“After four long, tense days,
we’ve reached a historic moment in this election.”
“Joe Biden is president-elect.”
“America's democracy is not guaranteed.
It is only as strong as our willingness to fight for it.”
When I look back on Biden's campaign,
I think the single most impressive thing he did,
were the Biden-Sanders task forces that followed the primary.
“CBS News projects the former vice president
beat Senator Bernie Sanders in Florida, Illinois, and Arizona.”
“Biden now has more than half of the 1,991 delegates
needed to clinch the Democratic nomination.”
“My goal as a candidate for president is to unify this party,
and then to unify the nation.”
He invited all of these different players
who had been harsh critics of the Biden campaign.
The Sunrise Movement, which is the youth-led climate movement,
he invited the Sunrise Movement into the task force.
They'd been incredibly critical of Biden.
They’d given his climate plan an F.
“You have had at least some hand in shaping Joe Biden’s climate plan.”
“Joe Biden’s plan will represent
a seismic shift in climate policy at the federal level,
[more] than anything we’ve seen in the last 40 years.”
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who had said that in another country,
her and Biden wouldn't even be in the same political party.
Into the task force -- and it worked.
“Voting for Joe Biden is not about whether you agree with him.
It’s a vote to let our democracy live another day.
That’s what this is about.”
“It’s so beautiful to see someone who stood for oppression, and the system,
change because of activism, and the voice of young people crying out.”
But: There is no reason to think that because Joe Biden won the election,
he'll be able to govern.
I think the likeliest outcome is that we’re going to have
a Joe Biden presidency and a Mitch McConnell Senate.
And that means that lots of things Joe Biden wants to do
are not going to happen.
I was looking at some data from a Fox News analysis.
There's these questions like,
“How concerned about the effects of climate change are you?”
And you're getting 46% Very, 26% Somewhat…
Gun laws…
Pathway to citizenship…
Changing to a government-run health care plan…
It seems clear from this data that what the American people want
is not being translated to law and policy.
And I'm wondering if you can give some context as to why that is.
Those numbers don't in any way surprise me.
We've seen numbers like that for a very long time.
“As of right now, Joe Biden holds a lead of about 13,500 votes…”
“Stop the count! Stop the count!”
The key thing to understand about the modern Republican Party,
is it is a party that routinely is not able to win the most votes
at any level of the national system.
It has lost the popular vote in seven of the last presidential elections...
It has gotten fewer votes in the last three or four Senate elections in a row...
A party that wins power without winning the most votes
is going to turn against democracy itself.
“Many forced to wait for hours, in part because of new voting machines
that were either missing or not working.”
“20% fewer polling places than we had in 2016.”
“This line of people wraps around the block.
There’s a line of cars to curbside vote.”
“People waited in line for two, three, four hours, just to cast a vote.”
Right after the House attempted to pass a bill
that would have made voting during a pandemic easier,
what Trump said on Fox and Friends was,
“They had things, levels of voting, that if you’d ever agreed to it,
you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”
What I'm wondering is,
obviously there are conservative parties, in other democratic systems,
that win power all the time,
in Canada or Great Britain, or Australia…
other majoritarian democracies.
He's wrong that the Republican Party would never win power again.
What he's right about is that HIS Republican Party
would never win power again.
They're a party that is increasingly afraid of what would happen to it
if it was exposed to full-on, actual democracy.
You're saying that if they if they really had to compete for votes,
that they would have to begin to embrace some of those policies,
as conservative parties in those countries have done?
Yes.
As we speak, Donald Trump is functionally engaged
in what we would understand, in another country, as a coup attempt.
“If you count the legal votes, I easily win.
If you count the illegal votes, they can try to steal the election from us.
Our goal is to defend the integrity of the election.
We will not allow the corruption to steal such an important election…”
“Well, we’re interrupting this because
what the president of the United States is saying,
in large part, is absolutely untrue.”
It's a very dangerous moment.
But even beneath that, what you then end up having is,
when a party wins power without winning votes,
they will tend to use that power
to make it easier to win power without winning votes.
“All signs, guys, all signs point to a runoff in Georgia.
Not just one, but two Senate races here in Georgia.
What that means here, is that Georgia could be at
the center of the political universe, through early next year.
January 5th is when the runoff is.”
So those Georgia runoffs, they’re really, really, really important.
“A record number of Americans, of all races, faiths, religions,
chose change over more of the same.”
If Democrats win the Senate,
and choose to make democracy a priority,
there's a lot they can actually do.
DC and Puerto Rico should be offered statehood. That’s obvious.
Things like automatic voter registration,
mail-in balloting…
We should just make elections a lot simpler to participate in,
and make sure the people's voices are being heard more clearly.
“Democracy works.
And I want you to know that I’ll work as hard
for those who voted against me as those who voted for me.
That’s the job. That's the job."