Where things stand
Joe Biden’s popular-vote lead has topped five million votes as counting continues in states across the country.
Not only has Biden bested the record set in 2008 by his old boss, Barack Obama, for the most votes won by a presidential candidate, but he is also on pace to win votes from a larger share of the total population than Obama did that year. Biden has received votes from 23.4 percent of the American population, compared with the 22.8 percent that Obama won in 2008.
But President Trump is not backing down in his effort to dispute the election. He tweeted the words “WE WILL WIN!” last night, accompanied by a video panning across the crowd at a Trump rally and a voice-over featuring the president issuing words of high-flown inspiration.
“The more people tell you it’s not possible, that it can’t be done, the more you should be absolutely determined to prove them wrong,” he says in the video, using language that would feel benign and nonspecific if he weren’t currently denying his own loss in the presidential election. “Treat the word ‘impossible’ as nothing more than motivation,” he continues.
Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, yesterday authorized a hand recount of the state’s presidential election, which Biden leads by more than 14,000 votes. The recount was expected, given the narrow margin, but it is unlikely to overturn the result. Despite the low chances of success, the president’s campaign had pushed for a manual recount. Votes in the state’s two Senate races, which are now set to go to runoff elections, won’t be subject to a recount.
In another tweet yesterday, Trump singled out a Republican city commissioner in Philadelphia by name. The president attacked the official, Al Schmidt, for defending the city’s efforts to count votes.
Schmidt has appeared on multiple TV stations recently, and he told CNN yesterday that he had read “completely ridiculous allegations” on social media about election impropriety in Philadelphia.
In a “60 Minutes” interview that aired Sunday, Schmidt said his office had received veiled death threats toward him and his staff members in the days since the election.
Biden last night named Ron Klain, a longtime Democratic operative, to be his White House chief of staff.
As was the case when Biden chose Kamala Harris as his running mate, there was hardly an element of surprise. Klain first went to work for Biden in 1989, shortly after graduating from Harvard Law School, when Biden was a senator from Delaware.
Klain went on to serve as Biden’s chief of staff in the Obama administration, where he also coordinated the White House’s Ebola response. He and Biden have remained in close communication since. The president-elect’s decision to tap Klain was an indicator that he plans to bring members of his inner circle along with him into the White House.
Facebook is extending its postelection ban on political advertising for an additional month, a move that will constrain the campaigns of the four candidates facing off in the two Senate runoffs in Georgia.
With Trump refusing to concede, Facebook took the measure “as part of our ongoing efforts to protect the election,” it said in a statement.
Facebook had said in October that it would halt all political advertising on its network after the polls closed on Nov. 3, in an effort to curtail election-related misinformation.
The New York Times