2020 Election Live News: Biden and Harris Look Toward Transition - The New York Times
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Matt Flegenheimer in New York
People have not historically hustled to spontaneous outdoor dance parties for Joe Biden. But beating President Trump can do strange things for a man’s reputation.
Mayor Ted Wheeler of Portland called for an end to violence in the city during a news conference on Aug. 30, a day after a right-wing demonstrator was shot and killed in downtown Portland.Credit...Sean Meagher/The Oregonian, via Associated Press
Mayor Ted Wheeler of Portland, who became a target of fury this year from both left-wing protesters and President Trump, won re-election this week after overcoming a challenger who had aligned herself with the city’s protests.
Mr. Wheeler’s rival, Sarah Iannarone, had declared herself an “everyday antifascist” in reference to the crowds that have continued to gather in the city since May to support racial justice and oppose police brutality.
Those activists have often chanted anti-Wheeler slogans, reviling him for overseeing a police department that repeatedly turned to aggressive tactics — including punches and thick clouds of tear gas — when targeting people for arrest. Mr. Wheeler has said he is moving out of his condo building after protesters targeted it during demonstrations.
Mr. Trump, for his part, had called Mr. Wheeler “wacky” and a “fool” for not bringing an end to protests that began after the killing of George Floyd by the Minneapolis police in May. Mr. Wheeler was angry with the Trump administration for a militarized crackdown that federal agents brought to the city in July, including a night when Mr. Wheeler himself was left coughing and wincing from federal tear gas even as protesters mocked him.
Mr. Wheeler captured 46 percent of the vote to Ms. Iannarone’s 41 percent. Write-in candidates, most notably the Black Lives Matter activist Teressa Raiford, accounted for 13 percent of the vote. (Party affiliations for mayoral candidates in Portland are not listed on the ballot.)
The protests in the city have raged on since the election and show no sign of abating.
Eric Schmitt in Washington
Former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, in a telephone interview: “Joe Biden brings back the American way of doing things. He’ll return us to who we are.”
Nov. 8, 2020, 1:14 p.m. ET
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President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. on Sunday attended Mass and visited the cemetery where his son Beau Biden and other family members are buried at St. Joseph on the Brandywine Church in Wilmington, Del.CreditCredit...Amr Alfiky/The New York Times
On the morning of his first full day as president-elect, Joseph R. Biden Jr. attended Mass at St. Joseph on the Brandywine Catholic Church near his house in Wilmington, Del. After the service, Biden visited the cemetery where his son Beau, who died in 2015, is buried. He was not expected to make another public appearance on Sunday.
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez criticized more centrist Democrats for arguing that progressive policies would drive away voters in swing districts.Credit...Desiree Rios for The New York Times
Democrats were largely united during the general election, with progressives tamping down their disagreements with Joseph R. Biden Jr. and pursuing a shared goal of ousting President Trump.
But now that Mr. Biden has won, divisions in the party are out in the open again.
On Sunday, Senator Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota, a centrist Democrat, said on ABC’s “This Week” that conservative-leaning voters in the party “get concerned when they see radical ideas being introduced to completely upend the energy system.”
And on CNN’s “State of the Union” Sunday, Representative James E. Clyburn of South Carolina, the highest-ranking Black Democrat in Congress, said slogans like “defund the police” provided fodder to opponents. He pointed to his work in the civil rights movement as proof, saying that he and the late Representative John Lewis had “concluded that it had the possibility to do to the Black Lives Matter movement and current movements across the country what ‘burn baby, burn’ did to us back in 1960.”
Perhaps the highest-profile young progressive in Congress, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, criticized these sorts of arguments on CNN after doing the same in an in-depth interview with The New York Times.
“It is not to deny that Republicans led very effective rhetorical attacks against our party — that I believe is absolutely true — but I think one of the things that’s very important is to realize that very effective Republican attacks are going to happen every cycle,” Ms. Ocasio-Cortez said. “And so the question is, how do we defend ourselves against that?”
Progressives “have assets to offer the party that the party has not yet fully leaned into or exploited,” she added. “When we come out swinging not 48 hours after Tuesday, and we don’t even have solid data yet, pointing fingers and telling each other what to do, it deepens the division in the party. And it’s irresponsible.”
