After months of primaries, polls, and (often wrong) predictions, Election Day is finally here. Stay up to date on all of the returns and results as Daily Intelligencer’s political team liveblogs the 2016 presidential election. It’s time, America.
Joe Biden picked up a few unusual endorsements today
Axios reports:
USA Today, one of the largest newspapers by circulation in America, gave Joe Biden its first-ever presidential endorsement on Tuesday.
“This is not something we do lightly or do eagerly,” said Bill Sternberg, head of USA Today’s editorial board.
… The newspaper, which published its first endorsement in 1982, posted a “dis-endorsement” of President Trump in 2016, but fell short of actually endorsing Hillary Clinton.
The Hill reports:
Michael Steele, who led the Republican National Committee (RNC) during the first years of Joe Biden’s vice presidency, formally endorsed him Tuesday morning after joining a “Never Trump” GOP group in August.
Steele made his announcement on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” shortly before starring in an advertisement paid for by the anti-Trump group the Lincoln Project.
He seems a little agitated these days
A message to unify America
If Biden wins, he could simply reverse course on this policy, making the court case irrelevant
Unfortunately, science-denying Scott Atlas is now steering the coronavirus task force
As summer faded into autumn and the novel coronavirus continued to ravage the nation unabated, Scott Atlas, a neuroradiologist whose commentary on Fox News led President Trump to recruit him to the White House, consolidated his power over the government’s pandemic response.
Atlas shot down attempts to expand testing. He openly feuded with other doctors on the coronavirus task force and succeeded in largely sidelining them. He advanced fringe theories, such as that social distancing and mask-wearing were meaningless and would not have changed the course of the virus in several hard-hit areas. And he advocated allowing infections to spread naturally among most of the population while protecting the most vulnerable and those in nursing homes until the United States reaches herd immunity, which experts say would cause excess deaths, according to three current and former senior administration officials.
Atlas also cultivated Trump’s affection with his public assertions that the pandemic is nearly over, despite death and infection counts showing otherwise, and his willingness to tell the public that a vaccine could be developed before the Nov. 3 election, despite clear indications of a slower timetable.
“If TikTok is saved, you can thank me”
Oracle CEO Larry Ellison donated $250,000 to a super PAC supporting Sen. Lindsey Graham’s (R-SC) reelection campaign as his company closed in on a coveted position as TikTok’s US technology partner. FEC documents show that Ellison made the $250,000 donation to the Security is Strength PAC on September 14th. The Security is Strength PAC has bought ads exclusively in support of Graham’s political ambitions, including his 2015 presidential campaign and his current reelection bid for the US Senate.
It’s an unusually large donation for Ellison, who also donated $5,200 to Graham’s Majority Fund in January. The timing of the larger donation is also remarkable, coming mere hours after Oracle officially announced that it had been chosen as TikTok’s technology partner for its US operations, beating out Microsoft in a high-profile bidding process to save the popular video app. …
Sen. Graham was reportedly pivotal in arranging the deal, although it’s unclear if he had any influence over the specific companies involved. In an interview with Vanity Fair in August, Graham said that he personally called Trump to suggest that he find a US company to purchase the platform in order to remedy the administration’s concerns over the app’s relationship with China. “Let Microsoft or somebody buy it, put it in American hands and allow the platform to survive and thrive because so many people enjoy it,” Sen. Graham said he told Trump over the summer.
“If TikTok is saved, you can thank me,” he said.
Competence matters.
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