AMY GOODMAN: From New York, this is Democracy Now!

VICE PRESIDENT KAMALA HARRIS: Look, we know who Donald Trump is. He is the person who stood at this very spot nearly four years ago and sent an armed mob to the United States Capitol to overturn the will of the people in a free and fair election.

DONALD TRUMP: They are fighting so hard to steal this damn thing. Look at what’s going on. Look what’s going on in your state. Every day, they’re talking about extending hours and stuff. What? Who ever heard of this stuff? We should have one-day voting and paper ballots.

AMY GOODMAN: Polls have now closed in more than half of the United States. Will Donald Trump return to the White House, or will Kamala Harris make history by becoming the nation’s first female president, first president of Asian descent and first Black female president? We’ll spend the next four hours getting responses from around the country as results roll in. All that and more, coming up.

Welcome to Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, “War, Peace and the Presidency.” I’m Amy Goodman.

It’s just past 8 p.m. on the East Coast, and polls have closed in roughly half of the United States. The first presidential candidate to reach 270 Electoral College votes will clinch the White House. Control of Congress is also at stake, with 34 Senate seats and the entire House of Representatives up for election. Of those, the Cook Political Report rates 22 House races and four Senate races as toss-ups. Republicans need to pick up two seats to gain a majority in the Senate, while Democrats are just four seats short of taking back the House.

Ahead of today’s vote, over 78 million people across the country already cast their ballots in early voting, with record participation in battleground states like North Carolina and Georgia. Women represented 53% of early voters nationwide. In the reliably red state of Iowa, The Des Moines Register poll showed Kamala Harris with a shocking three-point lead, as women voters shifted towards Harris where a six-week abortion ban took effect in July. Abortion is on the ballot in a record 10 states: Arizona, Florida, Missouri, South Dakota, Colorado, Maryland, Montana, Nevada and New York. This is a voter in Phoenix, who said abortion and women’s rights are a top issue when she cast her ballot.

MARQUETTA McCLELLAN: It’s funny to say, but my biggest fear is that we will definitely become Handmaid’s Tales, if you guys have ever seen that. That is my biggest fear. And I have two young daughters that I want to be able to grow up and live life just as free as I have.

AMY GOODMAN: Donald Trump has already begun undermining election results, targeting Philadelphia, a majority-nonwhite city and a Democratic stronghold in the crucial battleground Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. He wrote on his social media site Truth Social, quote, “A lot of talk about massive CHEATING in Philadelphia. Law Enforcement coming!!!” unquote. On Monday, Philadelphia’s District Attorney Larry Krasner issued a blunt warning against anyone who tries to subvert the election.

LARRY KRASNER: Anybody who thinks it’s time to play militia, F around and find out. Anybody who thinks it’s time to insult, to deride, to mistreat, to threaten people, F around and find out. We do have the cuffs. We do have the jail cells. We do have the Philly juries. And we have the state prisons. So, if you’re going to try to turn an election into some form of coercion, if you’re going to try to bully people, bully votes or voters, if you’re going to try to erase votes, you’re going to try any of that nonsense, we’re not playing. F around and find out.

AMY GOODMAN: In Georgia, at least nine precincts in three metro Atlanta counties have extended voting hours past the statewide closing time of 7 p.m. amidst problems with voting equipment and a series of emailed bomb threats. The FBI said the threats were not credible and appeared to originate from Russian email domains. Bomb threats were also reported in Navajo County in Arizona, as well as in Maine and Michigan.

Kamala Harris is watching election results roll in from Howard University in Washington, D.C. The historically Black college is her alma mater.

Donald Trump is at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, where he’s being joined by the world’s richest person, Elon Musk. Musk sank an estimated $120 million into efforts to get Trump elected. He spent Election Day using his X social media platform, formerly known as Twitter, stumping for Trump and promoting conspiracy theories about voter fraud. Musk also told a live-stream audience on X he might use his platform to declare Trump the winner, quote, “if the votes are clear enough that there is victory,” he said.

In West Virginia, two-term Republican Governor Jim Justice is projected to win the Senate seat vacated by Senator Joe Manchin, a longtime conservative Democrat who earlier this year announced he had quit the Democratic Party and would not seek reelection. In 2022, Justice became the second U.S. governor to sign a near-total ban on abortions after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.

News networks have called Mississippi, Florida, Tennessee, Alabama, Oklahoma, South Carolina, West Virginia, Kentucky and Indiana for Donald Trump, giving him 95 electoral votes. Vermont, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Maryland, Connecticut have been called for Kamala Harris, totaling 35 electoral votes. Thirty-four Senate races have been called for Democrats, 43 for Republicans.

This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, “War, Peace and the Presidency.” I’m Amy Goodman in New York, joined by Democracy Now!’s Juan González in Chicago. Hi, Juan.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Hi, Amy, and good evening to our listeners and viewers across the country and around the world.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, this is quite an evening, and we’ll be on the air for four hours tonight, and then, on Wednesday morning, the morning after, we’ll expand our hour weekday show to two hours, and we’ll be on from 8:00 to 10:00 Eastern Time.

But right now we begin our show in the battleground state of Georgia, where some polling stations were ordered to stay open later after bomb threats in some heavily Black precincts. We begin our four-hour election special with Carol Anderson, professor of African American studies at Emory University, author of many books, including One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy. Her other books include The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America and White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide.

The percentages are extremely low now of the votes that have been counted, Professor Anderson, and this is what leads to conspiracy theories, because if someone goes to sleep right now and wakes up tomorrow and they hear that Donald Trump is ahead in Georgia, what Donald Trump did last time was say, “See, it was fixed.” In a few minutes, we’ll be going to Robert Reich, the former labor secretary under President Clinton, who talks about the red menace, who talks about the numbers early on tending to favor Republicans, but then they change through the evening. But let’s take a snapshot right now of where we are in Georgia. Why don’t you start off by talking about these death threats that were issued against polling stations, leading to a number having to stay open much longer, particularly in Black areas of Atlanta, Carol?

CAROL ANDERSON: Yes. And so, in Union City, which is a city that is 90% African American, two of the polling stations received those bomb threats. And so, you see that the hours have to be extended because they had to evacuate those facilities. And so, you begin to see the kind of targeting, the kind of sense of if we can delay, if we can stop African Americans from voting, then what we can do is we can flip Georgia back to — back red, because in 2020 Georgia flipped to Biden, so Georgia went blue. And how do you stop that? You stop that through voter suppression. You stop that through intimidation. You stop that through threats of violence.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Professor, in terms of the — you mentioned voter suppression. Your sense of what have been the tactics, especially in a place like Georgia, that have been used over the past few — over the past year or two by those who wish to suppress the vote there?

CAROL ANDERSON: So, you see several things happening. There was a bill called S.B. 202, a new law that came in place right after the 2020 election. And it looked at every method that African Americans had used to access the ballot box, and it created additional obstacles or it shut it down. And so, one of the key methods that they has was they — S.B. 202 allows any individual in a county to be able to challenge an unlimited number of voters’ eligibility. And it then provides that the county board of election only has a limited amount of time in order to deal with those challenges. And so, like in Gwinnett County, you had over 30,000 voters have their eligibility challenged in a very narrow window of time. And so, when county boards of elections are supposed to be handling the election, supposed to be handling gearing up for the election, they have to handle all of these voter eligibility challenges. And so, that’s one of the things. And so, you imagine where you have tens of thousands of voters having their very right to vote being challenged by an unlimited number — with an unlimited number, so you can just see it coming over and over and over.

You had the absentee ballots. The method for asking for an absentee ballot changed. The method for the kinds of documentation you had to have for an absentee ballot changed. And so you will see people who thought that their absentee ballots were OK and then finding out that they weren’t because the methods have changed.

You’ll see that — one of the other things, the out-of-precinct voting. It used to be that if you were voting out of precinct, if you were voting for national offices, then those national offices would count, but your kind of local offices would not. S.B. 202 changed that. And so, out-of-precinct balloting doesn’t count anymore, unless you come in after 5:00 and there’s no way for you to get to where you’ve got — to your actual precinct before 7:00. And so, because there were a number of out-of-precinct ballots that were counted in 2020, and those ballots basically went for Biden, overwhelmingly went for Biden, and so the point was, “OK, if we cut those out, then we can cut out the kinds of access,” because when you take Atlanta, Atlanta sprawls over multiple counties, and the traffic here is no joke. And so, being able to get from work to where you’re supposed to vote is very difficult.

They also curtailed the hours, the days for early voting. And so you just see method after method after method after method designed to kind of constrict, constrain voting. But the thing is, is that there’s a massive ground game here of grassroots organizers who have been working within the communities, a range of communities, in order to overcome these obstacles. And that is, to me, why you’re seeing this massive voter turnout.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Yeah, and despite those suppression efforts, we’re seeing a record mail-in ballots. But you have been driving voters to the polls today. What do you see on the ground especially, and what are you hearing about not just Atlanta but other places like Savannah, as well?

CAROL ANDERSON: OK. So, unfortunately, I wasn’t able to drive folks today. I was planning on it, but the organization said they had their full complement of drivers. So, again, what you’re seeing are people really volunteering, people really stepping up and stepping in to do that work, to make sure that everybody can get to the polls, because after Shelby County v. Holder, which gutted the Voting Rights Act, Georgia shut down over 200 polling places, most of them in Black and poor communities, which increased the distance that people had to go to get to their polling places. And so, one of the things these organizations are doing are figuring out how to get people from their homes, from their residences to the polling place. And so, again, we’re seeing these lines, but we’re seeing people just stepping up and really stepping out to do the work, the heavy lifting of democracy.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk, Professor Anderson, about the Republican leadership of Georgia taking on President Trump as he continues to allege that there’s fraud? He talks about there needs to be paper ballots. In fact, there’s paper ballots almost everywhere in the whole country as backup. He talked about extended hours. He was concerned about this. In fact, it was the Republicans that had called for extended hours. But, of course, the most important thing in Georgia, where he is expected to go on trial soon, if he doesn’t become president again, is what he tried to do in the last election, overturn the election, the famous close to 12,000 votes he asked the Secretary State Raffensperger to find. They’re still there. The secretary of state is the same Republican. So is Governor Kemp. Interestingly, Kemp continues to support him, though he has slammed Kemp.

CAROL ANDERSON: So, I think what you’re seeing is the Republican leadership really on this kind of high-wire act. In so many ways, they are — you know, Kemp signed a six-week abortion ban. And you see the movement for voter suppression, they immediately signed the voter suppression law, S.B. 202, and then a subsequent one, S.B. 189. But when it came to finding the 11,780 votes, that was a bridge too far. And so you saw the Republicans stand up and say, “We’re not doing that.” And you saw Gabe Sterling, who was in the secretary of state’s office, basically saying, “These lies have to stop. We have looked at the film,” hen they’re talking about Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, basically, as Rudy Giuliani said, passing around USB ports as if they’re cocaine and heroin, basically targeting these women and terrorizing them, slandering them, defaming them. So, you saw the Republican leadership saying, “This isn’t happening. The fraud is not happening.”

We had three audits in 2020 here in Georgia, and the tallies lined up. They were so close to what the official counts were. And so, that massive rampant voter fraud, there was no evidence of it. Every time that Trump brought up something about or Giuliani brought up something about all of these people coming in from out of the state, out-of-state voting, or people using PO boxes to vote or dead people voting, every one of those was checked, every one of those was debunked by the Republican leadership. And it’s that high-wire act of, basically, really fully believing in abortion bans, really fully believing in voter suppression, but not believing in Trump’s MAGA craziness, where you see the Georgia Republican leadership trying to find that — not lose their balance on that.

AMY GOODMAN: Just some updates: Josh Stein has won the gubernatorial race in North Carolina, defeating the Republican Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson. And also, in New Jersey, Andy Kim has won the New Jersey Senate seat of Bob Menendez, who was convicted of corruption.

You mentioned abortion, which brings us to our next guest, Michele Goodwin, a professor of constitutional law and global health policy at Georgetown University, founding director of the Center for Biotechnology and Global Health Policy, host of the Ms. Magazine podcast, On the Issues with Michele Goodwin, and author of Policing the Womb: Invisible Women and the Criminalization of Motherhood.

Professor Goodwin, it’s great to see you. We don’t have the final results in by any means yet in the beginning of this four-hour special, and we may know by the end of this four hours, though many predict it could take days or even weeks. But some are saying this night could be the night of women in this country, specifically because of the unprecedented 10 abortion ballot initiatives in — 11 ballot initiatives in 10 states, which could get people out who weren’t planning to vote, and then when they get out there to vote for choice, for reproductive rights, they end up voting for the presidential candidate and down the line. If you can talk about what you think is happening right now around the issue of abortion, where, after Dobbs, a third of the country lives under an abortion ban, though President Trump, deeply concerned about seeing women flee to the Democratic Party now, has said that he would not endorse a federal abortion ban?

MICHELE GOODWIN: Well, this is an unprecedented time. It is an unprecedented day that we have a leading ticket, a major-party ticket, a Black woman, a woman of color, and so that is extraordinary. You’ve referenced what life has been like in the post-Dobbs reality, one that was handcrafted by the former president, who’s taken credit for the overturn of Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey in that Dobbs decision two years ago. The former president said that he wanted to criminally punish women when he was running for office in 2016. He rode that back and said that he was still committed, though not to criminally punishing women, although he’s waffled on that, that he nevertheless would want to overturn Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, and that he would place judges in offices and justices in offices, court, where they would do that bidding. And that’s exactly what has taken shape.

And the landscape has been enormous chaos, pain and misery for women throughout the United States, and girls, too. We have heard of cases of women being airlifted out of Idaho in order to get lifesaving care. There have been women across the American South, which is where the majority of these very restrictive abortion bans are, who have had to flee their states. There are cases of little girls who are now going into elementary school and middle school as parents, as mothers. There have been cases of women who have been gestating deceased fetuses, but their doctors, fearing criminal or civil punishments, refusing to end those pregnancies until a point of delivery. There have been women who have been bleeding in their cars in front of hospitals that refused to serve them. There have been cases of death in Georgia and also in Texas, and very likely in other states, that are directly related to the Dobbs decision.

And I could go on. And, in fact, let me do so, to just help to further paint what the United States looks like and why this issue is important in this election. You have lawmakers in Louisiana and South Carolina that have called for the death penalty against women and their doctors when abortion is terminated. There have been lawmakers that have called for the criminal punishment of women who leave the state. They’ve called for the tracking of women who leave the state. There have been women who have come forward to say that they were in grave medical conditions, and so they needed to leave the states in order — their state in order to get the medical care that they desired, but they made sure that they never used their credit cards, that they made sure that they would only use cash.

And what you see in this backdrop is not only medical horrors that have led to morbidities and mortality, but you also see the crafting of threat and creating an atmosphere of fear, which has now affected medical providers and clinics and hospitals. Some have even shuttered in terms of their maternity wards, where they just won’t practice reproductive healthcare at all out of fear of punishment.

And then you also see this enormous chaos, really a tragedy of human rights in the United States that has unfolded, where the former president has taken credit for it. The Harris campaign has leaned into this. And I will say that it’s not been a lean in that has just been strategic. I happen to have been with the vice president and a group of other scholars before the Dobbs decision was actually announced. She was deeply concerned about what could happen with the possibility that Roe v. Wade could be overturned. And so she has unapologetically then campaigned on this. And with that, there have been doctors, and there have been patients, including some who were anti-abortion but found themselves in crisis situations in states like Tennessee, Texas, Ohio, where there were abortion bans.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Professor Goodwin, there’s also been enormous fightback across the country, even in red states, with these ballot initiatives. The Associated Press reports that proponents of abortion rights ballot measures have raised over $160 million, nearly six times what the anti-abortion groups have raised, to fight these initiatives. What is your hope and expectation for these ballot initiatives tonight?

MICHELE GOODWIN: Well, in 2022, when there were people that were predicting the red tsunami, the red wave, that was the year of Dobbs, but they thought in that midterm election that there was strong support for this very conservative — in fact, it’s not even conservative, it is really off the chart, it’s inhumane — that there would be further support for that. And what I reminded people is that no mother wants to look across the table at her child — or father, for that matter — and think that if that child is raped, that that child should carry a pregnancy to term at the age of 9 or 10 years old. And so, what we see, even in the red states, we see that there are people who understand the realities, that women understand the reality of what a pregnancy is. And 30%, upwards of 30% of pregnancies will end in miscarriage or stillbirth. That’s millennia old. That’s thousands of years. It’s nothing new since Dobbs.

What you find is that there are lawmakers who don’t care about science. They don’t care about health. And they don’t care about women’s health. You find abortion bans that make no exception now for rape or incest, which five years ago would have been thought of as a bridge too far, but has been something that has now been embedded in these anti-abortion laws.

And let me just lay the ground a bit more for our viewers and our listeners. Roe v. Wade was a 7-to-2 opinion. Five of those seven justices were Republican-appointed. Justice Blackmun, who wrote the opinion in Roe v. Wade, was put on the court by Richard Nixon. And this gives us some sense about how far removed Republicans have come on matters of abortion. Even Planned Parenthood v. Casey, which further upheld Roe 20 years after, it was a 5-to-4 decision, and those five justices, all of them were Republican-appointed, who supported maintaining reproductive liberty in the United States.

Prescott Bush, the father of George H.W. Bush, was a treasurer of Planned Parenthood. So, again, one sees just how far this distancing is. And it is a complete disregard for the health, the safety of women and girls. But I do think that what we’ve seen from these ballot initiatives, that there are women, including in conservative states, that are saying that they have had enough, and they don’t support these bans.

AMY GOODMAN: Just a quick update, Florida Amendment 4, which is the right to abortion, yes is leading. And I want to get your comment on this, Professor Goodwin. An estimated 87.8% of votes have been counted, 57.2 — needs 60% to pass, and it’s at 57.2%. Now, this has been very interesting in Florida, Amendment 4, very restrictive abortion ban there. And the governor, DeSantis, has been trying to criminalize, go after, penalize TV stations for running ads for Amendment 4, until the judge said, “Does freedom of speech mean anything to you?” Professor Goodwin?

MICHELE GOODWIN: Well, I’m glad that you mentioned that, Amy, because we have to pay attention to what all of this represents. And that is really it is an attack on democracy. And this attack on democracy includes then the attack on free speech, the ability to be able to speak openly and freely about these matters, the right to be able to associate and to be able to assemble. We see all of those matters coming under attack in this post-Dobbs era.

And we have to able to stitch it together, that when women and people who have the capacity for pregnancy are denied being able to get basic healthcare, and when the Supreme Court has acknowledged — in 2016, in a case called Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt, the United States Supreme Court, our Supreme Court that overturned Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, acknowledged that a woman is 14 times more likely to die in the United States by carrying a pregnancy to term than by having an abortion. And I’ll repeat that. Our Supreme Court, that actually overturn the right to an abortion nationwide, acknowledged that a woman in the United States is 14 times more likely to die when she carries a pregnancy to term than by having an abortion.

And this is what we see reflected in how voters have come forward with regard to these ballot initiatives. We don’t know if it will be a sweep of those 10, where they are all pushing towards reproductive freedom, but the vast majority of them will be. And we’ve also seen how lawmakers in those states have tried to make these referenda far more difficult for voters. And you were just referencing that in Florida, which includes the sitting governor also trying to make it far more difficult for voters to get the information that they need to be informed on these issues.

AMY GOODMAN: And just looking at an AP piece, a federal judge who recently chastised Florida officials for trampling on free speech rights continued to block the head of Florida’s Health Department from taking any more steps to threaten TV stations that air commercials for an abortion rights measure. And again, it looks like it’s just about to hit 60%, which it needs for Amendment 4 to succeed. Michele Goodwin, we’re going to be checking back with you throughout the evening. I want to thank you for being with us, professor of constitutional law and global health policy at Georgetown University, founding director of the Center for Biotechnology and Global Health Policy, author of Policing the Womb: Invisible Women and the Criminalization of Motherhood. But before we end, I wanted to ask you two things. You’re wearing a very large white flower. It’s very beautiful. And I was wondering if it has any particular significance other than simply being beautiful.

