The Daily 202: Biden patched up the Blue Wall, but he failed to rebuild Obama’s coalition

Four years ago, Donald Trump carried Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania by a combined total of 77,744 votes. These three states were considered part of what political strategists and academics called “the Blue Wall” because no Republican had won them since 1988. 

Biden, 77, is a retro politician who ran a retro campaign. The central promise of, and rationale for, his candidacy during the Democratic primaries was that he could rebuild the Blue Wall by appealing to voters from places like his childhood hometown of Scranton, Pa., who had supported Obama and him in 2008 and 2012 before defecting to Trump.

Biden won back some number of the fabled Obama-Trump voters, but that does not appear to be the primary explanation for his victories in Wisconsin and Michigan – nor why his campaign is so confident that Pennsylvania will break his way once all the votes are counted from in and around Philadelphia. Biden’s inability to recreate the coalition that allowed Obama to twice carry Ohio illustrates the ongoing realignment in American politics.

The 2020 election was a referendum on Trump. The president struggled in suburban areas outside Milwaukee, Detroit and Philadelphia just as he did in other suburbs from coast to coast. 

While Biden reduced Trump’s margin of victory among working-class Whites, he did not bring them back into the Democratic fold. In Michigan, for example, Obama carried Macomb County outside Detroit by nine points in 2008 and four points in 2012. In 2016, Trump won the county by 12 points. This led to many stories about how the so-called “Reagan Democrats” were no longer Democrats. In 2020, Trump won Macomb again. But this time he only prevailed by eight points. To be sure, in close races like these, a few votes here and there can be decisive.

The urban-rural divide actually grew deeper this year. In 2016, Trump won 23 counties that Obama had won. Biden took back just two of them: Door and Sauk. “Biden instead exceeded previous Democratic win margins in Wisconsin’s two biggest cities, Milwaukee and Madison. That pattern extended to Michigan and other battleground states,” Philip Rucker and Robert Costa report. “That leaves the nation potentially heading toward a period of entrenched partisan warfare, even as it is battered by crises. ‘This is a democracy at full work, but clearly very divided,’ said Jim Doyle, a former Democratic governor of Wisconsin. ‘We are clearly very, very divided by cities and rural, we’re very divided by race.’”

With Michigan and Wisconsin in his column, Biden needs 17 of the remaining 68 electoral votes to become president. Pennsylvania’s 20 votes would put him over the top. So would Arizona (11) and Nevada (6), which together would put the Democrats right at the 270 they need. For Trump to prevail, the president would have to win either Arizona or Nevada and then maintain his current leads in Georgia (16), Pennsylvania and North Carolina (15).

While Biden fixated on rebuilding the Blue Wall, knocking down what has been part of the Red Wall might be what puts him over the top. Bill Clinton was the last Democrat to carry Arizona or Georgia. Biden’s lead narrowed overnight in Arizona while Trump’s lead in Georgia shrank. 

In Georgia, Trump leads Biden by 18,540 votes out of more than 4.8 million cast. There are about 60,000 ballots that still need to be counted.

In Arizona, Biden’s lead shrunk to about 68,000 votes early this morning out of more than 2.8 million cast when Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix, released more results. “Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs said during an interview on NBC that her state has just under 450,000 ballots left to count, and analysts said Trump would need to win about 57 percent of those to catch Biden,” per John Wagner. “That’s about the percentage Trump won in the latest batch from Maricopa, but some of the batches remaining will come from Democratic-leaning counties in which Biden had sizable leads.” 

Biden held rallies in Georgia and Arizona, but advisers say he never went to Texas (which no Democrat has carried since Jimmy Carter in 1976) because he did not want to get distracted from the Blue Wall states. The Biden campaign spent about $170 million to run ads in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, compared to $58 million in Arizona and Texas. Unlike the Sun Belt, the demographics of the Great Lakes States have not significantly changed in recent years. (While we often call this area the Rust Belt, many people who are from there hate that term. They prefer that these states be referred to as the Industrial Midwest.) 

