures for controlling the disease. Barely a month into the crisis, he decried Michigan and Virginia for pursuing responsible lockdown measures, whipping his fans into an anti-isolation, anti-mask frenzy.

As a result, the US had among the worst outbreaks in terms of deaths of any developed nation. It has faced not just a single wave of the pandemic, but three waves to date: the first in February/March, a second wave in June/July (where new daily cases were nearly double the first wave), and the surge we are currently in.

Trump responded to the most recent coronavirus surge by leaning into his alternate reality, painting an optimistic picture with packed rallies and recurring declarations that the country was “rounding the turn.” Indeed, at times he took actions highly likely to cause cases to spike, most notably holding large, in-person rallies in swing states, which were sometimes followed by an increase in Covid-19 cases.

In spite of the president’s wishful thinking, and because of his actions, the virus persisted. And Americans noticed. The public has overwhelmingly viewed Trump’s response as a failure. As of October 28, polls showed that 57.4 percent of Americans disapproved of his handling of the crisis, and only 39.8 percent approved.

So when the disease finally made its way to the White House, and to the president, in the fall, it was less of a surprise and more of a reckoning. There was a certain poetry to it: The death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, which offered the Trump administration a historic and rare opportunity to shift the Court to the right, led them to throw themselves a big party resulting in two dozen-odd Covid-19 cases in the White House and White House press corps — including the president himself. RBG had failed to retire under a Democrat and protect her legacy. But she managed to haunt Trump all the same.

You might expect a brush with the virus he failed to conquer would change Trump’s mentality — but of course, it didn’t. If anything, the reverse happened, with Trump telling voters, “Don’t be afraid of Covid. Don’t let it dominate your life.”

The catch, of course, was that Covid-19 does dominate our lives. We are afraid of it, and for very good reason. It has killed more than 230,000 people. And all the marketing and spin and PR magic in the world couldn’t paper over that.

Managing editor Micah Cohen joins Galen Druke to talk about whether the remaining votes being counted, particularly in Pennsylvania, could shake Joe Biden’s lead nationwide. They also discuss the significance of the outcomes in Arizona and Nevada, even if Biden wins Pennsylvania.