Understand Georgias Investigation Of Election Interference
An immediate legal threat to Trump.Fani T. Willis, the Atlanta area district attorney, has been investigating whether former President Donald J. Trump and his allies interfered with the 2020 election in Georgia. The case could be one of the most perilous legal problems for Mr. Trump. Heres what to know:
Looking for votes.Prosecutors in Georgia opened their investigation in February 2021, just weeks after Mr. Trump made a phone call to Brad Raffensperger, Georgias secretary of state, and urged him to find enough votes to overturn the results of the election there.
What are prosecutors looking at?In addition to Mr. Trumps call to Mr. Raffensperger, Ms. Willis has homed in on a plot by Trump allies to send fake Georgia electors to Washington and misstatements about the election results made before the state legislature by Rudolph W. Giuliani, who spearheaded efforts to keep Mr. Trump in power as his personal lawyer. An election data breach in Coffee County, Ga., is also part of the investigation.
Who is under scrutiny?Mr. Giuliani has been told that he is a target of the investigation, and prosecutors have warned some state officials and pro-Trump alternate electors that they could be indicted. Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, has been fighting efforts to force him to appear before a grand jury, but a federal appeals court ruled that he must testify.
With those victories, Mr. Biden now has two clear and plausible paths to victory:
Us Elections : Trump Can Still Win On November 3
With less than a week to go, US president’s best bet is major polling error in his favour
President Donald Trumps chances of winning a second term continue to slip away. With under a week to go, hes still down about 9 percentage points nationally, and theres little sign of any real movement in either direction. Early last week, I speculated that there was still enough time for significant changes to the race.
Thats much less true now. With the debates over, its hard to imagine anything that would spark a shift of more than a percentage point or two. And not only is Trump being badly outspent in the final days by former Vice President Joe Biden, but the current spike in the coronavirus, an issue that plays very badly for the incumbent, also is unlikely to help him as the few remaining undecided voters make up their minds.
As Nate Silver put it: Were sort of getting to the point where the only way Trump can win is with a major polling error, bigger than in 2016 . A Trump win is certainly not impossible. Silvers model pegs the chances at about 12%, while the Economist model puts it at only about 1 in 20. The reason Trump still has any serious chance is because the Electoral College appears to be biased in favour of Republicans this year, as it was in 2016, and perhaps a little more so . At least, thats the case if the state polls are correct.
Certification Of Electoral College Votes
The 117th United States Congress first convened on January 3, 2021, and was scheduled to count and certify the Electoral College votes on January 6, 2021. There were 222 Democrats and 212 Republicans in the House there were 51 Republicans, 46 Democrats, and two independents in the Senate. Several Republican members of the House and Senate said they would raise objections to the reported count in several states, meeting the requirement that if a member from each body objects, the two houses must meet separately to discuss whether to accept the certified state vote. A statement from the vice president’s office said Pence welcomes the plan by Republicans to “raise objections and bring forward evidence” challenging the election results.
On December 28, 2020, Representative Louie Gohmert filed a lawsuit in Texas challenging the constitutionality of the Electoral Count Act of 1887, claiming Vice President Pence has the power and ability to unilaterally decide which slates of electoral votes get counted. The case was dismissed on January 1, 2021, for lack of both standing and jurisdiction. The plaintiffs filed an appeal, and the appeal was dismissed by a three-judge panel of the appeals court the next day.
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Other Members Who Have Faced Questions About Jan 6
In addition to the members who have been implicated or directly named as participants Trumps efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, several other incumbent members of Congress have received formal requests for information from the Jan. 6 committee based on evidence and testimony it has received.
Thanks to Lillian Barkley for copy editing this article.
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Demographic Profiles Of Trump And Biden Voters
As was the case in the 2016 and 2018 elections, the Democratic voting coalition in 2020 looked quite different from the Republican coalition in several respects. Overall, Biden voters were younger, more racially and ethnically diverse, and less likely to live in rural areas than Trump voters.
In 2020, 85% of voters who cast a ballot for Trump were White non-Hispanic this compares with just 61% of Biden voters. These differences are roughly consistent with the share of White voters in each partys coalition in 2016.
Nearly two-in-ten voters who cast a ballot for Biden in the 2020 election were Black, identical to the share of Clinton voters in 2016 who were Black. That is significantly higher than the share of Trump voters who were Black .
The community profiles of Trump and Biden voters are similar in some fundamental ways to the previous two elections but more voters who cast ballots for Biden in 2020 say they live in a suburban area compared with Clintons 2016 voters.
