Former Vice President Joe Biden is the projected winner of South Carolina's first in the south Democratic primary.
It was Biden's first win during a presidential bid as he failed to win any states during his 2008 and 1988 campaigns.
The candidates now move on to the Super Tuesday states.
Watch:
Former Vice President Joe Biden is the projected winner of the South Carolina Democratic primary, according to multiple media reports.
The Associated Press, NBC News, ABC News and CNN called the race for the former vice president immediately upon the polls closing.
If official results match the projections, which were based on exit polls, it will mark Biden's first state victory while running for president after failing to win during his 2008 and 1998 bids.
Former DNC Chair and a former Gov. Terry McAuliffe (D-VA) endorsed the former vice president after the polls closed in South Carolina. Virginia is one of the Super Tuesday states that will be voting on Tuesday.
"Sleepy Joe Biden’s victory in the South Carolina Democrat Primary should be the end of Mini Mike Bloomberg’s Joke of a campaign," Trump tweeted. "After the worst debate performance in the history of presidential debates, Mini Mike now has Biden split up his very few voters, taking many away!"
During a CNN panel Saturday, Mitch McConnell strategist Scott Jennings tried to attack Democrats for criticizing President Donald Trump's response to coronavirus — and was promptly humiliated.
"Here in South Carolina, health care is very important. Public health and public safety is very important,' said Jalisa Washington-Price, the former South Carolina campaign director for Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA). "I think Democrats just sticking to the seriousness of this issue, sticking to combating what this administration is doing and not protecting their citizens. And it's scary. Quite frankly, it's scary, but Democrats, Speaker Pelosi, and a lot of the candidates have been doing a great job just sticking to issues and making sure that the American people are being safe."
"Can I just respond?" said Jennings. "I agree with you. We should be treating this seriously. But when Joe Biden and Mike Bloomberg and other Democrats jump on a stage in South Carolina and tell their supporters that the president and his administration have defunded the Centers for Disease Control, who is inciting public panic? Who is taking this seriously? That's a flat falsehood. Funding for the CDC has increased."
"Is that what he proposed in his budget?" shot back anchor Victor Blackwell. "Aside from what has — the increase in the funding, what was in the president's budget for the CDC?"
"The president's budget did not defund the CDC," insisted Jennings.
"Did it cut funding for the CDC?" asked Blackwell. "Did he propose a cut for the CDC?"
"He proposed reductions in federal spending across the board, but he did not defund the CDC," said Jennings.
"To say the CDC was defunded is incorrect. It is wrong. But we should point out, the president proposed a funding cut for the CDC," said Blackwell. "He also said there will be a miracle that comes along and will take care of coronavirus, and when the weather changes that coronavirus cases will decrease."
Watch below:
South Carolina's primary is just days away, but Will Jackson still hasn't made up his mind which of the three Democratic candidates he has checked out in recent days has the best chance of beating Donald Trump in November.
The 73-year-old African American veteran knows his vote on Saturday could have a defining impact on the race for the White House.
"I think the African-American vote in South Carolina is very important," he told AFP. "Those that think that it's not are fooling themselves and fooling the party."
The South Carolina primary is the first in the nation in which African Americans will have the largest say of any demographic group, accounting as they do for 60 percent of the southern state's Democratic voters.
The outcome here will offer the clearest indication yet which candidate has the backing nationally of the party's all-important black constituency, making South Carolina a key crossroad in the path to the nomination.
Jackson, wearing an army cap, has had a busy day.
He spoke with AFP at an afternoon campaign event with Joe Biden, in Georgetown on the state's central coast, before heading to a small rally in Myrtle Beach for Tom Steyer, a California billionaire banking heavily on a strong showing in South Carolina.
Earlier that morning, he had gone to a campaign event for former South Bend, Indiana mayor Pete Buttigieg, the youngest candidate and one vying to become the first openly gay president of the United States.
