Tag: 2020 Election
Stevenson’s army, November 6
The news media are waiting to “call” the election in any of several states that would give Biden enough electoral votes for the presidency.
The Biden-Harris campaign has a transition website ready to launch.
Politico has a daily “transition playbook” for news.
Control of the Senate won’t be settled until Georgia votes on Jan. 5.
WSJ says Democratic efforts failed to win control of more state legislatures in advance of redistricting.
And it looks like civil war in Ethiopia.
My SAIS colleague Charlie Stevenson distributes this almost daily news digest of foreign/defense/national security policy to “Stevenson’s army” via Googlegroups. I plan to republish here. To get Stevenson’s army by email, send a blank email (no subject or text in the body) to stevensons-army+subscribe@googlegroups.com. You’ll get an email confirming your join request. Click “Join This Group” and follow the instructions to join. Once you have joined, you can adjust your email delivery preferences (if you want every email or a digest of the emails).
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Trump is the fraud, Biden will win
President Trump last night spewed falsehoods by claiming that the election was being stolen from him:
There is little true in this statement. The fraud he is claiming is fraudulent. The press has responded with appropriate opprobrium.
In the meanwhile, counting of absentee ballots in Georgia and Pennsylvania has put Joe Biden in the lead. There is no reason to believe those margins won’t increase, as Democrats voted absentee more than Republicans. Biden will be sworn in January 20.
The road between now and then still has some curves in it. Trump is filing multiple lawsuits in several states and hopes to get one or more of them to the Supreme Court. He may also ask for recounts in some states, which take time. But when the Electoral College meets in state capitals on December 14, the outcome in each of the 50 states should be clear. In some states, there is still a possibility of a few “faithless” electors who vote for someone other than the person who won in the state, but Biden will reach a majority in the Electoral College and Congress will certify him the winner. That much is beyond a reasonable doubt.
Unfortunately, it looks as if the Republicans will retain their majority in the Senate by a vote or two. This is important, because both higher-level Administration appointments and Federal judges require the “advice and consent” of the Senate. The Republicans will do everything they can to block Biden nominees they don’t like. This could slow the new Administration to a crawl and prevent Biden from correcting the mass of right-wing judges, including some grossly unqualified, confirmed during the Trump Administration. Two Georgia Senate seats may need to go to a runoff in January, because Georgia requires it if no candidate gets more than 50% of the vote. But the odds of the Democrats winning both of those are slim.
So the United States will continue with “divided” government, but divided this time in favor of the Democrats. The fate of the Republican party is unclear, but Trump’s desultory remarks last night suggest that he intends to leave the White House claiming that he lost to fraud and that he will pursue that line after he leaves office. He and his sons may try to continue to control the party. That would spell the end of Republicanism as a center-right party and condemn it to a future of xenophobia, racism, mendacity, and increasing irrelevance as demographic changes move the American majority in the other direction.
The Democrats have problems too. Its left backed Biden but isn’t wedded to him. The Republican Senate majority will force him to try to reach across the aisle and adopt a more moderate stance than many on the left want. If he can get even a couple of Republican Senators to vote with him, Biden would be greatly empowered. But a move to the center could incite a rebellion on the left. He’ll need all his vaunted Congressional experience to keep the Democrats united.
Biden is currently winning the popular vote by 4 million. But there are more than 69 million Americans who voted for Trump despite his incompetence and failures. They are an enormous challenge. Politics doesn’t stop after an election.
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Stevenson’s army, November 5
The blue wave hit a red seawall.
Democratic efforts and hopes to win down ballot races and state legislatures fell far short.
President Trump has been defeated but not humiliated.
President-elect Biden will enter office crippled by a Republican Senate.
The pollsters have failed us all.
Military Times notes the military ballots still to be counted.
Start thinking about the 2022 Senate contests.
My SAIS colleague Charlie Stevenson distributes this almost daily news digest of foreign/defense/national security policy to “Stevenson’s army” via Googlegroups. I plan to republish here. To get Stevenson’s army by email, send a blank email (no subject or text in the body) to stevensons-army+subscribe@googlegroups.com. You’ll get an email confirming your join request. Click “Join This Group” and follow the instructions to join. Once you have joined, you can adjust your email delivery preferences (if you want every email or a digest of the emails).
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Kosovo indictments confirmed, dignity of the state maintained
The big presidential news this morning is not in the United States, where vote counting continues in several battleground states, but in Kosovo, where President Thaci and the current leader of the party he founded, Kadri Veseli, have been indicted by the Specialist Chambers in The Hague. That court, staffed by internationals, was
established pursuant to an international agreement ratified by the Kosovo Assembly, a Constitutional Amendment and the Law on Kosovo Specialist Chambers and Specialist Prosecutor’s Office. They are of temporary nature with a specific mandate and jurisdiction over crimes against humanity, war crimes and other crimes under Kosovo law, which were commenced or committed in Kosovo between 1 January 1998 and 31 December 2000 by or against citizens of Kosovo or the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.
I do not see the text of the indictment yet on the Specialist Chambers website, but it regards allegations of crimes committed while Thaci and Veseli were leaders of the Kosovo Liberation Army, possibly including murder and organ-trafficking described in the Council of Europe’s “Marty report.”
