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Nov. 5, 2020Dave’s Digital Café #27 – Minutes Reports/Links Shared:Foreign Affairs. Norden, Lawrence and Tisler, Derek (Nov. 5, 2020). The U.S. Election System Worked: Globe and Mail. Yakabuski, Konrad (Nov. 4, 2020). Whatever the final result, Democrats lost the 2020 U.S. election: Points/Questions Raised: Elections 2020: What Happened? The American electoral college is an odd system. Each state has a certain number of electors. The population of a state determines the members of Congress the state has. For each member of Congress and each Senator, the state gets an elector. In every state except two, the person who gets the plurality of votes wins all the electors from that state. Maine and Nebraska do things differently. If there are 270 electoral votes for one candidate, that’s when the networks call an election. The electoral college makes voting unfair. Texas has one electoral vote for every 733,000 people. Wyoming has three electoral votes, and one electoral vote for 195,000 people. There is a lot of variation. Allotting House districts can’t be done proportionately. This year, for the first time, we went into an election knowing the electoral college favoured one candidate – the Republican candidate. This is because, at the moment, the states that are won overwhelmingly, are won by Democrats. If Joe Biden wins California by millions of votes, all the excess votes he wins the state by are wasted. Whereas, Donald Trump won efficiently in Texas and Florida by a slim margin. Joe Biden’s strategy in the 2020 U.S. election was to win every state Hilary Clinton won in 2016, and add the “blue wall” of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan. Then, he tried to expand the map to win Arizona, North Carolina, Georgia, Florida and Texas. We knew this would be a close election. It was a near certainty that more people would vote for Biden, but it would still be close in the electoral college. We also knew a few key states might decide the race, it might take weeks to receive the official result, and it might involve the courts. Fox News declaring the victory Joe Biden’s was an important narrative for the legitimacy of a Joe Biden win. To have major media outlets supporting the narrative of a stolen election is very dangerous. The two most important forces in American politics are partisanship and negative partisanship. How people identify with their party, or how much they hate the other party. People are so aligned with their party and it intersects with so many other identities. People who consider themselves Republicans live in an entirely different space from Democrats or from Canadians. Fox News is light compared to conservative talk radio. The information bubble they’re in tells them Joe Biden is a socialist, and Donald Trump may be bad, but at least he won’t turn America into Cuba. It is not the same reality as ours. Biden’s strategy was to project him as the anti-Trump. He was an empathetic person. In a time of COVID-19, he would focus on people’s health. He would try to increase the base and be inclusive.Many people like what Trump says, and the racist rhetoric is a plus for many people, throughout the history of the United States. Trump found he was never electorally punished for that rhetoric. Some chunk of his voters like it, and others are somewhat OK with the rhetoric. Republicans let Trump get away with much erratic behaviour for years, including impeachment, because they rely on his voters. Some would rather give up some democracy than let the enemy win. Trump’s term ends Jan. 20 at noon, then the next president gets sworn in. We shouldn’t take for granted the peaceful transition of power. The U.S. is a democracy on the edge. Election interference can have many forms. The most insidious is stuffing of ballot boxes, someone hacking a voting machine, or purposely misreporting to mess with election results. There are no reports of that. Perhaps, there will be a court challenge that comes alleging these. There is electoral interference happening now with all the misleading information being spread around social media. American democracy is in a dangerous spot, and it’s not going to be fixed by Biden taking over, but it’s a start. It will take decades to slowly stitch back together the democratic norms that uphold a democracy and were fading before Trump. Perhaps Biden, with a Republican Senate, will work towards re-establishing how the two branches must co-exist so it’s not partisan warfare. How the Republican Party reforms itself post-Trump will be an interesting part of American history. ................
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