The former vice president noted that he leads in the popular vote by about 3 million during a subdued speech on Wednesday afternoon in Wilmington, Del. He observed that, with more than 70 million votes, more people just voted for him than other candidate for public office in U.S. history. “I’m not here to declare that we’ve won. But I am here to report, when the count is finished, we believe we will be the winners,” he said.

Even as he projected confidence and sought to project an aura of inevitability, Biden remained focused on the Blue Wall. “With all of the votes counted, we have won Wisconsin by 20,000 votes, virtually the same margin that President Trump won that state four years ago,” he said in his brief remarks. “In Michigan, we lead by over 35,00 votes and it’s growing, a substantially bigger margin than President Trump won Michigan in 2016. … And I feel very good about Pennsylvania. Virtually all of the remaining ballots to be counted were cast by mail, and we’ve been winning 78 percent of the votes by mail in Pennsylvania.”

Indeed, Trump’s lead in Pennsylvania declined by hundreds of thousands of votes on Wednesday as ballots were counted from suburban and medium-sized cities around the state, as well as Pittsburgh. “About 200,000 votes remain in Philadelphia, where Biden has captured almost 80 percent of the votes so far,” Harry Stevens, Adrian Blanco and Dan Keating report. “Relatively few votes are uncounted in the strong Republican rural areas. Almost half of the uncounted votes are in suburbs and medium cities where the mail-in ballots remaining to be counted may break Democratic.” 

Black voters could save Biden again, just as they did in South Carolina’s primary. “Nationally, Black voters overwhelmingly backed Biden by a margin of 87 percent to Trump’s 12 percent, according to exit polls,” Amy Wang, Vanessa Williams and Reis Thebault report. “Black voters were also galvanized this year by protests for racial justice following the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. In Kenosha, Wis., the August police shooting of Jacob Blake, a Black father of three, sparked widespread unrest in the city. ‘I feel it all came to a head with what happened in Kenosha,’ said Fayomi ‘Femi’ Agbongbon, a nursing assistant from Milwaukee who was active in get-out-the-vote efforts targeting her fellow health-care workers in the state, many of them people of color. … ‘We showed up to the polls.’”

One advantage Biden had over Clinton was the benefit of hindsight. She did not understand until the 11th hour how close the Blue Wall states would become. Bafflingly, she never visited Wisconsin in 2016. Not once. To make amends, Democrats scheduled their quadrennial national convention for Milwaukee this summer. Biden accepted the nomination remotely because of concerns about the coronavirus. But even as Wisconsin became one of the worst covid-19 hot spots in the country during the last few weeks, Biden still made a point to fly in for three visits.

Wisconsin seems destined to stay close in future elections. Four of the last six presidential races in the Badger State have now been decided by less than a percentage point. George W. Bush only lost Wisconsin in 2000 by 0.2 percent and in 2004 by 0.4 percent. In fact, Obama is the only presidential candidate since Ronald Reagan in 1984 – the last Republican before Trump to carry Wisconsin – who garnered more than 50 percent of the vote.

Ultimately, though, a win is a win. And here is one clever way to think about Biden’s potential path to victory:

We have another special report starting at 11 a.m. Eastern to dissect the latest results and look at the state of play in the states that have not been called. I will join Libby Casey, our data scientists who make our race calls and the engineers who oversee our internal modeling. Stream the broadcast on our home page or tune in on YouTube.

