Remember when impeachment was going to be the seismic political event of 2020?
Neither does anybody else.
President Donald Trump’s impeachment trial, which seemed so important in January, was overwhelmed in short order by even more tumultuous developments: A deadly pandemic that hardened the nation’s partisan divide and upended the economy. A racial reckoning that reverberated through American governance and culture. A president’s baseless attacks on the election itself, raising doubts about the legitimacy of his successor among millions of voters.
The past 12 months have left the United States a different place than it was when the year began. An unfathomable 330,000 Americans have died of COVID-19. The government is bigger after passage of the most expansive relief packages in the nation’s history to address the costs of the virus, still not under control. In the wake of politics of the most brutal sort, some scholars and citizens worry that fundamental democratic institutions have been bruised.
Lamonte Williams waves a flag outside the Chase Center in Wilmington, Del.William Bretzger, Delaware News Journal
Will the changes stick? Will 2020 turn out to be an aberration or a turning point?
Americans recognized the high stakes set by a year that was shaped by a combination of forces no one had experienced. “We’ve seen a pandemic before; we’ve seen economic crisis; we’ve seen racial turmoil,” Princeton historian Kevin Kruse said in an interview. “But not all at once, not all together.”
Asked for the single word that described 2020, the most frequent response in a USA TODAY/Suffolk University Poll this month was “awful” or “terrible” or “horrible,” adjectives chosen by nearly one in four. Fifteen percent used expletives that can’t be repeated here. Nearly all of the 1,000 registered voters surveyed Dec. 16-20 cited words that reflected strain or pain.
Only 7% chose positive words such as “OK/wonderful/good” or “enlightening/awakening.” Another 5% used neutral words, like “unprecedented” and “different.”
“We’re going to look back in 50 years and say this was the year of fundamental changes,” predicted Jim Messina, a veteran political strategist who ran President Barack Obama’s reelection campaign in 2012. Those changes have affected the contours of the economy, the power of social media, the strength of political parties’ bases and Americans’ views of the role of government.
“There’s this conception in Washington, D.C., that we’re going to go back to ‘normal’ now that Joe Biden is president,” Messina added. “But I just don’t think that is true.”
“We’re at a crossroads,” said Susan Stokes, director of the Chicago Center on Democracy at the University of Chicago, calling the moment “a big fork in the road.”
Here are four of the significant questions ahead about what direction the country will take next.
Was democracy damaged?
Trump challenged traditions and smashed norms from the moment he rode down the escalator at Trump Tower and launched his long-shot presidential bid in 2015. Never in modern times has an American politician provoked such heated controversies and survived, his political base unshaken. But nothing matched the potential repercussions of his assault on the democratic process itself during the final two months of his tenure, when he refused to recognize the results of the November election or to commit to the peaceful transfer of power.
Trump and his supporters filed dozens of lawsuits in eight battleground states; none of them gained legal traction. He lobbied governors and legislative leaders to take unprecedented maneuvers to overturn the certified count in battleground states. Even now, he is urging congressional Republicans to challenge the final Electoral College proceedings on Jan. 6.
While he has no realistic prospect of changing the outcome, Trump has succeeded in raising doubts among millions of his supporters about whether Biden won the White House fair and square. In the USA TODAY poll, a third of registered voters, including three in four Republicans, said Biden wasn’t legitimately elected, an assertion that has been repeatedly debunked by fact-checkers.
President Donald Trump continues to incorrectly assert fraud occurred in November’s presidential election.Patrick Semansky, AP
Those doubts could erode trust not only in the new president but also in the democratic process itself, political scientists and political practitioners warn.
“A lot of times the loser feels there was something wrong with the election, but usually the leadership gets itself up and dusts itself off and gets ready for the next time around,” Stokes said. “But if the leadership turns around and says, ‘This was stolen, this was fraudulent’ without any basis in truth or real kind of process or evidence, then the public will follow that – at the very least with a kind of ongoing decay in our democratic culture, and at the worst, violence.”
That “national culture of distrust” will test both parties and the next election, she said.
Was there a turning point on race?
On May 25, the final moments of George Floyd’s life were caught on a cellphone video. He pleaded for breath, and then for his mother, as a Minneapolis police officer knelt on his neck for nearly nine minutes.
Clergy from the Minneapolis area march June 2 to the intersection where George Floyd died in police custody.Jack Gruber, USAT
Other cases of police misconduct toward Black people gained new attention and sparked more outrage, including the shootings of Breonna Taylor in Louisville, Kentucky, Rayshard Brooks in Atlanta and Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin.