Nov. 8, 2020, 12:48 p.m. ET
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Vice President-elect Kamala Harris wore a white pantsuit with a white pussy-bow blouse at the victory speeches by the Democratic candidates on Saturday night.Credit...Erin Schaff/The New York Times
When Vice President-elect Kamala Harris stepped onto the stage and into history in Wilmington, Del., on Saturday, she did so in full recognition of the weight of the moment, and in full acknowledgment of all who came before. She is so many firsts: the first woman, the first woman of color, the first woman of Southeast Asian descent and the first daughter of immigrants to be vice president. How do you begin to express that understanding?
She said it — “while I may be the first woman in this office, I will not be the last” — and she signaled it by wearing something she had not worn in any of her moments of firsts since she became President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s running mate: a white pantsuit with a white silk pussy-bow blouse. The two garments have been fraught symbols of women’s rights for decades, but over the past four years they have taken on even more potency and power.
The white pantsuit: a nod to the struggle to break the final glass ceiling, stretching from the suffragists through Geraldine Ferraro, Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi and the women of Congress. A garment meant to symbolize “the quality of our purpose,” according to an early mission statement for the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage, published in 1913. Then redolent with frustration, now, finally, transformed into a beacon of achievement.
The pussy-bow blouse: the quintessential working woman’s uniform in the years when they began to flood into the professional sphere; the female version of the tie; the power accessory of Margaret Thatcher, the first female British prime minister. And then, suddenly, a potentially subversive double entendre in the hands of Melania Trump, who wore a pussy-bow blouse after her husband’s first “grab ’em by the pussy” scandal.
Now, again, reclaimed.
The point was not who made them (though, while we’re on the subject of building back better, the suit was by Carolina Herrera, an American business). The point was that to wear those clothes — to make those choices — on a night when the world was watching, in a moment that would be frozen for all time, was not fashion. It was politics. It was for posterity.
And it was the beginning of what will be four years in which everything Ms. Harris does matters. In her first-ness, in her ascent to the highest realms of power, she will become a model for what that means: how, as a Black woman, you claim your seat at the highest table. Clothes are a part of that; in some ways, they are how those at faraway tables connect to it.
Nov. 8, 2020, 12:34 p.m. ET
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Former President George W. Bush became the highest-profile Republican to publicly declare the election over in defiance of President Trump’s refusal to accept the results.Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times
Former President George W. Bush congratulated President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. on Sunday, becoming the highest-profile Republican to publicly declare the election over in defiance of President Trump’s refusal to accept the results.
“I extended my warm congratulations and thanked him for the patriotic message he delivered last night,” Mr. Bush said in a statement released after he spoke with Mr. Biden by telephone. “I also called Kamala Harris to congratulate her on her historic election to the vice presidency. 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.”
He added: “I want to congratulate President Trump and his supporters on a hard-fought campaign. He earned the votes of more than 70 million Americans — an extraordinary political achievement. They have spoken, and their voices will continue to be heard through elected Republicans at every level of government.”
Mr. Bush, the only living former Republican president, put his stamp on the outcome even as many of his party’s elected leaders held back either out of loyalty to Mr. Trump or out of fear of crossing the outgoing president. Mr. Trump has falsely asserted that the election was stolen without any evidence, leaving his party in the awkward position of following a president refusing to accept the reality that other Republicans have, even if they do not say so out loud.
Republican leaders like Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky have refused to publicly acknowledge Mr. Biden’s victory without necessarily embracing Mr. Trump’s wild claims. Many of them have either remained silent or straddled the line with statements calling for all legal votes to be counted and suggesting that the president should be permitted to file any lawsuits or call for any recounts allowed under the law. Only a few well-known Republicans, like Senators Mitt Romney of Utah and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, have congratulated Mr. Biden.
While Mr. Bush said Mr. Trump had “the right to request recounts and pursue legal challenges,” his statement made clear he did not think they would succeed and could encourage other Republicans to speak out and increase pressure on Mr. Trump to stop fighting the results with unsubstantiated claims.
“The American people can have confidence that this election was fundamentally fair, its integrity will be upheld, and its outcome is clear,” he said.
