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Georgia’s Senate Runoff Results Mark a Sea Change in American Politics

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Raphael Warnock’s victory in Georgia, and Jon Ossoff’s apparent win, would break Mitch McConnell’s grip on the Senate and the country.Photograph by Jonathan Ernst / Reuters

Click Senate Special Runoff below to see results from the race between Kelly Loeffler and Raphael Warnock, or General Election Runoff for results from the race between David Perdue and Jon Ossoff.



The pandemic makes all celebrations hushed and a little strange, including political-victory speeches. A little after 12:30 A.M. on Wednesday, the Reverend Raphael Warnock, the pastor of the Ebenezer Baptist Church and presumptive senator from Georgia, flickered onto a live stream, sitting alone in a small office. Over his left shoulder was a cross; over his right shoulder was a copy of Barack Obama’s “The Audacity of Hope.” Jon Ossoff, the other Democrat in Georgia’s twin runoffs for the Senate, appeared likely to unseat Senator David Perdue, but on Wednesday morning the race remained too close to call. If both Democrats win, they will give the Party, improbably, control of the U.S. Senate in January and President-elect Joe Biden a much better shot at passing meaningful legislation.

Warnock was reading from a prepared speech, at times a little jerkily, but he had a conversational tone and an easy grin. He barely mentioned the stakes of this election for Democratic policy goals, focussing instead on his own biography. Warnock is the eleventh of twelve children, was raised in a Savannah housing project, and now is the pastor of the church in Atlanta where Martin Luther King, Jr., served as pastor and John Lewis prayed. Warnock spoke of his mother. “The other day, because this is America, the eighty-two-year-old hands that used to pick somebody else’s cotton went to the polls and picked her youngest son to be a United States senator.”

All kinds of historical loops were closing in Georgia on Tuesday night. There were long ones, like those that Warnock mentioned. He will be only the eleventh Black senator in American history, and the first Black Democrat to be elected to the Senate from the South. His victory, and Ossoff’s apparent one, was powered by very high turnout among African-American voters and comparatively low turnout among the rural white voters on whom the Republicans have increasingly come to rely. But there were shorter loops, too. Almost exactly six years ago, Mitch McConnell became the Majority Leader of the Senate, and, ever since, politics in Washington have been in what was starting to seem like a permanent state of stagnation. McConnell operated as a hand brake on Washington, and Washington as a hand brake on the country, until it was hard to separate the political condition from the national one. Problems festered. Scant legislation passed. Nothing ever seemed to change. Republicans fought eternally to manage their own extremists, never successfully, while deepening their institutional control, of the judiciary most of all. The progressive certainty that the arc of history was bending only strengthened, but Democrats continued narrowly losing all of the most important votes. Everything kept coming down to a coin flip, but the coin always flipped the same way.

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The story has been similar in Georgia. Before this week, there had been eight statewide runoffs since 1992, and Republicans had won all eight. The Atlanta region kept growing, and becoming more progressive, but the state never quite turned. Even as Biden beat Donald Trump by eleven thousand seven hundred and seventy-nine votes in the state on November 3rd, there were heartening signs for McConnell: in both Senate races, the Republicans got more votes than the Democrats (though neither Perdue nor Loeffler reached the majority that would have averted Tuesday’s runoff). What happened between November 3rd and January 5th?

Just about everything. President Trump relentlessly, but ineffectively, tried to bully Republican state officials into finding some grounds to overturn Georgia’s results in the Presidential election, and some of his supporters issued death threats against those state Republican officials. Both Perdue and Loeffler were investigated for insider trading: they had sold off millions of dollars in stock after having received early briefings about the likely extent of the coronavirus pandemic. Loeffler’s campaign was accused of artificially darkening Warnock’s skin in some of the ads it ran. The very same tactics and compromises that have defined McConnell’s Republican Party—the cynical relationship with Trump, the comfort with defending the prerogatives of the rich, the weaponization of race—all backfired in Georgia. The margins were narrow again, but the conditions were different. This time, the coin flipped the other way.

If the Senate elections in Georgia constituted the first political event after Biden’s election, then they still seemed to belong very much to the Trump era: the lame-duck President’s efforts to overturn his own loss dominated the news throughout the runoff campaigns. Despite having so much at stake in the runoffs, Biden himself was a curiously intermittent presence in Georgia. He did arrive in Atlanta on Monday to hold an outdoor rally, where he sounded upbeat, promised healing, and seemed to belong to an entirely different time in American life than the one playing on the cable networks, in which Republican senators were promising to contest the certification of the election on Wednesday, despite having no evidence of fraud, and extremists were gathering in Washington for a pro-Trump rally. As votes were being counted in Georgia, some of those protesters were filmed fighting in D.C. with a line of riot police. Biden’s light presence was just as well; it let the focus drift elsewhere, to the long effort of activists to organize the progressive vote in Georgia. “The 10-year Stacey Abrams project to flip Georgia has nearly come to fruition,” ran a headline in the Times, just after midnight. At about 1:30 A.M. (with both races still uncalled, and Atlanta’s vote belatedly coming in) Ossoff took a very narrow lead over Perdue. Warnock’s race was called around 2 A.M. The hand brakes were off. The McConnell era seemed to be ending. Twice in Georgia—first in the Presidential race, and now in the Senate runoffs—the country’s politics had changed.