But Jackson is still undecided, a reflection of the race's uncertainties.
- 'Good barometer' -
South Carolina's black voters are "a good barometer of what African American voters across the country are actually thinking about the Democratic Party," says Robert Greene, a visiting professor of history at Claflin University, a historically black college in Orangeburg, South Carolina.
Beyond that, the South Carolina result could also influence voting in the rest of the southern states, which have similar demographics and several of which vote three days later in the big "Super Tuesday" contests.
Historically, Democratic candidates who have won in South Carolina have gone on to win the nomination, with the exception of 2004.
For that reason, many black voters here say they are aware of the gravity of their decision, especially when what is at stake is four more years of Trump, a president they see as racist and who they accuse of whipping up white supremacism.
"My main purpose is to vote for somebody that can beat Trump, period," said Jackson.
- An 'electable' candidate -
Biden, who served as vice president to Barack Obama, the country's first black president, says he is certain of victory in South Carolina and hopes to prove he has the best chance to defeat Trump.
He is counting on South Carolina being a "firewall" of support for his flagging campaign.
"The African American community knows me, they have known me for many years," he told CBS at the end of a Democratic debate in Charleston Tuesday. "That's the base of my support, my whole career. That's one of the reasons why Obama chose me."
But after poor showings in three previous state primaries, the 77-year-old now has to prove that he is really the most "electable" candidate, the central claim of his campaign.
Kendall Deas, a political science professor at the College of Charleston, says Biden is helped by being "a known entity" to the state's black voters.
"But I think, also, African Americans are very pragmatic in terms of how they vote. They've seen some of his stumbles prior to coming into South Carolina."
So "although they know him, they are shopping around and looking at some of the other candidates right now," he told AFP.
Complicating Biden's bid has been the popularity of the social programs championed by the current frontrunner for the Democratic nomination, Bernie Sanders, whose universal health care program resonates in the black community.
He also has been bedeviled by the surprise ascent in state polls of Tom Steyer, whose denunciation of a pervasive "racial subtext" in American life has gained him favorable attention in South Carolina.
Besides the imperative of defeating Trump, the state's African American voters want progress in health care, education and the fight against racism, Greene said.
According to the RealClearPolitics polling average, Biden is leading Sanders among South Carolina voters by 34.3 to 20 percent, with Steyer in third on 14 percent.
Saturday's primary will also be crucial for Buttigieg, a 38-year-old centrist who has done well in predominantly white, early voting states but needs to show he can win black support if he is to remain relevant.
"Mayor Pete" made a pitch for support at a breakfast on Wednesday with black community leaders, including activist Al Sharpton, acknowledging his ignorance of the black experience.
"I'm mindful of the fact that I will never know what it is like walking down the street ... to feel eyes on me, believing me to be dangerous just because the color of my skin," he said. "And so the next best thing I can do is listen those who have."
For centuries, South Carolina's Charleston was the largest port of entry for the transatlantic slave trade. Now, a billionaire activist named Tom Steyer is shaking up the state's Democratic primary by advocating slavery reparations for African Americans.
A California financier turned philanthropist and environmental campaigner, Steyer has poured tens of millions of dollars into the state ahead of Saturday's vote -- with a single-minded focus on the black voters who make up 60 percent of its Democratic electorate.
How South Carolina's African Americans vote in the White House primaries is traditionally a key indicator of which contender has nationwide support from the black community -- a crucial Democratic constituency.
Flooding the airwaves with promises to compensate the descendants of slaves, and to invest in universities in historically marginalized black communities, Steyer -- who lags far behind his Democratic rivals nationally -- has hoisted himself into third place in state polls, behind Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders.
"You've got to tell the truth about what happened," said Steyer during one of his final campaign stops at a Mexican restaurant in Myrtle Beach, drawing applause from the diverse crowd.