Mr. Bush spoke out a day after his brother, former Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida, who lost the Republican nomination to Mr. Trump in 2016, addressed his own congratulatory statement to Mr. Biden, writing on Twitter that he “will be praying for you and your success.”
The Bush family has been at odds with Mr. Trump since that primary contest. Mr. Trump excoriated Jeb Bush and attacked his brother repeatedly as he sought the Republican nomination that year. The former president has said he voted for “none of the above” in 2016. His father, former President George H.W. Bush, said he voted for Hillary Clinton that year, and his wife, Barbara Bush, wrote in Jeb’s name on her ballot.
The younger Mr. Bush has had a friendly working relationship with Mr. Biden going back years, although the two were often at odds over policy and politics. Mr. Biden voted to authorize Mr. Bush to use force against Iraq, leading to the 2003 invasion, but later became a sharp critic of the war.
Nov. 8, 2020, 12:24 p.m. ET
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Jared Kushner during a morning interview outside the White House last month.Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times
A White House official disputed reports that Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law, had advised the president to concede the election, saying Mr. Kushner was telling him to pursue “legal remedies” instead.
The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said that Mr. Kushner had abided by Mr. Trump’s desire to continue trying to fight the results of various contests through court challenges. Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer, has strongly encouraged this path, while most other advisers have said privately that the chances of the results changing are exceedingly slim.
White House aides and political advisers met at the Trump campaign headquarters on Saturday. When campaign officials laid out the small chances of changing the outcome of the election, Mr. Kushner asked a group of the political advisers to go to the White House to lay it out for Mr. Trump, according to people briefed on the meeting.
When people asked Mr. Kushner whether he should be there as well, he said that he would be part of the next level of discussions, the people briefed on the meeting said.
Congress’s inauguration committee is planning for an “outside, full-scale” event despite the pandemic, though it could be scaled back, the senator who chairs it said.
Nov. 8, 2020, 12:09 p.m. ET
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Senator Roy Blunt on Capitol Hill in September. He said Sunday that he did not expect the outcome of the election to change.Credit...Anna Moneymaker for The New York Times
Senator Roy Blunt of Missouri, a member of the Senate Republican leadership team, said on Sunday that while he thought it was too early to declare Joseph R. Biden Jr. the president-elect, he did not expect the outcome would change as more voters were counted and verified.
Mr. Biden passed the 270 electoral vote threshold needed to win the presidency on Saturday morning, after Pennsylvania was called in his favor. Mr. Blunt, who once served as Missouri’s top elections official, said in an interview on ABC’s “This Week” that it “seems unlikely that any changes could be big enough to make a difference” in the final result.
The senator’s comments came as President Trump’s campaign has vowed to bring legal challenges to state election results and as some Republican lawmakers have made baseless claims of widespread voter fraud and irregularities.
Gov. Kristi Noem of South Dakota, a close Trump ally, insisted on ABC that evidence would eventually emerge to support those allegations, though none has yet. In one case, she cited “dead people voting in Pennsylvania” — a viral claim that has been debunked.
Mr. Blunt also said that any legal challenges to election results needed to be heard in court, though he did not discuss particular claims.
“It’s time for the president’s lawyers to present the facts and then it’s time for those facts to speak for themselves,” he said.
Chris Christie, another longtime ally of Mr. Trump, also said that the president’s team needed to offer proof of claims of voter fraud. Without doing so, he said, Republicans would have a hard time backing the president’s position on the election.
“Show us,” Mr. Christie said on ABC. “Because if you can’t show us, we can’t do this. We can’t back you blindly without evidence.”
Nov. 8, 2020, 11:33 a.m. ET
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AtlantaMeridith Kohut for The New York Times
Lawrenceville, Ga.Elijah Nouvelage/Getty Images
PhoenixAdriana Zehbrauskas for The New York Times
AtlantaMeridith Kohut for The New York Times
PhoenixMario Tama/Getty Images
Charlotte, N.C.Travis Dove for The New York Times
As Joseph R. Biden Jr. took on the mantle of president-elect on Saturday, election workers continued to count votes in Georgia, Arizona and North Carolina — all states that have yet to declare a winner.
