2020 Election Results 5: The Nightmare Is Over (For now)

[SPHASH]

 

[onekidanddone]

This speech has been on my mind tonight 

 

[JordynDarby5]

My dad and I kept laughing at the Your Fired signs and the bunker one. It was so nice hearing a President speaking in complete sentences and not once sound insane. He said so much good stuff. Dealing with the virus, healing the country, listing the so many other things to be done. When he talked about his wife being a teacher and wondered if we'll actually get someone placed in charge of education who will actually do something. I liked everything he said. For the first time ever I'm interested in the Vice President. I can't wait to see what Kamala does. My cynical side keeps trying to remind me not to get too excited but I can't help it. 

[Audrey2]

2 minutes ago, GreyhoundFan said:

I enjoyed being able to listen to an entire speech without changing the channel. I've not been able to make it through a single Twitler speech in four years because the sound of his voice causes me to develop a major headache.

I enjoyed both speeches so much that I'm considering going back and listening to them again!

[Howl]

Twitter,  on Republicans, specifically Trump, being allowed more time to come to terms with his loss -- 

"There are no remedies in the Constitution for butthurt."

[GreyhoundFan]

My mom called me after the speeches tonight. She observed that the crowd, while very enthusiastic, was well-behaved and people were wearing masks. So nice to see instead of the klan rallies with frantic screaming and adulation of the mango moron.

[thoughtful]

7 minutes ago, GreyhoundFan said:

My mom called me after the speeches tonight. She observed that the crowd, while very enthusiastic, was well-behaved and people were wearing masks. So nice to see instead of the klan rallies with frantic screaming and adulation of the mango moron.

And they were yelling positive things for Biden, Harris and the US, not screaming nastiness about Trump and his cronies.

PBS panned over the crowd for a long time before the speeches, so I saw a lot. Very festive, very joyous, very diverse.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

A good piece from the WaPo: "Biden picked up the weight of the presidency and much of the nation set down its burdens"

Quote

The gravity of the office weighed on Joe Biden long before he became president-elect. Now that the title is his, the scale of the work before him is almost unimaginable. But the glory of this day, of this moment, is not so much what Biden has taken on, but what he has allowed so many in this country to set down.

As the country waited for ballots to be counted, it was Biden — not the occupant of the Oval Office — who was reassuring people that this democracy was intact, that the system was working and that the center would hold. He was the voice of calm optimism in the midst of tumultuous times.

When he became president-elect late Saturday morning, he did something far more herculean than accepting responsibility for a worsening pandemic and a struggling economy. He removed a terrible, suffocating weight from the back of this nation. For the more than 74 million Americans who voted for him — and surely even for some of those who did not — Biden’s election allowed this country to laugh, to dance and to breathe. He cracked open a space where the light could shine through. Indeed, his victory caused people to weep in joyful relief as they became aware of the heaviness that had afflicted their hearts, after they’d suddenly been relieved of it.

Biden lifted some — not all, but some — of the sadness and anger that hovered over the Black community, immigrants, Jews and others as they’d watched the current administration allow white supremacy to grow freely and thrive. Biden was willing to acknowledge the existence of systemic racism not in theory, but in reality. He knew what it meant for a Black parent to give their Black child “the talk” about how to move through life. He knew that it was not just about how to engage with police officers but also about how to avoid suspicion, how to always strive to be better than best, in order to just be seen as okay. Biden could see the world through other people’s eyes and that alone was worth cheering and banging on drums.

He amplified the voices of those who have been raising alarms about a planet increasingly in peril. He allowed science, fact and truth to once again rise to the surface.

His simple dignity and empathy are ballasts for a country that has been teetering between an openhearted, just future and a self-righteous, narrow-minded past. And when he addressed the nation Saturday night, he put his full heft as a statesman and a man of good will to that task.

“What is the will of the people? What is our mandate? I believe it’s this: America 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. The battle to control the virus. The battle to build prosperity. The battle to secure your family’s health care. The battle to achieve racial justice and root out systemic racism in this country. The battle to save our planet by getting climate under control. The battle to restore decency, defend democracy and give everybody in this country a fair shot,” Biden said. “That’s all they’re asking for. A fair shot.”

At 77, Biden knows what it means to be wounded by life. The stress tests he survived have built up his bones and strengthened his foundation. He has mourned his first wife, an infant daughter and an adult son who in his father’s eyes seemed on a trajectory to greatness. He’s felt the anguish of another son who struggles with addiction. Biden aspired to the presidency twice before. And this successful bid for the White House began with the gut punch of calamitous showings before the country’s earliest voters. But he bore up — bolstered by the notable support of Black voters. In South Carolina, they listened to the exhortations of House Minority Whip James E. Clyburn, and they laid hands on Biden’s campaign and brought it back to life.

