How Close We Came to an Unthinkable Moment

Kevin Carroll at The Dispatch:

Former President Donald Trump has been charged with four felonies for his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election. As a veteran, my blood ran cold reading two particular passages in special counsel Jack Smith’s indictment. They suggest that part of the former president and his co-conspirators’ autocratic plan to remain in power, despite knowing that they lost the 2020 election, was to make the U.S. military choose between subservience to civilian control or refusing to undertake an anti-democratic domestic political role.

In the first passage, it appears that when a deputy White House counsel warned Assistant Attorney General Jeffrey Clark that if Trump remained in office despite the absence of any evidence of outcome-determinative election fraud, riots would break out in U.S. cities, Clark responded, “That’s why there’s an Insurrection Act.” In the second, the indictment reports that when similarly warned of the risk of riots, Trump’s outside counsel John Eastman responded that there were points in American history when violence was necessary to protect the republic.

At the time of these statements, Trump planned to name Clark acting attorney general—the nation’s chief law enforcement officer—and Eastman had authored a memorandum advancing an argument, which he privately admitted was without legal merit, that Vice President Mike Pence could unilaterally reject slates of electors pledged to Joe Biden.

Taken together, these statements suggest that Clark and Eastman sought to have the vice president nullify the results of the 2020 election in bad faith, anticipated that this unconstitutional act might lead to widespread unrest, and that they planned for the commander-in-chief to order federal troops (or federalized National Guardsmen) to put down those riots.The armed services were to be told to use force against Americans to keep Trump in office, despite the objective fact, as established in more than 60 judicial proceedings, that Biden won the 2020 election.

...

The presidential demand anticipated by Clark and Eastman would place military leaders in the excruciating position of responding to an order facially legal under relevant statutes, but given for a purpose inimical to the ideals of the framers of the Constitution to which they swore an oath. Generals would be forced to choose whether to abandon an unbroken tradition of American military obedience to civilian control, or turn their guns on civilians to facilitate a losing candidate remaining in the White House beyond Inauguration Day.

Trying to Get Fox to Do the Right Thing

 Former Fox executive Preston Padden at The Daily Beast:

In a months-long series of email exchanges, I tried to get Rupert to stop the false news on Fox News Channel. Without my knowledge, Fox produced those emails as part of discovery in the Dominion case. I would not otherwise share them here.

On Jan. 5, without a clue what would happen the next day, I sent Rupert the following email

It would be a great service to the Country that I know you love, and to the party, to record and saturate a spot with Sean, Tucker, Laura, etc. saying something like: ‘We will never stop fighting for Freedom and the American way of life and against extreme liberal policies. While we are frustrated just like you are, the facts are that President Trump and his lawyers have not produced any evidence of widespread voter fraud that would change the fact that Joe Biden was elected President on November 3. All of us at Fox will work tirelessly for you and to serve as a watchdog on the Biden Administration. Meanwhile, please wear a mask and get vaccinated so that we can crush the virus.’

I knew from earlier email exchanges that Rupert did not believe that the election had been stolen. This was his response:

“I’ll think about it. Perhaps something like that in a few days!”

From the finding below in Judge Davis’ Order we know that Rupert followed up on my suggestion on the same day:

On January 5, 2021, Rupert Murdoch emailed Ms. Scott [CEO of FNC] that it was suggested the ‘prime time three should independently or together say something like “the election is over and Joe Biden won.”’ Ms. Scott forwarded it to Ms. Cooper and said, ‘I told Rupert privately they are all there—we need to be careful about using the shows and pissing off the viewers but they know how to navigate.’

To my knowledge, no such statement ever was telecast.

Fox Settles

Sara Fischer at Axios:

Fox News' $787 million defamation settlement with Dominion Voting Systems ends one lawsuit over the airing of election lies, but there are plenty more to come.

Why it matters: In dodging a trial, Fox was able to spare its executives and hosts further embarrassment on the witness stand. But the agreement also set a new benchmark for how much Fox is willing to pay to make such suits go away....