"You've got to repair what's done so that we can move on together," said Steyer -- who says the United States needs to confront a "subtext of race" underpinning nearly every issue it faces, more than 150 years after the abolition of slavery in 1865.
Teresa Skinner, an African-American retired nurse and veteran, was impressed.
"Tom Steyer's bringing something new," said the 51-year-old. "It's just an enlightening thing."
"He's just coming in as an individual that's wanting to make us better than what we are, and right now we're in a divided nation."
- 'Aggressive stance' -
Robert Greene, a visiting professor at Claflin University, a historically black college in South Carolina, attributes Steyer's popularity squarely to his "very aggressive stance" on reparations, "an issue that most of the other candidates will not touch."
The idea of reparations has been the topic of contentious debate in the United States for decades, but has picked up steam in recent years.
Last April, students at Georgetown University in Washington voted to create a fund to compensate the descendants of 272 people enslaved at the Jesuit-run school who in 1838 were sold to finance its operations.
In the past two years, at least two other US institutions have set up funds intended to address their past links with slavery.
In a video released this week, Steyer's campaign stated its case in uncompromising terms.
"For 400 years, this country has built a racist system of profits made on the backs of incarcerated black bodies," a narrator says. "Reparations are well overdue."
Retiree Ama Saran -- who intends to vote for Biden -- recognizes the potential of Steyer's proposal, but has doubts over what it would mean in practice.
"I think that it is important. I think it needs to be looked at," said Saran, who is African American.
"But we would have to plan that thing because there's a lot of division among the people who would be afforded reparations. There is not that much agreement about what that means."
Other Democratic candidates have agreed to convene a commission to study reparations if they win, but only Steyer has made the issue a cornerstone of his campaign.
- Money or message? -
President Donald Trump aimed an election-eve jab at Steyer, branding him a "loser" and a "joke."
But as Steyer pumps money into South Carolina, he has faced bitter criticism from Democratic rivals too, who accuse both him and fellow billionaire Michael Bloomberg of using virtually unlimited resources to buy the election.
"What's happening is you have Steyer spending hundreds of millions," Biden complained last weekend, when asked why his lead in the state had narrowed.
Biden is banking heavily on the black vote in South Carolina and beyond, hoping to leverage his popularity as Barack Obama's former vice president in a race that no longer features any African American candidates.
Steyer's actual ad expenditure in South Carolina stood at $23.6 million as of February 27, according to the Advertising Analytics monitor -- almost 10 times the second spender, the centrist Pete Buttigieg.
Steyer denies his growing support comes down to money: his campaign makes the case that as a newcomer to politics he had to invest to make himself known to the public.
"When you say that he's buying an election, you're actually insulting the voters," Steyer's spokesman Alberto Lammers told AFP at the campaign's headquarters in Charleston.
"What is resonating is his message, and people are responding to that."
For someone who has gone out of his way to stay off the political radar, Barack Obama could hardly loom larger over the bitter battle for the Democratic White House nomination.
The 44th president of the United States has been quoted dozens of times in primary debates and starred (unwittingly) in campaign ads in the run-up to the South Carolina primary and Super on Tuesday.
But Obama has so far strictly adhered to his pledge to remain out of the fray in terms of endorsing a particular candidate - though he has launched a few warnings from the sidelines during the primary process.
"The average American doesn't think we have to completely tear down the system and remake it," Obama told a fund-raising meeting in November.
Though he did not single out a particular candidate, he said most voters did not have the same views as "the activist wing of our party" - a veiled warning about the shift to the left promised by Bernie Sanders.
"Obama is extremely popular within the Democratic Party, and particularly with African-Americans, a key voting bloc in many states" including South Carolina, said Kyle Kondik, an analyst at the University of Virginia's Center for Politics.
"I can understand why candidates would want to make it seem as though he is backing them."
What about Bernie?
Of course, no one is using his connection with the nation's first black president more arduously than Joe Biden, Obama's vice president who is seeking a boost to his flagging campaign to take on President Donald Trump.
