PROTECT THE RESULTS – FIND AN EVENT NEAR YOU
The latest vote tally in Pennsylvania put Joe Biden ahead by more than 5,000 votes. He may win the state by 50,000 and also carry Georgia—a political earthquake in its own right. It’s now being confirmed that Biden won the election on Tuesday and will soon have enough Electoral College votes to be declared the next president of the United States.
Trump spoke from the White House press room Thursday night, ranting and raving that the election has been stolen, rigged, that the mail ballots were fraudulent, that he will never concede. Of course, he is threatening to stage a coup d’état. It may be necessary to send in law enforcement to arrest him and escort him from the White House in handcuffs. He should be tried, convicted, and put in jail on charges of treason, high crimes and misdemeanors, grand larceny, tax evasion.
What is the bottom line of this election? We won! The imperative that guided us from the beginning was “Get out the vote.” We knew that if we succeeded in a huge voter mobilization, we would win. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris received well over 74,000,000 votes—the largest vote total for a presidential candidate in history. We are all cheering the multiracial, multi-issue, coalition, led by so many clear-thinking women, that produced this victory.
Yet there was not a “Blue Wave,” a tsunami that delivered a landslide victory for Biden-Harris. We failed to defeat Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell. The fate of the Senate hangs in the balance, with run-offs likely to determine the outcome.
It’s also a fact that Trump mobilized a huge number of votes, nearly 70 million. These masses of voters, overwhelmingly white, were blinded by white supremacy and rabid anti-communism. Many embraced the groundless QAnon conspiracies that Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and other Democratic leaders are operating a pedophile ring and are cannibals.
Like lambs to the slaughter, these Republican voters, disproportionately rural, embraced Trump’s pathological lies and his “herd immunity” surrender in the struggle against COVID-19. If the nation continued down Trump’s path, hundreds of thousands or even millions more people would die of coronavirus. Biden-Harris, by contrast, embrace science. They promise to act to implement a plan to combat COVID-19. It may save millions of lives.
On the economic front, polls show that more tens of millions of voters still thought Trump’s management of the economy would be superior to Biden’s. The record shows otherwise, however. Trump, the billionaire who is $400 million in debt, has worked tirelessly to pick our pockets and hand trillions in superprofits to his billionaire cronies. With his plan to terminate the Social Security withholding tax, Social Security and Medicare would go bankrupt within five years. Bankrupt!
He promised to bring back manufacturing jobs exported under NAFTA. But manufacturing is in a full-fledged recession. His tariffs ignited a trade war, costing farmers hundreds of billions in exports of soybeans and other crops. Instead of pursuing international cooperation, Trump doled out welfare to farmers in hopes of winning votes in rural America.
But he, McConnell, and the Republicans refused to pass the HEROES Act to help tens of millions of unemployed workers, COVID-19 frontline workers, hundreds of thousands of small businesses, state and local governments, and the U.S. Postal Service.
His packed Supreme Court is poised to repeal the Affordable Care Act, stripping 20 million people of health care in the middle of a pandemic. And he hopes his lackeys on the high court will overturn the results of the election and hand him a second term.
We are marching with signs today that say: “PROTECT THE RESULTS!” and “COUNT EVERY VOTE.” Even with a Biden victory, we’ve got to keep marching. Democracy and the country are still in grave peril.
Tim Wheeler is the former editor-in-chief of People’s World.
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