Black voters raised up Biden because he was the tonic they believed a divided and exasperated nation could accept and he was the reliable partner they could trust. He was a pragmatic choice, but that doesn’t lesson his value. He was the loyal and supportive vice president to Barack Obama — willing to stand behind the country’s first Black president and to share both the beauty of that and the ugliness of it. The country was on the cusp of an era grappling with White grievance and White privilege and Biden, who had competed with Obama in the primaries, accepted his professional shortfall and joined his team. And that said something about Biden’s character, namely that it’s not a hostage to his personal success.

He turned around and helped a Black woman — an Asian American woman — take in the rarefied air of high power when he chose Sen. Kamala D. Harris (Calif.) as his running mate. She brought her own skills and constituency to the ticket. She benefited him in his ambitions, and if he has taught this country any single lesson from this choice and his victory, it’s that there’s wisdom in making space for the expertise and abilities of Black women.

Over the summer and fall, Biden tangled with President Trump in two debates and had his best moments when he ignored his competitor and spoke directly to the voters. He campaigned virtually and in socially distanced, drive-in rallies. Instead of those moments coming across as distant and aloof, they often felt more intimate without all of the usual political fanfare. And as he waited through the slow, tortuous counting of mail-in ballots — a slog that created a vacuum of uncertainty that could have easily been filled with chaos — Biden encouraged citizens to be patient and steadfast in the knowledge that their voice would be heard. Not his voice, their voice.

He sought to remind Americans that the count was not a matter of numbers and bureaucracy, it was about people. “Never forget the tallies are not just numbers,” Biden said Friday night as the country was still squirming with impatience. “They represent votes and voters — men and women who exercise their fundamental right to have their voice heard. And what’s becoming clear each hour is that a record number of Americans of all races, faiths, religions, chose change over more of the same.”

Like every politician, Biden is a man with an ego large enough to believe that he can fulfill the duties of the presidency. But for his part, there’s also a recognition that sometimes one’s place in history is most vividly defined not by the number of jobs created — although that is important — but by how lives can be changed for the ages in ways more profound than monetarily.

At a moment when this country’s wounds are deeper and more dire than financial, Biden — the man who has grieved under the public’s gaze, been professionally humbled in the harsh spotlight, spoken earnestly and impolitically of his support for same-sex marriage, and admitted mistakes in his earlier stances on criminal justice — seemed uniquely suited to this moment that was deeply in need of compassion. He is a man who understands that leadership sometimes means simply being human and being able to see the humanity in others. Leadership means carrying the burden so that others might breathe easier or can shine brighter.

Throughout the campaign, Biden liked to underscore his fitness and energy in order to silence the concern that he was too old for the office to which he aspired. He liked to dash up steps and jog along in a parade. He would appear in his official uniform: his navy suit and crisp shirt, his white pocket square folded just so with its perfectly even peaks and his Ray-Ban aviator sunglasses. And his face mask. It was an image composed of dignified old Washington, a bit of regular-guy panache and example-setting deference to science and the problems at hand.

As Biden inched his way to the presidency, his footsteps seemed heavier. It’s hard to bounce on one’s heels as the leader of the free world. But in that steadiness, there’s reassurance. He didn’t come to this race with revolutionary goals that would fundamentally remodel this country. Perhaps there will be time for that. Biden promised to focus on the urgent need to right this country’s course. And in doing so, to give everyone the space not just to breathe — but to safely, thankfully and blessedly exhale.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"Biden’s victory seemed clear for more than a day. So why did the media hold off on calling it?"

Quote

Day after day, hour after hour, as Joe Biden’s vote tally crept closer to definitive wins in several key states, top news organizations declined to declare what was becoming obvious to many observers — that Biden had won the presidency.

The delay inspired second-guessing from statistical and voting experts, as well as suspicions that the networks were being cowed into excess caution by Biden’s increasingly truculent opponent, President Trump.

“Biden is winning Nevada by TWO POINTS with mostly Dem ballots in Clark remaining and they haven’t called it?” marveled journalist Peter Hamby early Saturday on Twitter. “That’s just bananas. Any other cycle they would have called it.”

“It sure seems to me like not calling the race when the outcome is obvious . . . gives the president more time to spout misinformation,” fretted polling guru Nate Silver on Friday afternoon.