Just two weeks from Biden’s Inauguration, with his party likely to hold the slimmest of majorities in both houses of Congress, it’s hard to say what comes next. The wins by Democrats in 2020 were too narrow to banish Trumpism, as many in the Party had hoped they would. The challenges to election certification coming on Wednesday, led by the ambitious conservative Senators Josh Hawley, of Missouri, and Ted Cruz, of Texas, suggest that Trumpism may flourish; the QAnon-influenced paranoia among conservative media and the street demonstrations today to “Stop the Steal” suggest it may further darken. The Democratic Party’s path, too, is defined by tensions that are at least as generational as they are ideological, and which were present in Georgia. If Warnock represents the Party as it sees itself, then Ossoff—thirty-three years old, hyperactive on social media, with more family money than professional achievement behind him—embodies the Democratic Party as the Republicans see it. Neither Ossoff nor Warnock has ever held elected office; politically each remains, like Biden’s party, a little undefined. Ossoff didn’t speak in the early hours of Wednesday—his margins were smaller, so his campaign manager issued a press release expressing confidence that the vote would go the candidate’s way—leaving the stage to Warnock. Even the rough edges of Warnock’s speech, as he looked down to remember his text and then grinned up to recite it, contained some glimmer of hope. Politics has been stuck in the same place for so long. Here, at last, were two new faces.

Source: – The New Yorker

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Opinion: Canada's foreign policy and its domestic politics on Israel's war against Hamas are shifting – The Globe and Mail

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The vote in the House of Commons last week on Israel’s war against Hamas represents a shift in both Canada’s foreign policy and its domestic politics.

The Liberal government is now markedly more supportive of the rights of Palestinians and less supportive of the state of Israel than in the past. That shift mirrors changing demographics, and the increasing importance of Muslim voters within the Liberal coalition.

Both the Liberal and Conservative parties once voiced unqualified support for Israel’s right to defend itself from hostile neighbours. But the Muslim community is growing in Canada. Today it represents 5 per cent of the population, compared with 1 per cent who identify as Jewish.

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Although data is sparse prior to 2015, it is believed that Muslim Canadians tended to prefer the Liberal Party over the Conservative Party. They were also less likely to vote than the general population.

But the Conservative Party under Stephen Harper deeply angered the community with talk about “barbaric cultural practices” and musing during the 2015 election campaign about banning public servants from wearing the niqab. Meanwhile, Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau was promising to bring in 25,000 Syrian refugees to Canada if elected.

These factors galvanized community groups to encourage Muslims to vote. And they did. According to an Environics poll, 79 per cent of eligible Muslims cast a ballot in the 2015 election, compared with an overall turnout of 68 per cent. Sixty-five per cent of Muslim voters cast ballots for the Liberal Party, compared with 10 per cent who voted for the NDP and just 2 per cent for the Conservatives. (Telephone interviews of 600 adults across Canada who self-identified as Muslim, were conducted between Nov. 19, 2015 and Jan. 23, 2016, with an expected margin of error of plus or minus 4 percentage points 19 times out of 20.)

Muslim Canadians also strongly supported the Liberals in the elections of 2019 and 2021. The party is understandably anxious not to lose that support. I’m told that Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly often mentions the large Muslim community in her Montreal riding. (According to the 2021 census, 18 per cent of the people in Ahuntsic-Cartierville identify as Muslim.)

This is one reason why the Liberal leadership laboured so mightily to find a way to support last week’s NDP motion that would, among other measures, have recognized the state of Palestine. The Liberal caucus was deeply divided on the issue. My colleague Marieke Walsh reports that dozens of Liberal MPs were prepared to vote for the NDP motion.

In the end, almost all Liberal MPs ended up voting for a watered-down version of the motion – statehood recognition was taken off the table – while three Liberal MPs voted against it. One of them, Anthony Housefather, is considering whether to remain inside the Liberal caucus.

This is not simply a question of political calculation. Many Canadians are deeply concerned over the sufferings of the people in Gaza as the Israel Defence Forces seek to root out Hamas fighters.

The Conservatives enjoy the moral clarity of their unreserved support for the state of Israel in this conflict. The NDP place greater emphasis on supporting the rights of Palestinians.

The Liberals have tried to keep both Jewish and Muslim constituencies onside. But as last week’s vote suggests, they increasingly accord a high priority to the rights of Palestinians and to the Muslim community in Canada.

As with other religious communities, Muslims are hardly monolithic. Someone who comes to Canada from Senegal may have different values and priorities than a Canadian who comes from Syria or Pakistan or Indonesia.

And the plight of Palestinians in Gaza may not be the only issue influencing Muslims, who struggle with inflation, interest rates and housing affordability as much as other voters.

Many new Canadians come from societies that are socially conservative. Some Muslim voters may be uncomfortable with the Liberal Party’s strong support for the rights of LGBTQ Canadians.