“In a series of rapid-fire announcements throughout the day, Trump campaign officials said they planned to ask courts to halt vote-counting until more access is granted for Republican observers in Michigan and Pennsylvania; seek to initiate a recount in Wisconsin; and intervene in litigation pending before the Supreme Court over Pennsylvania’s extended deadline for mail ballots. The campaign also said it would challenge guidance related to voter identification rules for some voters in Pennsylvania, one of a half-dozen legal efforts undertaken by Republicans in the state this week. And in Georgia, the campaign sued election officials in Chatham County, home of Savannah, alleging that ballots arriving after the 7 p.m. deadline may have been mixed in with eligible ballots and improperly counted,” Elise Viebeck, Robert Barnes, Tom Hamburger and Rosalind Helderman report. “Democrats said they were unfazed by what they said was legal posturing by the president’s campaign. They said they were well-prepared to fend off any lawsuits or appeals.”

In keeping with his lifelong penchant for litigiousness, Trump said he wants the Supreme Court to determine which ballots should count: “Legal experts noted that Trump cannot simply seek the Supreme Court’s intervention in the election and stop the counting of ballots. There is no routine review of election results at the high court, and its most consequential election case — Bush v. Gore, which effectively determined the outcome of the 2000 presidential race — did not arrive there for about a month.” 

Local leaders defended their elections as well-run and refused to halt vote counts: “In Pennsylvania, Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf called the GOP effort an attempt ‘to subvert the democratic process.’ … In Wisconsin, Elections Commission Administrator Meagan Wolfe rejected the idea that there have been irregularities in the state’s count, telling reporters that the election ‘proceeded in a very normal fashion.’. … In Michigan, Democrats said the lawsuit the Trump campaign filed seeking to halt vote-counting was preposterous.” 

Nevada saw a slew of last-minute GOP lawsuits challenging its counting process: “The state Supreme Court on Tuesday night unanimously rejected a request from the Nevada Republican Party and the Trump campaign to halt the counting of some mail ballots in Clark County, a Democratic stronghold where votes for Biden would be key to his potential victory. As a result, Clark County will be able to continue counting most mail ballots under its current protocol. County officials must count any mail ballots postmarked by Election Day that arrive by Nov. 10, and they must complete their canvass by Nov. 16. As of Wednesday evening, Biden held a narrow lead of fewer than 8,000 votes in Nevada, but there were many mail and provisional ballots left to count.” 

Wisconsin law allows Trump to request a recount: “Under state rules, counties must complete a canvass of local results and turn those results over to the state between now and Nov. 17,” Helderman, Kim Bellware, Dan Simmons and Peter Kendall report. “A presidential candidate requesting a recount must do so no later than 5 p.m. on the first business day after the state has received its final results from the state’s 72 counties. The deadline for counties to turn over those results for this election under state rules is Nov. 17. … Given the current margin, state officials are allowed to require the Trump campaign to pay the estimated costs of a recount before it begins. Green Party candidate Jill Stein paid nearly $3.5 million to initiate a full state recount of the presidential vote four years ago.” 

Fox News calling Arizona for Biden (something The Post has not done) punctured the mood inside the Trump high command. Presidential adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner was in touch with Rupert Murdoch, the Fox News owner, as the night wore on, the New York Times reports. “The president’s family was heavily involved in efforts to question the validity of the vote tallies … Kushner was making calls, looking for what he described as a ‘James Baker-like’ figure who could lead the legal effort to dispute the tabulations in different states, according to a person briefed on the discussions. (Mr. Baker led George W. Bush’s successful recount case in 2000.) The president’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., was working out of the campaign headquarters in Virginia. … Eric Trump, whose wife, Lara, has been heavily involved in campaign activities, spoke at a news conference in Philadelphia, alongside Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former New York mayor.” 

Trump told his closest political and legal advisers that he wants to “go down fighting” and give Democrats a court fight that “they’ll never forget,” the Daily Beast reports. “By Wednesday afternoon, some semblance of that approach began to materialize. In Detroit, pro-Trump protests showed up at a ballot counting site demanding access to the officials and insisting that the counting be ended. In Arizona, one of Trump’s closest congressional allies, Rep. Paul Gosar, put out a ‘call to action’ for ‘red blooded American patriots’ to attend a rally to ‘protect our president’ at the Maricopa County election center. In Nevada, a Trump supporter interrupted a registrar of voters press conference by declaring ‘the Biden crime family steals this election.’ And throughout the day, the Trump campaign peppered donors and supporters with text messages and emails asking for money to help fund—what it erroneously called—an attempt by Democrats to ‘steal’ the election.”