Biden is "running as Obama's understudy and heir," Kondik said. The pair spoke on Tuesday ahead of the South Carolina contest, which is vital to Biden's chances, The New York Times reported.
But Sanders is riding high as the frontrunner, and the party's moderates are nervous about the 78-year-old senator's chances against the Republican incumbent.
"The establishment is freaking out," blared CNN.
"Running Bernie Sanders Against Trump Would Be an Act of Insanity," concluded a column in New York magazine.
Nevertheless, next week's Super Tuesday contests could leave Sanders with a virtually unassailable lead.
"If there is a way to stop - or at least slow - Sanders, most Democratic insiders are convinced it's this: former president Barack Obama and former first lady Michelle Obama get behind an alternative candidate to the Vermont senator," CNN commentator Chris Cilizza wrote this week.
"Not only that, but the Obamas make their endorsements soon - like pre-Super Tuesday - and they urge all of the other candidates to get out of the race ASAP."
Back in November, Politico reported that Obama planned to make a public statement if Sanders got too far out in front, in a bid to block him from winning the nomination.
'No plans to endorse'
If Obama did speak out, his opinion would resonate, but few think that will happen.
"President Obama has several friends in this race, including, of course, his own esteemed vice president," his spokeswoman Katie Hill said this week in a statement.
"He has said he has no plans to endorse in the primary because he believes that in order for Democrats to be successful this fall, voters must choose their nominee."
In 2016, Obama threw his weight behind Hillary Clinton, his onetime secretary of state, only when it became clear that she would beat Sanders for the nomination.
But the former US leader has made his views known on elections abroad, formally endorsing Emmanuel Macron in France and Justin Trudeau in Canada during their campaigns.
The rare comment from Obama's spokeswoman came as part of a condemnation of what she called a "despicable ad" from a pro-Trump PAC in which Obama's comments were taken "out of context" to disparage Biden.
Would Obama speak for Sanders?
But he has stayed silent about the many Democrats using his speeches in their ads in a bid to imply they have his support.
Biden of course has leveraged their friendship and partnership, but billionaire Michael Bloomberg, progressive Senator Elizabeth Warren and former Indiana mayor Pete Buttigieg have also sought to associate themselves with Obama's legacy in some way.
And all of them have quoted him to back up their policy positions.
"As Barack Obama said, we should pay attention to where the voters of this country are. And spending nearly $60 trillion is not where they are," tweeted moderate presidential hopeful Amy Klobuchar, as she bashed Sanders' platform.
Former presidents generally shy away from endorsing candidates after they leave office, with the notable exception of Bill Clinton -- who backed his wife in the 2008 and 2016 primaries, Kondik explained.
"I have no idea if Obama might endorse, but there has been no indication that he will. He, like many other Democrats, may honestly be conflicted about who he might back," the analyst added.
But if Sanders goes on to win the nomination, Kondik said he would be "curious to see whether Obama will speak" at the party's nominating convention in July.
Voters headed to the polls in South Carolina on Saturday for the fourth contest in the Democratic presidential nomination race, with Joe Biden looking to salvage his flagging White House hopes with a big win.
The former vice president is the firm favorite in the first state with a substantial African-American Democratic electorate to weigh in -- but trails far behind frontrunner Bernie Sanders in nationwide polls.
Both candidates will have a better picture of their overall prospects next week, when 14 states cast ballots on "Super Tuesday" -- and a third of the delegates who formally choose the Democratic candidate to face President Donald Trump in November are up for grabs.
Biden -- the onetime race leader who failed to notch a win in Iowa, New Hampshire or Nevada -- said he hopes South Carolina will propel him into national contention.
Voters have until 7:00 pm (2300 GMT) to make their choice.
"I've worked hard to earn these votes, and I think I'll do well," the 77-year-old told CNN on Friday.