State of play: Fox News and other networks face several other defamation lawsuits related to airing 2020 election lies.Most notably, Fox News faces a $2.7 billion case brought by election technology company Smartmatic. It also faces a lawsuit from former producer Abby Grossberg, who claims Fox News tried to manipulate her testimony during pre-trial discovery for the Dominion case.

...

In a statement responding to the settlement, Smartmatic lawyer Erik Connolly said, “Dominion’s litigation exposed some of the misconduct and damage caused by Fox’s disinformation campaign. Smartmatic will expose the rest."

Be smart: Smaller cable networks such as Newsmax and One America News (OAN) also face defamation lawsuits from Dominion, as do individuals including Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, Mike Lindell and Patrick Byrne.

Twenty Fox broadcasts and tweets Dominion says were defamatory

Fox hosts, producers, and executives privately disparate the election lies that the network was airing.

Fox and Election 2020

 Peter Baker at NYT reports that Fox News faced Trumpist criticism for correctly calling Arizona for Biden.

Typically, it is a point of pride for a news network to be the first to project election winners. But Fox is no typical news network, and in the days following the 2020 vote, it was besieged with angry protests not only from President Donald J. Trump’s camp but from its own viewers because it had called the battleground state of Arizona for Mr. Biden. Never mind that the call was correct; Fox executives worried that they would lose viewers to hard-right competitors like Newsmax.

And so, on Monday, Nov. 16, 2020, Suzanne Scott, the chief executive of Fox News Media, and Jay Wallace, the network’s president, convened a Zoom meeting for an extraordinary discussion with an unusual goal, according to a recording of the call reviewed by The New York Times: How to keep from angering the network’s conservative audience again by calling an election for a Democrat before the competition.

Maybe, the Fox executives mused, they should abandon the sophisticated new election-projecting system in which Fox had invested millions of dollars and revert to the slower, less accurate model. Or maybe they should base calls not solely on numbers but on how viewers might react. Or maybe they should delay calls, even if they were right, to keep the audience in suspense and boost viewership.

“Listen, it’s one of the sad realities: If we hadn’t called Arizona, those three or four days following Election Day, our ratings would have been bigger,” Ms. Scott said. “The mystery would have been still hanging out there.”

Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum, the two main anchors, suggested it was not enough to call a state based on numerical calculations, the standard by which networks have made such determinations for generations, but that viewer reaction should be considered. “In a Trump environment,” Ms. MacCallum said, “the game is just very, very different.”

The VP and the Counting of Electoral Votes

At AEI, Joseph Bessette and Gary Schmitt find no support for the view that the Vice President has unilateral constitutional authority to resolve electoral vote disputes.

Our analysis proceeds in four stages. First, we show that the framers viewed the Vice Presidency as a rather insignificant office and, thus, one unlikely to be given the constitutional power to decide presidential elections. Second, we show that the relevant constitutional language strongly suggests that Congress possesses the authority to legislate procedures to resolve electoral disputes. Third, we show that in the congressional debates of 1789 to 1805, every major alternative for locating the power to resolve electoral disputes – that it resides in Congress, in the state legislatures, or among the electors themselves when they meet in their states – was advanced except for one: that it resides in the office of the Vice Presidency. This silence, in our view, speaks volumes. Finally, we maintain that the principles and structure of the American constitutional order are inimical to allowing the discretion and will of a single individual (especially one who often has a personal stake in the outcome) to decide presidential elections. In brief, the history of the office, the text of the Constitution, founding-era debates, and the underlying logic of the Constitution do not support the view that the Vice President possesses unilateral constitutional authority to resolve electoral vote disputes.

Brian Kemp's Oath

 

Many posts have discussed oaths .