MICHELE GOODWIN: Well, thank you for that compliment of this flower. And I do think it’s beautiful, and, of course, white has been the symbol of suffrage. And though many will think about white suffragists, and they certainly are owed their due — we have, dating back more than a century, women being arrested while they’ve attempted to vote. But I also think about Fannie Lou Hamer, who 60 years ago informed our nation about what it was like to be a Black woman in Mississippi and attempting to vote, a state that required Black people to guess how many bubbles on a bar of soap, how many jellybeans in a jar. And she told our nation about what it was like to be dragged off a bus along with other Black women, taken to a jail, beaten unmercifully, including in her head. And she concluded her remarks at the Democratic National Convention, where she shared this — Dr. King passed along the the microphone to her — and she said, “All of this because we want to vote. All of this because we refuse to be second-class citizens.” And I think about that this evening as people are still in line to vote in many of those states that denied Black people, Black women the ability to be able to vote.

AMY GOODMAN: Yes, there are long lines, particularly in Georgia right now, in Pennsylvania, in Philadelphia. In Georgia, they said anyone who’s on the line by 7:00, because the polls closed at 7:00 Eastern, would be able to vote, which could mean hours, outside of the death threats in the polling places that have been continued. And finally, as you talk about history and the historic nature of what is happening today, if Kamala Harris were to win the presidency, she would become the first Black woman president, the first South Asian to be president of the United States, and of course the first woman to be president of the United States. Your thoughts?

MICHELE GOODWIN: Well, it’s a remarkable moment. It’s an opportunity for the United States to truly show leadership. The United States gets credit, some of which may be deserved and some not deserved, in terms of being a democracy. Many of our peer nations have already demonstrated that they can have confidence in women and their leadership, and they’re not insecure about women leading. In our country, we’ve not yet had that moment where women have been able to grab a hold of the presidency. Kamala Harris is the first female vice president of the United States. And so, it will be a day in which we come further into the light of equality, further into the light of our Constitution, holding promises not just for men but also women, too.

I think for many people, we take for granted questions about citizenship. We are still on a march towards full incorporation of women and their citizenship. And when I talk with my constitutional law classes about this, we see this. I mean, the Supreme Court requires that there is the highest degree of scrutiny when there is discrimination based on race. And it turns out you only need a little bit of scrutiny, a medium scrutiny, when it comes to discrimination against women still in these times. And so, we’re still on that march towards full equality, and I think that it is a great sign that the Democratic Party has now put forward two women to lead their candidacy for president, and I think that that is something worth remarking on, as well.

AMY GOODMAN: Also, I don’t want people to think anything is final, because Amendment 4 is at just ahead of 57%, but it has not hit the 60% mark it needs, and so we cannot call it as a victory for abortion rights at this point. But before professor Carol Anderson goes from the battleground state of Georgia, I wanted to put that same question to you that we just asked Professor Goodwin, and that is the historic nature of what is taking place today, and what it would mean if Kamala Harris were to become president.

CAROL ANDERSON: It would mean that the hopes and the dreams of someone like Fannie Lou Hamer, that Professor Goodwin talked about, would come so close to the realization of the democracy that she fought so hard for. It would mean that — it would mean that the dreams, it would mean that the hard work of the civil rights movement would come really close to being realized.

It would mean that this nation has a chance to live into its democracy, because the other thing that I think we really have to be very cognizant of is that we are dealing with two very different visions of America right now in this election. One vision is the kind of hate-filled vision that we saw coming out of Madison Square Garden, that was loaded with racism and misogyny and venom. And the other vision is the one that is about a multiracial, multicultural, multireligious, multiethnic, multilingual democracy that is absolutely vibrant, that plays into the strength of American democracy, that plays into the strengths of the diversity of this nation.

That’s what Kamala Harris’s administration would represent. That’s what her ascendancy to the presidency would represent, that America wants to move forward on this incredible experiment, this incredible gift of a democracy, that is really inclusive, that plays to our strength, that values the richness of this nation, that believes that this isn’t a zero-sum game, that the resources of this nation can empower us to full citizenship. That is what her ascendancy to the presidency would mean.

On the other hand, what a Trump presidency would mean, it would mean Project 2025. It would mean doubling down on racism. It would be doubling down on misogyny. It would be doubling down on misery.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, Professor Carol Anderson, I want to thank you for being with us, again, professor at Emory University, professor of African American studies, author of many books, including One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy.

I do want to update people. It looks like Amendment 4 has failed in Florida. Florida’s abortion rights ballot initiative fell short of passing, leaving in place a six-week abortion ban that’s helped restrict access across almost all of the Southern U.S. The measure’s defeat is a significant victory for Governor Ron DeSantis, who engaged multiple levels of state-sponsored power to oppose it. That’s reading from The Hill newspaper.

This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, “War, Peace and the Presidency.” I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González. We’re joined now by Robert Reich, former U.S. secretary of labor, professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, co-founder of Inequality Media. He writes a newsletter at RobertReich.Substack.com.

As we speak, Donald Trump has taken an early lead in the Electoral College. News networks have called Mississippi, Florida, Tennessee, Alabama, Arkansas, Oklahoma, South Carolina, West Virginia, Kentucky and Indiana for Donald Trump, giving Trump 101 electoral votes. Kamala Harris is the projected winner in Vermont, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Maryland, New Jersey and Connecticut, totaling 49 electoral votes.

Professor Reich, you recently posted a video titled “Beware Trump’s Election Night Trick.” Can you explain what you meant?

ROBERT REICH: Yes. Hi, Amy. It’s very, very nice to talk to you. And, Juan, it’s good to talk to you, as well.

When I posted that video, I was talking about what Donald Trump did in the 2020 election. And that is, he took the early returns, which showed him in the lead, as an indication that he would win, and then the later returns would show that he had lost. He said, “Must be discounted. They couldn’t be real. They were fake. They were a matter of fraud.” And what I wanted to draw people’s attention to is that early returns are very often Republican returns, because they are counted first. They are usually from counties that are either in the country, in the exurbs, or they are sort of easy to count, easier to count, because there are not that many in those districts and those counties. And the later votes and the later counts tend to be more Democratic, because they come from urban areas, where people — there are just many more people to be counted per district, per voting precinct. And the other very important aspect of this is having to do with mail-in ballots. Democrats have been using mail-in ballots to a much larger extent than Republicans, and mail-in ballots also take more time to go through.

So, it’s a mirage to look at the early returns and say that that means a Republican victory, because there is a blue wave that follows that red mirage. And people have to keep that in mind. Donald Trump has given every indication that he is going to do what he did in 2020, and Steve Bannon has even suggested he’s going to do it again. I don’t have any doubt that he will. And that is to declare victory on the basis of this early red mirage.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: But, Robert Reich, regardless of what he claims, the reality still is that a huge segment of the American population continues to support Donald Trump. And I’m wondering: Your sense of why that is?

ROBERT REICH: Juan, I consider that to be the biggest threat to democracy as we know it, because you’ve got 70 to 80 million people who are likely to be voting for Donald Trump despite everything we know and they know about him, about his character, about his temperament, about what he did during his four years in the White House. He is a demagogue. He is not a person who a democracy normally would put in that office. He’s not somebody who America has ever before put in that office, somebody whose character and values are so questionable in a democracy.

Now, Juan, you asked, “Well, why is it that so many people vote for him or voted for him or are likely to have voted for him?” I think it has a lot to do with the fact that the noncollege-educated person in this country — and I’m talking particularly, but not exclusively about men without a college degree — they have basically been ignored by politicians, by the Democratic Party, by much of the elite of this country, by the college-educated, by the flyovers. And I think that there is a deep resentment. When I was labor secretary, even in the early ’90s, I saw many, many people in this country without college degrees who were working harder than ever, playing by the rules, and yet feeling deeply frustrated and angry that they were getting nowhere, because they felt that the big corporations and the wealthy and people who had a lot more power than they had were manipulating the system and rigging it against them. These feelings have only grown over the last 30, 35 years. And I think Donald Trump has rested his entire campaign, in 2016 and again in 2024, on these kinds of feelings, and in 2020.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And I’m wondering what you think of the consistent use of Trump of immigration as — he’s called it at times the issue, yet even the exit polls today don’t indicate that. They suggest — I think it’s about 11% of people consider it their primary issue when they went to vote.

ROBERT REICH: Well, I think that, again, this is the practice of a demagogue to find scapegoats. I mean, the reason that so many people in this country have found it very difficult over the last — certainly over the last 30, 40 years, to get the kind of security and foothold they need — and I’m talking, again, about people without college degrees, who are working harder than ever — has a lot to do with how the economy has been restructured and reorganized over these past 30 or 40 years, by big money, by the moneyed interests. You know, you just connect the dots. Look at Citizens United, the Supreme Court case that opened the floodgates to big money in politics.

The reason that there is so much big money in politics is because big money wants to get a return on their investment in politics. Part of that return is lower taxes on the wealthy. Part of it is, at least until the Biden administration, a kind of rejection of antitrust enforcement. Part of it is rollbacks in regulations. The Biden administration has been, I think, incredibly good on most of these issues. But big money is still trying to rig the game, and many people in this country feel disenfranchised. I think if Kamala Harris wins — let’s hope she wins — I think one of the biggest challenges that she has to face is how to get back into the fold, into shared prosperity, all of these people in this country who feel that they are economically and socially disenfranchised.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to bring Ari Berman into this discussion with former Labor Secretary Robert Reich. Ari is a voting rights correspondent for Mother Jones magazine, his most recent piece, “How Election Deniers Took Over Georgia’s Election System.” He’s also the author of the book Minority Rule: The Right-Wing Attack on the Will of the People — and the Fight to Resist It. So, you talk about election deniers taking over the electoral board in Georgia, and now you have the dozens of threats against these polling places in Georgia. If you can talk about Georgia and then go beyond, Ari?

ARI BERMAN: Well, Amy, there were over 30 bomb threats in Georgia today, many of them at heavily Democratic areas around Atlanta, including heavy Black precincts in Atlanta. This is extremely concerning. The Georgia secretary of state said that at least some of them came from Russians, so that seemed to be, if verified, a clear form of Russian interference in the elections. And sending in things like my bomb threats, that’s a dramatic escalation of election interference. The fact that these bomb threats continued throughout the day, they were happening late into the evening, as people were voting. They had to actually close these polling places. They had to sweep them. People may have left. The polls were extended, but we don’t know if everyone came back.

And this is a state that’s going to be very, very close, Amy, just looking at the results. Georgia is looking as close as it was in 2020. So, we don’t know what the impact of this was. But it looks to me like a form of election interference and potentially a form of targeted voter suppression by foreign actors on Democratic voters in Georgia, and that’s very disturbing to the democratic process.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Ari, what are you — from the early results, what are you looking most at right now?

ARI BERMAN: Well, first off, I was just looking at how voting went, and, by and large, it went pretty smoothly today, although, as I told Amy, there were some major hiccups, for example, in Georgia. But now just it’s looking very, very close. It’s looking not unlike it looked in 2020, in terms of Georgia, North Carolina, these other places.

There has been a shift to the right in Florida. It’s notable that the abortion rights initiative failed, but it still got 57% of the vote, so it wasn’t like there wasn’t majority support for abortion rights in Florida. It was that Florida made it so tough to pass ballot measures with 60%. They basically made it very, very difficult to have direct democracy in that state. Then you also had the Republican governor interfere in an unprecedented way against that ballot measure. So, even though it’s going to be hailed as a defeat for abortion rights, and in practice it is, I think it’s still notable that 57% of the people did vote for it.

AMY GOODMAN: Explain that, that you don’t have to get just a majority of the vote, you need to get 60%.

ARI BERMAN: Well, in all of the states previously where abortion rights was on the ballot before 2024, where it passed in seven states, you only needed a majority support. In Florida, they made it a supermajority, because they don’t want direct democracy to be something that’s able to do very easily. First off, it’s already very hard to get a measure on the ballot in Florida. Then, this supermajority requirement is very, very difficult. It’s basically like the filibuster for ballot initiatives in Florida. That getting 60% is very, very hard. You rarely, rarely see it. Even when you do see it, for example, remember in 2018, Amy, Florida passed a ballot initiative restoring voting rights to people with past felony convictions. That got 64% of the vote, which was remarkable. Then the Florida Legislature gutted it and basically prevented half of those people from being able to vote by putting in essentially a modern-day poll tax. So that eliminated the electorate right there. So, in most states in the country, if 57% of people voted for something, it would become law, but not in Florida, because the democratic process is so constricted in that state.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Ari, I know we talked about this this morning, but maybe a lot of people may not have listened into the show this morning. The whole issue of election deniers sitting on county election boards, not only in Georgia but in other parts of the country, could you talk about that?

ARI BERMAN: Yeah, Juan. There’s nearly 70 election deniers on county boards of elections in the major swing states. There’s 21, and quite possibly more, in Georgia alone. These are the people that are going to be certifying the election results at the local level. So, right now we’re watching the results come in, but that’s just one part of the process. Those results have to be certified to be final. And there’s a lot of worry that if it’s a close election, which it looks like it will be, and if Harris wins these states narrowly, there’s going to be a lot of pressure on Trump’s election denier allies not to certify these election results at the local level.

He is no longer president anymore. That’s the good news. He can no longer put the power of the federal government to lean on people. But what he has done, unlike 2020, is he’s put his own people on many of these election boards, on state boards, on local election boards, to be able to try to weaponize fair election results and to try to block certification of elections if the election is close. And that’s what we’re going to have to watch after tonight in the days moving forward, as there’s deadlines for these states to certify their Electoral College votes and ultimately send it up to Congress.

AMY GOODMAN: And talk about why we are focused — I mean, there are 50 states in the United States. Why are we focused on seven of them? What percentage of the population does these seven states represent?

ARI BERMAN: Well, we’re focused on seven states because of the Electoral College, because these seven prized swing states represent 15% of the country, and they’re the ones that are going to determine who the next president is. That means that 85% of the people really are excluded from participating in a real way in terms of presidential elections. So, the Electoral College violates basic notions of one person, one vote, that all votes should count equally.

And we kind of accept this as a given every four years, that the system is going to work this way, as opposed to asking why. Why is it that the largest places in the country — New York, California — why they’re shut out of mattering? Why is it that if you’re a Republican in New York or you’re a Democrat in Wyoming, nobody ever goes and asks for your vote? Because all that matters are these seven swing states that we obsess over. So, it’s an unfair system. It’s an antiquated system. It’s —

AMY GOODMAN: And it was set up because?

ARI BERMAN: It was set up because the Founding Fathers wanted to restrict democratic participation and because of slavery, that the slaveholders among the Founding Fathers feared that in a free election, the free states would outnumber the slave states. In fact, at the Constitutional Convention in 1787, James Madison, the most prominent Founding Father at the convention, gets up and says, “I would favor the people picking the president, except that I represent a slave state in Virginia. And in a free election, the free states, like Pennsylvania, will outvote the slave states, like Virginia.” So, the Electoral College dates all the way back to slavery, and that’s a history a lot of people don’t realize.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And I’d like to bring — if we can, I’d like to bring in Robert Reich again. You were secretary of labor. The Democratic Party used to be thought of as the party of the working class, as opposed to the Republicans as the party of the middle class and the rich. What would be necessary for the Democratic Party to gain back the support of working Americans?

ROBERT REICH: Juan, I think that the Democratic Party would have to, number one, create ways to achieve prosperity, the American dream, that don’t require a college degree. Right now much of this country is under the — is living under the notion that the only way you can really succeed, financially and economically, is with a college degree. I think that’s absurd.

Secondly, the Democratic Party would have to really support unions and unionization, strengthening unions, to an extent that the party has not done in years. I mean, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, again, to a large extent, did support unions, was on the picket lines, but there has not been legislation — and that’s what’s needed — to make it easier for people to form unions and increase dramatically the penalties on companies for firing workers for trying to form unions.

And I think, thirdly, it’s very important — and again, the Biden administration deserves a lot of credit here — to break up monopolies, which not only charge consumers higher prices, but also keep workers’ wages down, because they have monopoly power to do that. All of these, and I could go on and on, but these are very important initiatives that the Democratic Party has got to take.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to go back to Ari. I know you have to leave in a minute. Ari Berman, you talked about the Electoral College, its roots in slavery. Democracy Now! also focuses on solutions. And talk about the efforts, because it would take too much to actually take it out of the Constitution, what this effort is.

ARI BERMAN: Yeah, you’re right. A constitutional amendment to get rid of the Electoral College would require two-thirds of the Congress and three-quarters of the states, which is a really heavy lift in terms of partisan polarization.

So, the other way to get rid of the Electoral College is the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, which is basically states pledge their winner of their electoral votes to the winner of the popular vote nationwide. And when it reaches 270 votes among state, it goes into effect. Right now that compact is at 209 Electoral College votes, so it needs to get 61 more. But there’s a number of prominent states where Democrats are in control or could take control, places like Michigan, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Wisconsin, that have yet to sign on to it. There’s actually state legislative races up for grabs in not just this election cycle but other election cycles, that could get to that number where you could have 270 electoral votes.

And the interesting thing about the Electoral College is that support for getting rid of it is very bipartisan, Amy. Seventy, eighty percent of Americans want to get rid of it, because it excludes upwards of 80% of Americans. So, even though Republicans feel like it benefits them to have this system, it still excludes a lot of Republican voters. And I think it would be a lot healthier for the country if candidates would campaign all across the country, including in the places where people live, as opposed to only focusing on those seven swing states, which are inundated by so many visits, so many ads, they don’t even want this anymore. So, I hope one of the things going forward from this election is people start thinking about not just why the system is the way it is, but also how to change it.

AMY GOODMAN: And, Ari, before you go, as we hit the top of the hour, what you’re looking at tonight for the rest of this evening, though you won’t be with us?

ARI BERMAN: Well, I’m looking at what’s happening with ballot initiatives in other states, what’s happening with state legislative races in other states, other down-ballot races, and then also just how tight the presidential race is. Right now it’s looking very tight. The tighter it is, the more likely it’s going to be that Trump is going to challenge the results and really try to intensify the “stop the steal” effort. And also, if the results look good for him, I would not be surprised at all if he tries to once again prematurely declare victory, before all the votes are counted in places like Nevada and Arizona, and quite possibly Wisconsin and other states, as well. So, we have to be prepared for that outcome. We have to be prepared for Trump to prematurely claim victory and also for him to dramatically accelerate his efforts to try to overturn the election, if it’s a close outcome, which it’s looking like it is.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, Ari, I want to thank you for being with us. Ari Berman is voting rights correspondent for Mother Jones magazine. His most recent piece is “How Election Deniers Took Over Georgia’s Election System.” Also author of the book Minority Rule.

We’re going to go to a break for a minute, then come back. And Wisconsin has polls that are closing at the top of the hour. We’ll also summarize all the results that we know so far. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.

[End of Hour 1]

AMY GOODMAN: From New York and Chicago, this is Democracy Now! This is the “War, Peace and Presidency” report. We’re doing a four-hour election special until midnight Eastern time. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González. Hi, Juan.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Hi, Amy. And welcome to our listeners and viewers and those who are returning for the second hour.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, it’s 9 p.m. Eastern, and polls are closing in 15 more states. Florida’s Amendment 4, which would have restored the right to abortion, has failed. The latest count shows the amendment received over 58% support but fell just short of the 60% supermajority needed to pass. Despite widespread support for abortion rights among Florida voters, Republican Governor Ron DeSantis has been fighting the measure for months, threatening criminal charges against TV stations for airing ads in favor of Amendment 4, and deploying his so-called election police to question people who signed a petition to put it on the ballot. Another amendment in Florida to legalize recreational marijuana also failed to hit the 60% supermajority threshold, receiving roughly 56% support, according to the latest reporting.

Philadelphia officials have fired back against Donald Trump’s threats on his social media site Truth Social, where he alleged, quote, “A lot of talk about massive CHEATING in Philadelphia. Law Enforcement coming!!!” unquote. Philadelphia is a majority-nonwhite city and Democratic stronghold in a crucial battleground state. This is Philadelphia City Commissioner Omar Sabir responding to Trump’s conspiracy theory about a rigged election.

OMAR SABIR: To be clear, Philadelphia elections are safe, simple and secure, as they have always been. There is no cheating. There’s no smoke to it. People say things, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s true. We have learned this in 2020.

AMY GOODMAN: In North Carolina, Democratic Attorney General Josh Stein has been elected as the next governor, replacing fellow Democrat Roy Cooper. Stein defeated North Carolina Republican Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson, a Holocaust-denying, LGBTQ-bashing, anti-abortion radical. Earlier this year, Donald Trump praised Robinson, who is Black, saying, “I think you are Martin Luther King times two.” But Robinson’s popularity plummeted after CNN reported on his hateful posts on a pornographic website, where he referred to himself as a Black Nazi and expressed support for reinstating slavery. Donald Trump has secured 120 electoral votes so far, with 99 for Kamala Harris. This is according to the Associated Press. It’s still too close to call —

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Yes. We’re going to break for a second while Amy composes herself. Robert Reich, I wanted to ask you, former secretary of labor, what are you looking for as the results come in from around the country in this election? What are you focusing on most?