The indictees have done the right thing: resigned and pledged to confront the charges in The Hague, where they will join a number of their wartime colleagues. The political impact inside Kosovo is not yet clear: many supporters of the KLA will protest. I imagine the government will help their defense. But their absence will leave a big hold in Kosovo politics. It is unclear as yet who will fill it. I hope they will be figures of unimpeachable character.
The Specialist Chambers are a laudable effort to establish accountability after the war of the late 1990s in what was then a province of Serbia. The trouble is it is focused only on one side of that conflict. Serbia was of course subject to the jurisdiction of the now defunct International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), also in The Hague. But that Tribunal and the Serbian courts have failed to hold accountable many criminal perpetrators in Kosovo. Slobodan Milosevic died in prison before the end of his trial. Several well-known commanders of the then Yugoslav army and police were never indicted and continue to hold prominent positions.
This makes the Specialist Chambers a one-sided instrument. It should not be so. Either the Serbian courts should bring charges against those who committed crimes in Kosovo or Belgrade should adopt the necessary laws to allow the Specialist Chambers to do so. The United States lost three of its citizens to a post-war murder inside Serbia for which no one has been held accountable. America and the European Union should be insisting far more strongly than they have to date on accountability in Serbia.
As for Thaci and Veseli as well as other indictees, I expect them to mount a vigorous defense against charges that may be difficult to prove, given the amount of time elapsed and the difficulty of finding and protecting witnesses. They should and will be presumed innocent until proven guilty. And they should be credited with the dignity of resigning and facing the charges. In doing so, they make me long for the day when America will again have leaders prepared to be subject to the law.
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Stevenson’s army, November 4
For only the 4th time since the Civil War, we won’t know the winner of a presidential contest within a day or two. In 1876, a congressionally established commission decided between competing electoral slates from 3 states in February. In 1916, Charles Evans Hughes waited until November 22 to concede to Woodrow Wilson. In 2000, the Supreme Court stopped the vote count in Florida in mid- December.And now we await final returns and possible recounts — and maybe additional legal challenges — in five states. The Senate majority is also uncertain — and may not be resolved until Georgia runoff election[s] on January 5.
WaPo says Cybercom ran an operation against Iran before the election .
A US general says US troops might be sent to Senkaku Islands.
WOTR has a provocative piece saying US military is wrong to plan against a fait accompli in the Baltics or Taiwan.
My SAIS colleague Charlie Stevenson distributes this almost daily news digest of foreign/defense/national security policy to “Stevenson’s army” via Googlegroups. I plan to republish here. To get Stevenson’s army by email, send a blank email (no subject or text in the body) to stevensons-army+subscribe@googlegroups.com. You’ll get an email confirming your join request. Click “Join This Group” and follow the instructions to join. Once you have joined, you can adjust your email delivery preferences (if you want every email or a digest of the emails).
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The count counts, let it proceed
Last night’s strong showing by Donald Trump in a lot of states where he was thought to be vulnerable was surprising. It appears he may have won all the “new” battlegrounds: certainly Florida and Texas, likely Georgia and North Carolina. If you believed the polls and support Biden like me that is disappointing. So too is the apparent failure of the Democrats to gain control of the Senate.
What appears to have happened is that both Democrats and Republicans enjoyed enormous turn out , with many more people voting than in previous presidential elections. The result is a clash between red and blue waves whose outcome unpredictable, as the votes in key states like Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania are still being counted. But the still uncounted ballots were mostly mailed in, which implies an advantage for Biden. Democrats did much more absentee voting while Republicans turned out more on Election Day.
That is why President Trump tried to announce his victory early this morning and pledged to go to the Supreme Court to stop “the voting,” by which he meant the vote counting. He is unlikely to be able to do that, as the votes are counted in municipalities and states over which he has little control. The Republicans will however go into court challenging procedures and ballots wherever they can. One or more of those challenges could reach the Supreme Court, as happened in Florida in 2000.
What we can say about this election so far is that it has been peaceful and orderly. The President’s threat to send his people to swarm polling places did not materialize. Neither did major Election Day voter suppression activities. There are no credible major claims of fraud or malfeasance, despite the President’s attempt to label vote counting after Election Day as criminal. If Moscow, Beijing, or Tehran aimed to undermine confidence in America’s ability to administer a democratic election, they failed. My fellow Americans seem to have enjoyed registering their dramatically different views of Donald Trump at the ballot box.
It is unclear why the polling was so far off the mark. The cause seems to be Trump voters who are not responding truthfully to pollsters. This is strange, as there is little embarrassment in calling yourself a conservative or a Republican in the places where he gets most of his votes. My guess is that in “blue” cities and suburbs, many of his supporters know he is a racist and don’t want to be tagged with that label. Denying you are a racist is very much part of American racist identity, especially in communities where it might bring opprobrium.
The outcome is still uncertain, but the Democrats and Republicans I listen to this morning (mostly on National Public Radio) think you would much rather be Joe Biden in the current situation than Donald Trump. Biden has more different routes to 270 electoral votes. The outstanding ballots will be mainly in his favor. The big question is when we’ll get a definitive resolution. The longer it takes, the more opportunity there is for Trump to disrupt the count. But there is no decent alternative to letting it proceed.
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