Molly Ball at Time:

Kemp never stopped being a lib-triggering conservative; he even kept up his crusade against the phantom threat of voter fraud, signing an election law that Democrats including President Biden see as racist voter suppression. Kemp seeks no credit for protecting the vote and saving the election. He argues he was just doing his job, and would prefer to talk about almost anything else. “I have always followed the law and the Constitution,” he says. “I believe that that oath I took is better and bigger than any person including myself, and it’s certainly bigger than any political party.”

Profiles in Courage

From the JFK Library:

For the first time ever, the John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award will honor five individuals — President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, U.S. Representative Liz Cheney, Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, Arizona Representative Russell “Rusty” Bowers, and Wandrea “Shaye” Moss — each for their courage to protect and defend democracy in the United States and abroad.

There is no issue today more important than the fight for democracy. These honorees have placed their careers and lives on the line to protect democratic principles and free and fair elections. They embody what President Kennedy admired most in others—political courage.

In February 2022, as Russia mounted a massive, unprovoked military assault on Ukraine, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy marshaled the spirit, patriotism, and untiring sacrifice of the Ukrainian people in a life-or-death fight for their country - a struggle that endures to this day. From the first moment of the invasion, Zelenskyy and his family became targets for assassination by Russian forces. In the face of this constant danger, Zelenskyy has led a courageous defense of democratic ideals and political independence. With candor and clarity, he has focused the eyes of the world on the existential threat facing Ukraine, and on the need for robust, uncompromising international engagement and cooperation to safeguard all democratic societies. His principled leadership has strengthened the resolve of Ukrainians and people around the globe to protect and defend the fragile human right of self-determination.

Prior to the election in 2020, Representative Liz Cheney was elected by her colleagues to be chair of the House Republican Conference, making her the third-ranking Republican in the U.S. House of Representatives, and the highest-ranking Republican woman in the history of the House. She has been one of the most conservative members within the Republican Conference. After the election, however, when President Trump falsely claimed that the election was stolen, she repeatedly called on the President to respect the rulings of the courts and his oath of office, and to publicly support the peaceful transfer of power. When the President instead rejected the lawful, certified outcome of the election, she broke with most in her party, urged fidelity to the Constitution, and stood her ground with honor and conviction. She stood against the lawlessness and violence of January 6th, and voted to impeach President Trump, concluding: "The President of the United States summoned this mob, assembled the mob, and lit the flame of this attack. Everything that followed was his doing.” Cheney received numerous death threats after casting her vote in favor of impeachment, and yet refused to take the politically expedient course that most of her party embraced. Because she would not remain silent or ignore the events of January 6th, Cheney's congressional colleagues stripped her of her leadership position in the GOP caucus. She now serves as the Vice Chair of the Select Committee investigating the January 6 insurrection, and remains a consistent and courageous voice in defense of democracy.

In December 2020, shortly after the presidential election, Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson was at home putting up Christmas decorations with her young son when armed protestors massed in front of her house demanding that Michigan's presidential election result be reversed. Protesters called Benson a "traitor” and a “criminal” for defending the certification of Michigan's accurate results, which favored Joe Biden. Benson, the state's chief elections officer, did not waver, and defended the will of Michigan voters and assured them that she would protect and defend the integrity of Michigan's vote in accordance with state law. Throughout the 2020 election cycle, Benson repeatedly refused to back down from fulfilling the duties of her office, even as threats and harassment from then-President Trump and his allies grew increasingly aggressive. Benson continues to speak out about the risks to free and fair elections in Michigan and nationwide, as Trump supporters continue to perpetuate false claims and work to seize control of state and local election processes from duly elected or appointed public servants.

Following the 2020 presidential election, Rusty Bowers, a pro-Trump Republican, resisted intense pressure from Trump and Rudy Giuliani and refused to go along with an illegal scheme to replace Arizona’s legal slate of electors with a false slate of electors who would elect Trump. “As a conservative Republican, I don’t like the results of the presidential election,” Bowers said. “I voted for President Trump and worked hard to reelect him. But I cannot and will not entertain a suggestion that we violate current law to change the outcome of a certified election.” For his decision of conscience, Bowers endured persistent harassment and intimidation tactics from Trump supporters, and later survived an attempt to recall him from the legislature. In January 2022, Bowers again acted to protect the integrity of Arizona elections by stopping a Republican-sponsored bill that would have allowed the legislature to overturn the results of an election. He remains a target for pro-Trump partisans.