ROBERT REICH: Well, I’m focusing not only, obviously, Juan, on the presidential race, but also the down-ballot races, particularly the House races. As you know, Democrats have really about four votes they need to flip the House of Representatives. It’s going to be very close, but I think they can do it. I mean, as you look at particularly the races in New York and in California, you see a lot of Republicans who are very, very vulnerable. And that’s one of the particular areas I’m looking at.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Yeah, especially, obviously, control of Congress, the reports have indicated that California and New York could hold the key to Democrats regaining control of the Congress. What are the races that you have most hope for?

ROBERT REICH: Well, up and down New York and California, you’ve got about eight different — eight or nine races where the Republicans are very, very vulnerable. And not only does it give New York and California an opportunity to really be more important — we were talking about the Electoral College before basically ignoring the coasts and ignoring purely Democratic states like California and New York — but the House races give a lot of people in California and New York an opportunity to be heard, not necessarily through the Oval Office, but through the House of Representatives, the People’s House.

Now, on the Senate side, the picture looks a little bit more difficult, because, obviously, many, if not in fact most, of the candidates who are up for reelection, the incumbents in the Senate, are Democrats. We will not see this in 2026, but we do see it, and we have to deal with the mathematics of it in 2024. So I am less optimistic about holding the Senate than I am about regaining control over the House.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank —

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And also —

AMY GOODMAN: Oh, go ahead, Juan.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Oh, Amy’s back. Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to thank you very much for joining us, Robert Reich. It’s great to be able to talk to you. I’m glad we’re doing an evening show so we can get to you, as we broadcast coast to coast and around the world, this four-hour “War, Peace and the Presidency” special. Robert Reich is the former secretary of labor under President Clinton and a professor at University of California, Berkeley.

We’re joined right now by Mehdi Hasan, an award-winning journalist, editor-in-chief and CEO of Zeteo. He, too, is reporting tonight throughout the night on the election.

Mehdi, talk about what you’ve been following so far and the significance of what we know at this point. In fact, I think just as we’re on the air right now, President Trump is expected to win South Dakota. And we’re going to be going to South Dakota soon.

MEHDI HASAN: Well, look, so far, no major surprises. I don’t think anyone is shocked that South Dakota is going to Trump or Kentucky went to Trump or that Vermont went to the Democrats. I think we’re looking at some trends.

The the thing that jumped out to me tonight was the CNN exit poll which put democracy as the number one issue, at the top, for voters, economy at two, abortion at three, immigration at four. That’s not a good sign for Republicans, to have democracy above the economy and to have abortion above immigration. So, we’ll see how that pans out.

I’m seeing people on Twitter saying that Puerto Rican-dominated areas of Florida are not coming out for Trump in the way they did in 2020. Shock, horror, when you run a racist campaign that makes jokes about Puerto Ricans.

So, I think we will wait and see what happens. I long ago, Amy, left the prediction game in 2016, after I thought Brexit wouldn’t happen and Donald Trump wouldn’t win. After that, I said, “I’m never doing predictions again.”

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Mehdi, I wanted to ask you about some non-election news from the Middle East, where Prime Minister Netanyahu has sacked Defense Minister —

MEHDI HASAN: Yeah.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: — Yoav Gallant, and the Israeli military has said they will not allow the residents of the northern Gaza Strip to return to their homes. Talk about the timing of this, Netanyahu doing this while he knows the rest of the —

MEHDI HASAN: Yeah.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: — United States citizenry is involved and focusing on the election.

MEHDI HASAN: Netanyahu is nothing if not an expert on American politics, and he understands the value to himself, the importance of doing this on Election Day, when America is in full naval-gazing mode.

Gallant, the defense minister, very close to the United States administration, very close to his U.S. counterpart Lloyd Austin, to Joe Biden, to Kamala Harris. Let’s just be clear: Some people are reporting this as a moderate removed from the Netanyahu Cabinet, but the Netanyahu Cabinet is so far right that, yes, someone like Gallant looks moderate in comparison, but let’s not forget Yoav Gallant is one of two men in the Israeli Cabinet, the other being Netanyahu, whom the ICC chief prosecutors requested arrest warrants for. Yoav Gallant is the man who, right after October the 7th last year, said, “We’re going to cut it all off — water, electricity, fuel,” referring to people in Gaza as “animals.” So, he is not someone who is moderate by any global definition of that term, but, yes, by the far-right nature of the Netanyahu Cabinet, he’s a moderate.

And it’s interesting that Netanyahu is getting rid of him, because he was the person who was very angrily denouncing Netanyahu in Cabinet meetings for not doing a deal to get the hostages back home. Here in the U.S., we have been lied to by our mainstream media and by the Democrats in Congress and the White House, who say, “Oh, Hamas is the obstacle to a deal, not Netanyahu.” Meanwhile, in Israel, Yoav Gallant is openly saying it’s Netanyahu who’s going to get the hostages killed, the ones who are still left behind. So, it is a major move by Netanyahu, including what he’s doing in northern Gaza, because he knows Americans aren’t paying attention. And even when they do pay attention, they give him a blank check.

AMY GOODMAN: So, Mehdi Hasan, can you talk about Kamala Harris’s position on Gaza and whether you have noticed any difference in her support of arming Israel from President Biden? Ultimately, you endorsed Kamala Harris. Is that right? Though, of course, you are a fierce critic of U.S. policy towards Israel.

MEHDI HASAN: So, I recoil a little bit, Amy, from the endorsement. I never told people to go vote for her. I made it very clear that I cannot tolerate another Trump presidency. America should not have another Trump presidency. The world will not survive another Trump presidency, whether it’s Gaza, whether it’s American democracy, whether it’s migrants, whether it’s climate change. And I’ve been very, very clear about the fact that Donald Trump becoming president again is not something anybody, especially progressive people on the left, should be willing to tolerate.

That said, Harris is someone who I definitely wanted to take over from Joe Biden, and I called for that to happen. I’m glad she did. Biden would have been losing big time tonight. But on Gaza, she’s been bad. Like, there’s no other word for it. She’s been really bad. She’s refused to break with Joe Biden. She’s had multiple opportunities to do so. When she’s asked on TV, “What would you have done differently to Joe Biden?” she says, “Nothing.” When she’s asked, “Can you support an arms embargo?” — or, forget arms embargo, just enforce the law — she’s a prosecutor, right? She’s running as the prosecutor. Well, say you’ll enforce the U.S. law, U.S. Foreign Assistance Act, which says we can’t send weapons to a country which is blocking American aid, which Israel is doing, the Leahy Law, which says you can’t send weapons to a country where the military is carrying out gross human rights abuses, which is what the Israeli military is doing in Gaza and the West Bank. She has refused to do that time and again.

And that has upset a lot of people, including in Michigan, swing state, Arab American voters, Muslim American voters, young progressives. If it costs her Michigan, that will be a tragedy, not to mention an irony, if Donald Trump wins Michigan because Muslim voters were upset with a Democratic administration.

All I can say is I hope that once she is president, if she wins, she will be someone who progressives in the Democratic Party in Congress can pressure to do the right thing. You know, at the end of the day, she’s vice president, right, Amy? You know better than me that vice president has two jobs only: to cast a deciding vote in the Senate and to stay alive. They don’t actually have any power over foreign policy. Hubert Humphrey in 1968 refused to break with LBJ on Vietnam until it was too late. He did it in September, and, you know, it wasn’t enough time to beat Nixon. We’ll see what happens on Gaza. It will be a great tragedy if she loses the election because she wouldn’t budge on Gaza and Donald Trump wins, a man who’s going to be much worse on Gaza, who’s made it very clear that he plans to let Netanyahu do even more killing than Biden and Harris have allowed him to do.

AMY GOODMAN: Mehdi, I —

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Mehdi — Mehdi, I wanted to ask you about a tweet that you released earlier about Elon Musk, the reports of him spending the night at Mar-a-Lago with Trump, receiving the election returns. Musk has spent close to $120 million on a super PAC supporting him. What concerns does this raise about the richest man in the world marshaling his vast reserves in support of Trump?

MEHDI HASAN: Yes. I mean, it’s another great irony of American politics. You have a billionaire, Elon Musk, and a pretend billionaire, Donald Trump, claiming to be the party of working people, claiming to be the party that’s against the establishment, against the machine, even though Trump is all about tax cuts for billionaires. That’s obviously what’s driving part of Musk’s support for Donald Trump, deregulation, tax cuts, but also the nonsensical anti-woke, or, what I would say, reactionary agenda.

Look, American politics has been in trouble for a while. We need to take a long, hard look at our democracy and how broken it is, how dysfunctional it is, you know, the gerrymandering, the Senate filibuster, the Electoral College, which denies the will of the people, has done in the past, in 2016 with Trump, in 2000 with George W. Bush, and of course campaign finance reform, right? Unlimited dark money, the idea that money is speech, that corporations are people — all of this stuff has undermined people’s faith in democracy. The New York Times/Siena College put a poll last week showing Americans do not believe that American democracy is working for ordinary people. They do not have faith in the system. And that is a real problem. That goes beyond Donald Trump. Donald Trump is more of a symptom of that than the cause of that.

And so, I have to I hope that Musk throwing all this money and throwing his weight and his messaging platform Twitter behind one party will remind: This is not how democracy is supposed to work. And the hypocrisy of Republicans claiming to be the party of working people while funded by billionaires like Musk is just so obvious and transparent right now. I hope people will recoil from it.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to ask you about what happened on CNN. I was watching it live when it happened, Mehdi.

MEHDI HASAN: Lucky you.

AMY GOODMAN: It was great to see you there. But you now have CNN banning the right-wing commentator Ryan Girdusky after he told you on air, “I hope your beeper doesn’t go off.” Of course, it was a reference to Israel’s terrorist attack in Lebanon last month that killed 37 people, injured thousands by detonating explosives in personal pager devices. This is your exchange on CNN NewsNight, just a clip of it.

MEHDI HASAN: Nobody wants to be called Nazis. It’s very inflammatory. But if you don’t want to be called Nazis, stop doing —

RYAN GIRDUSKY: You’re called an —

MEHDI HASAN: Stop saying —

RYAN GIRDUSKY: No, no, no. You got called an antisemite more than any of us at this table.

MEHDI HASAN: Stop saying things — yeah.

RYAN GIRDUSKY: And people will sit there and —

MEHDI HASAN: By you?

RYAN GIRDUSKY: No. By me? I never called you an antisemite.

MEHDI HASAN: OK.

RYAN GIRDUSKY: I mean, I’m not sitting here saying I don’t —

MEHDI HASAN: I’m a supporter of the Palestinians, so I’m used to it.

RYAN GIRDUSKY: Yeah, well, I hope your beeper doesn’t go off. The thing is, is that —

MEHDI HASAN: Did you just say I should die?

ASHLEY ALLISON: Oh wow! You should not —

RYAN GIRDUSKY: No.

MEHDI HASAN: Did you just say I should be killed?

RYAN GIRDUSKY: No.

AMY GOODMAN: So, that was just a little excerpt, but afterwards, after the commercial, host Abby Phillip apologized to you, Mehdi, following the incident, and CNN released a statement reading, quote, “There is zero room for racism or bigotry at CNN or on our air.” So, Ryan was gone, but so were you. And Abby Phillip wrote from her dressing room — did a little video that says, “I’m so sorry that Mehdi left. I can’t speak for him. But he should know he is always welcome here.” If you can comment on what happened and also why you left, as well?

MEHDI HASAN: So, I left because I can’t tolerate language like that, violent threats. Look, I’m a pretty thick-skinned person. I think you know that, Amy. You know I love an argument, a debate. I’m not afraid to, you know, throw down with the most right-wing of right-wing people. But even I’m used to racism, sadly. I’m used to racist attacks and Islamophobic tropes. I’m used to all of that. What I’m not used to — and I’ve been doing live television for over 15 years, and I’ve never walked out of live television ever, until Monday night on CNN last week — I’m not used to someone suggesting that I’m a terrorist and I should be killed by Israel live on air and then pretending he didn’t say it. So, that, for me, was a line.

I realized I couldn’t carry on for the rest of the hour. I was supposed to be on for the whole hour on this panel. I walked out. After I walked out, they threw the other guy out, and they asked me to come back. I said, “Look, I can’t come back and talk about climate change or Jeff Bezos or whatever it is. It’s just not in the head space.” And I didn’t want to normalize what happened, Amy. The problem is, too much of this right-wing rhetoric is normalized by liberal media. And some of us have to take a stand. And Ashley Allison was on the panel with me. She took a stand. And I took a stand, because it’s just not acceptable to say that stuff.

And I think it’s very important for us to understand two things. Number one, CNN has kind of brought this on itself, right? They keep booking these MAGA people and saying, “Well, they’re the reasonable MAGA folks.” And then, you know, it happened with Jeffrey Lord. It happened with Rick Santorum. They keep booking right-wing people, they say something insane, then they ban them from the network. Then the right-wing person says, “I’m a victim of cancel culture!” They keep doing it again and again. You know the definition of “insanity.” And that’s a problem.

And number two, why it was so telling a week before the election is it was a reminder, Amy, that these people are not even in power yet, and look how emboldened they are. The fact that that guy could come on the air with this preplanned line — it wasn’t spontaneous — that he thought he could say that and get away with it tells you how much racism and fascism has been unleashed in the American political media diet. And if they win tonight, if Trump wins tonight, God help us all. How many people out there in your local grocery stores, at your subway stations, at your kid’s school gate will feel emboldened to say outrageously racist or misogynistic things to our faces?

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Mehdi, I’m wondering — my concerns I’ve expressed on the show repeatedly is, in the coming days, if Trump does not prevail in the vote, the real possibility of more January 6th-type events across the country in different states and election boards. I’m wondering if you have thoughts about that, as well.

MEHDI HASAN: I’m with you, Juan. I’ve been warning for a while that this election season will, sadly, be marked by violence of some shape or form, because if they lose, then, yes, they’re going to do January 6th on steroids. They’re not going to tolerate being defeated by the Democrats, being defeated by a Black woman. They’ve made that very clear, that they don’t accept any result that doesn’t have them winning. There’s a lot of angry people on that side. There’s a lot of people with guns on that side. There’s a lot of people believing conspiracy theories online on that side. We’ve seen this movie before.

And if he wins, God help us all, we know that when liberals or leftists or progressives go out to protest, Donald Trump is going to very happily put the military on the streets. His team have talked openly about the Insurrection Act. He famously asked Mark Esper, his defense secretary, during the George Floyd protests, “Why can’t you shoot them? Shoot them in the legs.” So, that is Donald Trump. Political violence is part of who he is. It’s part of the appeal he has to his followers. And it’s part of why the rest of us feel so threatened by the idea of a Trump presidency that we keep saying he is not a normal Republican, he is not a normal conservative, this is not a normal candidate. This is someone who his own chief of staff, his own top general, Mark Milley and John Kelly, have said is a fascist, meets the definition of fascism. And that is what is on the ballot tonight.

AMY GOODMAN: Mehdi Hasan, I want to thank you so much for being with us, award-winning journalist, editor-in-chief and CEO of the new news organization Zeteo. Thanks so much for being with us.

MEHDI HASAN: Thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, “War, Peace and the Presidency.” Networks have projected Donald Trump has now secured 177 Electoral College votes to Harris’s 99. The states of Texas and Ohio have just been called for Trump. Polls have closed in the seven battleground states, but the races are too close to be called. The former president has also won South Dakota, where we go right now.

We’re joined by Nick Tilsen, founder and CEO of NDN Collective. He is joining from Rapid City, South Dakota. NDN Collective issued a very powerful statement today. It did not endorse Kamala Harris. If you can talk about your position, Nick Tilsen? Also talk about Trump taking your state of South Dakota.

NICK TILSEN: Well, I think our — I mean, our position is really about, as we organize to build power here in our communities and around the country, we recognize that no matter who’s president, that we are — that our voting is an act of selecting who our opponent is. And we’re in a historic moment and election here, where democracy is at stake. But also, democracy is at stake on both sides of the ballot, too, because we’re seeing political and legal repression coming from both sides.

And of course it’s far worse under, you know, a Trump administration than it is under a Harris administration, but we’re also recognizing that in this moment there’s a genocide happening here. And over and over and over, as different political leaders reached out to try to say, “We want the Indian vote,” we’ve said, “We want a stop. We want to see a ceasefire in Palestine. And we want to make sure that our solidarity with the Palestinian people is clear.” And quite frankly, all of the political leaders have become tone deaf to that. And so, you know, we wanted to release a statement that was very much founded in our values of who we are as Indigenous people in this historic moment, and that’s exactly what we did.

And, you know, with Trump winning South Dakota, that was expected. You know, this is a very racist, racist state here. You know, you can expect things in South Dakota to be happening like they are in other places. You know, we’re 10% of the population here in South Dakota but make up 51% of the people that are incarcerated here. That’s the kind of state we’re in, and that’s the kind of state that just voted for, you know, Donald Trump.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Nick, how have Native communities organized and plan to continue their work, no matter what the outcome of this presidential election?

NICK TILSEN: Well, I think that we have to continue organizing around very important issues, issues like calling for a ceasefire in Palestine and Gaza, also continuing to call for the return of Indigenous lands back into Indigenous hands, because that changes our positionality, because throughout the creation of America and the creation of this so-called democracy, this entire country was built on the stolen lands of Indigenous people. And there’s a very ripe movement right now. You know, the Land Back movement is the Red Power movement of this generation. And that movement has to have the ability to go beyond electoral politics and beyond just administrations.

And, you know, you see things like the apology that was just made from President Biden for its treatment of Indian people in the boarding schools. Well, an apology like that on behalf of the United States government to Indian people has to also transcend four-year cycles. For that repair to happen with our people, we have to be in this for the long — in the long haul, and so we have to continue to organize. And when we do vote, we need to recognize that voting is a tactic. We’re not voting for a leader that represents us, because there will never be a leader that truly represents us in the White House. We’re organizing as a tactic, as an extension of organizing and building power for our people.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about Leonard Peltier, in prison in Florida now going on how many years? We’re talking about almost half a century, is that right, Nick?

NICK TILSEN: Almost 50 years Leonard Peltier has been incarcerated, currently in Coleman prison in Florida. He is 80 years old. And he is a boarding school survivor. And he’s the longest-living incarcerated Indigenous political prisoner in American history. And so, you know, even here on election night, we hold Leonard Peltier in our prayers. And even in this transition of leadership that will be happening, we are calling for executive clemency to President Biden for Leonard Peltier, to release him. And that would be one of the ways that President Biden can deliver a win to Indian people, is to release Leonard Peltier, to recognize what this country has done to him. These are issues that we deeply, deeply care about. And so, we have to reconcile the past in order for us to move forward. And I really don’t want those issues, like Leonard Peltier or Land Back or what happened with the boarding schools, to be erased or ignored or be invisibilized in the time of an election.

AMY GOODMAN: You know, we talked about this when you were on Democracy Now!, but I asked President Clinton on Election Day 2000, when Gore was running against Bush, when Clinton was still president, if he would be granting clemency or a pardon to Leonard Peltier, and he said he was weighing it. That was almost a quarter of a century ago. And as you said, while today is Election Day, President Biden remains president through, you know, the third week into January.

NICK TILSEN: We will be pushing — you know, we will be pushing all the way 'til January 20th. We'll be pushing all the way 'til the inauguration, you know, asking President Biden to give executive clemency to Leonard Peltier. And we're asking our allies, and we’re asking our accomplices and people all throughout this country, that after this election, we need to think about pivoting towards justice. You know, we have been consumed by this election, and rightfully so. But day one of this administration, we also have to be thinking about how we hold the next administration accountable. And I think that one of the fundamental things that we have to say is, day one of the next administration, we want to see a ceasefire in Gaza. And we want to make sure that we begin to prioritize the human rights of the Palestinian people, because that actually strengthens our democracy if we make decisions like that, rather than to continue to support authoritarianism and white supremacist countries like the state of Israel.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, Nick Tilsen, we want to thank you so much for being with us. Nick Tilsen is Oglala Lakota, founder and CEO of the NDN Collective, joining us from Rapid City, South Dakota. And ending where we began, the statement that NDN put out, “As Indigenous Peoples, we are the living histories and testaments that settler colonial goals for extermination have never ended, and this government continues to negatively impact the well-being of our Peoples and the health and sustainability of Mother Earth.”

This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, “War, Peace and the Presidency.” I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González. We turn now to Puerto Rico for an update on a story we’re following about the election there. On Sunday, an estimated 50,000 people attended a rally organized by the center-left coalition known as Alianza, or Alliance, ahead of today’s election. The third-party coalition has gained momentum with Puerto Rican voters disaffected with the two main parties over corruption scandals, austerity policies and the disastrous privatization of the electrical grid. Alianza’s gubernatorial candidate Juan Dalmau addressed the crowd. Now we have an update on his race from Juan Carlos Dávila, Democracy Now!’s correspondent in San Juan, Puerto Rico.

Juan Carlos, it’s great to have you with us. Can you tell us what’s happening right now in Puerto Rico?

JUAN CARLOS DÁVILA: So, right now what is happening is that there’s still not a clear winner of the election. Right now, as we speak, there’s a press conference going on, led by the Puerto Rican Independence Party, where the candidate for governor, Juan Dalmau, is speaking to the press. Right now Juan Dalmau is in second place, trailing behind Jenniffer González, the current resident commissioner of Puerto Rico, trailing behind about 9%. She has around 40% of the vote, and Juan Dalmau has around 31% of the vote at this moment. But Juan Dalmau is still not conceding the election. He is still waiting for more votes to be counted.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Juan Carlos, there were questions about irregularities at the polls today. Could you talk about that and efforts to shut out other observers from other political parties?

JUAN CARLOS DÁVILA: Yeah, certainly. So, one of the main issues that was observed during the election, it was especially that the electronic system of the machines were not working properly, so people were having a tough time entering the ballots for it to be read. And when they — and sometimes they needed to do it more than once. And many times, the system, the machines shut down, and they needed to reboot the system. And there were only one machine per each classroom where the — you know, most of this is happening in schools, in classrooms, the election. So, in the classroom that is divided with the electoral center, there was one machine per classroom, so the process was really slow.

What has been questioned is that in many instances the people that represent the two main party system, the Popular Democratic Party and the New Progressive Party, they were asking people, when it was not being read, that when the machine did not read the ballot, that they would take care of it. But people did not trust them and wanted to stay until the machine read their ballot. But there’s a lot of moments when that is observed, when actually some of the people from these two main parties wanted to keep the ballots, saying that they would bring it all later, but there was [inaudible] trust in that.

There’s also some claims about — with older people, that some representatives of these two parties in the electoral centers are trying to guide them, guide the older voters in a way to manipulate and influence that they don’t vote for the Alianza. So, also, some of these have been said in social media.

But perhaps the most major development lately in regards to this, it was a ruling by a judge that happened just yesterday about how now the New Progressive Party, which is the administration in power, could count — could count absentee and early votes on their own, without the need of a balance, which means that other people from other — that one representative from each party should be present on the counting table, and now the judge that was submitted this petition by the New Progressive Party determined that the New Progressive Party can count the votes on their own. And this has sparked some movement from some supporters of the Alianza, who are going to these centers where these votes are being counted to participate as observers to make sure that the New Progressive Party is not in the table by themselves.

And also, there’s been — finally, there’s been also other issues regarding to the machines, because just three days before the election, they changed what they were telling the people, that they should make a cross mark for the candidate they were voting, and now they say that they needed to make — to, like, paint the entire block where they are going to be casting the votes, because the machines were having problems reading the process.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Juan, the importance of a third-party candidate for the first time breaking the stranglehold of the two major parties? As you mentioned, Jenniffer González, the pro-statehood person, is also a fervent Trump supporter?

JUAN CARLOS DÁVILA: Yeah, certainly, it is important, because it is inspiring a lot of hope that change could be happening in Puerto Rico. But there’s also still the problem of the fiscal control board in Puerto Rico, that how much a governor from a third party, like Juan Dalmau, could actually do when there’s a fiscal control board. And beyond that, it doesn’t seem like the Alianza could get the majority of legislative seats. What I’m referring is to the Senate and the House of Representatives in Puerto Rico. So, he would be governing without a majority of the legislative system. So, obviously there’s hope, a lot of hope around Juan Dalmau’s figures, but also, if he would get elected, there’s a lot of challenges, like the fiscal control board and not having the Puerto Rican Legislature decide.

AMY GOODMAN: Before you go, Juan Carlos, I wanted to ask you about the response to the Madison Square Garden rally and the comments that Puerto Rico is a “floating island of garbage,” how people there have responded. But also, for people to understand that the people of Puerto Rico, though U.S. citizens, cannot actually vote for president of the United States, is that right? Only Puerto Ricans in the continental United States can vote. It sounds like we just lost Juan Carlos Dávila. But, Juan, why don’t I put that question to you? I mean, it’s amazing. Like, right now we’re looking at Pennsylvania, a very close race, but it has an enormous number of Puerto Ricans in places like Allentown, that Kamala Harris just addressed yesterday, what, 450,000 Puerto Ricans. And who can — which Puerto Ricans can vote, and which can’t?

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Yes, no, you have to be — you have to be a resident of one of the 50 states to be able to vote. Those in Puerto Rico, the 3.2 million people, which represents a population probably bigger than about 20 states in the union, cannot vote for president. They can’t vote for United States Senate. They only have a vote for one, what’s called a resident commissioner, who sits in the House of Representatives and cannot vote in the House of Representatives but can sit on committees and can speak on committees. So, yes, the Puerto Ricans on the island continue to be disenfranchised in that sense. Of course, Puerto Rico is a separate country, even though it’s a U.S. territory. But the reality is that the only way a Puerto Rican can vote is if they move to the United States, anywhere from California to Pennsylvania, Illinois or New York, and become a resident there. Then they can vote.

AMY GOODMAN: And could determine who’s president of the United States right now from the continental U.S., from what? From Pennsylvania, from Wisconsin, from Michigan. New Jersey has over 400,000 Puerto Ricans, right? Wisconsin —

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, in total — 

AMY GOODMAN: — 61,000.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: In total, Amy, there are — in total, Amy, there are 5.8 million Puerto Ricans living in the continental United States. That’s about twice the Puerto Rican population on the island, and it’s been increasing over the years. So, really, the real sort of political power of the Puerto Rican people is in the United States, not in Puerto Rico.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, we want to thank Juan Carlos Dávila, Democracy Now! correspondent, for joining us from San Juan.

But right now we’re going to give you a short summary of the latest news on this historic election night. Networks have projected Donald Trump has now secured 177 Electoral College votes to Harris’s 99. The states of Texas and Ohio have just been called for Trump. Polls have closed in the seven battleground states, but the races are too close to call. The former president has also won South Dakota.

We’re going to turn right now to John Nichols, The Nation's national affairs correspondent. His recent articles include “When Iowa Is Up for Grabs on Election Day, Anything Can Happen” and “Trump's Not the Only Top Republican Whose Fascism Is Showing.” He’s joining us from the battleground state of Wisconsin, whose polls have just closed in the last hour.

John, can you tell us the latest about what’s happening in Wisconsin, and also respond to Trump taking Ohio, and what that means for the most expensive Senate race in the country — right? — $400 million poured into the Sherrod Brown race?

JOHN NICHOLS: So, let’s begin with that Wisconsin race. And we don’t have enough to tell you where Wisconsin’s going right now. But what I can tell you is that in the exit polls that have come out — and that’s the baseline of stuff, not something that’s necessarily definitional — there is evidence that suggests that Donald Trump has run better than expected in the Black vote in Milwaukee. If that is the case, that is very significant, because Milwaukee is often a big decider in our elections, often comes in very, very late and often delivers a big boost to the Democrats. I would caution against overassessing that, because in an exit poll like this, you’re talking about a relatively small number of people. I don’t think it’s definitional, but I do think it’s something you keep an eye on. There is some evidence around the country and in Wisconsin that Donald Trump is running a little bit better than expected in some demographics that I think people had assumed he wouldn’t do so well in.

Interestingly, on the flip of that, in the exit polling at least, Kamala Harris looks to be running a little better among women in general. And that’s very significant. Why we’re cautious about all this, Amy, is because Wisconsin is a state that in the last six presidential elections has seen four of them decided by under 25,000 votes. And I have to tell you that as I look at the data as it’s coming in right now, it looks as if we could end up there again with a very close result. That is not assured. You know, we’ve got to get a little bit more in. But what I can tell you is it does look like it could be close.

I can tell you that Dane County, the very Democratic county around Madison, has had an extremely high turnout. That’s going to ultimately be very significant for Kamala Harris and the Democrats. I can also tell you that in much of the rest of the state, turnout’s been very high. End result is it’s going to be a long night from Wisconsin, I think. And what’s going to make it a little longer is they had a problem with counting the absentee ballots in Milwaukee. It was not a, you know, terrible thing. It was some sort of glitch with the machine. But they’re going to have to recount them all. And that means that Milwaukee County, which in 2020 and in our 2018 gubernatorial election were definitional — in both of those counties, or, in Milwaukee County, in both those elections, Milwaukee decided the election, right? When it came in late, it told you the result. We may not get Milwaukee ’til 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning or even later.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, John, about Ohio and the race for Sherrod Brown, what are you seeing there?

JOHN NICHOLS: I’ve been watching it really closely. And if I’m looking down here, it’s only because I’m looking at just the latest numbers right in front of me. And those numbers have, with 62% reporting, Bernie Moreno, who is the Republican candidate, he is ahead by several percentage points. Now, there’s still a lot of the vote out in Ohio, and as we look at where the vote has come from, there is space for Sherrod Brown to make that up. But I want to emphasize to you here, it is tougher for Sherrod Brown than I expected. And he is in a vulnerable spot right now. When you’re down four points with 62% in, you know, every additional percentage point that comes in, you’ve got to make up space.

And so, Sherrod Brown, I have covered him for decades. He is a brilliant campaigner. He will definitely run ahead of the Democratic ticket. I would virtually assure you of that. It’s just a question of: Can he run far enough ahead? And this is something we have to look at tonight. In all of these Senate races that are competitive, if Donald Trump does better than expected in red states that have Democratic senators — that’d be like Montana, Ohio, a couple other places that are very close, Wisconsin, Michigan — if Trump does better than expected, that then means that those Democratic Senate candidates have to get a lot of Trump votes. They have to actually get people who checked a ballot for Donald Trump and then come over and check a ballot for the Democrat for the Senate.

In Montana, for Jon Tester, we’re going to see that later in the evening. But that’s a tough thing, right? It’s tough to climb that hill if Trump has a big win. This is the challenge with a substantial early declared victory for Trump in Ohio. It means that he’s doing pretty well there. If he is in fact doing pretty well, that makes Sherrod Brown’s hill taller. So what I’m telling you right now is that Sherrod Brown is in a tough race. And it is possible — I’m certainly not saying that it will — it’s possible he could lose. If Sherrod Brown loses his race, and if Jon Tester loses his race in Montana, and already West Virginia has been declared as a Republican win, you’re in a situation where it’s almost certain that the Republicans will control the Senate.

AMY GOODMAN: And AP is reporting Angela Alsobrooks has defeated Larry Hogan — 

JOHN NICHOLS: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: — the former Republican governor, in the Maryland Senate race to fill Ben Cardin’s seat. So, that would be a — that’s Angela Alsobrooks, who would be a Democrat replacing a Democrat. But we also have this news that’s just breaking, and that is that the Delaware state Senator Sarah McBride won Delaware’s only House seat. NBC News is projecting this win, making her the first openly transgender person elected to Congress. The significance of this, John?

JOHN NICHOLS: It’s very significant. It means our politics is opening up, right? That we are seeing people who really look like all of America getting elected in different places, right? Wins that might have been unimaginable a few years ago, now happening. And Delaware is a very Democratic state. She was the Democratic candidate. She ran a very, very good campaign. And so, at the end of the day, you’re seeing real progress here in America.

But I will counsel — I will counsel that what we’re seeing tonight around the country, I think, is a pattern of results that kind of fit our states, right? That states that are a little more progressive, a little more Democratic, are in fact producing wins for Democrats. States that are more Republican producing wins for Republicans. We’re not seeing a breakout pattern on congressional races so far. And that is significant. That’s something that we are going to have to keep an eye on as the night goes on.

AMY GOODMAN: Sarah McBride won in Delaware. And I wanted to go to your own state of Wisconsin with Tammy Baldwin versus Eric Hovde — Eric Hovde, the multimillionaire who has been going after Tammy Baldwin as an LGBTQ person, as a lesbian — I mean, she’s totally open and out about that — but has made it sort of the centerpiece of his ad campaign against her, John.

JOHN NICHOLS: Yes. Look, the Wisconsin race has been one of the ugliest races that I’ve seen. And I’ve been in Wisconsin for a very long time. And so, I will tell you that what I have seen in this race is a campaign where Tammy Baldwin started out in a very strong position. She’s a popular — was a, has been a popular senator, a very hard-working, effective senator. But so much money came in for such an ugly campaign against her. And basically, what the ads in Wisconsin said was, look, Tammy Baldwin is — she’s an out lesbian. She has a partner who lives in New York who is involved in finance. And basically, the ads on TV, you know, had lines like, “She’s sleeping with Wall Street,” and things like that. And, I mean, it was — it had pictures of her partner up. Now, the fact of the matter is that many people have partners who work in some industry or another industry, and sometimes in politics that comes up as an issue. But this campaign was run in a very, very profoundly ugly way. It does appear that Hovde, toward the end, clearly closed the gap. He got closer to Baldwin. And last polls had Baldwin a little bit ahead.

My sense is that Baldwin can win this race, and she will probably — A, I think there’s a chance, good chance perhaps, that Harris can win Wisconsin. But there is a likelihood that Baldwin runs a little ahead of wherever Harris runs, similarly to what we were talking about with Sherrod Brown and other people around the country. And so, at the end of the day, my sense is that Hovde’s campaign may not succeed. But I will strongly emphasize to you, this has been one of those races that tells us a whole lot about what’s happening in our politics. And that is that the movement of massive amounts of money into a state from outside — Hovde financed much of his own campaign, but he also just had massive amounts coming in from super PACs associated with Mitch McConnell and others. That really had an impact. There’s simply no question.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: John — John, if I could interrupt? Because we just have about —

JOHN NICHOLS: Yes.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: — about a minute. But I wanted to ask you, toss to you the same question I asked Robert Reich. The Democratic Party has always touted itself as the party of working people, but more and more blue-collar, non-college-educated people have been gravitating to Trump. Why is that, and what could be done about it?

JOHN NICHOLS: Well, I mean, you talk about — maybe spend a little more time talking about economics. I would love to spend a whole show with you two talking about my deep frustration with the Democratic campaign this year, because I was very impressed by a lot of what they did. They did a lot of very effective things, etc., etc. But they didn’t talk about some fundamental economic issues. Kamala Harris and, you know, all of these Senate candidates, all of them, they should have been talking about growing unions in every speech. They should have been talking about what that means and about the structural realities that relate to that. They should have been talking about what Shawn Fain of the UAW talks about all the time, which is that Trump, when he was president, restructured NAFTA and made it worse. He made our trade policies worse for working-class people. Shawn Fain and the UAW referred to “Trump’s NAFTA.” Did you hear the Democratic candidates making that central to their speeches every time, one after another? No, you didn’t.

And so, one of the things that I think is really important here is that for the working class of this country, multiracial, multiethnic working class, for that working class, you do have to have a message that speaks directly to how you raise them up economically, how you make their lives better, and about fundamental issues that concern them.

At the heart of that, I believe, is an explaining of what you’re running on, why you’re running on it, getting much clearer that you are running against the billionaire class. I will note that tonight, I think — I hope I’m right about this — the first Senate race declared in the country, and a huge victory, was for Bernie Sanders in Vermont. Now, I know Vermont is now seen as a pretty liberal state, but it has a Republican governor, and historically, until recent decades, it was a pretty Republican state. Again, I know it’s a more liberal state now, but the fact is that Bernie Sanders has been up there speaking as an open democratic socialist, talking about economics, being very, very clear on this, and, you know, he’s won reelection without a blink of the eye. And the fact of the matter is, he also had time during his campaign to go out across the country. I saw him last Monday in Madison, Wisconsin, where he filled the hall, along with AOC, talking about fundamental economic issues. And people were — you know, they were connected to it. They understood it. So —

AMY GOODMAN: John?

JOHN NICHOLS: Yes?

AMY GOODMAN: We have to leave it there for now. We want to thank you so much for being with us. We’re also going to be talking to you in our extended special tomorrow morning, 8:00 to 10:00 Eastern Time. John Nichols, The Nation's national affairs correspondent, author of more than a dozen books, including his latest, co-written with Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, whose just been reelected, titled _It's OK to Be Angry About Capitalism_.

This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, as we go to Orlando, Florida, to speak with Manuel Ivan Guerrero, an 18-year-old freshman at University of Central Florida, climate organizer with the Sunrise Movement.

It’s great to have you back with us. If you can — the last time we talked to you, you were dealing with this devastating hurricane. If you can talk about — we don’t know who’s going to win yet, Kamala Harris or Donald Trump, but what that means to you as a climate activist, Manuel?

MANUEL IVAN GUERRERO: Honestly —

AMY GOODMAN: In this first election that you’ll be voting.

MANUEL IVAN GUERRERO: This is my first election. And on a statewide level, it’s been extremely disheartening. Florida has had a lot of big losses tonight. We already — the right to fish and hunt, which is a very anti-climate bill, has just passed as an amendment in the state. And abortion has just lost — the right to an abortion has just lost in the state of Florida, as well as nationally.

Us, as the Sunrise Movement, we’ve done a lot of work surrounding the election. We’ve called 4 million — we’ve contacted 4 million voters through phone banks and text banks and canvasses, encouraging people to vote strategically against Donald Trump and for Kamala Harris, because Trump is our worst-case scenario. The climate change movement — the climate crisis under Trump is going to be a disaster. And we need to choose the environment which we want to organize under, and frankly, as much as I don’t like to say it, that is Kamala Harris’s presidency, if she wins.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And what are your — with the election today, what did you see in terms of turnout by young people?

MANUEL IVAN GUERRERO: Here in Florida, the turnout has been very, very large on behalf of young people. Here at my own campus, on my college campus, there has been a 147% turnout from the amount of students that go to this college to the amount of people that actually turned out to vote, which means that a vast majority of the people who go to school here have voted. And that is consistent across all of the major college campuses in the state of Florida. And that is very consistent throughout the country. This election is decided by young people. We are the voice that is making this election possible. And Kamala Harris can’t win without us. This election is going to be decided by the youth vote.

AMY GOODMAN: And do you think she was successful in reaching out to Gen Z, to you?

MANUEL IVAN GUERRERO: I do think that she had a lot of shortcomings when it came to her campaign reaching out to Gen Z, especially on an international level, as well as on the climate crisis. She has not addressed the climate crisis as much as we would like to, although we have had a few wins, such as her including the climate crisis into one of her plans earlier in the year. And in general, it’s been a very mixed bag. And no matter what, we need to continue fighting once the election happens, because we don’t trust Kamala Harris to listen to us about the climate crisis. We only fight for her because she’s the environment we want to organize under, not because we want her particularly.

AMY GOODMAN: Manuel, we only have a minute. We talked to you after — I can’t remember if it was Hurricane Milton or Hurricane Helene. But how have the recovery efforts gone in Florida? And are people making the connection to climate change?

MANUEL IVAN GUERRERO: We’ve been very much emphasizing the connection. We went down, and we had a protest right after Hurricane Helene, and then Hurricane Milton hit. And frankly, the hurricane relief efforts have been pretty successful in terms of, like, getting people back on their feet. Lots of relief efforts are still going on at the moment. We’re still distributing food. Lots of our partner organizations, Florida Student Power, are still holding food distributions down in more affected areas, in Sarasota and [inaudible] and areas like that. And in general, people have been making that connection. That connection is being very much reinforced in the state of Florida. And we’re hoping to see that, if not now, then in the future.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, Manuel Ivan Guerrero, we want to thank you very much for being with us. And congratulations on voting for the first time in this election as an 18-year-old freshman at the University of Central Florida, a climate organizer with the Sunrise Movement.

We’ll be back with our election night special in a minute. We’re continuing through midnight. This is “War, Peace and the Presidency.” As we cover the latest news at the top of the hour, we’ll summarize everything we know at this point for both the presidential race, Senate races, congressional races and ballot initiatives around the country. We’re going to start off by talking to Texas Congressmember Greg Casar. I’m Amy Goodman, here with Juan González. I’m in New York, he’s in Chicago. This is Democracy Now!

[End of Hour 2]

AMY GOODMAN: From New York, this is Democracy Now! This is “War, Peace and the Presidency.” We’re halfway through our four-hour special. I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh, here in New York.

It’s 10 p.m. on the East Coast. Polls have closed in Montana, Nevada and Utah. In Delaware, Democrat Sarah McBride has been elected the first openly transgender congressmember in U.S. history, defeating Republican John Whalen. She has vowed to address criminal justice reform, abortion rights and gun violence, among other issues.

In reproductive rights news, ballot measures protecting abortion access have passed in Maryland and New York. They’ve failed in Florida.

As the latest results are coming in, a review of the presidential race so far this evening, Donald Trump has won at least 188 Electoral College votes to Harris’s 99. So far, Trump has carried most of the Southeast, with North Carolina and Georgia still counting ballots. Kamala Harris has clinched most Northeastern states and Illinois. Trump’s also won the Dakotas, Nebraska, Wyoming, Montana, Utah, Ohio and Texas. Trump has also won Florida handily, where he lives, becoming the first Republican presidential candidate since 1988 to win Miami-Dade County. Decision Desk HQ has called North Carolina for Trump. Other news agencies have yet to call that race.

In Maryland, Prince George’s County Executive Angela Alsobrooks, a Democrat, defeated former Maryland Governor Larry Hogan in the Senate race, keeping the seat Democratic.

We now go to Austin, Texas, where we are going to be joined by a congressmember, Congressmember Greg Casar. Donald Trump has won Texas, but the Senate race between Senator Ted Cruz and Congressmember Colin Allred for Cruz’s Senate seat remains too close to call. Congressmember Greg Casar is a Democrat from Texas, whip of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, labor organizer and son of Mexican immigrants.

Congressmember Casar, we welcome you back to Democracy Now! Can you talk about what’s happened in your state, President Trump taking the state? But the Senate race, all eyes are on this Senate race between Allred and Cruz, still too close to call.

REP. GREG CASAR: Thanks so much for having me on on such a critical night.

And for my entire lifetime, we haven’t seen a Democratic president win Texas, but Texas keeps getting closer and closer every time. Texas isn’t a red state or even a blue state. It’s just an underorganized state, where so many people are sick of politics, have checked out and need to have their door knocked on, need a real person to talk to them and talk to them about how we can actually make a difference in their lives. And that’s what so many on-the-ground organizers have been doing.

And frankly, if there had been the investment from the national Democrats for the last six years, I think that Colin Allred would be ahead of Ted Cruz right now. But right now the race is very close, with some of the voting results that I’m seeing having Colin a bit behind.

But what I think is so important for the Texas story is that the vast majority of people in the state don’t vote. You know, of registered voters, we have a majority that vote, but it’s still not even a very great majority. And so, I think that’s part of what’s important for folks to know back at home.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, Congressmember, could you explain why is that the case? Why is, as you say, Texas underorganized? And why don’t so many people in Texas vote?

REP. GREG CASAR: We’re a big state. And unlike other battleground states, I talk about Texas as the biggest battleground state in the country. But unlike other battleground states, we do not have the level of organizing infrastructure. There’s been a multidecade-long campaign to crush labor unions and their power in this state. The Democratic Party oftentimes has treated Texas as an ATM to pull money out of rather than invest long-term organizing money into. And so, I deeply appreciate the way that organizers and the Democratic Party have come together in states like Georgia, like Nevada, like Wisconsin, where there’s multiple floors’ worth of organizers in most of the major metropolitan areas working to get out the vote. We just don’t have that level of investment in Texas.

And so, when Ted Cruz didn’t even get 51% of the vote six years ago, that’s when we thought that the national Democratic Party would wake up and invest adequate resources in Texas. But we didn’t see that. In the last couple of months, suddenly there’s been interest again that’s put more wind behind Colin Allred’s sails. He’s been working really hard. Everybody’s been working hard for him. But our hope is that after this election cycle, come what may, we finally start treating Texas just like the other battleground states. And I think that’s what would make a real difference and have Republicans finally lose the state in the coming years.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And, Congressmember, you’ve been going door to door trying to get people out to vote. What are you hearing from voters in Texas, the places that you’ve been to, if you could just tell us about that?

REP. GREG CASAR: From Texas to Nevada, all around the country where I’ve been, we hear so many voters being disillusioned with politics. And I think and hope that the vice president will win the presidential election. But even if she does win, it will be really close, in a race that shouldn’t have been close. And the Democratic Party’s responsibility is to build a coalition that includes progressive voters and urban voters but also brings rural voters back to the table, that brings together working-class voters across demographic and racial lines. And if we’re going to do that, then I think we need to form a Democratic Party that truly is for working people and stands against the billionaire class that’s funding Donald Trump.

I’m sitting in Austin, Texas, right now, where Elon Musk has relocated most of the operations from Tesla. Also, right up the road here next to my district is Bastrop, Texas, where he’s relocating Twitter, or what’s now known of as X. He and other billionaires are dumping money into right-wing politics, stripping away everyday Texans’ rights, but, most importantly, they’re putting their hand in everyday Texans’ and everyday Americans’ pocketbooks. And the Democratic Party needs to stand up against that kind of corporate greed, stand up against the coward politicians that enable that kind of corporate greed.

And I think that kind of Democratic Party could get out voters in places like Texas, who just currently on the economic issues don’t — they don’t have a clear picture of who is for them. And I think we need a Democratic Party that’s clearly for working-class people and middle-class people. I’ve seen Joe Biden, I’ve seen Kamala Harris start heading more in that direction. That’s really important. But we need to consolidate the entire Democratic message around being for working-class voters across these ideological and geographic lines.

AMY GOODMAN: Right now Reuters is reporting that Donald Trump is outperforming what he did in 2020. Congressmember Casar, you’re the whip of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. Can you explain? I mean, you have this Madison Square Garden rally, where among the people who spoke, and he went on — President Trump went on, after he called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage,” to call the event a “lovefest” repeatedly. Just last night, after he talked about he’s going to protect women, whether they want it or not, in the last week he called for Liz Cheney, a fellow Republican, the former Republican from Wyoming, to be shot in the face, and last night he called Nancy Pelosi the B-word. Can you explain how it is that he is outperforming around the country himself from 2020?

REP. GREG CASAR: Look, we have to look at the way that billionaire interests have pumped lies and propaganda constantly out into the American public. And the question is: How can we beat back those sorts of lies? And I think the only way to beat back lies is with truth. I think the only way to beat back the kind of authoritarian message that Trump and Trumpism pumps out there is with more democracy.

And if we want to beat that back, then I think progressives need to make sure that the progressive movement is principled but also populist. I think we need to go directly at some of these billionaire and corporate interests and make clear who the villains in this story really are, because Donald Trump has been telling his version of the story. He knows that people are feeling stressed. People are feeling anxiety. And Donald Trump has said that the villains are immigrants or the villains are the LGBTQ community, the villains are Democratic politicians that put immigrants above everybody else. That’s the false story that Donald Trump has been telling consistently on the campaign trail since 2016. Democrats need to have a compelling and populist and popular message in response, that the villains aren’t the immigrant communities, the villains aren’t your own neighbors. The villains and the people that are making that stress and strain are Wall Street. It is the special interest lobby. It is the corporate greed that is driving up prices for people and the politicians that are allowing that to happen. I don’t think the Democratic Party has had that solid of a message to keep working-class voters fully within our coalition that we used to have in years past.

And so, I still believe and hope that President Harris will win the popular vote and the Electoral College, but if we want to be able to beat not just Donald Trump, but Trumpism, then I think we need to forge a Democratic Party that is popular amongst a broad swath of the American public. And that means bringing people, rallying people around an economic message, that everyday Americans should be able to afford a decent life while working a dignified job and having a secure retirement, and that we’re going to stand up to a Republican Party that just talks like they’re for workers, but really they’re out there attacking people’s basic rights and giving tax breaks out to billionaires.

So, in this coming Congress, come what may in this election, I think it’s going to be so critical for principled progressives to take popular stands, say we’re not going to extend the Trump tax scam that gives away so many of tax dollars to the top 1% and big corporations, while leaving middle-class families holding the bag. I think that that’s the kind of fight that progressives need to take on, so that we bring the vast majority of Americans back together around a pro-democracy and a pro-worker agenda.

AMY GOODMAN: Congressmember Greg Casar, I want to thank you for being with us, Democrat from Texas, whip of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, labor organizer and son of Mexican immigrants.

This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. This is “War, Peace and the Presidency.” I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh, as we turn now to Washington, D.C., to the campus of the historically Black college Howard University, where Kamala Harris is holding her watch party. It’s her alma mater.

We’re joined now by Eugene Daniels, _Politico_’s White House correspondent, with a special focus on Kamala Harris. He’s also the co-host of The Playbook. Eugene Daniels is president of the White House Correspondents’ Association.

You’re at the watch party, Eugene. What is the sense of what’s happening right now?

EUGENE DANIELS: Yeah. Amy, happy to be with you.

You know, the watch party, the people here are excited. They are outside on The Yard, which is this kind of very popular and famous landmark at Howard. They’re watching the returns as they’re coming in, and they kind of don’t know what to make of them, right? I think they, just like a lot of Americans, were hoping to have early answers. But like we all know, that was never going to be the case. They’re looking at North Carolina and a likely — and other folks, you know, starting to call it for Donald Trump, even though it’s too early to call for the Associated Press. Same thing in Georgia. But they’re feeling good about the blue wall states. And when you talk to the folks on the campaign, they’re saying the same thing. The exit polls showed one thing, but exit polls often get changed. So we’re still in a very much wait-and-see-how-the-collection-turns-out phase.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And if you could say, Eugene Daniels — you wrote a piece last month titled “Inside Harris’ Black men blitz.” Can you talk about how Harris has appealed to this demographic and why this was so significant in this election?

EUGENE DANIELS: Yeah. You know, one thing that’s been really interesting, for decades Black men have soured on the Democratic Party. It’s not a Kamala Harris-created problem, but it is, was, as the candidate, her responsibility to try to fix as much as she possibly can. And what she started to do was she had this Black man agenda — right? — where they offered — said they would offer small business loans of up to $20,000 that will be forgivable, a focus on Black — the issues of health that affect Black men disproportionately.

And what you heard from inside the campaign and Democrats outside that have just looked at this issue and Black — and how you convince them to come back to the Democratic Party is that Black men have felt like there’s these conversations that are happening about a lot of different constituency groups, and they feel left out of that process. And even when there is something that the Democrats have done for Black men, they don’t always sing it from the rooftops the same way that they do when it’s an LGBTQ+ issue or for these men or women — quote-unquote, “women’s issue,” right? And so, it’s about messaging. It’s about a focus.

And we will see — you know, the exit polls are showing that Donald Trump did a lot better in Wisconsin, for example, with Black men. We’ll have to keep watching those returns. But Harris and her team kind of did a full blitz, right? They went and talked to people like Charlamagne tha God, who is a very influential radio host in the Black community. She was on the radio today with Big Tigger. There was all these different access stuff of where they were looking to make sure that Black men came home, and the way she treated them, according to her campaign, was as a persuadable group, not just a voting bloc that was going to automatically vote for her.

AMY GOODMAN: Now, you were one of the three journalists at the National Association of Black Journalists, NABJ, questioning of Kamala Harris. I’m wondering if you can — I want to go to that SOT, that sound on tape, as it’s called in the business, when you asked her a question.

EUGENE DANIELS: Is there a specific policy change that you, as president of the United States, would say you would do that would help this along? Because, you know, you’ve gotten a lot of credit for emphasizing the humanity of Palestinians, but what I often hear from folks is that there’s no policy change that would — that either you or the president, President Biden, have gone and said they would do. Is there a specific policy change, as president, that you would do in our helping of Israel in this war?

VICE PRESIDENT KAMALA HARRIS: We need to get this deal done, and we need to get it done immediately. And that is my position, and that is my policy. We need to get this deal done.

EUGENE DANIELS: But in the way that we send weapons, in the way that we interact as their ally, are there specific policy changes?

VICE PRESIDENT KAMALA HARRIS: Well, Eugene, for example, one of the things that we have done that I’m entirely supportive of is the pause that we’ve put on the 2,000-pound bombs. And so, there is some leverage that we have had and used. But, ultimately, the thing that is going to unlock everything else in that region is getting this deal done.

AMY GOODMAN: Your response, Eugene Daniels, to her answer?

EUGENE DANIELS: Yeah, I mean, in the moment, I kept trying to get her to reveal something, right? And what was very clear to me, sometimes when you’re interviewing a politician, sometimes kind of nonanswer is their answer, right? And you have to focus — you have to kind of take it for what it’s worth.

What her aides say and what folks in the White House and on the campaign will tell you is that, you know, she is trying to make sure that she doesn’t — she wasn’t messing up the deal, the possible deal, for hostages being freed and a ceasefire, that any — and, you know, Israel and Hamas were looking for kind of any indication that the administration was waffling. But at the same time, when you talk to voters, they wanted to hear something different. They wanted to hear something specific, right?

Me and my colleague Holly Otterbein last year in November wrote a story about the kind of things that Vice President Harris was saying behind closed doors to President Biden: one, that he needed to be tougher on Benjamin Netanyahu, and, two, that he needed to speak differently about the plight of the Palestinians. He changed one, not really the other. And so, we know that she has these views, but as a candidate, she has struggled with what a lot of vice presidents struggle with, which is distinguishing yourself without distancing yourself too much from the man whose office you have to walk into the next day. And that has been kind of the needle that she’s threading.

And we will see whether or not young people, Black voters and, obviously, Arab American voters in this country didn’t like her answers so much to not vote for her in some of these key battlegrounds. But that is the message that you heard from folks. They like the way that she spoke. They like the rhetoric. But they didn’t hear any policy changes. And they weren’t voting for rhetoric. They wanted to see something different in substance.

AMY GOODMAN: And do you think — I mean, Eugene, if you can say, what is the sense in the room? I mean, it was expected that Republican votes would be counted more at the beginning. We were just talking with Robert Reich, the former labor secretary, more voting in person, and those are the votes that get counted first. But at this point in the evening, at 10:19 Eastern Time, is this still the feeling?

EUGENE DANIELS: Yeah, it is. It still is the feeling. It depends on who you talk to. A lot of Democrats have been describing it as “nauseously optimistic.” They still feel that way. But I will also say — and it’s unclear if that’s because the Wi-Fi is not great here in the filing room, or they’re concerned. We are hearing — I am hearing from less of my sources, who are hugely talkative, right? And so, what that says is either they are worried about some of these numbers that they’re seeing coming in or they’re digging into the numbers to see what’s actually there to kind of figure out what they’re going to — what they’re going to say, how they’re going to spin it and where we’re at, right?

I think, you know, there are a lot of Democrats who think at this point she — her best lane here is the blue wall states, Nebraska, too, and maybe Nevada, right? That is where a lot of their focus has been at this point. I think they woke up with this excitement that maybe North Carolina was on the table and they could actually win it and it would work out really well for them. But that seems to have — that seems like a far-fetched dream at this point.

But they are still optimistic, but they are definitely leaning into the idea that we are not — they feel like we’re not going to know tonight. The Harris campaign, they’re saying, “Buckle in.” They had a couple of days where they felt like we might have an answer tonight, but they’re feeling like it’s going to be a few days before they have a 270 call for either Donald Trump or Kamala Harris.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, Eugene Daniels, we want to thank you for being with us. I’m sorry we couldn’t see you, but that’s the problem when the internet isn’t quite working right where you are. Eugene Daniels is _Politico_’s White House correspondent with a special focus on Kamala Harris, co-ost of The Playbook, president of the White House Correspondents’ Association. speaking to us from Howard University, the alma mater of Kamala Harris, where she is holding her watch party tonight.

This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, “War, Peace and the Presidency.” I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh. We turn now to the battleground state of Phoenix, Arizona. We’re joined by Marisa Franco, director and co-founder of Mijente, a national digital organizing hub for Latinx and Chicanx communities. And we also want to report, this just in, NBC News is projecting Republican Senator Ted Cruz has won reelection to the U.S. Senate in Texas, beating out Congressmember Colin Allred. While you are, Marisa, in Phoenix, Arizona, if you can respond to this latest news of this major victory for Ted Cruz in Texas?

MARISA FRANCO: I think we’ll have to examine the numbers. I mean, we’ve known for a long time there’s a gap in Texas. There’s a big gap between Democrats and Republicans, and just a huge amount of people that are not registered to vote. So, I think that we’ll be able to really glean the successes and failures of the campaign and where we’re at in Texas. I think Texas has a potential to be an extremely strategic and impactful state, a state where demographic change is happening — just not yet. And so, I think that in analyzing the numbers as the dust settles on the race, we’ll be able to really be able to tell where we’re at.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And if you could explain —

MARISA FRANCO: But it [inaudible] —

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Go ahead, Marisa. Go ahead.

MARISA FRANCO: But it also — it sucks. Ted Cruz is absolute trash. So, there’s that.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And if you could — we’re talking to you in Phoenix, Arizona, Marisa. If you could talk about what the situation there is, what results you’ve seen coming in now, however tentative, and about the propositions that are on the ballot this year, starting with Proposition 314? If you could explain what that is?

MARISA FRANCO: Well, so far, there has been over 2.2 million votes cast by mail. It’s a state where a vast amount of people vote by mail. So, we should be getting results, but we don’t really know yet.

There has been several — a slew of ballot initiatives, including Proposition 314, which is sort of a combination between Arizona’s S.B. 1070, Arizona’s anti-immigrant law over a decade ago, and S.B. 4, which is one of the more recent anti-immigrant laws coming out of Texas by Governor Abbott. So, it’s a really nasty combination of the two. There’s also Proposition 139, taking on the abortion ban, which I think a lot of us are looking at, and we hope that will succeed.

And then the race for Senate with Rubén Gallego looks positive, but it has felt like the race at the top of the ticket, and like many other states across the country, it’s razor thin, and it’s going to be a coin flip. So, it’s still too early to —

AMY GOODMAN: Marisa, the latest numbers we have on that, Congressmember Gallego 53%, Lake 45%, with 48% reporting, almost half reporting. If you can talk about what were the major issues in this race, and talk about what could be, although it’s too early to say, the significance of a Gallego victory?

MARISA FRANCO: That’s tracking the polling. Gallego was polling higher than Harris in the state. So, my sense is that will likely hold, especially — the early vote had actually a big chunk of GOP voters and independent voters. It was actually more than Democrats. So that looks very, very promising for Senator Gallego. You know, I think that, you know, where it’s a departure from Kyrsten Sinema, I think it will remain to be seen how much of an advocate and an ally Senator — if he is, Senator Gallego will be. But nevertheless it’s a bright spot, considering what we’re facing in the federal landscape with respect to control of Congress. It’s one of those seats that needed to be won, and I hope that we’re able to deliver that here in Arizona.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Marisa, now, if you could say — about Proposition 139 on abortion, if you could say what precisely that measure is and where you see it going, why it’s so important in Arizona?

MARISA FRANCO: Well, Arizona was one of the states that banned abortion following the Supreme Court decision, so this was an effort by advocates, women here in the state, like many other states, to try to actually create an amendment in the Constitution, in the state Constitution, to protect the right to an abortion. It has been one of the campaigns that has catalyzed and has drawn in many, many people. And I think it’s important to just say, you know, we’re looking at a very close race. There’s some of us who have been through this before. It’s a nauseous optimism. But there’s so many people that are joining and doing political work for the first time. And so, I just think that it’s important to honor that and the work that people have done, and that certainly has been a campaign that has drawn thousands of women across Arizona who have been alarmed at the actions taken at the state Legislature.

AMY GOODMAN: There are 10 states that have abortion referendum in this election. Florida has gone down. It actually won a majority of the vote, but not the supermajority that was needed, that was imposed on a ballot initiative passing in Florida. And New York, the number one initiative has passed. So, that’s very significant in Arizona. And I wanted to go back to what I believe is the only amendment around immigration in the country. And if you can talk more specifically about that initiative, proposition — the proposition that involves criminalizing people who are going over, crossing the Arizona-Mexico border without authorization, and allowing local law enforcement to arrest and deport migrants?

MARISA FRANCO: It’s devolving what has been a civil federal issue. It’s continuing to trend that Arizona in many ways started over a decade ago of devolving something that is federal to the state level, actually empowering the states to enforce federal immigration law by making it a state law. It is a new Jim Crow, in many ways, where legislatures, governors and different advocates are creating more and more ways to come after immigrants and to be able to embolden state officials and local law enforcement to enforce federal immigration law. And it’s unfortunate.

I think that there has been — I think that it’s been a really difficult — it’s been a difficult time on immigration. The discourse at the top of the — at the presidential race has not necessarily shown real contrast. And so, likely this — you know, nobody — I haven’t seen recent polling on this particular initiative, but very likely it’s going to go to the courts. But this is just a continued trend of governors and state legislatures taking immigration enforcement into their own hands in the absence of any action at the federal level.

And we continue to posit that it is almost 40 years since there has been legalization in this country, and this country would not run without the efforts, labor and contributions of immigrant people. And it’s about time that there be respect and dignity for the people who live, work and are part of our communities. This initiative, like Arizona has often done, the way that we’re seeing in Texas, is taking us in the wrong direction. And we’ll have, I think, an ongoing fight on our hands following the outcome of the election.

AMY GOODMAN: And back on the abortion measure, the ballot measure, it’s leading 63.2% with more than a million votes, and “no” is 36.8% at 635,000. So this is very significant. AP is reporting that the abortion ballot measure that so many worked for so long to get on the Arizona ballot is at this point 63 to 36. It does look like it’s going to pass, Marisa.

MARISA FRANCO: That’s great news. And I think it’s potentially foreshadowing. We shouldn’t have to be fighting for these basic rights in 2024. And that is, I think, the threat and has been a threat of a Trump presidency and the ongoing MAGA movement. And when I think about what happens in this election and I think of Latinos in my home state of Arizona, my hope is that we remember, that we remember that this is a state that in many ways foreshadowed MAGA. This was a state that took on looking to abolish ethnic studies, that took on to take away voting rights, that banned abortion. I hope that we remember that.

And beyond that, I hope that we actually project that the status quo middle of the road, like, we can beat the likes of Kari Lake, but we don’t just have to go middle of the road, which I think a lot of people are tired of, of status quo policies that aren’t actually making relevant impact in our lives. And so, I think that while it is a huge victory, and it’s also labor that we shouldn’t have to be doing in 2024, and thus that’s a situation we’re facing. But nevertheless, it’s a victory, and, you know, my hat goes off to the folks that worked so hard. It clearly was an issue that is unpopular, here and across the country.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, Marisa Franco, we want to thank you so much for being with us, director and co-founder of Mijente, the national digital organizing hub for Latinx and Chicanx communities.

This is Democracy Now! And we are more than halfway through our four-hour special on this election night, this historic election, and we’ll be summarizing for you everything we know as we go along the way, from the presidential race to congressional and Senate races, the balance of the Senate and the House, and also we’ll be talking about ballot initiatives, like we’re talking about the ones around abortion. I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh.

The latest news out of Delaware, Democrat Sarah McBride has been elected the first openly transgender congressmember in U.S. history, defeating Republican John Whalen. She’s vowed to address criminal justice reform, abortion rights, gun violence and more.

We’re now joined by Imara Jones, who is the founder and CEO of TransLash Media and host of its investigative podcast The Anti-Trans Hate Machine. Her new piece for Newsweek is headlined “What’s at Stake for Trans People in This Election.”

Welcome back to Democracy Now! It’s great to have you with us, Imara. Start off with this Sarah McBride making history, winning the congressional seat, the only congressional seat in Delaware.

IMARA JONES: Thank you. Thank you for having me on during this marathon tonight.

Look, I think that Sarah made history and shows quite clearly that candidates matter. I think that we have to remember that aside from being a trans candidate, that Sarah made history as the first trans person to ever address a major political convention. Additionally, Sarah is just a terrific political talent in her own right, made history as the first trans state senator from anywhere in the United States and is now making history again tonight. Very close ties to the Biden family, understands the issues in her state, worked for Beau Biden. And so, I think that, you know, not only is Sarah a great political talent, as I said, storied in politics, but also is attached to a really powerful political family for all the right reasons. So, I think, again, candidates matter. And that’s what we saw tonight. And it was well thought and well earned.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And so, Imara, if you could — you’ve been sitting with us as we’ve been reporting. If you could respond to the results that have come in so far and whether you’re surprised at how, at least at the moment, it appears that the race is extremely close?

IMARA JONES: I mean, my prediction, to anyone who would listen, all year was that it was going to be a very tight race, that Vice President Harris could very well eke it out, but it would be eking it out. So, I think that the race has gone back to where I always thought that it was going to be, and I think we’re having the race that was always predicted.

And so, I’ve gotten very nervous emails and texts throughout the night. I was happy to hear from Eugene, who is on the ground, who mentioned that some of his sources are going silent. But I think that it’s because people are probably digging into the numbers, because it’s going to be very tight. So we may not know tonight, and we may not know for a couple of days. And so, I think we just have to steel ourselves for that.

So, I’m not surprised. And look, I think that one of the things that I — when I was on recently, is that I mentioned that the way that anti-trans issues are deployed is in tight races. And so, this lends credence to why they were deploying anti-trans issues, because they read the same poll numbers.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And what’s at stake for the transgender community? What do you think the most important issues are?

IMARA JONES: I mean, I think that what makes this different, I wish that we could talk about, you know, what happens to trans healthcare or trans housing or trans overall healthcare issues, like, you know, for any other standard group of people in the United States. But I really do think that in this race, the issues for trans people are existential.

And, I mean, we’ve had — there is a candidate in the race, Donald Trump, who, as a part of his closing argument last night, launched into an anti-trans screed. They also dropped a new ad today attacking Imane Khelif for being trans and participating in the Olympics. There is new ad dollar assessments that showed that they’ve spent north of $100 million on these ads over the past month. And so, I think that, you know, we are teeing up trans people to be one of the major targets in the [Trump] administration, and, for him, a part of the group that he’s identified or implied would be a part of his day one purge.

AMY GOODMAN: I mean, the amount — I don’t know if people understand the tens of millions of dollars that were poured into ads. I mean, you’d see them in the middle of football games. You’d see them in baseball games. I want to turn to an ad that the Trump campaign ran, the first-ever presidential campaign ad on the topic, and the Senate Leadership Fund, backed by Mitch McConnell, running ads in key Senate races, swing states, during major football games.

NARRATOR: Kamala was the first to help pay for a prisoner’s sex change.

VICE PRESIDENT KAMALA HARRIS: The power that I had, I used it in a way that was about pushing forward the movement, frankly, and the agenda.

NARRATOR: Kamala’s agenda is they/them, not you.

NARRATOR: But Brown voted multiple times to allow transgender biological males to participate in girls’ sports.

NARRATOR: Baldwin supported providing puberty blockers and sex change surgeries to minor children. She even supports forcing Wisconsin women’s domestic violence shelters to admit biological men who claim to identify as women.

AMY GOODMAN: So, how did the Democrats respond to these attacks? And where does that leave you, where does it leave humanity, after this election?

IMARA JONES: Well, the Democrats responded, as I have characterized it most charitably, as cautiously and in a measured way. Right? First of all, they didn’t respond to the ads at all. There was no set of ads that they could have run, for instance, with trans kids in them, showing the humanity of those families and how those families are being targeted. There are lots of ways, you know, that you can respond that hold up to your values but also try to appeal to people who may not necessarily be on your side. And politicians know how to do that. Moreover, they had over a year to prepare for these attacks. I mean, everyone knew that there was going to be a certain point where this was going to be the focus. So there wasn’t really response on the ads. And then, in the comments by the vice president, you know, she was measured in what she said. And so, there hasn’t really been a full-throated or, you know, politically focused response from the Democrats.

And I think that it’s because they made a bid for the Haley voter as a way to try to get them over kind of the 48-49 hump to 50 plus 1. And they know that those voters who supported Ambassador Haley are not pro-trans, because Ambassador Haley herself made being anti-trans a key argument for her campaign. It was in her first speech out of the gate. It was in her stump speech everywhere. And so, I think that they thought that in order to appeal to those voters, that they had to be more careful than I actually think that the vice president is herself personally. I mean, she’s gotten up in front of juries and argued for and about the humanity of trans people in some very focused ways. So I think that this is something that she knows how to do. I think that there was just some reticence, given who they decided to target to get them over the hump.

AMY GOODMAN: Imara Jones, I want to thank you very much for coming in here today. What are you looking at, as we wrap up, as the way forward? And what will you be advising politicians? Will you be running yourself? I mean, you actually came out of the Clinton White House.

IMARA JONES: Yeah, no, I — no. The answer is no. You know, once you cross into journalism, that’s it. So, that’s too late.

I think where I am looking forward in terms of what comes next, Amy, is kind of where you ended your last question, which is: What does this mean? I think the fact that we have had, it looks like, north of $100 million worth of ads dropped against trans people means that the atmosphere may have soured, in a way that means that there’s a lot of work to do, and that by not actually coming up with ways to respond that center the humanity of trans people, that there’s actually been a large political opening that’s been created through which authoritarians and extremists are driving a truck. And I think that that vulnerability has only been exposed and that danger has only been heightened by this campaign. And so, the danger for trans people and the danger for democracy that’s being exploited by people who are anti-democratic using trans people, that’s not going anywhere tonight. And these results will not give anyone comfort, even if, as I’ve said, you know, Vice President Harris ekes it out tonight.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank you so much for being with us, Imara Jones, founder and CEO of TransLash Media. Check out the podcast, The Anti-Trans Hate Machine. Imara’s new piece for Newsweek is headlined “What’s at Stake for Trans People in This Election.” This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, “War, Peace and the Presidency.” I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: We turn now to the battleground state of Michigan, where the presidential race is too close to call. With 25% of votes counted, Donald Trump has a narrow lead. We’re joined now in Dearborn, Michigan, by Linda Sarsour, a Palestinian American Muslim organizer, author of We Are Not Here to Be Bystanders and co-founder of MPower Action Fund.

Welcome back to Democracy Now!, Linda Sarsour. If you could describe the scene there in Dearborn? You’ve been at an election party with other Arab Americans. What are you hearing?

LINDA SARSOUR: I am here at a wonderful Dearborn establishment called The Canteen, which is hosting a watch party. There are dozens of Arab American and Muslim American organizers that are here. You know, it’s hard to tell where people are. People are watching the results coming in. It seems so far, at least as of now, that Donald Trump is leading in this election. Obviously, Michigan has not fully reported their numbers, so that, of course, is the most concern to the people that are here to see what happens in the state of Michigan.

AMY GOODMAN: I just want to let people know the latest news. Despite the fact that the very well-respected Des Moines Register poll indicated that Kamala Harris was up three points, it looks like President Trump has trumped Harris in Iowa and has won the state of Iowa. Also, just to let people know, you have the abortion initiative that looks like it has passed in Arizona. Well, it has also passed in New York. It has gone down, a different abortion initiative, but gone down in Florida. And Colorado has just voted to enshrine abortion rights. Just some of the latest news as we go through this four-hour special.

So, Linda Sarsour, if you can talk about the Arab American and Muslim vote in Michigan and how both Trump and Harris have appealed to or not appealed to the hundreds of thousands of voters in Michigan who are Arab American or Muslim?

LINDA SARSOUR: I have been organizing in Michigan for the last few months, and today I was at polling sites across Southend of Dearborn, around eastern Dearborn, and I saw a high voter turnout. I saw lines that I hadn’t actually seen before in Dearborn.

The sentiment is very mixed on the ground. The community is not monolithic. There were some people were willing to share, as they came out of polling sites, who they voted for. Some did disclose that they did vote for a third party, many for Jill Stein, also some for Dr. Cornel West. There were a very small minority of people that did disclose that they voted for Donald Trump. And yes, there were some — a small few that I was able to talk to you that did say that they voted for Kamala Harris, more so because they did not want to see another Donald Trump presidency. So, the sentiment is mixed here.

But what’s beautiful is that many people were going for down-ballot races. There were many Arab American, Muslim Americans on the down ballots, especially things like school board, judges. So, the turnout is there. But I think the community here is still devastated. Many people here are voting around Gaza. That is the motivating issue that is bringing them to the polls.

So we’re just watching this election, Amy. I can’t believe it’s this close. That’s the sentiment here. Why is this election so close? Why is there a competition between Kamala and Donald Trump at this time in 2024? So, again, we’re like everybody else around the country. We’re waiting to see what the final results are.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And what is your sense, Linda? What are you hearing? Why is the race so close?

LINDA SARSOUR: I think that there have been miscalculations that have happened across the board. I think that this idea that Gaza is not a central issue to many voters across the country, including antiwar voters, progressives, young people, students across the country, and, of course, Arab American, Muslim American and Palestinian American voters, who happen to find themselves highly concentrated in states like Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Georgia — and that’s one. Second, people like Donald Trump, who are leveraging the trauma that our community has been experiencing, and also that Kamala Harris’s campaign ignored, predicts within the community who wanted to share policy demands with the vice-presidential candidate — or, the Vice President Harris, and she did not engage people in the community. The campaign sheltered her from folks that could have really given her insight and given her the truth telling about what it is that we expect from her if she were to be the president of the United States of America. So, there were some, in my opinion, lack and deficiency of the campaign reaching out in a genuine, authentic way to Muslim American, Arab American, Palestinian American voters. They wanted to decide who our leaders were instead of allowing us to decide who our leaders were to speak on behalf of our community.

Donald Trump mosque hopped. He went to different communities within the Arab American community. He met with religious leaders. I, as you know, despise Donald Trump. I don’t want to see Donald Trump in the White House again. But his campaign did the type of outreach in parts and elements of our community that the Kamala Harris campaign did not do.

AMY GOODMAN: You know, Linda, we interviewed the mayor of Dearborn after he refused to meet with President Trump when he came to Dearborn just in the last few days. The question is, of course, when it comes to Kamala Harris, why, from the Democratic convention, refusing to have a Palestinian American voice on the stage of the DNC, right through to — we just interviewed an Arab American leader in Michigan who ran in the primary for Congress — he lost, but he was invited to a private event with Kamala Harris, and he was in the theater there. I think that area was called Oak Park. And —

LINDA SARSOUR: Royal Oak, yes.

AMY GOODMAN: Oh, Royal Oak. Royal Oak, that’s right. And right before it started, someone asked him if he’d like to get up and follow them. He did, thinking they were just moving his seat, and they ushered him right out the door, and there were police there, and they said, “If you dare to make trouble, you’ll end up in a police car.” Ultimately, he was — the Kamala Harris campaign apologized to him, though gave no explanation, said any time in the future he would be invited into an event.

LINDA SARSOUR: I know Dr. Ghanim very well, who is the gentleman that you were speaking of, Amy. And this is the kind of things that happen at the Kamala Harris campaign events. It’s not enough that people give apologies there. Someone needs to be held accountable.

We’ve seen this before. I don’t know if you remember, Amy, back in 2008, when Obama was running, and he came to Michigan, and he was doing a campaign event, and then his campaign staff moved two young Muslim American women wearing hijab from behind him where he would be standing in the camera shot. And once Obama found out about that and he found out that those young sisters were moved, he was outraged. And he picked up the phone, and he called those sisters. He told his campaign, “Find me these sisters, and I need to call them, because this is absolutely unacceptable.”

You know, the campaign put out a statement, but Kamala Harris never picked up the phone and called an important figure in the Muslim American community. Dr. Ghanim is not just a regular guy. He’s a very well-respected leader across the Muslim American community that has been doing work for decades in the larger Michigan Muslim community.

So, again, there’s been a lot of shortcomings of the campaign in genuine outreach to Arab American voters. Gaza is a top issue for these communities. This community wants to know: How are you going to end this genocide against the Palestinian people and against what’s happening to our sisters and brothers in southern Lebanon, and, of course, the bombardments that we continue to see in Yemen? And that’s what the community wants to know.

So, again, everything’s up in the air here, Amy. I think people are really just wanting to see how Michigan turns out. I think Michigan is an important question for the demonstration of the Arab American vote. Was there really a protest vote? Were people scared of a Donald Trump presidency that they were maybe willing to vote for Kamala? We don’t know this until we see the results tonight.

AMY GOODMAN: We want to thank you, Linda, for joining us, Linda Sarsour, Palestinian American Muslim organizer, author of We Are Not Here to Be Bystanders and co-founder of MPower Action Fund, speaking to us from Dearborn, Michigan. She’s been organizing in Michigan now for weeks.

We turn now to Tara Houska, as we wrap up this hour. She’s an Indigenous lawyer, activist and founder of the Giniw Collective, Ojibwe from the Couchiching First Nation. Tara Houska was brutally arrested in 2021 for participating in a nonviolent action against Line 3, joining us now from International Falls, Minnesota. Minnesota, Tim Walz is the governor of Minnesota. If you can just share overall your response to the latest developments today, this evening, in a very, very close race between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, Tara?

TARA HOUSKA: How many times have we heard this is the election of our lifetimes, that democracy is on the line? We hear that again and again. Democracy is on the line. I do not understand why the Democrats do not act as if democracy is on the line. Why do they not listen to voters? Voters are telling you we have a number of issues, and one of them is a genocide that you are committing, that the United States is complicit in, and that matters to us. This election shouldn’t even be close, yet here we are.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And Trump, indeed, is also leading in Minnesota. If you could comment on that, Tara?

TARA HOUSKA: I haven’t even seen that. I’ve been a part of several different live streams tonight. That really does not surprise me. I mean, I think there is a growing red sentiment in Minnesota. I feel like people are disillusioned by the failures of the Democratic Party to follow through on a lot of the promises that they make again and again, and it is just not reaching the folks that have traditionally supported the Democratic Party. I mean, this is a strong, deep blue state, yet — I mean, I’m sitting to you — talking to you from International Falls, Minnesota. This was blue for generations. It’s now turned red. I mean, why did that happen? Because we see the middle class being gutted, and we see so many of these promises that are being made by them not being followed through on.

Yeah, you mentioned Tim Walz and Line 3, being brutally arrested. I mean, they made promises about specifically even that project. We will not — this will not happen through treaty territory if it’s opposed by tribal nations. And yet, what happened when they got into office? It was silence, and we’re going to let the process play out. You know, Biden promising to be the biggest climate president in history, ran as a climate president, then he approved more oil and gas leases in his first two years than Trump did in the first two years. I mean, it’s just again and again these failures that I think folks are just fed up with, and they’re looking for a different path, and Trump speaks in a very different way.

AMY GOODMAN: Tara, if Kamala Harris and Tim Walz become president and vice president, then Minnesota will have the first Indigenous governor, the lieutenant governor right now, Peggy Flanagan. I don’t know if that could possibly be the case at this point, but your thoughts overall?

TARA HOUSKA: I mean, I think that would be an incredible moment for our people and for, you know, the long history of this country and our continuing lack of representation in the seats of the empire. I think that we also need to recognize that no matter what color someone is that’s sitting in office, no matter what their background is, that they have to be held accountable, and that means, you know, regardless of the identity politicking that seems to be really, really prevalent right now in the Democratic Party. We need to see actions that match up with the words. The rhetoric is not enough.

AMY GOODMAN: I have to say, The New York Times is reporting Trump has an 87% chance of victory at this point, as we talk to you at 10:56 Eastern time. Your thoughts on President Biden in Arizona standing with Deb Haaland, the first Indigenous cabinet member, apologizing for the history of residential schools?

TARA HOUSKA: That was a beautiful, powerful moment that was brought about by decades of Native folks working from within, working from without, to bring about even the acknowledgment of the trauma that was brought upon our people, of the cultural genocide that occurred to our people, of the fact that it was not that long ago, although U.S. history doesn’t even barely acknowledge it. It’s not taught to our children. My living grandmother went through boarding schools and residential schools. It is a powerful moment. I will also say that it is deeply shameful to me that it seems they chose this moment where they are actively complicit in a genocide of other people to apologize for the genocide on our people.

AMY GOODMAN: And, of course, he was interrupted by an Indigenous person who made that very point, apologizing for a past genocide, the person said, as a current one is ongoing. Tara Houska, I want to thank you so much for being with us. Tara Houska is an Indigenous lawyer, activist, founder of the Giniw Collective, Ojibwe from the Couchiching First Nation, arrested in 2021 for participating in nonviolent action against Line 3, joining us from International Falls, Minnesota.

And I just want to read this note from Nate Cohn, chief political analyst at The New York Times. “For the first time tonight, we consider Trump likely to win the presidency. He has an advantage in each of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. To win, Harris would need to sweep all three. There is still a lot of vote left, but in the voting so far, Trump is narrowly but discernibly ahead.” Again, that is Nate Cohn, chief political analyst at The New York Times.

You are watching Democracy Now!'s “War, Peace and the Presidency.” I'm Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh. This is a four-hour special. In our last hour, we will be speaking with, among a number of people, Katrina vanden Heuvel from The Nation magazine, publisher of The Nation magazine, and more. Let your friends know. Democracy Now! will also have a two-hour special tomorrow morning 8:00 to 10:00 Eastern. Stay with us.

[End of Hour 3]

AMY GOODMAN: From New York, this is Democracy Now!, “War, Peace and the Presidency.” We are in the final hour of our four-hour election special. I’m Amy Goodman, here with Nermeen Shaikh in New York.

Polls have closed in California, Idaho, Oregon and Washington state, as we head into the last hour of our live election broadcast. Polls will close in Hawaii and Alaska in the next two hours. That means all polls will be closed by then. While the seven key swing states have not been called, Trump appears to have a solid lead in both North Carolina and Georgia. In Texas, Republican Senator Ted Cruz has won reelection, fending off a strong challenge by Texas state representative and civil rights lawyer Colin Allred.

In Ohio, Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown is trailing MAGA Republican Bernie Moreno by about a quarter of a million votes, with 86% of ballots counted. Senator Brown has held the seat since 2006. Before that, he served as a congressmember, voting against the War in Iraq, against the PATRIOT Act, against warrantless wiretapping and in favor of marriage equality. Bernie Moreno is a wealthy former car dealer who was backed by Donald Trump and Senator JD Vance. In September, he visited the city of Springfield, Ohio, to launch racist attacks against Haitian refugees, calling for them to be deported even though they were welcomed in the community under the Temporary Protected Status program. Ohio is the most expensive race ever, with over $400 million spent. If Moreno wins, Republicans will take control of the Senate.

Colorado voters have passed a measure enshrining abortion rights in the state’s Constitution. A similar measure could also pass in Arizona, where early returns show it’s received more than 63% support. New York has also passed a pro-abortion measure. One has been defeated in Florida.

These are the words of The New York Times chief political analyst Nate Cohn, who wrote just a few minutes ago, “For the first time tonight, we consider Trump likely to win the presidency. He has an advantage in each of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. To win, Harris would need to sweep all three. There is still a lot of vote left, but in the voting so far, Trump is narrowly but discernibly ahead,” unquote. Trump currently leads Harris 214 to 179.

For more, we begin our final hour with Katrina vanden Heuvel, publisher of The Nation magazine.

Katrina, if you can start off by just responding to this latest news?

KATRINA VANDEN HEUVEL: Well, I think it’s still too early. There’s darkness before the dawn. I’m glad Democracy Now! is doing a two-hour special tomorrow morning. I think we need to see the full results from the blue wall, as it’s called, Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania. It’s a challenging evening. I think there was more expected from numbers and from states like Georgia and North Carolina. It’s been — it’s more of a slog.

We’re not seeing, I don’t think, the surge of the women’s vote. “It’s women, stupid,” is something that’s been going around. “It’s the women. Thank the women.” Of course, we’ll thank the women, but I don’t see that surge we had hoped to see, and I see worse numbers in some suburban areas than even Biden got.

I guess I’m also — it’s an evening where we’re losing a very great senator, possibly, as you said. I think it was a quarter of a million votes, you said, divided Moreno, the challenger, the car dealer, from a great senator, Sherrod Brown, who came to the Senate in 2007, I believe, from the Congress and has been not only what you said, Amy, someone who opposed the worst of America, the authorization to go to war in Iraq, PATRIOT Act, but stood for the dignity of working people in a state, Ohio, which has gone increasingly red, except for Sherrod Brown, in elected office.

But most important is how it will move ahead in these next hours, days. Let’s not forget that in 2020 the election was decided on Saturday in Pennsylvania. So I think it’s a tough evening, but I think we still have to look ahead.

I would add one thing, which is, if it does turn out that Trump returns to a White House he has defiled in a previous term, I think there are questions about the Democratic Party and the campaign strategy of Kamala Harris. But we’re not there yet, and I think we have to keep our focus on the prize.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: But, Katrina, could you explain? I mean, you’ve said that, you know, women turning out in as large numbers as was anticipated perhaps didn’t materialize. But is it possible also that there were more women — of course, this is all very early, and we don’t know anything definitively — whether more women would have voted for Trump this time around?

KATRINA VANDEN HEUVEL: We don’t know, do we? I mean, maybe you have been watching exit polls.

I do think there was a campaign strategy to rally women, which is smart. Women hold up half the sky. They hold up this country. The caring economy, which has been Kamala Harris’s contribution, in many ways, to rebuilding, reconstructing America, had a lot to do with women, who take care of the children — child care is extremely expensive in this country — or take care of the parents and get caught. There was — I think the strategy of going after suburban women may be something to look carefully at. The strategy of going after a kind of coalition that didn’t play to the base, mobilize your base, is a wise strategy in many ways.

Kamala Harris decided to go for what I might call the “hug Liz Cheney” route, and she did so with vigor and vim. And maybe that raised questions not just among women, but men, working people, who wanted more on the economy. I think we do hear, certainly out of Georgia, more on the economy, economy. But the assault on abortion rights post-Dobbs, we still don’t know fully, but should contribute to a surge in women’s votes.

And yeah, I mean, I think working people of all kinds — and there’s also this kind of sub-campaign, which I think should go on, in any case, what I might call it the post-it election, where, you know, women are often under the thumb of a partner or husband and worried about voting in a way that they would disagree with, and there was an effort to make sure women knew they were of agency and could vote for whom they wished. But —

AMY GOODMAN: I mean, I think it was — I think it was Congressmember Cheney, Liz Cheney, who first brought up that, you know, you can go with your husband to the poll, but you don’t — your voting is private, and you don’t have to vote the same way that he does.

KATRINA VANDEN HEUVEL: That’s something Liz Cheney may have said.

AMY GOODMAN: And then Harris made an ad about that. And clearly that got under Trump’s skin, as he called for her to be shot in the face, Liz Cheney.

KATRINA VANDEN HEUVEL: I mean, you just said something, Amy, which is just — what he has said in these last — Donald Trump entered our lives electorally with talk of American carnage, of dystopia, of anger, of violence, punching people in the face, shooting people in the face. I sometimes wonder, you want to — he ran a campaign which was about immigration and safety, safety on his own terms. But the immigration and economy, to a certain extent, I think, trumped — excuse the pun — the issues of democracy.

Democracy is an extraordinarily important idea, term and principle. It means different things to different people. I do worry it’s become a little of an elite presentation. A lot of money, funding goes into it. And the extremism, you know, the fascism, authoritarianism, which is real, versus democracy might not have played as well. At least we don’t know.

But I do think the economy, this country is in economic pain in many ways and wants change. I mean, I don’t want to speak for the country. But Kamala Harris’s campaign has been more about continuity and about a kind of economy — she did talk in a more kind of inclusive, populist way about price gouging leading to the rise in prices. Inflation did play a role. It’s not President Biden’s fault that what he did with his Bidenomics, and certainly the massive stimulus around COVID, averted a recession and did lead to better economics. But if you avert something, like you avert a war through diplomacy, it’s not — you don’t get as much credit as if you go to war or if you don’t fulfill the stimulus, which he did do.

Trump took credit. He wrote his name on checks. I mean, he’s a huckster. He’s a grifter. By the way, there was a lot of talk about Trump, as there should be, but people know Trump. Many people know who he is. The question is what you are going to do. And I think Kamala Harris is and was terrific when she said, “I have a to-do list. He has God-knows-what list.” But that fueled down a little after the convention.

I still think a kind of multiracial populism, speaking to the economics of a country, fusing it, by the way, with abortion rights, which are part of an economy, part of family issues, part of sitting around the kitchen table, led to this divide between young — led to a massive gender gap, which women agreed, but the young men, who were inclusively turned off, that’s a larger discussion about what is being a man in the society. But, boy, did he, Trump, play to it in the worst, most derelict and dangerous ways.

AMY GOODMAN: Katrina vanden Heuvel, let me ask you about the lack of sunlight, any distance between Kamala Harris and Biden when it comes to Gaza.

KATRINA VANDEN HEUVEL: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: Many people said, you know, she is the vice president, and she can’t oppose him publicly right now. But when Biden had that gaffe after, you know, the whole statement about Puerto Rico being an island of — “floating island of garbage” at Madison Square Garden, and —

KATRINA VANDEN HEUVEL: Right.

AMY GOODMAN: — Biden was asked about it, and he said, you know, something like all his supporters are garbage, and then said he didn’t mean to say that, he meant to say the so-called comic that said it was garbage. Kamala Harris was very clear. She said, “No, he misspoke, and he didn’t mean that, and he corrected himself.” But then she said, “But I want to make a statement about this.” And, of course, she said, “You cannot characterize Trump’s supporters in the same way you can characterize Trump.” So, she was very clear and very definite. But when it comes to Gaza, she could not bring herself to do this, when it came to the tens of billions of dollars that the U.S. continues to fund billions of dollars of weapons sent to Israel. She not only would not speak out against that in any way, but also refused to allow Palestinian voices or meet with Palestinians in Michigan who asked to meet with her, allow them at the Democratic National Convention, speaking from the stage. Your thoughts on this? And do you think this ultimately is what, if in fact — and it’s absolutely too soon to say —

KATRINA VANDEN HEUVEL: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: — could cost her the election? Because Arab Americans, Muslim Americans, young people, progressive Jews, African Americans, Indigenous people in this country all deeply care about this issue.

KATRINA VANDEN HEUVEL: So, I think, Amy, I’d go back, to being, at the convention in Chicago It was not difficult to bring on a Palestinian voice. Uncommitted talked to Waleed Shahid about this and James Zogby. The committee organizing the convention, I think, had many choices. And there was a doctor who came onto your program and spoke after the convention denied a place. That was not difficult. Once that happened, it seemed pretty clear that Kamala Harris would not distance or distinguish herself in any real way, substantive way, from President Biden.

I think you have to go back to President Biden and the failure, rank, almost criminal failure, to abide by American laws. To send offensive weapons to Israel, to arm to the teeth, is against American law, Leahy, human rights legislation and other factors that could have been used. Certainly the money keeps pouring in even after the most genocidal actions. I would make a distinction between the statement she read about the comic. That becomes more of a campaign trope. This is a fundamental issue of war and peace, which in my mind is why think Cheney and George W. remain in some ways worse than Trump, war criminals.

But if she wins, she’s going to enter a world with two wars. And by the way, it is — with the exception of Democracy Now! and a few other media outlets, I hope The Nation, it’s a measure of the terrible media malpractice in this country that so little in this campaign, in debates, etc., revolved around the world. But she will enter a world of two wars, Ukraine being the other, also war crimes. And there hasn’t been any significant kind of effort not simply to distinguish from Biden, but to speak to the issue. There’s been some softening about the Palestinian casualties in her discussion. But it will be interesting to see what comes out of mostly Michigan and the “uncommitted” vote and how that is played. But she was not going to move.

And I do think when you become a candidate, certainly in the kind of strategy Kamala Harris — and I don’t want to put this fully in the past tense, because we still have — again, it wasn’t resolved until Saturday in 2020. But you become, once you choose the campaign strategy she did, not a captive by any measure, but someone who’s involved with an establishment consensus. And I see the strategy she’s run as president in that mold, and I see the willingness not simply to not step back on the Gaza crimes, but also to take on this Manichaean view of the world as divided between authoritarianism and democracy. I think that is simplistic. I think it leads to an overmilitarization of our engagement with the world that doesn’t demand American indispensable nation leadership. It does demand an America that is abiding by treaties, abiding by its best interests and abiding by a respect for the world. And I think some of the world in this time has bypassed America, because it sees it not standing up, by any measure, to the principles it proclaims as the leader of the free world, a key I do not have on my computer and wish I had not just used.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Katrina vanden Heuvel, publisher of The Nation magazine. We’re also joined by Jean Guerrero. Jean has written extensively about immigration, among many other issues. As we watch the results come in, Jean is the contributing opinion writer from The New York Times, joining us from Los Angeles, author of Hatemonger: Stephen Miller, Donald Trump, and the White Nationalist Agenda. Yes, former Trump White House adviser Stephen Miller immediately launched into an anti-immigrant, racist tirade when he took to the stage last Sunday at Madison Square Garden.

STEPHEN MILLER: Who is going to stand up and say the cartels are gone, the criminal migrants are gone, the gangs are gone? America is for Americans and Americans only!

AMY GOODMAN: So, that is Stephen Miller, who often precedes Trump when he speaks at rallies across the country. Jean Guerrero, it looks like at this point with The New York Times saying a Trump victory is likely, Stephen Miller becomes ever more important. Can you respond?

JEAN GUERRERO: Absolutely. I think that if this election goes in favor of Trump, it will be in large part because of the Democratic Party’s failure to come up with a counternarrative on immigration, which is the number one weapon of the Trump campaign. Kamala Harris, during her campaign, has failed to frame immigration as an economic issue, which it is for millions of mixed-status families across this country who have had primary breadwinners deported over many decades by both Democratic and Republican administrations. One of the reasons that we are not seeing — or, one of the reasons inflation isn’t as bad as it might be is because of immigration. And there’s so many ways to frame immigration as an economic issue that benefits the United States.

These are people who build our America’s homes and highways, people who harvest America’s crops, who take care of the elderly in our hospitals, and who Trump has promised to round up en masse and deport. And I think that what we need to be — what every viewer, every listener out there needs to be asking themselves right now is: If Trump wins, what are you going to be doing to defend immigrants from these massive deportations? I think this is an urgent question, even though, again, it’s too early to tell what the results are going to be. We have to believe Trump when he tells us what he’s going to do. And if Trump returns to the White House, he is going to unleash a historic era of devastation on immigrant and mixed-status families across this nation. Immigrants are the number one scapegoated group in the United States since Trump decided to make immigration his signature issue. These are people who are forced to live in the shadows, and Trump wants to hunt them all down. So I think it’s imperative that each of us who is listening ask ourselves: If Trump wins, what am I willing to do? Am I willing to put my body on the line to stop these deportations and to protect people?

I’m not just talking about undocumented immigrants. If Stephen Miller has his way, which he will if Trump returns to the White House, he will be able to fulfill his worst, his most anti-immigrant fantasies towards immigrant communities. It won’t just be undocumented immigrants who are targeted. It will be legal immigrants. It’ll be — even JD Vance has said that they’re not going to rule out deporting DREAMers. They’ve said they want to revive the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, which would allow them to deport both legal and illegal immigrants, and even countless Americans would be deported, simply because they are Latino or are racially profiled as immigrants. And that may sound like hyperbole, but there is a precedent for this, Operation Wetback in the 1950s. In fact, my great-uncle, who was a U.S. citizen, was deported from this country as a part of that operation. But Trump’s plans would be exponentially worse because of the scale. There’s 22 million people in the United States who live in mixed-status families where there’s at least one undocumented person who lives with a U.S. citizen child or relative, a green card holder. And these are all families that would be subjected to separations, where, you know, parents are deported and U.S. citizen children are left as orphans.

And it would be economically devastating to this entire country, but especially to immigrant communities, which have already endured, as I said earlier, decades of deportations that have stripped families of primary breadwinners over and over again, and is one of the reasons that we see immigrant communities, Latino families across this country struggling economically the way that they are.

And the last thing I’ll will say about this is just that I think if Trump wins, it will speak to an inadequate outreach to Latino communities, particularly young Latino voters, who have the most at stake in this election. More than half of them have an undocumented family member or a close friend. More than half — I’m sorry. And Latino youth are also more likely to be LGBTQ. They’re more likely to have immigrant parents. So they have a lot at stake in this election. And if they don’t turn out in the numbers that we are expecting them to and, you know, deliver this election for Harris, it will be as a result of inadequate outreach.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And, Jean Guerrero, you said earlier that — well, again, we don’t know precisely how this will turn out, but Trump certainly seems much closer than was expected earlier to the White House. If you could say what you think a more effective counternarrative, that the Democrats could have a counternarrative on immigration, what would that look like? And then if you could respond to what’s happening with Proposition 314 in Arizona?

JEAN GUERRERO: Yes, absolutely. I mean, so, the entire immigration debate during this campaign has been in terms of what’s happening at the border, in terms of border security. And Harris has been touting her credentials as somebody who was in favor of a border bill that would have increased resources for Border Patrol and stopped fentanyl from coming into this country. And to some extent, that was strategically targeting moderate voters and trying to counter Trump’s narrative about her as an “open borders” candidate, which was obviously a false narrative.

But they entirely failed to counter the demonization and the scapegoating that Trump made a hallmark of his campaign, you know, constantly putting out information about immigrants, painting them as criminals, highlighting very rare cases of immigrants, you know, murdering U.S. citizens and trying to paint that as something that’s happening widespread in the United States. There really wasn’t a strategy on the part of the Harris campaign to counter that scapegoating. They sort of ignored it and failed to really emphasize that immigrants are a huge strength in this country and are the reason that our economy isn’t worse than it is right now. And they are people who build our highways and our homes and harvest our crops, and we depend on them. And there just — there wasn’t that counternarrative, and I think that framing it as an economic issue would have been really transformative.

AMY GOODMAN: Instead, what she repeatedly said —

JEAN GUERRERO: And the other thing is, you know, she made —

AMY GOODMAN: What she repeatedly said, Kamala Harris and her surrogates, was that they support the bipartisan, mainly Republican bill — right? — that the Senate had hashed out and that Trump rejected. That’s as far as she would go, which was overwhelmingly about militarizing the border, Jean.

JEAN GUERRERO: Exactly. And even though her campaign was very much about, you know, freedom, freedom to have control over your own body and various other freedoms that the campaign focused on, they never talked about immigrant rights or the border in terms of freedom. And I think that was a missed opportunity, and I think it reflected a sense of fear that ultimately played into the Republicans’ hands, because there was no counteroffensive to this just relentless demonization of immigrants and this perception of immigrants as the problem, when in fact they are just the scapegoat that Trump is using to distract from the fact that he has no real solutions to the problems of working-class and middle-class Americans in this country.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, Prop 314 is leading by something like — is winning by 61% of the vote in Arizona. And while I’m giving numbers, Trump is leading in Arizona by about 3,000 votes. And you have The New York Times now saying that the needle is up to 91% probability that Trump will win. Harris would have to win all three key blue wall battleground states: Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. The question is: Will she win any of them? We’re going to turn right now — I want to thank you, Jean Guerrero, contributing opinion writer for The New York Times, joining us from Los Angeles, author of the book Hatemonger: Stephen Miller, Donald Trump, and the White Nationalist Agenda. We still have Katrina vanden Heuvel with us. We are going to turn to Christin Greer, as well. I want to get Katrina’s quick comment on this latest news, the Times having it 91% probability Trump will win.

KATRINA VANDEN HEUVEL: I don’t mean to make light of it. Maybe it’s — isn’t the digital tech team at The New York Times on strike? I’m sorry. Maybe there’s been some mistakes. I still say let’s wait for the morning. There’s something about the Times interactive whatever it is, that deepened dread, reminds me of the polling.

But I guess, above all, I think the comments on immigration were very important, because I think there’s a militarization of so much. There’s an issue of public security and public safety, but that doesn’t need to be about demonization and militarization, which has seeped too far into our political culture and work. And that’s my sense. I think there are going to be a lot of — there may be a lot of recrimination about failed establishment consensus or failure to be bold and find a counternarrative, which is going to be so key in the days and months ahead, counternarrative and thinking anew about not just the Democratic Party, but, as your previous guest said, about policies that have scapegoated and not improved the lives, and go more economic, economic populist economic, and not militarization.

AMY GOODMAN: In addition to Katrina vanden Heuvel, we’re joined by Christina Greer, associate professor of political science at Fordham University here in New York, host of the podcast FAQ NYC and host of The Blackest Questions podcast on TheGrio and the author of Black Ethnics: Race, Immigration, and the Pursuit of the American Dream. Your overall response to where we stand at this point, Professor Greer? It is just about 11:30 p.m. Eastern Time. The New York Times is predicting a win for President Trump. He just won Iowa, which the — what is considered the very reliable Des Moines Register poll that just came out had predicted that Kamala Harris, in fact, was possibly going to win that state, just by a few percentage points, but still it surprised everyone. But, in fact, that isn’t the case. Your response overall to what we’re seeing? We’re waiting to hear from Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.

CHRISTINA GREER: Right, I agree with Katrina: We’re still waiting to hear. And I think, as, you know, we move past this election, we’ll have to have a real deep reckoning with what polling looks like in the 21st century. But, you know, to discount this election right now would be foolish.

Right now the map looks very similar to 2020 with Joe Biden, and we’re still waiting to hear from Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, very important states that have very blue cities in those states. You know, if we zoom out 30,000 feet, all states are red states. It’s just: Do you have enough blue cities in your state to flip it to a Democratic blue state every four years? And so, until every ballot is counted — you know, in Pennsylvania, we know that they don’t count absentee ballots until Election Day. We know that, you know, Wisconsin has shored up their absentee ballot counting, but it still takes quite some time, and similarly with Michigan. So we might not know anything this evening, especially because so many big cities have yet to come through on that ballot. And if the blue western wall holds for Kamala Harris, and those three states that have a lot of Democratic cities in them, I think we could see possibly a different result. So, I’m not counting her out just yet.

AMY GOODMAN: To shore up what you’re saying, 5 million votes were cast in Georgia. Nine percent of the vote is left to count. So that’s close to half a million votes are left to count, most of which are from heavily blue metro areas, Professor Greer.

CHRISTINA GREER: Yes, and we also know that Georgia is known for their shenanigans when it comes to counting votes. And so, I think, you know, a lot of times people want results the evening of Election Day, but we have to recognize that it’s more important to get it right and to count every vote than to just give people some sort of projection just because that’s what they desire. So, if it takes time, it takes time. We do know that Republicans are great at saying, “Well, you know, if it takes time, then it must be election fraud, and we definitely won, and we’re claiming victory.” But that’s not necessarily the case.

And so, we do know that this has been a highly unusual campaign. Kamala Harris had a very short runway. We do know that this country is probably more divided than we’ve seen in modern history. We know that Donald Trump has excavated some of our worst fears in many ways for a whole host of reasons. And we know that the Democrats have tried to build coalitions that have made progressive Democrats quite uncomfortable. So we have a confluence of factors as we emerge from COVID that bring out states and certain voters that make this election unlike 2020, unlike 2016, and definitely unlike 2008. And so, I think, you know, as my grandmother would say, time reveals all things, and we just have to be patient for the electoral process to do its thing.

AMY GOODMAN: David Shuster, formerly with MSNBC, just tweeted, “The night is feeling a lot like 2000 election. Gore thought he had lost Florida… he was down 200,000 votes and didn’t realize that most of Miami had not yet reported. The networks/MSM didn’t realize it either. Then Miami came in and the Bush lead evaporated. Lessons learned.” Katrina vanden Heuvel?

KATRINA VANDEN HEUVEL: [inaudible] faced it. We lived through a coup. Five hundred and thirty-seven votes led George W. Bush, according to the Supreme Court, to be elected. He was selected. The Supreme Court should have been impeached. But what also happened is there was the Brooking — Brook Brother — Brooks Brothers riot, protest in the streets of Dade County. The right-wing Republicans protested and scared and manufactured a fear that led somewhat to the outcome, whereas Jesse Jackson and progressives wanted to protest union labor. But what came out of that, there was no real reckoning. I believe that Jim Baker — I’m sorry, James Baker and Jimmy Carter were put on a blue ribbon commission. But here we are. Gore didn’t need to concede. Again, I think there was an establishment consensus, and they rounded up the best speechwriters, the Jon Meachams of that time, to, you know, make a concession speech that spoke to freedom and liberty. But I think, you know, if you look back, that was an American coup.

Where we are now is what Christina said so well, is we should have patience and see what the blue wall produces — and patience is not an innate American characteristic, especially around elections, but I think it’s important now — and to learn the lessons of 2000, if those are going to be parallel lessons, which I have heard more and more, and, of course, you raised it, Amy. But I think there are lessons to be drawn. There will be a reckoning if Kamala Harris does not win, of that strategy, of that etc. But the courts, of course, as Christina knows well, and you do, too, and our correspondent, justice correspondent, Elie Mystal, that was not even the right-wing court we have now, so the damage that could be done — and people should again look at Project 2025 for more of a kind of manifesto, much more fierce than the Heritage Foundation document when Reagan became president, followed that — is these are all things to factor in as we talk tonight, because there is a pattern that 2000 showed, which we need to resist.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, we’re joined now in Washington, D.C., by Daniel Nichanian. He’s editor-in-chief of Bolts, a publication that covers local politics and policy with a focus on voting rights and criminal justice.

Welcome to Democracy Now!, Daniel. If you could respond to the results that we’ve seen come in so far, what’s most surprised you?

DANIEL NICHANIAN: Well, we don’t know yet the results at this point of the presidential race. I just overheard others on the panel speak about that and how we need to wait. Former President Trump seems to have — seems to have a lead at the moment, but it’s still too early to call.

But what I am watching, you know, throughout the night, especially as the federal government looks like it will potentially go back to Republican hands, is what is happening at the state level, at the local level. And it’s really for two reasons. One is obviously always important, for questions of civil rights, voting rights, criminal justice, that you just mentioned. The state and local level is very important. But also, if the right is going to come back into power in D.C. at the federal level, there’s going to be even more attention, I think, in some quarters about what’s happening in state courts, what’s happening in DA offices, and whether those are spaces for an alternative set of issues, an alternative set of approaches, a place where maybe the left or the Democratic Party or different flavors of that politics can thrive. So, you know, there’s a lot that’s happened also at the state and local level. Conservatives have done — have made a lot of gains. We could talk about that. But there have also been some bright spots for progressives, potentially.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, could you tell us, what are those bright spots, Daniel?

DANIEL NICHANIAN: Yeah. So, for instance, a race that I was following earlier tonight in the first part of the night was prosecutor races in Florida. So, the governor there, the Republican governor, had removed from office two prosecutors in Orlando and Tampa in the last couple of years. He had just removed them from office, making the case that they had violated the duty of their office because they were reforming the office. In one case in Tampa, the prosecutor had said he would not prosecute abortion cases. And now the two former prosecutors, the Democrats, were trying to gain their office back against the appointees of Ron DeSantis. So, it’s kind of a split result, so I don’t know if it’s a bright spot for the left necessarily. But in Orlando, Monique Worrell, who’s a Black woman, who was just removed from office, as I was saying, by the governor last year, won easily as she won her job back, even as in Tampa the Republican appointee survived against a comeback effort. You know, Florida, obviously, has really seen a red wave tonight.

Another race I would mention, in Michigan, obviously, we are waiting for the results of the presidential election in Michigan. It appears there that Democrats have expanded their majority on the state Supreme Court. Now, that’s very important for issues like abortion rights, issues like voting rights, that might come under continued assault by the federal government and by federal courts, of course. So, for liberal attorneys to be able to go to a state court system, that is actually extremely important in the years ahead potentially.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Daniel Nichanian, who is editor-in-chief of Bolts, a publication that covers local politics and policy, with a focus on criminal justice and voting rights. We also just heard that Adam Schiff won the Senate race in California. Now, we don’t know the balance of the Senate or the House yet. The House could be determined by races in California and here in New York. Can you comment on these, Daniel Nichanian?

DANIEL NICHANIAN: Yeah, we don’t yet know what’s happening in the House. The Senate seems like Republicans have a clear edge in taking the Senate at the moment with some — with leads in races like Ohio, on top of the one they have already flipped in West Virginia earlier tonight. The U.S. House at the moment is very much uncertain. There’s so much happening in California and in New York and other states that are a little behind on the count. It definitely looks like Democrats are running generally a little bit ahead at the congressional level than they are at the presidential level, which is potentially creating the possibility, even if Trump were to win the presidency, which obviously we’re not at this moment sure yet — it could create the possibility of a split Congress. I will say that that still would take a lot of wins by Democrats at the moment in races that are at the very least very uncertain. So, it is also very possible at the moment that there’s a Republican trifecta in 2025.

AMY GOODMAN: Christina Greer, as you hear this discussion, if you want to comment on where we stand at this point? Again, we don’t know about the blue wall states of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. And the most populous areas, for example, of Pennsylvania have not been completely counted.

CHRISTINA GREER: Right. And so, you know, I do believe in waiting for the results. I mean, the larger question is: Why is it so close? And so, whether or not Kamala Harris is victorious or Donald Trump is victorious, we need to ask ourselves: Why is it that someone who represents the Republican Party was able to do so well with a platform that is anti-immigrant, anti-woman, anti-LGBTQ+, anti-environment, anti-education, anti-intellectualism, anti-economics? You know, when you have dozens of security advisers saying that this man is a danger not just to America, but to society writ large, we have to ask ourselves: Why is it that so many Americans are invested in this type of isolationist, draconian type of politic, on not just the federal level but trickling down to, you know, the Senate and the House and obviously state races across the country?

And so, as we stand a very divided nation and we wait for results to come in, if it is indeed true that Donald Trump goes back to the White House, I think the Republican Party, because he has so few real Republicans working in his administration — he literally has some of the bottom-of-the-barrel individuals who have not been Republicans or in the Republican establishment. They’re just there as sort of barnacles to get their agenda passed. And we know that with Donald Trump, all you have to do is give him a modicum of flattery, and you can get your way.

And so, we have to ask ourselves: What does the future of our democracy look like? You know, in so many ways, we ask ourselves as organizers: Who do we want to be in opposition to? Kamala Harris was the type of person that so many people thought, “At least you can have a conversation and negotiate and come to the table in a good-faith effort to get certain important issues across the finish line, whether it be climate change, whether it be Gaza or some sort of international or domestic issues.” We know how Donald Trump will behave. He has told us time and time again how he feels about particular policy positions. So, the fact that so many millions upon millions of Americans are willing to take him at his word and believe him and still vote for him says a lot about where our nation is and how so many people — in the words of Lyndon Johnson, where he said, you know, if you can convince the poorest white man that he’s better than the Negro, then you can pick his pockets all day long. We have so many people who are just willing to do that to someone else that they feel is lesser. And I think that’s the type of politic that Donald Trump has excavated in this country, and it’s the worst of our ideals.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, Professor Greer, I want to thank you very much for being with us, a professor at Fordham University here in New York, as we turn right now to Amy Littlefield. She is the abortion access correspondent at The Nation magazine, independent journalist who covers reproductive health. Amy, you’re at a watch party for Amarillo Ordinance, as for the first time ever the anti-abortion ordinance was rejected in Texas. Can you explain where you are? And then if you can talk about the 10 states that have abortion ballot initiatives on them, and what do we understand has happened at this point? We know Florida, the reproductive rights referendum has gone down. In Missouri, a reproductive rights referendum has passed. In Arizona, it clearly looks like it is leading, as it is in Montana, Nebraska. But Missouri extremely significant, as it was the first state after the overturning of Roe v. Wade to essentially ban abortion. Amy, what do you understand at this point?

AMY LITTLEFIELD: Well, Amy, I can tell you I am right outside of a watch party for the pro-choice contingent that just successfully made history and beat an anti-abortion ordinance here in the buckle of the Bible Belt, Amy. This is truly amazing. I mean, every other time that an anti-abortion ordinance has been put to a citywide ballot in the state of Texas, it’s passed. Amarillo is the first state to reject it. We are in solid Trump country today. And I can tell you I was at the polls all day today talking to folks, some of whom were voting for Trump but were voting against this initiative.

This initiative would have used the bounty hunter enforcement mechanism that was made famous under the Texas S.B. 8, the six-week ban, that, you know, causes neighbors to sue neighbors in order to enforce the ban so that city officials or state officials can’t be sued over it. It would have used this bounty hunter enforcement provision to go after anyone who was helping someone travel through Amarillo to get an abortion in another state or who was helping a resident of Amarillo leave the city of Amarillo to get an abortion in another state. This is hugely significant, because Amarillo is in the Texas Panhandle. It’s sort of the gateway to Colorado and New Mexico and states where people were in fact passing through the city of Amarillo to get there.

So, I am just outside. I can see the jubilation through the window of these folks who mobilized and defeated this anti-abortion ordinance here. Just came from the watch party, where Mark Lee Dickson, who came up with this idea of sanctuary cities for the unborn, was, you know, talking about this defeat, comparing this moment to the Alamo and saying Texas remembers the Alamo and that the fight isn’t over. But clearly, a very — you know, not the result they were expecting for over there, from the man I would say is the closest we have to a modern-day Anthony Comstock.

AMY GOODMAN: And your response to this overall news? We do not know the key swing states. If Harris took all three of them — Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan — she has a chance of winning. But The New York Times is putting it beyond 90% that it looks like Trump will win. What this means for reproductive rights in this country, and Florida, the initiative going down, though it passed in New York?

AMY LITTLEFIELD: Right, right. I mean, Florida is a major defeat. You know, over $100 million were invested in this bitter fight in Florida. This is the highest-stakes abortion rights ballot initiative because of how huge Florida is, 84,000 abortions there, and now, of course, the six-week ban in place. We know Ron DeSantis pulled out all the stops, including using taxpayer money to fight this ordinance. And we also know that Florida has among the highest thresholds in the country. Sixty percent threshold was needed. So, there was a resounding majority of Floridians that did vote in favor of this, but it just wasn’t enough to clear the 60% threshold. And we know there was interference from Ron DeSantis, from sending election police to question people who signed the abortion rights petition to, you know, threatening criminal charges against TV stations that aired ads in favor of this.

Missouri, I do want to highlight. You know, this is a state with a total abortion ban, so this is historic, you know, that the abortion rights ballot initiative has passed there. And, of course, we’re seeing other states, including New York, declaring victory on pro-choice ballot initiatives.

I mean, in terms of what to expect from another Trump presidency, I mean, I can hardly bring myself to say it, Amy. This is the man who put the Supreme Court justices on the court that got us into this situation in the first place, that overturned Roe v. Wade and brought us the Dobbs decision. So, it will be dark days ahead for reproductive rights, there’s no question.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, we’re going to continue to follow this, and we’ll update people tomorrow. We’ll be speaking with professor Michele Goodwin. Amy Littlefield, we want to thank you very much for being with us from Amarillo, Texas, abortion access correspondent at The Nation, independent journalist who covers reproductive health.

As we’re in the last minutes of our four-hour special tonight, we’re joined now in Washington, D.C., by Chris Melody Fields Figueredo, executive director of the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center. Chris, if you could walk us through the ballot measures you’re watching and what we should know so far? We just started to talk about the 10 — we’ve been dealing with it throughout the night — 10 states that have abortion access referenda. There are something like, what, 39 democracy initiatives or ballot measures around the country. There are medical marijuana ballot measures across the country. Take us through it.

CHRIS MELODY FIELDS FIGUEREDO: Yeah. So, you know, it is going to be a good night, I think, overall, for reproductive rights and abortion. You know, we have victories already in New York, Missouri, Maryland. Things are looking good in Colorado and Nebraska. Still out in the West, we’re still, but the numbers are looking good so far.

Economic justice is a huge issue this year, too. It’s been on the minds of voters. It’s looking good to raise the minimum wage in a number of states, like Missouri, paid leave in Missouri, and Nebraska is also looking good, as well. And, you know, it’s kind of a mixed bag this evening. Overwhelmingly, I think the story will be — and we’ll see more results come through as the western states come — is that the people are using their power and making major progress towards making a future that they deserve.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And are you surprised by some of the results that have come in so far, Chris?

CHRIS MELODY FIELDS FIGUEREDO: I am not. You know, I heard your previous speaker talk about the government interference in states like Florida. You know, it is tough, but I know I was actually knocking doors this weekend and up until yesterday, and came back from Florida last night, and, overwhelmingly, Floridians do support reproductive freedom and wanted to stop the extreme abortion ban. But we have seen how the DeSantis government really tried everything, including taxpayer funds, to stop that ballot measure. But the organizers, they’ve run a really good campaign.

And it’s looking like we’re going to lose on redistricting in Ohio. But again, the state really interfered, put really confusing ballot language there. So, I think, really, the story to remember is I think actually the people are with us, and they have been for a number of years. But now, because we are winning on so many of these issues, we are seeing, especially in these Republican trifecta states, they’re trying to undermine the will of the people and pull out all the stops to dilute our voices.

So, I think the bigger — you know, the big message out of this is that ballot measures still remain a really important tool for people to take power into their own hands. And, you know, I’m already seeing in Arizona, in some of the results there, that they’re going to defeat the state legislatively referred measures to try to take less power from the people for the citizen-led process. So, I think, overall, we are going to be pleased with the results on these issues at the ballot when we put them before voters.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to go back to Daniel Nichanian, who is the head of Bolts. Daniel, if you can summarize for us in this last minute what we know at this point? Actually, interestingly, The New York Times has now said that Trump has an 89% chance of winning, so they brought the number down. I think they were at 91% a little while ago. And again, the three key states that everyone has been talking about, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, have not been called, though AP has called North Carolina for Donald Trump.

DANIEL NICHANIAN: Yeah. I mean, it does seem at this moment the races are not over, are not called. But it does seem like a very good night for Republicans at the federal level for now. And so, it really becomes, over the next few years, a battle for, you know, really, what are Republicans going to do at the federal level and what it means for people who oppose that. And very importantly, at the state and local level, what can the left do? What are progressives going to do?

And I think the person who just talked before me is right that ballot initiatives are an important tool. But, you know, I actually talked a week ago to an Ohio voter who said that they felt tricked by the ballot language to oppose redistricting reform there. And they immediately, after voting, realized that it was the ballot language crafted by the Republican Party in Ohio to oppose redistricting reform and, effectively, trick people who told me that they had voted opposite they had wanted. So, we are seeing right now also the results of those efforts, and we’re seeing big losses for the left also at the state level in elections like that.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, we want to thank you both for being with us. Daniel Nichanian is editor-in-chief of Bolts.

It is nearly midnight here in New York. The AP has called North Carolina for Donald Trump. Of the six remaining battleground states that will decide this election, Trump is leading in five of them: Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Arizona and Michigan. Early results from Nevada have not been released yet. The current Electoral College map gives Trump 230 votes and Kamala Harris 200. An exit poll by Edison Research found Trump overperformed in this election compared to 2020. Trump won 55% of white voters polled nationwide. Harris won 43% of white voters. Harris won 86% of Black voters nationwide, compared to Trump’s 12%. The exit poll showed Trump won 45% of Latino voters nationwide. That’s up by 13 percentage points compared to 2020.

A closely watched ballot measure that would have restored abortion access in Florida failed to pass, falling just short of the required 60% supermajority, receiving roughly 57% of the vote. Measures protecting abortion did pass in New York, in Colorado and in Maryland. Votes are still being tallied for abortion measures in Missouri, though it’s way ahead there, Arizona, Nebraska, South Dakota and Nevada.

Republicans have flipped two seats in the Senate, giving them 50 seats, with several races too close or too early to call. But they’re poised to win a Senate majority. In West Virginia, Republican Governor Jim Justice won the race to fill in Senator Joe Manchin’s seat. In Ohio, the MAGA Republican Bernie Moreno has defeated the Democratic incumbent Sherrod Brown in the most expensive Senate race ever, with over $400 million spent. Democratic Senator Jon Tester of Montana is also in a tight race to hold on to his seat against Republican Tim Sheehy, and Tammy Baldwin is now trailing Republican challenger Eric Hovde, with 68% of votes counted. For the first time in history, two Black women will serve in the Senate at the same time: Angela Alsobrooks in Maryland and Lisa Blunt Rochester in Delaware, both Democrats.

The balance of the House of Representatives remains unknown as votes are still being tallied. It could take days or even weeks to have a final picture of who will control the House. As of the most recent count, Democrats have secured 125 seats, Republicans 170. Two hundred eighteen seats are needed for control of the House.

We’ll be back tomorrow morning for a two-hour post-election show, 8 to 10 a.m. Eastern. Oh, a very happy birthday to John Hamilton. Democracy Now! is produced with Mike Burke, Renée Feltz, Deena Guzder, Sharif Abdel Kouddous, Messiah Rhodes, María Taracena, Tami Woronoff, Charina Nadura, Sam Alcoff, Tey-Marie Astudillo, John Hamilton, Robby Karran, Hany Massoud and Hana Elias. Our executive director is Julie Crosby. Special thanks to Becca Staley, Jon Randolph, Paul Powell, Mike Di Filippo, Miguel Nogueira, Hugh Gran, Denis Moynihan, David Prude, Dennis McCormick, Matt Ealy, Anna Özbek, Emily Andersen and Buffy Saint Marie Hernandez. Again, tell your friends and family a special two-hour edition of Democracy Now! tomorrow morning 8:00 Eastern time. I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh and Juan González.

[End of Hour 4]