Election Highlights: Biden Wins Presidency, Calling for End of ‘Grim Era’

 

Joseph R. Biden Jr. addressed the nation for the first time as president-elect, saying, “This is the time to heal in America.” Kamala Harris is the first woman elected vice president. President Trump has vowed to file legal challenges. WILMINGTON, Del. — Joseph R. Biden Jr. addressed the nation for the first time as president-elect on Saturday night, delivering a message of unity and trying to soothe the extraordinary divisions that defined the last four years in American politics.

“Let this grim era of demonization in America begin to end here and now,” he said.

In remarks before a drive-in audience in Wilmington brimming with longtime friends from Delaware, his home state, he directly appealed to the tens of millions of Americans who backed President Trump’s re-election, seeking to make good on his central campaign promise of bringing the country together.

“For all those of you who voted for President Trump, I understand the disappointment tonight,” Mr. Biden, speaking at the conclusion of his third run for the presidency, said. “I’ve lost a couple times myself. But now, let’s give each other a chance. It’s time to put away the harsh rhetoric, lower the temperature, see each other again, listen to each other again.”

He added, “This is the time to heal in America.”

Mr. Biden’s optimistic speech, flecked with references to faith and American history, came 48 years to the day after he was first elected a senator from Delaware. He spoke from a flag-bedecked stage outside the Chase Center on the Riverfront, an event center near the Christina River, where he invoked themes that shaped his presidential campaign.

The message, as it was throughout the campaign, was rooted more in a sense of values than in an especially ideological viewpoint, an approach that helped him build a broad coalition throughout the campaign but that will be tested in partisan Washington.

Yet Mr. Biden grew impassioned as he insisted that for all of the tensions in the country, Americans still wanted to see their leaders find common ground. He promised to bring steady leadership and experience to meet the staggering crises facing the nation, most prominently the coronavirus.

“What is our mandate?” he said. “I believe it’s this: Americans have called upon us to marshal the forces of decency, the forces of fairness, to marshal the forces of science and the forces of hope in the great battles of our time.”

Senator Kamala Harris, the vice president-elect, spoke first, telling voters that they had chosen “hope and unity, decency, science and, yes, truth.”

She invoked her mother, Shyamala Gopalan, who came to the United States from India at the age of 19, and paid tribute to the women “who throughout our nation’s history have paved the way for this moment tonight.”

“While I may be the first woman in this office, I will not be the last,” she said. “Because every little girl watching tonight sees that this is a country of possibilities.”

 

 

Biden, Flipping Michigan and Wisconsin, Says It’s ‘Clear’ He Will Reach 270

The undecided presidential election entered a new phase on Wednesday as former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. was declared the winner of Michigan and Wisconsin, two key swing states that President Trump won four years ago.

With its path to victory narrowing, the Trump campaign said that it would seek a recount in Wisconsin and announced that it had taken legal action seeking to halt the vote count in Michigan, one of a flurry of lawsuits that included joining an action challenging the extension of ballot deadlines in Pennsylvania and filing another seeking to segregate late absentee ballots in Georgia.

The Trump campaign’s string of challenges came as the president found himself with few ways to win the 270 electoral votes needed to be re-elected. By Wednesday afternoon, Mr. Biden was holding slim leads in several key states which, if the trend continues, could propel him to the critical Electoral College threshold and the presidency.

The lingering uncertainty of the 2020 campaign was perhaps unsurprising in an election with record-breaking turnout where most ballots were cast before Election Day but many could not be counted until afterward.

Mr. Trump’s chances of winning a second term depended on his ability to hang on to his leads in states like Georgia and Pennsylvania — where Mr. Biden has been narrowing the gap as vote counting progresses — and on overtaking Mr. Biden in one of the states where he is currently ahead.

With millions of votes yet to be counted across several key states — there is a reason that news organizations and other usually impatient actors were waiting to declare victors — Mr. Biden had narrow leads in Arizona and Nevada. If he can hold those states, the former vice president could win the election even without Pennsylvania, which has long been viewed as a must-have battleground state.

“I’m not here to declare that we’ve won,” Mr. Biden said in a speech Wednesday afternoon in Wilmington, Del., “but I am here to report that when the count is finished, we believe we will be the winners.”