“That homemade video recording [of Floyd] shook the world,” said Michael Eric Dyson, a Vanderbilt professor and author of “Long Time Coming: Reckoning with Race in America,” published by St. Martin’s Press this month. “There’s no question that this year has been a game-changer in the first year of a new decade. There is no question that when you look at the pandemic of COVID, and the pandemic of race, and the presidential race, and all that it revealed about us as a nation – we’re astonished. We’re looking at each other.”
Not since the civil rights movement in the 1960s has there been such a powerful public response to and scrutiny of the nation’s record on race, and one that resonated with Black and white Americans. The debate that began on police reform also focused attention on the disproportionate impact of the coronavirus on people of color and on signs of systemic racism in housing, education and employment.
Dyson is optimistic about the future, but he and other advocates say the protests of the year won’t lead to lasting changes without difficult and sometimes controversial action ahead.
“I just hope that everyone understands that the symbolic gestures actually are important,” Sherrilyn Ifill, president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, said in August, “but they do not end the conversation.”
Will COVID-19 be vanquished?
In recent weeks, the initial distribution of two FDA-authorized vaccines for COVID-19 has given Americans hope that they can see a light at the end of the tunnel, of an end to the pandemic that has upended almost everything in American life.
At the same time, though, the tunnel has gotten darker than ever. The numbers of new cases, of hospitalizations and of deaths all reached new heights in December. The vaccines alone won’t bring the coronavirus under control for months or more.
Biden vows that the pandemic will be his first priority. It is likely to define his presidency, as it has defined Trump’s tenure. No new president has ever taken office in the midst of such a broad and deadly public health crisis with repercussions that are shaping other pressing challenges. The pandemic has thrown millions out of work and widened the nation’s economic divide.
Biden says he’ll start by asking all Americans to wear face masks, a common-sense measure that has become a bitter partisan divide. He’ll also have to persuade people to take the vaccine, another plea that will test their trust of him and their government.
In the USA TODAY poll this month, the percentage of those willing to take the vaccine as soon as they could jumped to 46%, up from 26% in late October. One in three wanted to wait. But one in five said they would never take it. Among Republicans, the partisan group that presumably will be the most resistant to Biden’s entreaties, 36% said they would never take it.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease specialist, now estimates that 70% to 90% of Americans need to be immune for the virus to fade and life to return to normal.
Allen Matthews, 42, an engineer from Lone Tree, Colorado, who was called in the survey, is among those who still needs to be convinced. “Probably just wait,” he said about taking the vaccine, unsure of its safety. “It needs to be out there for longer.”
Will voters be exhausted or engaged?
Nearly 160 million voters cast ballots in 2020, a record.
In an unexpected turn, the pandemic seems to have boosted turnout because it prompted many states to make voting easier, including an enormous expansion of mail voting, used by nearly half of all voters. Some states already have begun to debate whether to adopt or roll back some of those changes in future elections.
The partisan impact of higher participation – a good thing for democracy in general – was more complicated than pundits predicted beforehand. Democrats won the White House but Republicans gained ground down the ballot, including in the House of Representatives.
Biden received more than 81 million votes, nearly 12 million more than Obama got in 2008, the previous high-water mark. Even though Trump lost the popular vote, he broke the previous record, too, receiving more than 74 million votes.
The turnout rate was historic as well. In all, 66.7% of those eligible to vote did. That’s the highest in more than a century, since 1900, and part of a new trend. Turnout in the 2018 election had hit a midterm record, too, only four years after the 2014 midterms had scored the lowest turnout in seven decades.
Why the turnaround?
“There’s only one variable that changed between 2014 and 2018, and that’s Donald Trump,” said Michael McDonald, a University of Florida political scientist who runs the United States Election Project. “It’s clear that people have a visceral reaction to him: Love him or hate him.”
That raises the question of whether the jump in turnout will continue after Trump no longer stands at center stage in politics. He has energized voters both for and against him, but he has also left some exhausted by his shifting policies, provocative rhetoric and chaotic style of decision-making – all of those epitomized by his favored 280-character means of communication, Twitter.
McDonald, for one, predicts that the Trump turnout effect will persist. “A lot of research shows voting is habit-forming,” he said. “When you vote once, you’re more likely to vote again.”