AFP / Gal ROMA Chart showing support for top candidates in the US Democratic presidential nomination race as of February 27, 2019, according to the RealClearPolitics national polling average"It's been the launching pad for Barack and I believe for me," Biden added, referring to the nation's first black president and his boss for eight years, Barack Obama.
Biden leads in state polling, a dozen points ahead of Sanders and 20 points up on billionaire activist Tom Steyer, who is gunning for a third-place finish.
Steyer has spent an extraordinary $23.6 million on ads in South Carolina, nearly 10 times the number two spender, former Indiana mayor Pete Buttigieg, according to Advertising Analytics.
At one polling place in a suburb of the state capital Columbia, about 20 people were lined up at 7:00 am when the doors opened. In the first hour of voting, a steady stream of voters waited.
For 67-year-old retiree Samantha Rogers, who is black, Biden is the right candidate to take on Trump.
"He's more experienced. He's for all people, not just African Americans. He's for everyone," she told AFP.
But for 21-year-old student Andrea Green, "Bernie is telling the truth. He's authentic."
- 'Exemplary heart' -
Biden and fellow moderates including Buttigieg and Senator Amy Klobuchar may well face a Sanders buzz saw come Super Tuesday, with the 78-year-old self-declared democratic socialist leading in the two biggest prizes including crown jewel California.
AFP / JIM WATSON Bernie Sanders, frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination, has come under criticism from establishment Democrats for his liberal positions, which they feel will make him vulnerable to President Donald Trump in the November 2020 electionSanders is dominating there with 32.5 percent support, according to the RealClearPolitics polling average, with fellow progressive Senator Elizabeth Warren second.
Biden is a distant third with just 12.5 percent, in danger of missing the 15 percent threshold for earning delegates from the state.
Sanders has eclipsed Biden in Texas, the other big Super Tuesday delegate gold mine, and expanded his lead there after a CNN poll showed him ahead of Biden by six points.
The senator also tops polls in Super Tuesday states Colorado, Maine, North Carolina, Utah, Virginia, his home state of Vermont and Warren's Massachusetts. Some of the races are tight.
With several Democratic establishment leaders fretting that Sanders could hold an insurmountable delegate lead after Tuesday, some have begun openly sounding the alarm.
Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia, the 2016 vice presidential nominee, endorsed Biden on Friday, tweeting that "Joe has exemplary heart, character, and experience" to be commander-in-chief.
South Carolina congressman James Clyburn, an influential black lawmaker who has endorsed Biden, warned of "down-ballot carnage" if the Democratic nominee is seen as too radical.
AFP/File / Logan CYRUS Democratic presidential hopeful Elizabeth Warren, a progressive senator from Massachusetts, is among several candidates who will be under pressure to end their campaigns if they fail to do well in the Super Tuesday votingWith party grandees desperate for a moderate to halt Sanders, the frontrunner punched back to say his campaign is best positioned to win.
"One of the things the establishment is doing is, they're saying, 'Bernie can't beat Trump,'" Sanders told a crowd in St. George, South Carolina.
He pointed out that over the country's last 60 head-to-head polls with the incumbent, "we're ahead of Trump in 56 of them."
Sanders said his campaign will triumph "because we have an agenda that speaks to the needs of working-class people."
- Sanders too 'radical'? -
Rivals have mounted a fusillade of attacks against Sanders.
Among them were ads slamming his gun rights voting record, aired by former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, who skipped the first four states in favor of making a splash on Super Tuesday.
The centrist Bloomberg, a billionaire media tycoon, has pumped a record $500 million into advertising, leading rivals to accuse him of seeking to "buy" his way into the race.
Buttigieg has warned that Sanders would be too "radical" a nominee, while Biden suggested the frontrunner would get trounced by Trump in southern states.
AFP / Nicholas Kamm Trump drew criticism for scheduling a rally in South Carolina with the coronavirus crisis deepening"Do you think running as a socialist would help you in Georgia, in North Carolina?" Biden said on CNN. "In South Carolina? In Texas?"
