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Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Biden’s win, House losses, and what’s next for the Left

The congresswoman said Joe Biden’s relationship with progressives would hinge on his actions. And she dismissed criticism from House moderates, calling some candidates who lost their races “sitting ducks.”

For months, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has been a good soldier for the Democratic Party and Joseph R. Biden Jr. as he sought to defeat President Trump.

But on Saturday, in a nearly hourlong interview shortly after President-elect Biden was declared the winner, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez made clear the divisions within the party that animated the primary still exist. And she dismissed recent criticisms from some Democratic House members who have blamed the party’s left for costing them important seats. Some of the members who lost, she said, had made themselves “sitting ducks.”

Well, I think the central one is that we aren’t in a free fall to hell anymore. But whether we’re going to pick ourselves up or not is the lingering question. We paused this precipitous descent. And the question is if and how we will build ourselves back up.

We know that race is a problem, and avoiding it is not going to solve any electoral issues. We have to actively disarm the potent influence of racism at the polls.

But we also learned that progressive policies do not hurt candidates. Every single candidate that co-sponsored Medicare for All in a swing district kept their seat. We also know that co-sponsoring the Green New Deal was not a sinker. Mike Levin was an original co-sponsor of the legislation, and he kept his seat.

I think it’s going to be really important how the party deals with this internally, and whether the party is going to be honest about doing a real post-mortem and actually digging into why they lost. Because before we even had any data yet in a lot of these races, there was already finger-pointing that this was progressives’ fault and that this was the fault of the Movement for Black Lives.

I’ve already started looking into the actual functioning of these campaigns. And the thing is, I’ve been unseating Democrats for two years. I have been defeating D.C.C.C.-run campaigns for two years. That’s how I got to Congress. That’s how we elected Ayanna Pressley. That’s how Jamaal Bowman won. That’s how Cori Bush won. And so we know about extreme vulnerabilities in how Democrats run campaigns.

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Biden could roll back Trump agenda with blitz of executive actions

For Joseph R. Biden Jr., who narrowly won the election in a deeply divided nation; the early signals he sends as the country’s new leader will be critical.

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‘It’s such a relief’: Biden voters rebuild a wall that Trump smashed

Joe Biden’s victory was particularly sweet for supporters in three states he had to win: Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan.

 Kristyn LaBarge was on a walk when she found out, not from a smartphone alert or a call from a friend but from the loud banging of pots that something significant had happened — that Joseph R. Biden Jr. had made Donald J. Trump a one-term president.

From San Francisco to New York to Washington, D.C., big Democratic cities were erupting with spontaneous street parties of singing, honking and dancing on Saturday. But in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, which catapulted Mr. Trump to the presidency in 2016 and which Mr. Biden had just reclaimed, the celebrations seemed particularly sweet and personal. That was especially true in the leafy suburbs of Philadelphia, where huge Democratic margins had tipped the state that tipped the election.

“It was one of the most phenomenal moments of our lives,” said Ms. LaBarge, a 48-year-old mother of two boys and two girls. She rushed home to find that her son was already blasting the national anthem. In this most bitter of election’s wake, hearing Mr. Biden’s calming tone this week, she said, “was like this sweet music washing over me.”

“It just feels like,” she said, pausing and redirecting. “It’s such a relief.”

 

— New York Times: Top Stories

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What happens to the border wall under a President Biden?

President Trump made building a wall on the southern border to stop the flow of illegal immigration one of the his top priorities of his term in office. Now, with a considerable stretch built, what happens to the wall when President-elect Joe Biden takes office?

 

— FOX News

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Biden, in victory tweet, promises to be ‘President for All Americans – whether you voted for me or not’

In a victory tweet after Joe Biden was projected to become the next president of the U.S., the former vice president promised to be “President for all Americans.”

 

— FOX News

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Kamala Harris makes history as first woman and woman of color as vice president

Ms. Harris, the daughter of an Indian mother and Jamaican father, has risen higher in the country’s leadership than any woman ever before her.

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Biden wins presidency

Joseph R. Biden Jr. achieved victory offering a message of healing and unity. He will return to Washington facing a daunting set of crises.

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Texas Longhorns band will not play ‘Eyes of Texas’ during football team’s’ final two home games

The Texas Longhorns band will not play the school’s spirit song during the football team’s final two home games of the season over the controversy surrounding the music.

The University of Texas’ Longhorn Band will not perform at either of the school’s remaining home football games, according to a report from the Austin American-Statesman’s Brian Davis.

Per the Statesman, Doug Dempster, dean of the College of Fine Arts, said the alma mater will continue to be played over loudspeakers at Darrell K Royal-Texas Memorial Stadium for the remainder of the season.

This decision comes after the Longhorn Band did not perform in Texas’ win over Baylor on Oct. 24, when around half of the band’s members said they would not be comfortable performing the alma mater because of its roots to racist minstrel shows.