And then, finally, the dam seemed to break all at once. At 11:24 a.m. on Saturday, CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer declared Biden the winner, based on projections that winning Pennsylvania, with its 20 electoral votes, would push him past the required 270. NBC News followed on-air seconds later, followed quickly by CBS, MSNBC, ABC and the Associated Press. The Washington Post reported the projection at 11:34 a.m.

The media calls play no official role in the nation’s transfer of power — it is ultimately up to the states to certify their voting results before the electoral college meets in December. But they have taken on an outsized importance in the process, a fact underscored by the spontaneous celebrations that broke out within minutes of the news alerts, as thousands of people gathered outside the White House, in New York’s Times Square, in downtown Chicago and in other Democratic strongholds across the country. While the outcome had already become increasingly clear, the media’s call for Biden seemed to be the unofficial stamp of approval.

And it was the media’s role in providing unofficial closure to the race that especially rankled Trump’s backers, who have been claiming, without evidence, that widespread fraud took place. “The media do not get to determine who the president is,” tweeted Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) on Saturday. “The people do. When all lawful votes have been counted, recounts finished, and allegations of fraud addressed, we will know who the winner is.”

TV networks and other major news outlets project election winners by relying on piecemeal vote returns from state officials and statistical analysis of regional and local voting patterns. Each described their reluctance to declare Biden the winner earlier — even as they said it grew likelier by the day — because of insufficient data and the uncertainty caused by the coronavirus pandemic in states that were still counting the last few thousand ballots.

Public curiosity and confusion about this process ran especially high because two news organizations — Fox News and the Associated Press — separately called Arizona for Biden just several hours after the polls closed, while most other news organizations have still deemed the state too close to call. Fox in particular has loudly stood by its call, even while mail-in ballots have narrowed the gap for Trump — a projection that drew the Trump campaign’s wrath and led his supporters to chant “Fox News sucks” as votes were being tabulated in Phoenix on Thursday and Friday.

But the variation in timing and calls among news outlets doesn’t appear to have been political. Fox and AP drew their voting data from a nonprofit research firm affiliated with the University of Chicago that it hired after the 2016 election, after it broke away from a larger consortium of the other major news organizations, which collectively relied on data from a company called Edison Research. While similar, the two data sets appear to have led to different calls on Arizona.

The decision meant that both Fox and AP essentially moved 11 more electoral votes into Biden’s column than other news organizations — a projection that put him that much closer to victory. It led to speculation that Fox — a conservative-leaning network with close ties to the Trump White House and watched closely by the president — would be the first network to call the election for Biden, especially if the network made an early call for Nevada, where Biden also led from early on.

Ultimately, Fox was among the last major outlets to weigh in Saturday, with anchor Bret Baier delivering the news to viewers at 11:40 a.m.

ABC News political director Rick Klein said media organizations had to grapple with new variables in making calls this year, particularly the huge surge in mail-in balloting and varying state rules about when those ballots could be counted. “We tried to be as transparent as we could throughout this process,” he said in an interview.

The tipping point in projecting Biden’s victory on Saturday was the release of a new batch of ballot counts from Allegheny and Philadelphia counties in Pennsylvania, both heavily Democratic areas. Given Biden’s slender but gradually growing lead in Pennsylvania, the batch that came in Saturday morning gave network “decision desk” staffers confidence to predict that Biden’s advantage was insurmountable.

The desks, composed of data specialists and political scientists and all officially separate from the news organization’s reporting staffs, also had another key piece of data: a rough estimate of the number of uncounted mail and “provisional” ballots — a wild card. New returns suggested those ballots would be unlikely to give Trump enough opportunity to potentially overtake Biden.

“Look, we got just enough vote in, in order to call Pennsylvania, even if it may slip into a recount,” NBC’s Chuck Todd told viewers. “We think it’s just mathematically nearly impossible for the order of finish to change in Pennsylvania.”

Most networks spent Wednesday, Thursday and Friday in a kind of suspended animation as the outcome remained unclear in Pennsylvania, Arizona, Georgia and Nevada, the last four states where the winner wasn’t clear and whose electoral votes could sway the election. There were multiple field reports from big urban areas, such as Phoenix’s Maricopa County and Pittsburgh’s Allegheny County, where workers were gradually churning through the final ballots, followed by network analysts updating the totals on oversized display screens.

The early returns — based on in-person votes — tended to place Trump in the lead. But Biden gradually pulled ahead as more votes came in, especially from mail-in ballots that were disproportionately utilized by Democrats. Mail-in votes generally take longer for county officials to open and process, especially in Pennsylvania, where election workers were not allowed to begin processing them until Election Day.