Contributing: Sarah Elbeshbishi
President-elect Joe Biden receives a COVID-19 vaccine and urges Americans to do the same.ap
FREDERICTON – New Brunswick Premier Blaine Higgs has called an election for Oct. 21, signalling the beginning of a 33-day campaign expected to focus on pocketbook issues and the government’s provocative approach to gender identity policies.
The 70-year-old Progressive Conservative leader, who is seeking a third term in office, has attracted national attention by requiring teachers to get parental consent before they can use the preferred names and pronouns of young students.
More recently, however, the former Irving Oil executive has tried to win over inflation-weary voters by promising to lower the provincial harmonized sales tax by two percentage points to 13 per cent if re-elected.
At dissolution, the Conservatives held 25 seats in the 49-seat legislature. The Liberals held 16 seats, the Greens had three and there was one Independent and four vacancies.
J.P. Lewis, a political science professor at the University of New Brunswick, said the top three issues facing New Brunswickers are affordability, health care and education.
“Across many jurisdictions, affordability is the top concern — cost of living, housing prices, things like that,” he said.
Richard Saillant, an economist and former vice-president of Université de Moncton, said the Tories’ pledge to lower the HST represents a costly promise.
“I don’t think there’s that much room for that,” he said. “I’m not entirely clear that they can do so without producing a greater deficit.” Saillant also pointed to mounting pressures to invest more in health care, education and housing, all of which are facing increasing demands from a growing population.
Higgs’s main rivals are Liberal Leader Susan Holt and Green Party Leader David Coon. Both are focusing on economic and social issues.
Holt has promised to impose a rent cap and roll out a subsidized school food program. The Liberals also want to open at least 30 community health clinics over the next four years.
Coon has said a Green government would create an “electricity support program,” which would give families earning less than $70,000 annually about $25 per month to offset “unprecedented” rate increases.
Higgs first came to power in 2018, when the Tories formed the province’s first minority government in 100 years. In 2020, he called a snap election — the first province to go to the polls after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic — and won a majority.
Since then, several well-known cabinet ministers and caucus members have stepped down after clashing with Higgs, some of them citing what they described as an authoritarian leadership style and a focus on policies that represent a hard shift to the right side of the political spectrum.
Lewis said the Progressive Conservatives are in the “midst of reinvention.”
“It appears he’s shaping the party now, really in the mould of his world views,” Lewis said. “Even though (Progressive Conservatives) have been down in the polls, I still think that they’re very competitive.”
Meanwhile, the legislature remained divided along linguistic lines. The Tories dominate in English-speaking ridings in central and southern parts of the province, while the Liberals held most French-speaking ridings in the north.
The drama within the party began in October 2022 when the province’s outspoken education minister, Dominic Cardy, resigned from cabinet, saying he could no longer tolerate the premier’s leadership style. In his resignation letter, Cardy cited controversial plans to reform French-language education. The government eventually stepped back those plans.
A series of resignations followed last year when the Higgs government announced changes to Policy 713, which now requires students under 16 who are exploring their gender identity to get their parents’ consent before teachers can use their preferred first names or pronouns — a reversal of the previous practice.
When several Tory lawmakers voted with the opposition to call for an external review of the change, Higgs dropped dissenters from his cabinet. And a bid by some party members to trigger a leadership review went nowhere.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 19, 2024.
FREDERICTON – A 33-day provincial election campaign is expected to officially get started today in New Brunswick.
Progressive Conservative Premier Blaine Higgs has said he plans to visit Lt.-Gov. Brenda Murphy this morning to have the legislature dissolved.
Higgs, a 70-year-old former oil executive, is seeking a third term in office, having led the province since 2018.
The campaign ahead of the Oct. 21 vote is expected to focus on pocketbook issues, but the government’s provocative approach to gender identity issues could also be in the spotlight.
The Tory premier has already announced he will try to win over inflation-weary voters by promising to lower the harmonized sales tax by two percentage points to 13 per cent if re-elected.
Higgs’s main rivals are Liberal Leader Susan Holt and Green Party Leader David Coon, both of whom are focusing on economic and social issues.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 19, 2024.
VICTORIA – If the lead up to British Columbia‘s provincial election campaign is any indication of what’s to come, voters should expect the unexpected.
It could be a wild ride to voting day on Oct. 19.
The Conservative Party of B.C. that didn’t elect a single member in the last election and gained less than two per cent of the popular vote is now leading the charge for centre-right, anti-NDP voters.