Even before the Wisconsin race was called, the Trump campaign said that it would request a recount. Under Wisconsin law, a recount can be requested if the margin between the top two candidates is less than one percentage point.

Bill Stepien, Mr. Trump’s campaign manager, said in a statement that “the president is well within the threshold to request a recount and we will immediately do so.”

Mr. Stepien later claimed that the Trump campaign had not been given “meaningful access” to several counting locations in Michigan, and that it had a filed suit in the Michigan Court of Claims to halt counting until access was granted. Shortly after that he announced that the campaign would intervene in Pennsylvania. Later in the evening, the campaign said it was filing suit in Georgia seeking to get counties to separate late-arriving ballots from the rest.

Taken together, the legal actions threatened to slow the counting in states where Mr. Trump was projected to lose or in danger of losing.

One source of Mr. Biden’s resilience lies in the nature of the votes still to be counted. Many are mail-in ballots, which favor him because the Democratic Party spent months promoting the message of submitting votes in advance, while Mr. Trump encouraged his voters to turn out on Election Day. And in Pennsylvania, many of the uncounted votes are from populous urban and suburban areas that tend to vote heavily for Democrats.

Four years ago, Michigan provided one of Mr. Trump’s most surprising victories and helped him take back the Northern industrial states that had favored Democrats in presidential elections since the 1990s. In this election, Mr. Trump’s popularity took a serious hit with the coalition of white voters — independents, those who had an unfavorable view of him but supported him anyway, people with and without college educations — that helped secure his win in Michigan in 2016.

Even in Pennsylvania, where Mr. Trump had run up a daunting lead of roughly eight percentage points as of Wednesday afternoon, Mr. Biden had a plausible shot of catching up. Pennsylvania’s secretary of state said there were more than 1.4 million mail-in ballots still to be counted, and those votes are expected to heavily favor Mr. Biden.

Mr. Trump held leads in North Carolina and Georgia, and his campaign expressed hopes that his early Pennsylvania lead could withstand an influx of mail-in ballots for Mr. Biden. Then, if Mr. Trump were able to retake the lead from Mr. Biden in Arizona or Nevada, which has gone Democratic in recent elections, he would have a path to a second term.

Early Wednesday, Mr. Trump prematurely declared victory and said he would petition the Supreme Court to demand a halt to the counting. Mr. Biden urged his supporters — and by implication, Mr. Trump — to show patience and allow the process to play out.

 

2020 Election Live Updates: Polls Show Biden Ahead in Pennsylvania and 3 Other Key States

Polling conducted by The New York Times and Siena College also shows Biden ahead in Wisconsin, Florida and Arizona. A Republican lawsuit seeks to invalidate more than 120,000 votes in Houston.

Here’s what you need to know:

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Trump is counting on efforts to target potential supporters who sat out 2016.

 

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With just two days until Election Day, all eyes are on Pennsylvania.

 

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A Republican lawsuit over drive-through voting in Houston seeks to invalidate more than 120,000 votes.

 

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Vehicles flying Trump flags try to force a Biden-Harris campaign bus off a highway in Texas.

 

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Trump’s planned late-night rally in Florida could run afoul of a local curfew.

 

ton in 2016 by 44,292 votes, or less than one percentage point. Mr. Trump and Joseph R. Biden Jr., the Democratic presidential nominee, have been all over the state this weekend, reinforcing how critical it has become to the outcome of this election.

But a New York Times/Siena College poll published Sunday suggests that the strategy may not have worked in Pennsylvania and three other states: Wisconsin, Florida and Arizona. Yes, there has been an influx of voters who sat out 2016. But the Times/Siena College poll found that they are by and large voting for Mr. Biden.

Among eligible Pennsylvania voters who did not turn out in 2016, Mr. Biden is leading Mr. Trump by 12 points. His margin among those voters is 19 points in Wisconsin, 17 points in Florida and 7 points in Arizona.

None of this should prompt Democrats to break out the champagne. For one thing, this figure includes people who were not old enough to vote in 2016, and Mr. Trump has not done well with young voters.

But the poll shows Mr. Biden with a lead in four of the most crucial swing states, leaving him in a strong position heading into Election Day. He leads Florida by three points, Arizona and Pennsylvania by six and Wisconsin by 11.

Some efforts by Mr. Trump may have paid off, if modestly. He has made a concerted effort to draw Hispanic support across the country, and the poll found that 33 percent of Latino respondents in Florida supported him over Mr. Biden, with 9 percent undecided. In 2016, a survey of voters leaving polling places found that 31 percent of Hispanic voters favored Mr. Trump over Mrs. Clinton.

 

nytimes.com/live/2020/11/01/us/trump-biden-election

Covid-19 Live Updates: American Public Grows Increasingly Wary of Virus Vaccines

 

As the Trump administration has pressed publicly for top-speed development and approval of a coronavirus vaccine, allotting billions of dollars to pharmaceutical companies, political leaders and public health experts have warned of the dangers of rushing the process.

That divide has only grown recently, as two of the country’s high-profile governors, Andrew M. Cuomo of New York and Gavin Newsom of California, revealed their caution about potential vaccines.

Mr. Newsom announced plans to form an independent panel in his state to review any federally approved vaccines before they are administered to residents. “Of course we won’t take anyone’s word for it,” he said in a news briefing Monday.

California’s new case rates have stayed relatively low, but in much of the rest of the country, the numbers are alarming: On Friday, according to a New York Times database, the United States reported at least 70,464 new cases, the highest figure since July 24. Over the past week, there has been an average of 56,655 cases per day, an increase of 30 percent from the average two weeks earlier.

Mr. Newsom’s announcement came after Mr. Cuomo said last month that New York would also review vaccines approved by the federal government — although Mr. Cuomo tied the move to doubts raised when President Trump suggested that he would reject tougher Food and Drug Administration guidelines. “Frankly, I’m not going to trust the federal government’s opinion,” Mr. Cuomo said.

Recent surveys appear to show that the public shares the governors’ skepticism, with the idea of getting a vaccine as soon as it is available losing appeal for many Americans.

In a poll of likely voters conducted by The New York Times and Siena College, 33 percent said they would definitely or probably not take a vaccine after F.D.A. approval.

In a STAT-Harris poll of about 2,000 people, conducted Oct. 7-10 and published Monday, 58 percent of respondents said they would get vaccinated right away, down from 69 percent who said the same in August.

The decline was twice as steep among Black respondents: Just 43 percent said in October that they would get the vaccine, down from 65 percent in August.

 

 

A Combative Trump and a Deliberate Biden Spar From Afar at Town Halls

 

President Trump spoke positively about an extremist conspiracy-theory group, expressed skepticism about mask-wearing, rebuked his own F.B.I. director and attacked the legitimacy of the 2020 election in a televised town hall forum on Thursday, veering far away from a focused campaign appeal. Instead, he further stoked the country’s political rifts as his Democratic opponent, Joseph R. Biden Jr., pushed a deliberate message anchored in concerns over public health and promises to restore political norms.

Mr. Trump’s defensive and combative performance came on a night that was supposed to feature a debate between him and Mr. Biden, but that morphed into a long-distance study in contrasts on different television networks after the president declined to participate in a virtual debate.

 

On the central issue of the election, the coronavirus pandemic, the two candidates appeared to inhabit not just different television sets but different universes. Mr. Biden has made the full embrace of strict public health guidelines the centerpiece of his candidacy, while Mr. Trump has continued to defy even the recommendations of his own government on matters as basic as the use of masks — a pattern that persisted in their opposing events on Thursday.

 

Mr. Biden lashed virtually every aspect of the president’s handling of the health crisis, including his language on masks.

“The words of a president matter,” Mr. Biden said. “When a president doesn’t wear a mask or makes fun of folks like me when I was wearing a mask for a long time, then, you know, people say, ‘Well, it mustn’t be that important.’”

 

In perhaps his most incendiary remarks, Mr. Trump repeatedly declined to disavow QAnon, a pro-Trump internet community that has been described by law enforcement as a potential domestic terrorism threat. The president professed to have no knowledge of the group, and as a result could not disavow it, but then demonstrated specific knowledge of one of its core conspiracy theories involving pedophilia that is entirely false.

“I know nothing about it,” Mr. Trump said. “I do know they are very much against pedophilia. They fight it very hard.”

When the NBC anchor Savannah Guthrie pressed Mr. Trump to reject the community’s essential worldview, and described some of its most extreme and bogus elements, the president gave no ground: “I don’t know,” he insisted. “No, I don’t know.”

 

source : https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/15/us/politics/presidential-town-halls.html