• Bill Barr’s Justice Department told prosecutors that armed federal agents are allowed inside ballot-counting venues to investigate potential voter fraud. The DOJ email raised the specter of the Trump administration intimidating local election officials or otherwise intervening in vote tallying. (NYT)
• As counting continues, neither Trump nor Vice President Pence have any public events planned for Thursday. Biden’s campaign has not advertised any appearances, either, although that could change. (Wagner)
• European election observers decried Trump’s “baseless allegations” of voter fraud. “Nobody — no politician, no elected official, nobody — should limit the people’s right to vote,” said Michael Georg Link, a member of the German parliament who led the lawmakers sent by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe to observe a U.S. election for the ninth time. (Carol Morello)

It’s easy for Trump to flood courthouses with lawsuits. It’s much harder to provide convincing legal arguments. “A lawsuit without provable facts showing a statutory or constitutional violation is just a tweet with a filing fee,” said Justin Levitt, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles. (ProPublica)

“Trump’s son [Eric] and others, including White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany, claimed falsely in tweets later hidden by warning labels that the president had won Pennsylvania — even though no such determination had been made. And the campaign’s spokesman, Tim Murtaugh, claimed without evidence that crowd control at a processing center in Detroit was an effort to thwart Trump’s chances of reelection,” Isaac Stanley-Becker, Tony Romm, Elizabeth Dwoskin and Drew Harwell report. “Social media companies raced to apply labels to the misleading posts, with Facebook in most cases appending a notice that the count was still underway. Twitter applied more stringent standards, hiding some of the claims behind warning labels and restricting the reach of the tweets … Sen. Mark R. Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said the torrent of questionable tweets from Trump and his associates showed that the guardrails set up by Silicon Valley were insufficient.” 

• Arizona officials emphatically denied claims that Republican ballots marked with Sharpie pens were disqualified, but that didn’t stop some on the right from amplifying claims that the problem was rampant. Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs and multiple county officials have said there is no merit to the Sharpie concerns. (Hannah Knowles, Emma Brown and Meryl Kornfield)
• YouTube refused to take down a video that falsely claims Trump won the election. The platform wouldn’t say why the video from One American News Network, which has more than 300,000 views, doesn’t violate its misinformation policies. (CNBC)
• Hundreds protesting Trump were arrested in Minneapolis as they blocked a freeway. (Star Tribune)

“Trump’s premature victory claim and unsubstantiated allegations of voter fraud have been met with a deep unease globally over what lies ahead for the U.S. political process — and more than a little glee from America’s traditional adversaries,” Simon Denyer and Rick Noack report. “One German newspaper likened the U.S. president to a Roman emperor contemptuous of his citizens. In Japan, America’s closest ally in Asia and a country whose postwar constitution was largely written by Americans, the slow vote count dominated television news and made for painful watching for many. … The National, one of the United Arab Emirates state-owned English language dailies, lamented the divisions in the United States amid the pandemic, economic crisis and now the elections. … France, though, offered a hopeful assessment on Thursday, saying the country’s strong democratic values would ensure the correct results. … In China, a number of publications used the election to crow about the shortcomings of the American system.” 