The official Opposition BC United, who as the former B.C. Liberals won four consecutive majorities from 2001 to 2013, raised a white flag and suspended its campaign last month, asking its members, incumbents and voters to support the B.C. Conservatives to prevent a vote split on the political right.
New Democrat Leader David Eby delivered a few political surprises of his own in the days leading up to Saturday’s official campaign start, signalling major shifts on the carbon tax and the issue of involuntary care in an attempt to curb the deadly opioid overdose crisis.
He said the NDP would drop the province’s long-standing carbon tax for consumers if the federal government eliminates its requirement to keep the levy in place, and pledged to introduce involuntary care of people battling mental health and addiction issues.
The B.C. Coroners Service reports more than 15,000 overdose deaths since the province declared an opioid overdose public health emergency in 2016.
Drug policy in B.C., especially decriminalization of possession of small amounts of hard drugs and drug use in public areas, could become key election issues this fall.
Eby, a former executive director of the B.C. Civil Liberties Association, said Wednesday that criticism of the NDP’s involuntary care plan by the Canadian Civil Liberties Association is “misinformed” and “misleading.”
“This isn’t about forcing people into a particular treatment,” he said at an unrelated news conference. “This is about making sure that their safety, as well as the safety of the broader community, is looked after.”
Eby said “simplistic arguments,” where one side says lock people up and the other says don’t lock anybody up don’t make sense.
“There are some people who should be in jail, who belong in jail to ensure community safety,” said Eby. “There are some people who need to be in intensive, secure mental health treatment facilities because that’s what they need in order to be safe, in order not to be exploited, in order not to be dead.”
The CCLA said in a statement Eby’s plan is not acceptable.
“There is no doubt that substance use is an alarming and pressing epidemic,” said Anais Bussières McNicoll, the association’s fundamental freedoms program director. “This scourge is causing significant suffering, particularly, among vulnerable and marginalized groups. That being said, detaining people without even assessing their capacity to make treatment decisions, and forcing them to undergo treatment against their will, is unconstitutional.”
While Eby, a noted human rights lawyer, could face political pressure from civil rights opponents to his involuntary care plans, his opponents on the right also face difficulties.
The BC United Party suspended its campaign last month in a pre-election move to prevent a vote split on the right, but that support may splinter as former jilted United members run as Independents.
Five incumbent BC United MLAs, Mike Bernier, Dan Davies, Tom Shypitka, Karin Kirkpatrick and Coralee Oakes are running as Independents and could become power brokers in the event of a minority government situation, while former BC United incumbents Ian Paton, Peter Milobar and Trevor Halford are running under the B.C. Conservative banner.
Davies, who represents the Fort St. John area riding of Peace River North, said he’s always been a Conservative-leaning politician but he has deep community roots and was urged by his supporters to run as an Independent after the Conservatives nominated their own candidate.
Davies said he may be open to talking with B.C. Conservative Leader John Rustad after the election, if he wins or loses.
Green Leader Sonia Furstenau has suggested her party is an option for alienated BC United voters.
Rustad — who faced criticism from BC United Leader Kevin Falcon and Eby about the far-right and extremist views of some of his current and former candidates and advisers — said the party’s rise over the past months has been meteoric.
“It’s been almost 100 years since the Conservative Party in B.C. has won a government,” he said. “The last time was 1927. I look at this now and I think I have never seen this happen anywhere in the country before. This has been happening in just over a year. It just speaks volumes that people are just that eager and interested in change.”
Rustad, ejected from the former B.C. Liberals in August 2022 for publicly supporting a climate change skeptic, sat briefly as an Independent before being acclaimed the B.C. Conservative leader in March 2023.
Rustad, who said if elected he will fire B.C.’s provincial health officer Dr. Bonnie Henry over her vaccine mandates during the COVID-19 pandemic, has removed the nominations of some of his candidates who were vaccine opponents.
“I am not interested in going after votes and trying to do things that I think might be popular,” he said.
Prof. David Black, a political communications specialist at Greater Victoria’s Royal Roads University, said the rise of Rustad’s Conservatives and the collapse of BC United is the political story of the year in B.C.
But it’s still too early to gauge the strength of the Conservative wave, he said.
“Many questions remain,” said Black. “Has the free enterprise coalition shifted sufficiently far enough to the right to find the social conservatism and culture-war populism of some parts of the B.C. Conservative platform agreeable? Is a party that had no infrastructure and minimal presence in what are now 93 ridings this election able to scale up and run a professional campaign across the province?”
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 19, 2024.