The shifting leads, and slow-arriving ballots, created a torturous wait. It also gave Trump an opening to launch baseless allegations that the election was being stolen. “I had such a big lead in all of these states late into election night, only to see the leads miraculously disappear as the days went by,” he complained on Twitter on Friday evening. “Perhaps these leads will return as our legal proceedings move forward!”

But others thought news organizations were being far too cautious in not declaring Biden the winner. Some smaller news outlets powered by research company Decision Desk HQ made the call Friday morning that Biden won.

“Does anyone think this wouldn’t have been called hours ago if roles were reversed and there was no fear that the loser would demagogue and incite crazies against the news outlet?” Tim Miller, who is part of a group called Republican Voters Against Trump, asked on Friday afternoon.

Fox declined to make an official comment on its late call. But a network spokesperson pointed to its early call on Arizona and Nevada as evidence of its independence. The network also noted a comment by its political director, Chris Stirewalt, who amid attacks on Fox by Trump’s campaign said the network was “serene and pristine” in declaring Arizona for Biden.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

[GreyhoundFan]

So it appears Treason Ken is the sacrificial lamb.

[HerNameIsBuffy]

42 minutes ago, GreyhoundFan said:

A good piece from the WaPo: "Biden picked up the weight of the presidency and much of the nation set down its burdens"

 

This made me cry and it's so beautiful I'm going to read it again and savor every sentence.  What a wordsmith.

[GreyhoundFan]

 

[EmmieJ]

7 hours ago, Ozlsn said:

West Clare hotelier loses US election.

Irish newspaper headline.

Damn, that's savage!  LOL

[GreyhoundFan]

Hmm, so Faux pre-empted Judge Box-o-Wine because she was leghumping. Interesting.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

For four years, the MAGAts have been calling Dems snowflakes and telling us to get over it. Yeah, I give exactly zero fucks about how they are feeling right now.

 

[AmazonGrace]

2 hours ago, thoughtful said:

Now I want to know what Jill Biden's shirt says in that picture. All I can see is "Be Bro"

I was assuming it says Be Brave.

[GreyhoundFan]

Newsmax, owned by Twitler's buddy Chris Ruddy, is competing with OANN to be the most idiotic outlet.

 

[HerNameIsBuffy]

35 minutes ago, GreyhoundFan said:

Hmm, so Faux pre-empted Judge Box-o-Wine because she was leghumping. Interesting.

 

I now have no doubt, they are definitely sending a message to Trump that his cush treatment from Fox is over.

[Smee]

11 minutes ago, GreyhoundFan said:

Newsmax, owned by Twitler's buddy Chris Ruddy, is competing with OANN to be the most idiotic outlet.

 

My husband lurks on far right parts of reddit to see what Trumpers say and apparently Fox News has “gone to the libs” and “can’t be trusted” so Newsmax is their preferred source. I watched about 5min of it after Trump had his dummy spit from the White House briefing room and they were calling Republicans like Frothy “traitors” for daring to acknowledge that it was inappropriate.

[Destiny]

6 minutes ago, HerNameIsBuffy said:

I now have no doubt, they are definitely sending a message to Trump that his cush treatment from Fox is over.

Honestly, I think Faux News is salivating at this turn of events. The leghumpers will be flocking to hannity et al for their nightly what did the president fuck up today briefings. It will be great for ratings. 

[GreyhoundFan]

I promise that I was nowhere near NYC today!

 

[HerNameIsBuffy]

This is a real tweet... nice to know I still have the ability to be shocked.

This is the landscaping shop where Rudy had his press conference today.  Next to the sex shop and across from a crematorium.  Because of course he did.

6 minutes ago, Smee said:

My husband lurks on far right parts of reddit to see what Trumpers say and apparently Fox News has “gone to the libs” and “can’t be trusted” so Newsmax is their preferred source. I watched about 5min of it after Trump had his dummy spit from the White House briefing room and they were calling Republicans like Frothy “traitors” for daring to acknowledge that it was inappropriate.

I never troll (because it's boring) but I lurked on r/ conservative today to see their reaction and some of the posts about Kamala are disgusting.  About her race, sex life, etc.

As happy as I am about this election, I've posted in the past issues I have with her record.  Her record.  Not her skin color, sexual past, or gender.  There is nothing resembling reasoned dialogue about the issues there.

[GreyhoundFan]

Of course they want to have support rallies for the toddler's bruised ego:

[Lillymuffin]

2 hours ago, onekidanddone said:

This speech has been on my mind tonight 

 

Is that where that quote comes from? It’s been going through my head all day, but I didn’t know who said it.