“The nuanced and sometimes dissonant political preferences shown by Latino voters in the 2020 presidential election have sparked bewilderment and soul-searching among Democrats as the party lost significant ground with Latinos in Florida and Texas over the past four years,” Jose Del Real and Arelis Hernández report. “In Florida, nearly half of Latino voters cast ballots for Trump, according to network exit polling. In Arizona, exit polls showed more than six in 10 Latino voters cast ballots for Biden, and 56 percent did so in Nevada. In the heavily Latino Rio Grande Valley in Texas, Trump lost rural Starr County — which is 96 percent Hispanic — by just 5 percentage points compared with a loss by 60 points in 2016. …

“The key to making sense of those trend lines, political experts and community organizers say, is to throw out the idea that Latinos compromise one single electorate. Although in the aggregate they tend to lean Democratic, the political calculations of Latinos are shaped by where they live, their ancestry, age, education, income and faith, among other factors in a group of approximately 32 million citizens, all with distinct political inclinations. … Although Cuban Americans, who tend to live in Miami-Dade County, have historically been Republican-leaning voters, their commitment to the GOP is not monolithic. Meanwhile, Puerto Ricans, whose numbers have grown in the state in recent years, are often assumed to be Democrats. That is not always the case among many evangelical Protestants and those who have recently moved from Puerto Rico.”

The Biden campaign’s paltry outreach efforts to Latinos made him more vulnerable to disinformation and mischaracterizations, including claims that he was a socialist, which the Trump campaign spread widely in Miami-Dade and were largely unchallenged until the final stretch: “Social media researchers have seen a wide range of misinformation targeting Spanish-speakers in the United States. In recent years, technology companies have put in place mechanisms to combat misinformation about the election, the pandemic and other topics. But misinformation has proliferated regardless because content moderation is less developed in other languages besides English.”

“First, this electorate seems to have been more conservative than the 2016 electorate. In the 2016 exit polls, conservatives outnumbered liberals by 9 percentage points. In the initial 2020 numbers, the margin is 13 points,” Slate’s William Saletan observes. “Trump’s biggest gain since 2016 was among self-identified Christians. … [And] contrary to expectations, Biden didn’t do much better with seniors than Clinton did. … These numbers will change somewhat as votes are tallied and the composition of the electorate is reassessed. But the patterns so far suggest several lessons. One, Democrats are having trouble attracting self-identified Christians. Two, they can’t count on the votes of people of color, just because the Republican candidate is overtly racist. Three, they need better turnout on the left. And four, they need to consolidate a majority of independent voters.” 

“Democrats’ dream agenda of pushing through a large new economic stimulus bill, strengthening the Affordable Care Act and paring back the 2017 tax cuts could face stiff resistance after Republicans greatly outperformed expectations in Tuesday’s election,” Erica Werner reports. “Nancy Pelosi was eyeing a legislative maneuver called ‘budget reconciliation’ to push extensive legislation through the Senate without GOP votes — the same mechanism that Republicans used to pass their partisan tax bill in the first year of Trump’s term, and that Democrats used to pass the [ACA]. Democrats could only use budget reconciliation if they controlled the Senate next year, which appears very unlikely at this point.” 

A Republican Senate would make it harder for a President Biden to confirm certain Cabinet nominees. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) is planning to block more liberal picks, like Elizabeth Warren or Stacey Abrams, if Biden wins. Susan Rice could also be a casualty. Axios reports that the majority leader’s opposition could prompt Biden to pick more moderate options like Lael Brainard for Treasury, Chris Coons or Tony Blinken for State and Doug Jones for Justice. (Biden’s transition website went live last night: “The transition team will continue preparing at full speed so that the Biden-Harris Administration can hit the ground running on Day One.”)

Biden fell short of the resounding repudiation of Trump that many political strategists believed was necessary to extinguish the political fires the president has lit, Rucker and Costa report: “Indeed, Republicans who yielded their identity as a political party to Trump appear to have won affirmation from some voters. … There is now a lack of clarity about what it means to be a Republican. The party has no common set of facts or an agreed-upon agenda other than supporting Trump. The party’s official 2020 platform shrunk to a brief resolution that assailed the news media and heaped praise on the president. Some veteran Republicans said Trump’s polarizing brand of politics could make it more difficult for the party to build a national majority in the 2022 and 2024 election cycles. … Shepherding the party away from its demons remains a challenge without an evident solution or a leader who can eradicate them from the ranks. Even if Trump is defeated, he could remain embedded in the Republican psyche and a lodestar of the GOP’s core activists.” 

• Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) defeated Democratic challenger Sara Gideon. “Speaking as Elton John’s ‘I’m Still Standing’ played, Collins thanked Gideon, the 48-year-old speaker of the Maine House, for a ‘gracious’ concession,” the AP reports.
• The four retiring senators will be replaced by members of their own party: Bill Hagerty, a former U.S. ambassador to Japan, will succeed Lamar Alexander in Tennessee. Cynthia Lummis, who served as Wyoming’s lone congresswoman for eight years, will replace Mike Enzi. New Mexico Rep. Ben Ray Luján, who chaired the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in 2018, will replace Tom Udall. Kansas Rep. Roger Marshall will take over from Pat Roberts. (Paulina Firozi)

“In the House, bleary-eyed Democrats were still sorting out the wreckage when they awoke Wednesday with dozens of their members’ races still uncalled and not a single GOP incumbent ousted — an outcome that virtually no one in the party had predicted,” Politico reports. “Even with tens of thousands of ballots still to be counted, shell-shocked Democratic lawmakers, strategists and aides privately began trying to pin the blame: The unreliable polls. The GOP’s law-and-order message amid a summer of unrest. The ‘hidden Trump voters.’ The impeachment hangover. The lack of a coronavirus stimulus deal. Some corners of the party were also beginning to question the message and tactics at the top, with several Democrats predicting — and some even demanding — a significant overhaul within the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.”

“Republicans fended off an effort by Democrats to revamp the balance of power in state legislatures, crushing expectations in Tuesday’s election by easily maintaining state House majorities ahead of the drawing of new congressional districts next year,” Tim Craig reports. “Although some competitive state legislative races remained too close to call Wednesday, Republicans claimed victory after results showed Democrats would fall far short of their goal to flip as many as seven state legislative chambers. Amid a surge in Republican turnout, Democrats had not made any gains in the Texas House of Representatives by Wednesday evening and lost ground in several other states, including Iowa and North Carolina. Republicans have claimed victory in taking control of both chambers of the New Hampshire legislature, snatching back the power Democrats had won in the 2018 midterm elections.” Democrats held out hope that they might still flip control of the Arizona House, where their candidates were locked in several tight races.

• A Muslim millennial was elected the country’s first openly nonbinary lawmaker. Mauree Turner, a 27-year-old Black Muslim who wears a hijab, was elected to the Oklahoma state legislature, becoming the highest-ranking nonbinary official in the U.S. (Teo Armus)
• Voters ousted a Georgia district attorney, Jackie Johnson, who was criticized for her handling of the investigation into the death of Ahmaud Arbery, the Black jogger chased and then fatally shot by two White men. (Jaclyn Peiser)

• The Editorial Board: “Surprise! The election is unfolding as predicted.”
• Ruth Marcus: “If Biden wins, he’ll inherit a mission impossible.”
• George Will: “America is battered, but a somewhat happy ending is in sight.”
• Colbert King: “Whether he goes or stays, Trump has done damage that can’t be forgiven.”
• J. J. McCullough: “American politics are exhausting – even in Canada.”
• David Byler: “It’s too early to trash the polls.”

The pandemic is roaring across the Midwest and Plains states. Eighteen states set records for hospitalizations. “And Connecticut, Iowa, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, Nebraska and North Dakota saw jumps of more than 45 percent in their seven-day rolling average of new infections, considered the best measure of the spread of the virus,” Lenny Bernstein, Joel Achenbach, Frances Stead Sellers and William Wan report.