Overall, urban voters continue to constitute a larger share of the Democratic coalition compared with the Republican coalition. And rural voters remain a significantly larger portion of the Republican electorate.
However, when comparing Clintons voters with Bidens, there are some significant shifts. In 2016, about half of Clintons voters described their communities as suburban , while 32% said they were from an urban area and 19% were from a rural area.
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Can Trump Still Win No Hes Already Lost
Joe Biden has won enough states by enough votes that President Trump cannot overcome those deficits through legal challenges or recounts.
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Five days after television networks and other major news organizations called the presidential election for Joseph R. Biden Jr., President Trump continues to maintain that he will win.
That is false.
Mr. Bidens winning margins in the key battleground states he has captured 20,000 votes in Wisconsin, 54,000 votes in Pennsylvania and 148,000 votes in Michigan are well above the thresholds of votes that have been changed in previous recounts.
Even in Georgia, where officials are preparing for a hand recount of the ballots, Mr. Biden leads by 14,000 votes, a margin that is unlikely to be reversed.
The New York Times and other news media outlets have not anointed Mr. Biden the winner of the presidential election, but have just done the math: The former vice president has won enough states by enough votes that Mr. Trump cannot overcome those deficits through legal challenges or recounts.
Biden Can Still Stop Trump And Trumpism If He Can Find A Bold Plan And Moral Vision
The US president has been struggling and his divisive rival still has the Republican party in his grip. But there are reasons for hope
The president has also been getting kudos for the killing of Ayman al-Zawahiri, the al-Qaida successor to Osama bin Laden, in a spectacularly discreet US drone strike that resulted in no other casualties.
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Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley
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Voting Patterns In The 2020 Election
The 2020 election featured continuity in the voting patterns of major demographic and political groups in the population, but there were a few important shifts. The gender gap in the 2020 election was narrower than it had been in 2016 as Democrats made gains among men and Republicans made gains among women. In the 2016 election, Donald Trump won men by 11 percentage points while Hillary Clinton won women by 15 points . In the 2018 election, Democrats substantially narrowed the gap with men while maintaining an 18-point lead among women. In the 2020 election, men again divided nearly evenly , while Bidens advantage narrowed to 11 points among women .
Similarly, as Biden increased his level of support among White men in the 2020 election relative to Clintons in 2016, Trump gained among White women, which had the effect of further narrowing the gender gap among White voters. In 2016, Trump won White men by 30 points . That gap narrowed to a 17-point margin for Trump in 2020 . White women, a group sometimes categorized as swing voters and who broke nearly evenly in 2016 , favored him in 2020 .
Biden received the support of 92% of Black voters, nearly the same as Clinton received in 2016 and Democratic candidates for the U.S. House received in 2018.
Party and ideology
Age and generation
Geography
Religion
White non-evangelical Protestants voted for Trump over Biden by a 14-point margin , while Black Protestants were an overwhelmingly Democratic group .
Pressure On State And Local Officials
As the Trump campaign’s lawsuits were repeatedly rejected in court, Trump personally communicated with Republican local and state officials in at least three states, including state legislators, attorneys general, and governors who had supported him in the general election and continued to support him. He pressured them to overturn the election results in their states by recounting votes, throwing out certain votes, or getting the state legislature to replace the elected Democratic slate of Electoral College members with a Republican slate of electors chosen by the legislature. In late November, he personally phoned Republican members of two county electoral boards in Michigan, trying to get them to reverse their certification of the result in their county. He then invited members of the Michigan state legislature to the White House, where they declined his suggestion that they choose a new slate of electors. He repeatedly spoke to the Republican governor of Georgia and the secretary of state, demanding that they reverse their state’s election results, threatening them with political retaliation when they did not, strongly criticizing them in speeches and tweets, and demanding that the governor resign.
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Has Anyone Tried This Before
The last time a closely contested election involved a battle over electors was in 2000 between Al Gore and George W Bush. That was a fight in one state, Florida, where the difference between the candidates was just a few hundred votes. Eventually, the US Supreme Court stepped in and halted any further review and Bush became president.
For a disputed election involving multiple states you have to go back to the 1876 race between Republican Rutherford B Hayes and Democrat Samuel Tildon.
In that episode, contested results in Louisiana, South Carolina and Florida meant no candidate was able to win a majority in the Electoral College. The deadlock threw the election to the US House of Representatives, which ultimately sided with Hayes, who like Bush in 2000 and Trump in 2016, won fewer votes nationally than his defeated opponent.