Finally, Muslim voters for whom supporting the rights of Palestinians is the ballot question may be drawn more to the NDP than the Liberals.

Regardless, the days of Liberal/Conservative bipartisan consensus in support of Israel are over. This is the new lay of the land.

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Recall Gondek group planned to launch its own petition before political novice did – CBC.ca

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The third-party group helping promote the recall campaign against Mayor Jyoti Gondek had devised plans to launch its own petition drive, as part of a broader mission to make Calgary council more conservative.

Project YYC had planned with other conservative political organizations to gather signatures demanding Calgary’s mayor be removed, says group leader Roy Beyer. But their drive would have begun later in the year, when nicer weather made for easier canvassing for supporters, he said.

Those efforts were stymied when Landon Johnston, an HVAC contractor largely unknown in local politics, applied at city hall to launch his own recall drive in early February. Since provincial recall laws allow only one recall attempt per politician per term, Project YYC chose to lend support to Johnston’s bid.

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“Now we have to try to do door-knocking in the winter, and there’s a lot of preparation that you have to contemplate prior to starting. And Landon didn’t do that,” Beyer told CBC News in an interview.

Project YYC has helped gather signatures, created a website and erected large, anti-Gondek signs around town. It has supplied organizational heft that Johnston admits to lacking.

Their task is daunting.

According to provincial law, in order to force a recall plebiscite to oust the mayor before the term is up, they have two months to gather more than 514,000 signatures, an amount equal to 40 per cent of Calgary’s population in 2019.

They have until April 4 to collect that many signatures, and by March 21 had only 42,000.

Beyer criticizes the victory threshold for recall petition as so high that it’s “a joke,” and the province may as well not have politician recall laws.

So if he thinks it’s an impossible pursuit, why is he involved with this?

“You can send a message to the mayor that she should be sitting down and resigning … without achieving those numbers,” Beyer said.

Project YYC founder Roy Beyer, from a Take Back Alberta video in 2022. He is no longer with that provincial activist group. (royjbeyer screenshot/Rumble)

He likened it to former premier Jason Kenney getting 52 per cent support in a UCP leadership review — enough to technically continue as leader, but a lousy enough show of confidence that he announced immediately he would step down.

Gondek has given no indication she’ll voluntarily leave before her term is up next year. But she did emerge from a meeting last week with Johnston to admit the petition has resonated with many Calgarians and is a signal she must work harder to listen to public concerns and explain council’s decisions.

The mayor also told the Calgary Sun this week that she’s undecided about running for re-election in 2025. 

“There used to be this thing where if you’re the mayor, of course you’re going to run for another term because there’s unfinished business,” Gondek told the newspaper.

“And yes, there will be unfinished business, but the times are not what they were. You need to make sure you’re the right leader for the times you’re in.”

The last several Calgary mayors have enjoyed multiple terms in office, going back to Ralph Klein in the 1980s. The last one-term mayor was Ross Alger, the man Klein defeated in 1980.

Beyer and fellow conservative organizers launched Project YYC before the recall campaign. The goal was to elect a conservative mayor and councillors — “a common-sense city council, instead of what we currently have,” he said.

Beyer is one of a few former activists with the provincial pressure group Take Back Alberta to have latched themselves to the recall bid and Project YYC, along with some United Conservative Party riding officials in Calgary. 

Beyer’s acknowledgment of his group’s broader mission comes as Premier Danielle Smith and her cabinet ministers have said they want to introduce political party politics in large municipalities — even though most civic politicians have said they don’t want to bring clear partisanship into city halls.

Although Beyer admits Project YYC’s own recall campaign would have been a coalition effort with other conservative groups, he wouldn’t specify which ones. He did insist that Take Back Alberta wasn’t one of them.

A man in a grey baseball cap speaks to reporters.
Calgary business owner Landon Johnston speaks to reporters at City Hall on March 22 following his 15-minute conversation with Mayor Jyoti Gondek. (Laurence Taschereau/CBC)

Johnston says he was approached by Beyer’s group shortly after applying to recall Gondek, and gave them $3,000 from donations he’d raised.

He initially denied any knowledge of Project YYC when documents first emerged about that group’s role in the recall, but later said he didn’t initially realize that was the organizational name of his campaign allies.

“They said they could get me signatures, so I said, ‘OK, if you can do it by the book, here’s some money.’ And it’s worked,” he said.

Johnston has said he’s new to politics but simply wants to remove Gondek because of policies he’s disagreed with, like the soon-to-be-ended ban on single-use plastics and bags at restaurant takeouts and drive-thrus.

He’s no steadfast conservative, either. He told CBC’s Calgary Eyeopener that he voted for Rachel Notley’s NDP because one of its green-renovation incentives helped his HVAC business.

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Larry David shares how he feels about Trump – CNN

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Larry David shares how he feels about Trump

“Curb Your Enthusiasm” star Larry David shares how he feels about former President Donald Trump and the 2020 election. Watch the full episode of “Who’s Talking to Chris Wallace,” streaming March 29 on Max.


03:21

– Source:
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