Democrat Joe Biden may have produced a winning national formula, but it wasn’t by trimming — or even holding — Donald Trump’s 2016 winning margins in hundreds of counties across the agricultural and industrial north.
Democrats slid further behind in huge rural swaths of northern battlegrounds. The party lost House seats in the Midwest, and Democratic challengers in Iowa, Kansas, Montana and North Carolina Senate races, all once viewed as serious threats to Republican incumbents, fell, some of them hard.
“The pressure for Democrats has to be on conveying an economic message for rural America,” said Iowa Democrat John Norris.
Democrats appear to face diminishing chances of gained U.S. Senate control, with Georgia playing the decisive role. Despite the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, Democrats, Republicans and their supporters plan to flood Georgia neighborhoods with staff and volunteers to knock on doors and rally their bases to vote in the state's pivotal U.S. Senate runoffs on Jan. 5.
Even as President Donald Trump refuses to the concede the election, Biden moved ahead with policy and personnel picks this past week.
Biden’s first wave of Cabinet picks and choices for his White House staff have prized staying power over star power, with a premium placed on government experience and proficiency.
But it's not all back to the future. Big tech companies that enjoyed a cozy relationship with the Obama-Biden administration will face a less-friendly Biden-Harris team.
Also this past week, the federal government recognized President-elect Joe Biden as the “apparent winner” of the Nov. 3 election. Trump still refused to concede and vowed to continue to fight in court after General Services Administrator Emily Murphy gave the green light for Biden to coordinate with federal agencies ahead of his Jan. 20 inauguration. But Trump did tweet that he was directing his team to cooperate on the transition.
And speaking of tweeting, speculation rose of a crackdown on Trump's social posting if and when he leaves office.
Even if Trump's administration faces waning days, there's still time to enact changes on federal policy. The Trump administration is moving forward on gutting a longstanding federal protection for roughly 1,000 species of birds in the United States
And the Justice Department is amending its execution protocols to allow methods beyond lethal injection such as firing squads and poison gas.
Who'll be out at the White House
The New York Daily News took a look at some of the high- and not-so-high profile politicos who will be out of a job come Jan. 20, if President-elect Joe Biden takes office.
The end of Trump's White House
With President Trump on his way out of the White House - whether he admits it or not - a small army of appointees, advisers, cronies and clingers is poised to exit the nation’s capital, too.
William Barr
Perhaps no Trump official enraged Democrats more than Trump’s last attorney general pick, William Barr. Shortly after assuming the post in February 2019, he took over control of all Justice Department investigations, most notably the Mueller probe of Russian interference in the 2016 election. In a press conference for the history books, Barr declared what Special Counsel Robert Mueller had been unwilling to state — that there was no evidence of obstruction of justice by Trump or his allies during the nearly three-year-long probe. Barr also raised hackles for championing social issues outside the typical purview of an attorney general, railing against “militant secularists” in a 2019 speech at the University of Notre Dame law school.
Ben Carson
When Trump first aired the idea of appointing Ben Carson as secretary of Housing and Urban Development, the neurosurgeon-turned-political candidate reportedly thought he had no business running the federal agency in charge of housing policy. Once he accepted the job, though, he was embroiled in controversies including spending $31,000 in taxpayer money on a dining room for his office. He was ultimately cleared of wrongdoing for that. Critics fault him for falling short on promises to fix low-income housing, presiding instead over an increase in HUD units that fail health and safety inspections.
Betsy DeVos
Americans got to know Education Secretary Betsy DeVos in a 2018 interview on “60 Minutes,” and many thought she didn’t pass the test. She pleaded ignorance on issues like public schools in her home state of Michigan, infamously stating, “I have not intentionally visited schools that are underperforming.” The wife of former Amway CEO Dick DeVos and sister of the founder of the controversial security firm formerly known as Blackwater, she was blasted for suspending investigations into for-profit colleges early in the administration. Trump was rumored to be considering her removal in the event of his re-election.
Stephen Miller
Senior adviser Stephen Miller was considered the architect of Trump’s hardline policies on immigration. He seemed bent on doing everything possible to keep immigrants out of the country, from embracing a wall along the border with Mexico to using COVID as an apparent pretext to halt entry into the U.S. Miller urged other members of the administration to back one of the most hated policies of the Trump White House, the “zero tolerance” approach of separating children from undocumented immigrant parents. “If we don’t enforce this, it is the end of our country as we know it,” he reportedly said in May 2018.
Paula White
For non-Trump supporters, one of the most baffling aspects of the administration was the president’s appeal to evangelical Christians, who adored a man who publicly reveled in adultery and other carnal sins. Analysts have pointed to Trump’s appointment of conservative judges, support of Israel and sociological changes in American churches as reasons for the fervent support. But his choice of personal pastor may also say it all. Paula White preached a version of Christianity known as the “prosperity gospel” and raved against LGBT rights and abortion. She recently appeared to pray for the 2020 election to be overturned, saying, “We stop and we override the will of man for the will of God.”
Louis DeJoy
Trump’s appointment of a new postmaster general as Americans readied to mail in an unprecedented number of ballots drew heavy criticism over the summer. Louis DeJoy came from the private sector, where he ran a national logistics company, and got in Trump’s good graces through huge campaign contributions. The U.S. Postal Service reportedly slowed its processing of ballots in the weeks before the election, and many forms reached voters late. There are now calls to investigate the postmaster general’s not-so-joyous handling of the election.
Ivanka Trump
While dogged by allegations of nepotism the past four years, Trump had no problem giving daughter Ivanka Trump, son-in-law Jared Kushner and sons Donald Jr. and Eric and their partners high-profile roles in his administration and campaign. Ivanka Trump’s pre-White House efforts to advocate for women seemed to make her the object of special scorn to liberals. Many said she was, in the words of a famous “Saturday Night Live” skit, “complicit” in what they viewed as a war on women’s rights. How the family of socialites will fare in a post-Trump New York City — where residents literally danced in the streets upon learning of his defeat — remains to be seen.