The song’s controversy extended to the team during the first several weeks of the season, when most Texas football players left the field immediately after games and did not participate in the playing of “The Eyes.” After athletic director Chris Del Conte met with the team before Texas’ win over Baylor, all players have remained on the field for the song after each of the past two games.

The Longhorns take on West Virginia in their second-to-last home game Saturday.

 

— FOX News

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Biden also edges ahead in Georgia, gathering strength

Joe Biden is leading in Nevada and Arizona and threatening to erase President Trump’s advantage in Pennsylvania. The Trump team is pressing legal challenges in several states.

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What Trump’s speech last night made me realize

It’s not too late to end up on the right side of history.

Speaking from the White House briefing room on Thursday night, President Trump tried to delegitimize the 2020 election. This attempt may have been shuddersome, disgraceful and dangerous. But there’s one thing it was not: a surprise.

On the contrary. It was tediously predictable, exactly what you’d expect of a man who has spent four years lumbering through Washington, crushing custom after custom and norm after norm. As Trump faltered on the brink of losing a presidential election — the first incumbent to do so in 28 years — he declared, baselessly, that absentee votes legitimately cast were fraudulent; that the diligent workers paid to count those votes were doing something nefarious; and that the “election apparatus” in the still-unresolved states were controlled by Democrats. (They are not. Georgia’s secretary of state, for one, is a Republican.)

“They are trying to steal an election,” Trump said, speaking (I think) of ballot counters in Detroit and Philadelphia. “They are trying to rig an election. We can’t let that happen.”

But here’s my question for Republicans: Are they going to let this happen? Allow the head of their party to challenge the integrity of an election with record-breaking participation rates — in the midst of a pandemic, no less — just because he despises the result?

They’ve allowed just about everything else and given this demagogue a rather comfortable home; perhaps Trump’s words right now will hardly shock them. Faced with the prospect of losing an election, he’s now doing what demagogues do.

We just haven’t seen the likes of it in the United States.

What Trump said on Thursday night was historic, and not in a good way. These past four years, the president has done his best to weaken the foundations of democracy. But on the evening of Nov. 5, he seemed hellbent on breaking the 244-year-old thing itself. Telling your nation that the free election it just had is a sham — that’s taking aim at the head and heart.

  • The election. And its impact on you

Back in June, I wrote that you could see Trump trying, already, to make an autocratic lunge for power. He had replaced the last of his honorable civil servants and cabinet officials with a gallery of dupes, dopes and devotees. He had dispatched Attorney General William Barr to do his bidding at the Department of Justice. He had gotten rid of five inspectors general. He had used the military to clear a public square of protesters. He had found an ally to purge the heads of Radio Free Europe and its three cousins, in what seemed like a spooky bid to make his own version of state-run TV.

As the election approached, he and his allies did everything they could to disenfranchise Democratic voters. Their efforts do not appear to have been sufficient. As I write, Joe Biden is poised to win enough Electoral College votes to win the 2020 election.

And so Trump is now doing what any aspiring strongman would: making a mad grab for power, the people’s choices be damned. He’ll use his lawyers, certainly. But just as important, he’ll use disinformation. From his Twitter feed. From the podium in the White House briefing room. From his own children — essential accessories in any banana republic — who are currently throwing Molotov cocktails on Twitter.

The company had to remove a tweet by Don Jr. on Thursday, who called on his father to “go to total war over the election to expose all of the fraud, cheating, dead/no longer in state voters, that has been going on for far too long.” (And perhaps this goes without saying, but: Sic.)

More than ever, these falsehoods have consequences. Those who simply shrug them off don’t seem to care about their reach, their power, their ability to foment unrest. A Facebook group called “Stop the Steal” started on Wednesday and was shut down within the space of 22 hours, after the company learned that members were trying to incite violence. At that point, it had acquired over 320,000 followers, becoming one of the fastest-growing groups Facebook had ever seen.

Those who’ve supported Trump have one last chance to be on the right side of history.

A couple already have. And I’m betting more will join them, though it may be for the wrong reasons. On Thursday, after the president’s news conference, the New York Post ran a story about it under the headline “Downcast Trump makes baseless election fraud claims in White House address.” I do not think the paper’s owner, Rupert Murdoch, had a sudden flash of conscience. I suspect that he likes winners, and he suddenly senses that Trump isn’t one. If the president is a cult leader, now is the moment he’s demanding that his followers drink the Kool-Aid. Rupert decided he wasn’t all that thirsty.

Let’s see how many other Republicans decide they aren’t that thirsty either. Let’s see how many of them finally put country before party, deciding it’s more important — no, imperative — for American democracy to live.

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— Jennifer Senior has been an Op-Ed columnist since September 2018. She had been a daily book critic for The Times; before that, she spent many years as a staff writer for New York magazine. Her best-selling book, “All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood,” has been translated into 12 languages. @JenSeniorNY

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