How Much Can The Balance Of These Two Scenarios Affect Measures Of Opinion On Issues
The adjustment from the tilted version to the balanced version , makes very little difference in the balance of opinion on issue questions. Across a set of 48 opinion questions and 198 answer categories, most answer categories changed less than 0.5%. The average change associated with the adjustment was less than 1 percentage point, and approximately twice that for the margin between alternative answers . The maximum change observed across the 48 questions was 3 points for a particular answer and 5 points for the margin between alternative answers.
One 3-point difference was on presidential job approval, a measure very strongly associated with the vote. In the balanced version, 39 percent approved of Trumps job performance, while 58 percent disapproved. In the tilted version, 36 percent approved of Trumps performance and 60 percent disapproved. Two other items also showed a 3-point difference on one of the response options. In the balanced version, 54% said that it was a bigger problem for the country that people did not see racism that was occurring, compared with 57% among the tilted version. Similarly, in the balanced version, 38% said that the U.S. had controlled the coronavirus outbreak as much as it could have, compared with 35% who said this in the tilted version. All other questions tested showed smaller differences.
The complete set of comparisons among the 48 survey questions are shown in the topline at the end of this report.
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Opinionlegally Trump Doesn’t Have To Concede Symbolically It’s Vital He Does Anyway
The late 19th century was a time of massive change in American life, including widespread industrialization and social upheaval. After the Civil War, Republicans locked down control of the presidency and Congress. That didnt begin to change until the near-loss of popular-vote winner Samuel Tilden in 1876 to President Rutherford B. Hayes, in one of the tightest elections ever, ultimately decided by a special commission. By the 1880s, close party competition had returned with narrow margins in both houses of Congress and even a tied Senate at one point.
Trump Falls Short In Popular Electoral Votes Lawsuits Fail
Despite efforts to convince the country and the courts otherwise, Trump did not win reelection.
Trump broke President Barack Obamas popular vote record with over 74 million votes, but still fell short of Biden, who surpassed Trump and all previous presidential candidates by racking up a record-shattering 81 million votes. The Biden-Harris ticket gained roughly 51% of the popular vote to the Trump-Pence tickets 47%, according to the nonpartisan Cook Political Report.
But as the 2000 and 2016 elections showed, the popular vote is not the sole determinant of presidential elections the Electoral College makes the final call.
Each state is allowed a number of electors, which is determined by adding its number of senators to its number of House representatives . Nationwide, there are 538 electoral votes to cast.
On Election Day, people vote for their preferred candidate’s electors, who are chosen by political parties or independent candidates before the election. Those individuals, collectively the Electoral College, then cast votes for president and vice president, usually representing the choice their state’s voters made.
Candidates have to win at least half of the country’s electoral votes to be elected president.
None has gotten very far just one case has been won and at least eight are pending.
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How Biden Won: Ramping Up The Base And Expanding Margins In The Suburbs
It brings the number of states Biden flipped from Trumps 2016 column to five, including Arizona, which last voted Democratic in a presidential race when it backed Clinton in 1996.
Biden also flipped Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, three key northern industrial states that ultimately delivered the White House to Trump four years ago. Biden also won a single electoral vote in Nebraskas 2nd Congressional District, which last voted Democratic for former President Barack Obama in 2008.
Electors from each state and the District of Columbia are expected to vote on Dec. 14. The new Congress will then count the votes and certify Bidens victory on Jan. 6, two weeks before the inauguration.
But Georgias political activity is far from over. The state will hold two runoff elections on Jan. 5 for both its U.S. Senate seats, which are currently held by Republicans.
Half Of Republican Nominees Have At Least Flirted With Denying The Election
As mentioned above, out of 340 Republican nominees for Senate, House, governor, attorney general and secretary of state so far, 120 are full-blown election deniers .2 This includes people like Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey, who said in a campaign ad that the fake news, big tech and blue-state liberals stole the election from President Trump, and Indiana Rep. Greg Pence, who voted not to certify Pennsylvanias electoral votes and hasnt spoken out on the issue since. It also includes at least four people who attended the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol: Pennsylvania gubernatorial nominee Doug Mastriano, Ohio 9th Congressional District nominee J.R. Majewski, Oregon senatorial nominee Jo Rae Perkins and North Carolina 1st Congressional District nominee Sandy Smith.
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Can Donald Trump Still Win The Us Election 2020
- 13:43, 4 Nov 2020
THE RACE between Donald Trump and Joe Biden is in its final stages as vote counting continues across the US – with the Democrat pulling ahead of the Republican firebrand in Pennsylvania, a key state in the race.
But after the US President prematurely declared victory, what are his chances of securing a second term in the White House?
Follow ourUS election 2020 live blog for the latest news & updates
