Tag: 2020 election

The year of the vote: How Americans surmounted a pandemic and dizzying rule changes so their voices would be heard

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NOTE: This election article is being provided free of charge by The Washington Post.

Ben Lucas thought about displaying a Biden-Harris campaign sign in his front yard in Eugene, Ore., but he preferred to encourage all Americans, not just Democrats, to participate in this year’s election.

So last weekend, the 24-year-old graduate student found an old piece of plywood in the garage, painted the letters “V-O-T-E” on it and propped it against a tree.

He explained: “I wanted to be seen, and I wanted to be heard.” Continue reading.

Texas Supreme Court Rejects GOP Scheme To Toss 127,000 Ballots

A legal cloud hanging over nearly 127,000 votes already cast in Harris County was at least temporarily lifted Sunday when the Texas Supreme Court rejected a request by several conservative Republican activists and candidates to preemptively throw out early balloting from drive-thru polling sites in the state’s most populous, and largely Democratic, county.

The all-Republican court denied the request without an order or opinion, as justices did last month in a similar lawsuit brought by some of the same plaintiffs.

The Republican plaintiffs, however, are pursuing a similar lawsuit in federal court, hoping to get the votes thrown out by arguing that drive-thru voting violates the U.S. constitution. A hearing in that case is set for Monday morning in a Houston-based federal district court, one day before Election Day. A rejection of the votes would constitute a monumental disenfranchisement of voters — drive-thru ballots account for about 10% of all in-person ballots cast during early voting in Harris County.

After testing the approach during the July primary runoff with little controversy, Harris County, home to Houston, set up 10 drive-thru centers for the fall election to make early voting easier for people concerned about entering polling places during the pandemic. Voters pull up in their cars and, after their registrations and identifications have been confirmed by poll workers, are handed an electronic tablet through their car windows to cast ballots. Continue reading.

Trailing in the polls, Trump enlists his administration and co-opts the government to bolster his reelection

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In the final days of the 2020 election season, President Trump has featured his White House press secretary as a star at his campaign rallies, where she has triumphantly joined him onstage.

Trump’s daughter Ivanka, a senior White House adviser, has stumped for him and on Saturday posted a stylized photo with uniformed law enforcement officers in Wisconsin, a key battleground.

His top aides, including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and national security adviser Robert O’Brien, have found pressing official business in a number of swing states, traveling there on taxpayer money. Continue reading.

Videotape Reveals Corporate-Funded Plan To Try To Overturn A Trump Loss

The right-wing group behind the “Stand your ground” laws began working in February to challenge a Trump election defeat.

A powerful corporate-funded right-wing organization that includes state legislators and lobbyists was already mobilizing early this year to overturn a possible election loss by President Donald Trump, according to a videotape of an official discussing the plan.

“Obviously we all want President Trump to win,” said Lisa Nelson, chair of the controversial American Legislative Exchange Council, which was responsible for getting the at-times-lethal “Stand your ground” laws enacted in several states.

“Really what it comes down to is the states and the state legislators,” Nelson noted in remarks in February, recorded in a videotape obtained by Documented, a watchdog group that tracks corporate influence on public policy.  Continue reading.

‘Uncharacteristically glum’ Trump speech surprises historian Beschloss: The president ‘does not look happy’

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Donald Trump put on an uncommonly sad face at his rally today in Pennsylvania, and it’s triggering his minions’ fear that the monarchy is in jeopardy.

Their fears may not be irrational, based on early accounts of the rally’s dour tone from reputable sources. Trump was speaking from Newton, PA, the first of four rallies planned for Trump in the critical state of Pennsylvania today.

Historian Michael Beschloss, as credible and circumspect as it comes, offered multiple tweets describing Trump’s “dejected speech.” Continue reading.

Exposed Corruption Swamps Trump Campaign In Final Week

It’s been a long, difficult week in Trumpworld with all of the incriminating reports of corruption surrounding President Donald Trump and his administration. With Election Day less than five days away, Trump is likely feeling the pressure as the opposing forces work over time to state their case and prove that he is unfit for the office of the presidency.

Many of the stories raise more questions about Trump’s leadership and the hidden agendas of his White House officials and other members of his administration.

Here’s a breakdown of the stories circulating this week:

1. Trump, Turkey President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and the Turkish Bank A new report by the New York Times has uncovered details about Trump and U.S. Attorney Bill Barr questionable handling of possible violations of U.S. sanctions involving billions of dollars worth of gold and cash that was funneled to Iran. Continue reading.

Trump is ending his campaign on an ugly new low — and barely anyone noticed

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Donald Trump, tragically occupying the office of president of the United States, possibly has uttered the ugliest words of an ugly career defacing the national stage. And they barely led the news anywhere.

Trump has been claiming at his super-spreader rallies for the past week that American doctors are profiting from the death of COVID-19 patients. Take a step back and absorb this atrocity. This man just invented a mendacious lie from scratch, not even remotely rational and in the process denigrated the frontline heroes who have been risking their lives and those of their families in a 9-month struggle against the worst pandemic in a century.

It didn’t even dominate a news cycle. The nation has been so numbed by this Hitlerian character that this singular slander cannot be distinguished from all his other regurgitations. Continue reading.

When He’s Not Whining, Even Trump Is Bored at His Closing Rallies

“He’s been doing so many of these [recently]. You’d be tired, too,” one senior Trump 2020 aide told The Daily Beast.

At the first rally during his final three days of campaigning against the one he calls “Sleepy Joe,” President Donald Trump couldn’t help but sound tired.

During his campaign stop in Newtown, Bucks County, the president was conspicuously subdued, delivering one of his laziest, most bored-sounding rally speeches in recent memory. Lacking his standard energy and lib-owning peppiness, Trump sleepwalked his way through his prepared and ad-libbed remarks about how the Hunter Biden emails and foreign-dealings story was somehow the “biggest” story in the country, a country ravaged by Trump’s own mismanagement of the coronavirus crisis and an economic implosion.

He mocked The New York Times for having “apologized” to its readers for something or other. He accused his enemies during his self-described “little special speech” of trying to “silence his voice.” He spoke of “the riots,” the politicians who “let Minneapolis burn,” and the progressives and left-wing educators who wanted American schoolkids “indoctrinated” with history that put greater emphasis on matters such as the horrors of slavery. (His solution? “Patriotic education,” whatever that means.) He sneered at the crowd sizes former President Barack Obama was attracting recently, in support of the current Democratic nominee. And he, of course, mocked “Joe Biden, who’s not all there,” to the crowd’s giddy laughter. Continue reading.

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Will Trump’s Broken Promises to Working-Class Voters Cost Him the Election?

Last December, Bob Kemper, the grievance chairman of United Steelworkers Local 1299, was summoned to a conference room at Great Lakes Works, a U.S. Steel plant just south of Detroit. A cohort of senior managers told Kemper and three other union officers that the automotive industry, which buys almost all of the plant’s steel, was cutting its car production. With reduced demand for its product, most of Great Lakes would be “indefinitely idled.” Kemper knew this meant that members were getting laid off, but the terminology was unfamiliar. “Our contract says the facility has to be declared shut down in order for our members to get a severance,” Kemper told me. “We were trying to figure out what the fuck ‘indefinitely idled’ means.”

Nearly a thousand workers have since lost their jobs. The layoffs came at an inauspicious time for Donald Trump, who won the Presidency, in 2016, by flipping Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania by a combined total of seventy-seven thousand votes. (His winning margin in Michigan, barely ten thousand votes, was the slimmest of any state.) Two days before Election Day, Trump had held a rally in Macomb County, Michigan, a national bellwether for the white working-class voters who were once known as Reagan Democrats. “We are going to stop the jobs from going to Mexico and China and all over the world,” Trump said. “We will make Michigan into the manufacturing hub of the world once again.” A Republican Presidential candidate had not won Macomb County since 2004; Trump carried it by nearly fifty thousand votes. View the post here.