• At least 10 cases have been linked to an early voting site in Southampton, N.Y. Officials said six of them were poll workers.
• In Oklahoma, where a record 1,026 coronavirus patients are being treated in hospitals, doctors pleaded for a statewide mask mandate and warned of an impending crisis. (Oklahoman)
• Four players for the San Francisco 49ers, as well as Detroit Lions quarterback Matthew Stafford, were placed on their teams’ covid-19 reserve lists. This means the 49ers will be shorthanded for their game tonight against the Green Bay Packers. (Mark Maske)
• Montgomery County is the first locality in the Washington region to reimpose significant restrictions on social and commercial activity after weeks of rising infections. The Maryland suburban county restricted gatherings to 25 people and reduced capacity for restaurants and shops from 50  percent to 25 percent. (Rebecca Tan, Dana Hedgpeth and Michael Brice-Saddler)
• Some covid-19 survivors who lost their sense of smell and taste are reporting long recoveries, where it doesn’t fully come back. Known as parosmia, the often temporary distortion makes things smell different and unusually unpleasant. Certain distortions cause everything to have a fecal-like odor, which can make common foods and drinks revolting because the flavor is tied to sense of smell. (Allyson Chiu)

“McConnell (R-Ky.) also said that state and local aid — a longtime Democratic demand — could be part of the legislation,” Werner reports. “McConnell made his comments during a news conference in Kentucky a day after the election, and following his own reelection to a seventh term in the Senate. ‘We need another rescue package. … Hopefully the partisan passions that prevented us from doing another rescue package will subside with the election. And I think we need to do it and I think we need to do it before the end of the year,’ McConnell said. … Congress will also face a Dec. 11 government shutdown deadline when funding for federal agencies runs out unless lawmakers approve another spending bill. McConnell said he and [Speaker Nancy] Pelosi agreed on the need for a new package of spending bills for fiscal 2021 — rather than an extension of government funding at existing levels.”

• British lawmakers voted overwhelmingly in favor of a month-long shutdown, Sky News reports.
• Italy announced a new nationwide curfew, per the AP.
• France is considering imposing a nighttime curfew in Paris, per Reuters.
• China is making its already-stringent border restrictions even tighter. Starting Friday, travelers from the United States, France and Germany will have to take a blood test that looks for coronavirus antibodies, in addition to a nucleic acid test for the virus. (Reuters)
• Australia, a nation of 26 million, has almost eliminated the community spread of the coronavirus by putting faith in science. No cases were reported on the entire continent Thursday. (A. Odysseus Patrick)

“The nation’s formal exit from the global effort to combat climate change — a departure set in motion by Trump more than three years ago — marked the only sliver of certainty in a sea of ambiguity about the future trajectory of U.S. climate and environmental policy,” Brady Dennis, Juliet Eilperin and Dino Grandoni report.

• The Trump administration tapped atmospheric scientist Betsy Weatherhead to conduct the next National Climate Assessment, the federal government’s most definitive and comprehensive report on climate change and its consequences on the United States. She accepts that human-induced climate change is happening and poses a serious threat. (Jason Samenow and Andrew Freedman)
• Hurricane Eta brought disastrous flooding to Central America, as concern grows in the southeastern U.S. The storm hit Nicaragua with 140 mph winds and a life-threatening storm surge. A flood disaster is underway as a number of locations are set to see mudslides amid two to three feet of rainfall. (Matthew Cappucci)

Former Wisconsin governor Scott Walker (R) pointed out that the odds are low of Trump prevailing after a recount in the state:

The Trump campaign deployed Rudy Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer, to Pennsylvania:

On her first day as a congresswoman-elect, Georgia Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene – a QAnon adherent – spread a flood of misinformation that Twitter felt compelled to flag:

Stephen Colbert said he’s aware waiting for election results is hard, but patience is valuable: 

Seth Meyers said Republicans are responsible for the slow ballot counting that they’re complaining about now: 

Sam Bee mocked the president’s election night speech:

Trevor Noah wondered why polling appears to be getting worse: