Election night reporting

A video collecting some of my reporting from throughout the night:

Young Americans React – Is the U.S. becoming a dictatorship?

October 2020: For Swedish public broadcaster SVT, I interviewed four young political leaders and a political science professor in North Carolina to get their views on whether America is moving in an authoritarian direction. The first version is a shorter video with three of the interviewees included. A version with all five can be seen below.

Interviewees:
Thomas Ellis – Vice President, UNC Young Democrats
Madi Mrzygod, President, NC State College Democrats
Ashley Anderson, Political Science Professor, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Tim Wigginton, Press Secretary, the Republican Party of North Carolina
Devonte Wilson, President, Young Democrats of North Carolina

Biden empathizes, Trump scares: Debate 2 roundup

What was supposed to be the third debate, but ended up being the second and last, was substantial in comparison to the first, although that was a low bar to clear.

The mic of the opposing candidate was muted during the initial response to each question. Trump listened to his advisors telling him to let Biden speak himself into a hole. Biden didn’t speak himself into a hole but interrupting him as Trump did in the first debate did nothing but damage to his campaign. So Trump kept his cool all the way into the last bit of the debate when he started shouting “Who built the cages?” saying that the immigration facilities holding migrant children were built in 2014 during the Obama administration. While this is true, the practice of routinely separating children at the border is a Trump administration practice, not an Obama one. While the Obama administration did separate kids at the border, it was in cases where the child’s safety was in doubt, or when the parent had a serious criminal past. The Trump administration, on the other hand, egged on by then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions, pushed for family separations as a deterrent to stop families from attempting to enter the US.

On the handling of the Coronavirus, Trump brought out his greatest hits: he cited ramped up testing as the reason for the high number of cases and he said that first expectations were that 2.2 million Americans would die from COVID. The problem with that is that it was an estimate for if the US government and the American people did nothing do stem the spread of the virus, it was not a baseline for a successful response as Trump likes to imply.

Trump returned again and again to his go-to attack on Biden every time the former VP tried to suggest anything new: Why didn’t you do this when you were VP? Biden several times described partial successes that he wanted to finish, such as the treatment of drug offenses. But the reply that left the room quiet was when Biden said: We had a Republican congress. The Democrats had control of congress until the 2010 election, and a Republican Party with a surging Tea Party and Freedom Caucus was not about to make deals with Obama.

Biden did well what he always does well, he empathized with people, he described the struggle of minorities, while Trump again claimed he’s the best thing that’s happened to African Americans since Abraham Lincoln, despite all the racist polices and comments and plentiful other evidence to the contrary. Like comments he’s made previously, Trump claimed he was “the least racist person in the room” without any evidence in support and a lot of evidence against.

One of the oldest attacks in American politics is for a Republican to say that a Democrat is a socialist, an old Cold War tactic used to scare voters into thinking that the Democrats are the American version of the Bolsheviks. Trump didn’t outright call Biden a socialist, probably because he has realized that it doesn’t stick. What Trump did say was that Biden was in favor of socialized medicine and would outlaw private insurance. This turned into a layup for Biden as he got to do what he loves to do: talk about how he beat all those left-wingers in the primary because he disagreed with them. This is a win-win for Biden: he gets to appeal to undecided moderates and the few Republicans who are hesitating to vote for the President, without losing any progressives as they have no alternative in America’s two-party system. Trump still didn’t have a plan to show off, even after five years of talking about replacing Obamacare with something better.

Trump ended up spending a lot of time talking about things that most people haven’t heard about or which has no relevance in most people’s lives. He attacked Biden for his and his son’s dealings with foreign powers in a way that was lacking any and all facts, and he said the stock market would tank if Biden was elected. Most people haven’t heard the latest story about Hunter Biden and his laptop, and most aren’t living and dying with the ups and downs of the Nasdaq. Meanwhile, Biden often spoke directly into the camera trying to talk directly to people, and those were his strongest moments.

Trump blamed his accountant for not releasing his taxes despite the fact that as the President of the United States, he has the right and power to do so himself.

The moderator, Kristen Welker of NBC News, got a lot of credit for moderating a debate that didn’t collapse into chaos. Although that was probably just as much because of Trump realizing that screaming his head off didn’t exactly help in the end last time around.

Will this debate turn around the race? Most certainly not.

Will it stop the bleeding for the Trump campaign? Probably not.

Can Trump still win? The odds are heavily against him, but of course he can.

The American political compass — from the middle to the right

American history is full of examples from when the two major parties were completely unrecognizable from their present-day selves. Compared to European political parties, the US political landscape has moved significantly over the years. Parties have switched names, places, ideas, people, and voters.

In the UK, Labour has always been to the left and the Conservatives have always been to the right. The same can be said for the Swedish Social Democrats and the Moderates. This dichotomy can not be translated to US politics. The Democrats have gone from being the party of segregationists to being the party of civil rights just within the last century. The Republicans have gone from being the party of Lincoln and emancipation to relying solely on white votes and having a leader whose greatest weapon is the dog-whistle.

Trump has accused Biden of being controlled by the radical left. Many Americans took a step back in fear as Bernie Sanders willingly called himself a democratic socialist because, since the Cold War, the only thing a lot of older Americans can think of when they hear the word “socialist” is Josef Stalin and Fidel Castro.

But what the so-called “radical left” is campaigning for would barely scratch the surface of center-left politics in a European context. Some Democrats on the left side of the party have admitted that they wouldn’t be in the same party as Joe Biden if the US was a multi-party democracy like many European countries are.

In a European context, the American “radical left” would be considered center-left, Joe Biden and his band of moderate Democrats would be slightly to the right of the middle, and the Republicans would barely exist on any political map with their current views of an extremely limited government, except of course for the military, and social conservatism. These views of course exist in Europe, but they don’t hold one of the major parties in a vice-like grip like they do in the United States.

We can see this slowly changing among younger demographics. Like Bernie Sanders showed us, there are many people who have shed the Red Scare after multiple financial crises and various other hardships. The generation who will be the first who will have a lower standard of living than their parents unsurprisingly do not run away screaming when a major presidential candidate self-identifies as a “democratic socialist”.

Slowly but surely, the American political compass is moving from going from the middle to the right, to maybe in a few years even include an actual left.

Mitt Romney — from presidential candidate to outcast

Chronicling Mitt Romney’s political journey during the last decade is chronicling the Republican Party’s journey into Trumpism. After the loss in 2012, the party looked inward and came to the conclusion that the party was becoming too white to win. Then Lousiana Governor Bobby Jindal, a rare major minority player in the pre-Trump GOP, said that the Republicans needed to “stop being the stupid party.”

The reach out to minorities and the attempt to expand the party’s electorate was supposed to be made in 2016. Then Donald Trump finally entered presidential politics for real after toying with the idea for decades. Trump did expand the party, but not in the direction the post-2012 autopsy had suggested. Trump dug deeper among white working-class voters than any Republican before him, making a bold play that paid off by the thinnest of margins.

What would happen to Mitt Romney after 2012 is what has happened to George W Bush after he left the White House in 2008. Public opinion had Bush the younger in the gutter when he left the presidency. Time heals most wounds, and now, over a decade and four years Trump later, his numbers have rebounded.

Likewise, Mitt Romney was seen as extremely conservative in 2012, and as there undoubtedly are every year, there were people all over the world offering their houses and second bedrooms to worried Americans who just had to leave the country in the event of a Romney victory. Today, being a newbie senator at the tender age of 73, being the only Republican to vote to convict the President during the impeachment trial in the Senate, he’s almost seen as a member of the resistance, a stalwart of pre-Trump Republican politics, and a flashback to when politics was nice, clean and pure, despite the fact that 2012 was the height of partisanship in the last fifty years of American politics. It just seemed like the good old days because since then the country has only drifted further apart. People watched senator Romney walk in a Black Lives Matter march and felt warm and fuzzy inside as if there was hope once more. But Romney is a lonely figure in today’s GOP. He is a rare case of a Republican member of congress who can openly criticize the President, without immediately being booted from the stage. Arizona’s Jeff Blake didn’t have that same staying power, neither did Tennesee’s Bob Corker. But Utah has a special mix of conservatives and Mormons who are willing to vote for the President and the only senator in the Republican conference willing to criticize the President in unmuddled language.

In a leaked video during the 2012 campaign, Romney told a room of donors that 47 percent of the country was completely reliant on the state and would vote for Obama no matter what. The Obama campaign pulled off the trick of painting Romney as a distant, rich, big-time company director without a clue about what life is like for a majority of Americans.

Before the 2012 campaign, Obama had used Romney’s healthcare plan from when he was Governor of Massachusetts as a framework to lure over Republican votes in congress, but without success. In 2015, Romney said: “Without Romneycare, I don’t think we would have had Obamacare.”

Democratic 2020 Presidential nominee Joe Biden, then Obama’s Vice President said that Romney would “put black people back in chains” were he to get elected. Eight years later Romney is the only major national Republican to take part in a Black Lives Matter march after the death of George Floyd. After the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Romney was one of few Republicans who Democrats hoped without go against nominating a new justice before the inauguration after Republicans blocked Obama’s pick of Merrick Garland in 2016. But in the end, Romney supported the appointment of another justice to the Supreme Court, proving that he’s still a conservative, something some seem to have forgotten during the Trump years.

All this shows how far the Republican party has traveled over the last eight years. In 2012 he was the party’s standard-bearer, now he’s one of three or maybe four Republican senators liberals count on to break with the President during important votes.

Romney’s GOP was not the cult of personality that Trump has built. Loyalty to the President now trumps everything, something which Romney’s lonely stature only reinforces.

Pence plows on in the first and only VP debate with Harris

This debate won’t change much, but the lasting impression was two candidates avoiding questions and Pence repeatedly plowing on over his allotted time. Pence delivers the conservative message, which is very similar to Trump’s, but the way he puts it forward is wholly different.

Pence, like Trump, was putting forward misleading and blatantly false claims, but his tone made it seem like the debate was a step back to normalcy. Harris on the other hand was not her social media moment creating self, like in the primary and during Senate hearings.

This was probably part of the plan because she’s no longer trying to win over the Democratic base, she’s trying to win over the few undecided voters who are left. Biden/Harris are in the lead, so avoiding unforced errors is vital at this point in the campaign.

Pence skirting the rules will probably go unnoticed when compared to Trump’s performance in the first debate. People kept blaming the moderator, but when a candidate is refusing to abide by the rules, there’s not much that can be done that would fly in a TV debate.

A few takeaways:

Pence had to create an Earth 2 to defend the White House’s handling of the pandemic by suggesting that the Obama administration’s handling of the swine flu would have been worse if it had been as deadly as COVID. The problem with that is of course that it just wasn’t.

210 000 Americans have died because of COVID so far.

12 000 Americans died because of the swine flu.

To make a comparison just didn’t seem to make any sense. Pence was digging deep to deflect the Trump administration’s handling of COVID.

Harris deflected on the filibuster and packing the court. Maybe the Senate’s love for its bipartisan past is fading and the reality of abolishing the filibuster to get anything done is dawning on some of its past and current members.

Pence deflected on Roe v Wade. Conservatives seem to be aware of how unpopular their socially conservative policies are and aim to hide their true goals from an American people with whom they are clearly out of step.

What Biden gets in Kamala Harris as a running mate

Just like Biden, who was ahead in the polls the entire primary but struggled to look like a winner, Kamala Harris was number one in the veepstakes practically since Biden’s nomination seemed clear, but she also struggled to look like the clear choice, until it turned out that the person everybody thought was gonna get picked all along ended up being chosen. Ever since 2016, it seems like a lot of people are hesitating to believe that what seems most likely to happen will actually happen.

What Biden gets in Harris is a strong debater who may be able to get under Trump’s skin. We saw that in the early primary debates. Her past as a prosecutor and California Attorney General will appeal to those of a more moderate inclination, and this is likely to have contributed to her selection as Biden probably feels he has shored up enough of the progressive wing through his work with Bernie Sanders.

And with as big a lead as he has, he probably didn’t want to take any chances that late in the race by announcing an unknown candidate. Rep. Karen Bass had a lot of the congressional Democratic Party behind her, but she’s unknown nationally.

With Kamala, Biden already knows what he’s getting after her run for President and after her time in the Senate. Some people close to Biden held grudges against Harris since her attacks on Biden last summer, but Biden himself was never one to hold a grudge. Time also solves a lot of problems of that kind.

Harris was lambasted for being “too ambitious” to be a part of a transitional Biden administration, but this has long been a sexist smear lobbed at women who dare to do anything at all. Some have said that Harris may turn off voters who are displeased with her prosecutorial record, but most voters are much more motivated by dislike of the opposition than anything else, especially now.

VP picks rarely have any larger electoral effects, LBJ won Texas and other southern states for Kennedy in 1960, but that is a pretty lonely example. It’s not like Biden wasn’t gonna win California had he not picked Harris. It’s worth remembering in this time of firsts, Harris is not only the first black woman but also the first person of South Asian descent, her mother having immigrated from India in 1960, to appear on a major party presidential ticket.

The choice McConnell made by deciding to push through Amy Coney Barrett

When Mitch McConnell was choosing whether or not to push through a Supreme Court nominee before the election, he was weighing his short-term and long-term priorities.

Short term: Hold on to the Senate in November.

Long term: Get another lifetime conservative appointment to the Supreme Court.

Polling says that most Americans think that the next President should nominate the next Supreme Court Justice. By going ahead with the nomination before the election, McConnell has decided that securing his judicial legacy is more important than remaining Majority Leader.

It’s probably the right choice. Regardless of his decision, Democrats look likely to retake the Senate and booting McConnell out of the Majority Leader’s office. The likelihood isn’t overwhelming, but the Senate usually goes the way of the presidency, and Biden has had a steady lead for months. No presidential candidate has been as steadily behind their opponent as Trump has been in 2020 since Bob Dole ran against Bill Clinton in 1996.

McConnell gets another Supreme Court Justice, but has to give up his job to Chuck Schumer. At 78, that may very well look like a good time to retire to Mitch.