In December 2020, Wandrea “Shaye” Moss, a full-time employee in the Fulton County Department of Registration & Elections since 2017, became the target of a vicious smear campaign by then-President Trump and his allies who were seeking to overturn the 2020 election. As a registration officer, Moss mostly handles voter applications and absentee ballot requests. She also helps to process the vote count on Election Day, in addition to other duties. In the wake of a close vote that tipped the state of Georgia to Joe Biden, Trump and his supporters falsely accused Moss of processing fake ballots for Biden during the late-night hours of Election Day. After being identified and targeted by Trump and his followers, Moss received so many death threats and racist taunts that she was forced to change her appearance and go into hiding. She carried out her duties remotely as much as possible. Although state officials repeatedly debunked the Trump camp's lies about Moss, she continued to receive threats and harassing messages from Trump loyalists nearly a year after the election. Despite the onslaught of random, undeserved, and malicious attacks, Moss continues to serve in the Fulton County Department of Registration & Elections doing the hard and unseen work to run our democracy.

Pence on Overturning Elections

 

College Voter Turnout 2020

From the Institute for Democracy & Higher Education at Tufts:

• At 66%, student turnout far exceeded the rate of 52% from the prior presidential election. This comes close to the national voting rate of 67% for all voters in 2020, as calculated by the U.S. Census Bureau.
• In past years, we’ve pointed to low “yield” rates as a problem—students were registering, but not following through and voting. In 2020, the rate of registered students who then voted hit 80%, an important milestone and signal that they are vested in their own futures and the health of democracy
• Maybe campuses attached class registration to voter registration. Maybe first-year students were eager to have their voices heard. For whatever reason, students ages 18-21 defied national patterns and prior student voting patterns and voted at slightly higher rates than older (30+) student voters.
• The highest voting rates were achieved at private baccalaureate degree-granting (BA) and private doctoral-granting (PhD) institutions, and indeed, voting rates at private BA institutions jumped 17 percentage points from 2016. These changes might point to differences in institutional and student resourcing and/or the retention of more affluent students (who vote at significantly higher rates than their poorer peers) in a difficult semester. They may also point to the liberal arts and sciences as a catalyst for voting
• Asian American student participation rose dramatically—a change also observed in the general population3 —although Asian American student turnout was still lower than other demographic groups. Although they participated at high levels and remain among the most consistently reliable group of voters, the increase in Black women’s turnout was significantly lower than was typical across demographic groups. Overall, turnout gaps were no larger between students of different races and sexes than they were in 2016.
• Biggest Gain: Asian-American students up 17 percentage points. Also Significant: Multiracial and White men boast increases of 16-17 percentage points. Largest Gap: Asian-American to White non-Hispanic: 20 percentage points. Most Consistently Reliable Voters: Multiracial, Black, and White women

Counting the Vote

John C. Fortier and Charles Stewart III have an AEI report titled Lessons learned from the 2020 election.  

From the overview:

The 2020 election witnessed a continuation oftrends established in recent elections, whereby vote counting has slowed and the votes counted are disproportionately Democratic the further away from Election Day the counting proceeds. These trends are due to certain types of ballots taking longer to count completely and large urban areas taking longer to complete the vote count. » Despite these national generalities, many states deviated from the national trend. » In 2020, most states counted nearly 100% of their final totals of ballots within 48 hours of polls closing on Election Day. Six states — Iowa, Florida, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Louisiana — counted nearly one hundred percent of their total ballots within four hours of polls closing. » Research that has looked at the speed with which states reported their votes has concluded that (1) states with more mail ballots are slower to report vote totals, (2) states that limit the pre-processing of mail ballots are slower, and (3) states that allow mail ballots to arrive after Election Day are slower. » The magnitude of the “blue shift,” the pattern whereby later-counted ballots are disproportionately Democratic, depends on when one starts the 4 comparison. Indeed, if one compares final election results with vote reports in the first three hours following polls closing, there was a national “red shift” in 2020. » Many states have certification deadlines that come very close to the “safe harbor” benchmark for certifying elections, thus perhaps giving insufficient time for careful consideration of recounts and challenges.

Dominion v. OAN and Newsmax

 A release from Dominion Voting Systems:

Today, legal representatives for Dominion Voting Systems filed defamation complaints against Newsmax Media Inc. in the Superior Court of Delaware, and against Herring Networks Inc. — owner of One America News (OAN) Network — and Patrick Byrne in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia. Also named in the complaint against One American News Network are Herring Networks owners Robert Herring and Charles Herring, as well as One America News Network personalities Chanel Rion and Christina Bobb.

From Dominion CEO John Poulos:

"The defendants in today's filings recklessly disregarded the truth when they spread lies in November and continue to do so today. We are filing these three cases today because the defendants named show no remorse, nor any sign they intend to stop spreading disinformation. This barrage of lies by the Defendants and others have caused—and continue to cause—severe damage to our company, customers, and employees. We have no choice but to seek to hold those responsible to account."

From Dominion legal counsel Stephen Shackelford, Partner at Susman Godfrey LLP:

"As detailed in our complaints, OAN, Newsmax, and Patrick Byrne have knowingly and continuously sold the false story of election fraud in the 2020 presidential election, with Dominion cast as the villain, severely injuring Dominion in the process. Newsmax and OAN both endorsed, repeated, broadcast, and amplified a series of verifiably false lies about Dominion to serve their own commercial purposes. Patrick Byrne is responsible for bankrolling and promoting a viral disinformation campaign about Dominion that reached millions of people worldwide. We are suing to set the record straight, to vindicate Dominion's rights, to hold the Defendants accountable, and to recover damages for the devastating economic harm done to Dominion's business."

The filings can be found here.

From the complaint against OAN:

Throughout this time, OAN recklessly disregarded the truth; indeed, OAN knew the statements it repeatedly broadcast about Dominion were lies, as former OAN producer Marty Golingan confirmed to the New York Times. Specifically, OAN knew the vote tallies from Dominion machines had been confirmed by numerous independent audits and hand recounts of paper ballots following the election. OAN also knew the lies it was promoting and endorsing about Dominion had been debunked by an increasingly long list of bipartisan election officials, election security experts, judges, then-Attorney General William Barr, then-Director of the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency Chris Krebs, Election Assistance Commissioner Ben Hovland, Republican Georgia Governor Brian Kemp, Republican Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, and Republican former Colorado Secretary of State Wayne Williams, to name several. OAN also knew or recklessly disregarded that there was no evidence whatsoever to support its claims that Dominion was created in Venezuela by Hugo Chavez for the purpose of rigging elections.

Election Adaptations During COVID

Kevin Kosar at AEI:

COVID-19 forced states to make myriad adjustments to their elections administration in order to ensure sufficient access to the ballot. Changes included expanding voter access to the use of absentee ballots, extending voter registration deadlines, and increasing the number of polling places, among others. How well did states do in adapting their elections administration?

To answer this question, I turned to Professor Zachary Courser and Professor Eric Helland. They co-direct Claremont McKenna College’s Policy Lab, an interdisciplinary policy research program that teaches students policy writing and research skills that prepare students for work in legislatures, think tanks, and non-governmental organizations. Zach, Eric, and their Policy Lab students spent the past year examining states’ emergency election statutes and election administration adaptations during the pandemic, and they have some interesting findings.

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You and your students created a scorecard to measure states’ adaptations to make voting accessible during the pandemic. How did you create the scorecard, and which states scored highest?

Before the election, we evaluated state statutes dealing with elections emergencies to understand the legal framework for adaptation during an emergency, and then tracked all the adaptations that states took to ensure access to voting for the general election. We then analyzed which measures were most likely to have an effect on increasing access during the pandemic and assigned each a score accordingly. Adaptations clustered in four main categories: vote-by-mail, drop-off boxes, deadline adjustments, and polling place adjustments. We assigned measures for mail-in voting the highest point value, as we think they did the most to protect health and promote perceptions of safety during the pandemic. As a result, states that already had all-mail elections, or adapted by increasing access to absentee balloting, tended to score higher.

The average grade was a C, and as you can see from the map below, the highest scoring states clustered in the west. Hawaii, Oregon, Washington, and Utah all score A’s, with New Jersey scoring the highest in the nation. Southern states were laggards on access generally, scoring the lowest as a region — with most states rating a D or F. Missouri scored the lowest in the nation.

The 2020 Election

Nathaniel PersilyCharles Stewart III have an article at The Journal of Democracy titled " The Miracle and Tragedy of the 2020 U.S. Election."

The abstract:

The 2020 election was both a miracle and a tragedy. In the midst of a pandemic posing unprecedented challenges, local and state administrators pulled off a safe, secure, and professional election. This article discusses metrics of success in the adaptations that took place—record-high turnout, widespread voter satisfaction, a doubling of mail voting without a concomitant increase in problems often associated with absentee ballots, and the recruitment of hundreds of thousands of new poll workers. However, a competing narrative of a “stolen election” led to a historically deep chasm between partisans in their trust of the election process and outcome.

Polling Problems, Again

 Politico Playbook:

As our polling guru Steve Shepard reports today, the competing firms — ALG Research, GBAO Strategies, Garin-Hart-Yang Research Group, Global Strategy Group and Normington Petts — banded together in an unusual collaboration after the election to conduct a self-autopsy of sorts. It acknowledged “major errors” and a failure “to live up to our own expectations” — yet, frustratingly, no easy solution to the problem of consistently overestimating how major Democratic candidates, including JOE BIDEN, would perform.

Among the culprits:

• Deteriorating public trust in institutions, government, the news media and, yes, the polling industry — driven by DONALD TRUMP’S bashing of those very institutions. Essentially, Trump voters were less willing to participate in polls.
• Pollsters again underestimated turnout among rural and white non-college-educated voters, who overwhelmingly backed Trump.
• Failure to detect late movement toward Trump and Republican candidates in the run-up to the election.
• Not accurately accounting for the fact that Democrats stayed home and answered their phones in greater numbers last year than Republicans who did not follow Covid-19 restrictions as closely.

Read the full story here. And read the memo here.

Pew:

Pew Research Center is among the organizations examining its survey processes. The Center does not predict election results, nor does it apply the likely voter modeling needed to facilitate such predictions. Instead our focus is public opinion broadly defined, among nonvoters and voters alike and mostly on topics other than elections. Even so, presidential elections and how polls fare in covering them can be informative. As an analysis discussed, if recent election polling problems stem from flawed likely voter models, then non-election polls may be fine. If, however, the problem is fewer Republicans (or certain types of Republicans) participating in surveys, that could have implications for the field more broadly.

This report summarizes new research into the data quality of Pew Research Center’s U.S. polling. It builds on prior studies that have benchmarked the Center’s data against authoritative estimates for nonelectoral topics like smoking rates, employment rates or health care coverage. As context, the Center conducts surveys using its online panel, the American Trends Panel (ATP). The ATP is recruited offline via random national sampling of residential addresses. Each survey is statistically adjusted to match national estimates for political party identification and registered voter status in addition to demographics and other benchmarks.2 The analysis in this report probes whether the ATP is in any way underrepresenting Republicans, either by recruiting too few into the panel or by losing Republicans at a higher rate. Among the key findings:

Adults joining the ATP in recent years are less Republican than those joining in earlier years. 

Donald Trump voters were somewhat more likely than others to leave the panel (stop taking surveys) since 2016, though this is explained by their demographics. 

People living in the country’s most and least pro-Trump areas were somewhat less likely than others to join the panel in 2020. 

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Stirewalt on Self-Validating Coverage

AT Fox News, Chris Stirewalt called Arizona for Biden on election night.  Fox recently fired him. He writes at LAT:

Whatever the platform, the competitive advantage belongs to those who can best habituate consumers, which in the stunted, data-obsessed thinking of our time, means avoiding at almost any cost impinging on the reality so painstakingly built around them. As outlets have increasingly prioritized habituation over information, consumers have unsurprisingly become ever more sensitive to any interruption of their daily diet.

The rebellion on the populist right against the results of the 2020 election was partly a cynical, knowing effort by political operators and their hype men in the media to steal an election or at least get rich trying. But it was also the tragic consequence of the informational malnourishment so badly afflicting the nation.

When I defended the call for Biden in the Arizona election, I became a target of murderous rage from consumers who were furious at not having their views confirmed.

Having been cosseted by self-validating coverage for so long, many Americans now consider any news that might suggest that they are in error or that their side has been defeated as an attack on them personally. The lie that Trump won the 2020 election wasn’t nearly as much aimed at the opposing party as it was at the news outlets that stated the obvious, incontrovertible fact.

Women Candidates in 2020

 Stacy Montemayor and Pete Quist, National Institute on Money in Politics; Karl Evers-Hillstrom and Grace Haley, Center for Responsive Politics, | 2020-12-21

Key findings:

• Between 2016 and 2020, the percentage of women candidates in gubernatorial and state legislative races saw a massive jump, from 25 percent to 32 percent.
• At least 142 women will hold seats in the next Congress, an all-time high mark.
• In 2020 races for the U.S. House and Senate, women candidates outraised men on average, while also nearly closing the gap in state-level contests.
• In 2020 races, women accounted for 33 percent of donations to congressional candidates and 31 percent of donations to state-level candidates, both record marks.

...

Republican women also made gains in state races, though they were less pronounced. Women made up nearly 23 percent of 2020 Republican candidates, up from 18 percent in 2016. The biggest jump came from non-incumbent Republicans. In 2016, nearly 19 percent of Republican challengers were women. That figure jumped to 27 percent in this year’s elections.

Figure 2: Women candidates in 2020 state races, by party

Women candidates generally won at the same rate at which they ran at the state level. In 2020, 32 percent of all candidates for state legislative and gubernatorial seats were women, and 32 percent of the general election winners were women. In the 2016 and 2012 election cycles, women only accounted for 26 percent of general election winners.

Gender parity at the state level is still a ways off despite modest gains. Nevada remains the only state in the nation with a majority-female legislature. The vast majority of leadership positions in state legislatures are held by men. Just seven women serve as speakers of state houses, and nine women currently serve as governors.

Believing Misinformation

Many posts have discussed the spread of myths and misinformation.

 Joel Rose at NPR:

A significant number of Americans believe misinformation about the origins of the coronavirus and the recent presidential election, as well as conspiracy theories like QAnon, according to a new NPR/Ipsos poll.

Forty percent of respondents said they believe the coronavirus was made in a lab in China even though there is no evidence for this. Scientists say the virus was transmitted to humans from another species.

And one-third of Americans believe that voter fraud helped Joe Biden win the 2020 election, despite the fact that courts, election officials and the Justice Department have found no evidence of widespread fraud that could have changed the outcome.

The poll results add to mounting evidence that misinformation is gaining a foothold in American society and that conspiracy theories are going mainstream, especially during the coronavirus pandemic. This has raised concerns about how to get people to believe in a "baseline reality," said Chris Jackson, a pollster with Ipsos.

 

Electoral Vote: What Happens Today

 From CRS:

December 14, 2020: Electors Vote in Their States Monday after the second Wednesday in December of presidential election years is set (3 U.S.C. §7) as the date on which the electors meet and vote. In 2020, the meeting is on December 14. Electoral college delegations meet separately in their respective states and the District of Columbia at places designated by their state legislature. The electors vote by paper ballot, casting one ballot for President and one for Vice President. The electors count the results and then sign six certificates, each of which contains two lists, one of which includes the electoral votes for the President, the other, electoral votes for the Vice President, each of which includes the names of persons receiving votes and the number of votes cast for them. These are known as Certificates of the Vote, which the electors are required to sign. They then pair the six Certificates of Ascertainment provided by the state governors with the Certificates of the Vote, and sign, seal, and certify them (3 U.S.C. §§8-10). The six certificates are then distributed by registered mail as follows: (1) one certificate to the President of the U.S. Senate (the Vice President); (2) two certificates to the secretary of state (or equivalent officer) of the state in which the electors met; (3) two certificates to the Archivist;  and (4) one certificate to the judge of the U.S. district court of the district in which the electors met (3 U.S.C. §11).

Following the Election

 From Pew:

About a third of U.S. adults (36%) say they followed the results of the presidential election “almost constantly,” according a Pew Research Center survey of 11,818 U.S. adults conducted Nov. 12-17, 2020, as a part of the Center’s American News Pathways project. Another 34% say they checked in fairly often, while about two-in-ten (22%) did so occasionally. Just 7% of Americans say they tuned out the results entirely. What’s more, about four-in-ten U.S. adults (38%) say the sources they turned to most did very well in helping them understand the results after polls closed. A similar portion (40%) say they did somewhat well, for a total of 77% who gave positive marks. Only 14% say their most turned-to sources for election results did not too or not very well. 

Cable TV was the most relied-on platform for election night news among those asked about, with news websites and apps and network TV the next most likely places to turn. Three-in-ten Americans say that in following the results, they turned most to cable TV. About a quarter (24%) say they turned most to news websites or apps while about two-in-ten (22%) relied most on network TV. Only 9% say they turned most to their social media feeds – a platform that some were concerned would serve as a place for misinformation and conspiracy theories to spread. A mere 2% focused most on what the candidates and their campaigns had to say, while 6% say they mostly turned somewhere else.

Social Isolation and Nonresponse to Surveys

Across the board, public opinion surveys overstated Democratic support in the 2020 election.

Daniel A. Cox at the Survey Center on American Life:

In our pre-election survey on the strength of Americans’ social networks, we found that nearly one in five Americans (17 percent) reported having no one they were close with, marking a 9 percentage point increase from 2013.1

...

[T]here is good reason to believe that the polls might be missing some of these people who don’t have strong social ties. Social isolation, or the lack of social integration, has long been thought to reduce willingness to participate in surveys. Americans who feel alienated or isolated from society do not feel compelled to participate in surveys out of a sense of civic obligation.

Researchers at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and Hiroshima University have shown that Americans with weaker social connections are less inclined to cooperate with survey requests and that some survey estimates may be “systematically biased due to nonparticipation from socially isolated people.” Our survey was not suited to uncover the reasons for why people didn’t participate, but we did find that those with smaller social networks are far less politically engaged. For example, Americans with at least four social ties are three times more likely than those with none to have contacted an elected official in the last 12 months.

However, there may not be an easy solution to this problem. Providing financial incentives to bolster cooperation might help, as would increasing the duration of the survey field period. These are standard practices in survey research to increase representation among difficult to reach groups. But it’s not clear at this point whether incentivizing respondents or lengthening the interviewing period would increase participation rates among Americans who are socially isolated. A 2000 study found that increasing an interview period from five days to eight weeks made little difference in the final results — although perceptions of the Republican Party were more positive in the survey that included the longer interviewing schedule.