Stephanie Saul in New York
As Biden’s lead increases in Georgia, the remaining votes are coming from about 22,000 military and overseas voters, as well as provisional ballots that required additional information, such as missing IDs.
Nov. 8, 2020, 11:28 a.m. ET
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Representative James E. Clyburn of South Carolina on Capitol Hill in May. He appealed to Republican lawmakers on Sunday to reject President Trump’s refusal to concede the race.Credit...Erin Schaff/The New York Times
The morning after President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory speech, Democrats urged Republican lawmakers to reject President Trump’s refusal to concede the race and accept the election results.
“What matters to me is whether or not the Republican Party will step up and help us preserve the integrity of this democracy,” Representative James E. Clyburn, Democrat of South Carolina, said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
Mr. Clyburn, whose support of Mr. Biden was crucial to his primary win, said that he did not think Mr. Trump’s concession was as important as the actions of Republican lawmakers as a group.
“We had better get a hold of ourselves and this country and stop catering to the whims of one person,” he said. “So it doesn’t matter to me whether or not he concedes.”
Several congressional Republicans have publicly offered their congratulations to Mr. Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris, including Senators Mitt Romney of Utah and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska.
Symone Sanders, a senior adviser to Mr. Biden, said on CNN that no one from the White House had reached out to the campaign since the election was called on Saturday morning, though some congressional Republicans had.
Katie Glueck in Wilmington, Del.
Biden is spending this Sunday morning, like most Sunday mornings, in church. He is set to be the nation’s second Catholic president.
Stephanie Saul in New York
Even though President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. now leads by more than 10,000 votes in Georgia, a recount is still expected there.
With the votes still being tallied in Georgia, a once-red state that proved surprisingly difficult for Trump, Biden now leads by more than 10,000 votes.
The race may be called, but Philadelphia votes are continuing to build on Biden’s margin. Nearly 90 percent of a recent batch of votes went to Biden, adding 3,868 to his margin.
Trump was greeted at his golf course by a small handful of people, including two holding Trump 2020 signs. But another sign said, “Orange Crushed.”
Michael D. Shear in Washington
Trump has arrived again at Trump National Golf Club in Virginia, even as he and his allies refuse to concede his loss and as Biden moves ahead with building his new administration.
Nov. 8, 2020, 10:00 a.m. ET
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President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris took a public-facing step toward building their administration on Sunday, launching a website for their transition team.
The website, BuildBackBetter.com, outlines four immediate priorities for the Biden-Harris administration: the coronavirus pandemic, the recession, climate change and systemic racism.
Mr. Biden will announce his Covid-19 task force on Monday. As a candidate, he repeatedly criticized President Trump for mishandling the pandemic, making the issue a focal point of his campaign. On Saturday, the United States recorded more than 100,000 new coronavirus cases for the fourth consecutive day.
As part of its effort to present transition plans to the public, Mr. Biden’s team also launched Facebook, Twitter and Instagram accounts using the handle @Transition46.
Nov. 8, 2020, 9:52 a.m. ET
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Libby March for The New York Times
Libby March for The New York Times
Libby March for The New York Times
Libby March for The New York Times
Libby March for The New York Times
On the day that the United States elected its first female vice president, many visitors marked the occasion by visiting the grave of Susan B. Anthony, a leader of the 19th-century women’s suffrage movement, at Mount Hope Cemetery in Rochester, N.Y.
President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. has said the United States will rejoin the Paris climate accord.Credit...Amr Alfiky/The New York Times
WASHINGTON — President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. is poised to unleash a series of executive actions on his first day in the Oval Office, prompting what is likely to be a yearslong effort to unwind President Trump’s domestic agenda and immediately signal a wholesale shift in the United States’ place in the world.
He has vowed that on Day 1 he will move rapidly to confront the coronavirus pandemic by appointing a “national supply chain commander” and establishing a “pandemic testing board,” similar to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s wartime production panel. He has said he will restore the rights of government workers to unionize. He has promised to order a new fight against homelessness and resettle more refugees fleeing war. He has pledged to abandon Mr. Trump’s travel ban on mostly Muslim countries and to begin calling foreign leaders in an attempt to restore trust among the United States’ closest allies.
Women celebrating the victory of Vice President-elect Kamala Harris on Sunday near the Indian village of Thulasendrapuram, where her maternal grandfather was born.Credit...Reuters
NEW DELHI — From the moment the sun came up in Thulasendrapuram, a little village in southern India, people started stringing firecrackers across the road. They poured into the temple. They took colored powder and wrote exuberant messages in big, happy letters in front of their homes, like this one:
“Congratulations Kamala Harris, pride of our village.”
If there was one place in India that relished the triumph of Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Ms. Harris, his running mate, in America’s presidential election, it was Thulasendrapuram, the hamlet where Ms. Harris’s Indian grandfather was born more than 100 years ago.
“Kamala has made this village very proud,” said Renganathan, a farmer, who rushed to the village’s main temple. “She’s a great lady and an inspiration. She belongs to this soil.”
Although Ms. Harris has been more understated about her Indian heritage than about her experience as a Black woman, her path to the vice presidency has also been guided by the values of her Indian-born mother and her wider Indian family.
Her mother, Shyamala Gopalan, who came to America young and alone in the late 1950s and made a career as a breast cancer researcher before dying of cancer in 2009, remains one of the people Ms. Harris talks about most.
“When she came here from India at the age of 19, she maybe didn’t quite imagine this moment,” Ms. Harris said in her victory speech on Saturday. “But she believed so deeply in an America where a moment like this is possible.”
Nov. 8, 2020, 9:49 a.m. ET
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President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. addressed the nation on Saturday night, as seen in Times Square in New York.Credit...Desiree Rios for The New York Times
Joseph R. Biden Jr. emerged as the president-elect on Saturday, after nearly four days of tallying and tabulating votes and national anticipation of the election outcome.
But it’s not over yet: In the weeks between Election Day and Inauguration Day on Jan. 20, several key mechanisms take place, most related to the Electoral College, that eventually lead to a president in the White House.
So with the vote count nearly completed, and the next president made clear, what happens next? Beginning on Nov. 10 and lasting through Dec. 11, states will begin to certify their election results, a process carried out over slightly different time frames in each state. This could all be made even more complicated by the Trump campaign pursuing lawsuits in key states that could delay the formal certification of the vote.
Then the Electoral College comes in. When Americans cast their ballots on Tuesday, they were actually voting for this slate of electors, appointed by their state’s political parties, who are pledged to support that party’s candidate. The electors don’t always do that, as seen in 2016, and whether they should be allowed to change their positions has been widely debated. The Supreme Court unanimously ruled in July that states may require electors to abide by their promise to support a specific candidate.
On Dec. 14 — the Monday after the second Wednesday in December — the electoral votes will be cast. Each state convenes its electors on the same day, and they cast their votes for the presidency before sending those votes to Congress. Those votes must arrive in Washington by Dec. 23. After the new Congress is sworn in on Jan. 3, the members of the House and Senate meet in the House chamber on Jan. 6 to hear the electoral votes counted.
Its important to note that members of Congress can challenge or reject the electoral votes, though that process is complicated and rarely occurs. You can read more about it here.
Nov. 8, 2020, 9:48 a.m. ET
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Biden supporters in Phoenix on Saturday.Credit...Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York Times
While Joseph R. Biden Jr. secured Pennsylvania and the presidency on Saturday, votes were still being counted in a handful of states that have not yet been called.
Here is a look at key states where more results are expected:
Arizona: Officials in Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix, said a small number of provisional and other ballots remain. They plan to announce the next results update for the county at 6 p.m. Eastern on Sunday. As of early Sunday, Mr. Biden leads in Arizona by fewer than 19,000 votes.
Georgia: Because of the small margin between Mr. Biden and President Trump, the state will conduct a recount, the secretary of state said on Friday. Mr. Biden leads by about 10,000 votes, with a small number of absentee, overseas, military and provisional ballots yet uncounted in some counties.
Two other states, where the outcome seems more clear, are also yet to report their votes.
In Alaska, only 56 percent of the state’s ballots had been counted, less than in any other state, by Sunday morning. There is little question that Mr. Trump will take the state’s three electoral votes.
In North Carolina, 98 percent of the estimated vote total has been reported, and Mr. Trump is leading.
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