Trump put his own thumb on the scales Friday, at a rally in South Carolina.
"While we're building a great future, the radical Democrats are trying to burn it down," he told the crowd.
Trump concluded that the race was "down to two candidates: crazy Bernie and sleepy Joe," adding that it was time for Bloomberg to throw in the towel and "go home."
Jared Kushner vowed on Friday that a second term from his father-in-law, President Donald Trump, would be both efficient and drama-free.
The senior White House adviser claimed that Trump's re-election campaign was running smoothly, much as the president's second term supposedly would, while speaking with organizer Matt Schlapp at the Conservative Political Actions Conference (CPAC).
"The way that you see the campaign being run, there's no leaks. There's no drama. I would say it's high-competence, low-drama," Kushner said. "Everything is very efficiently run, and I think that's exemplary of how President Trump would run his second term in office."
Kushner's comments came just months after the Trump campaign fired its top pollsters after internal data showing Trump losing to former Vice President Joe Biden in key battleground states were leaked.
Vanity Fair's Gabe Sherman reported last year that "infighting is already consuming" Trump's reelection campaign.
"It's a sh*tshow," a source who worked on Trump's 2016 campaign told him. "There's a revolt against [campaign manager Brad] Parscale."
Since then, the campaign has been on a "crusade" against leaks, Politico reported.
Kushner said Friday that Trump's first campaign succeeded, because "he made a lot more good decisions than wrong decisions."
The campaign, which featured Trump saying incredibly racist things about immigrants, incredibly sexist statements about women, attacks on Gold Star families, a campaign event that cheated veterans out of millions and mockery of a disabled reporter ended with Trump losing the popular vote by a margin of nearly 3 million while clinching the Electoral College with the aid of less than 80,000 combined votes in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan.
"Everything that worked. We've doubled and tripled down on," Kushner said. "Everything that didn't work, we've swept away."
Kushner added that he "loved" working with his father-in-law, because he's "not afraid to fail" and "not afraid to try new things."
"He's not afraid to take on challenges because they're too hard, and that's what you need from a leader," he said.
Trump's son-in-law also complained that the president did not get a "honeymoon period" after his inauguration because of how hated he allegedly was in Washington.
"He didn't adapt to Washington," Kushner said. "He's forcing Washington to adapt to him, which is good."
While other politicians try to do what is popular according to poll numbers, Trump does the opposite, Kushner claimed.
"A lot of politicians follow the polls," he said. "He actually brings the polls to his positions. He can really change polls."
"The more the president's been attacked, the more people realize what he's fighting for . . . They love that he's fighting for them," he added. "When they see Washington fighting against him — most people don't like Washington, so they like the fact that he's fighting against Washington."
Kushner's comments came after polls revealed that a majority of Americans backed Trump's removal from office before Senate Republicans acquitted him mostly down party lines. His interview also came on the same day that Trump lashed out at Fox News after its latest poll showed him losing to every leading Democratic candidate.
Advertising spending on the US presidential primaries has surpassed an "unprecedented" $1 billion, half of which came from the coffers of billionaire Democratic White House hopeful Michael Bloomberg, a tracking firm said Friday.
The former New York mayor, who was the ninth richest man in the world last year, has spent $539 million on television and radio spots, as well as digital ads, since launching his run on November 25, Advertising Analytics said.
With four months still to go before the Democratic convention, the spending has blown past the previous record of $338.2 million set by President Barack Obama during his 2012 re-election campaign.
Bloomberg is dipping into his personal fortune of some $60 billion, earning him sharp criticism from competitors who say he is trying to buy the election.
Tom Steyer, another billionaire competing to be the Democratic candidate to take on Donald Trump in the November election, has spent $186.1 million on advertising so far, Advertising Analytics said.
Senator Bernie Sanders, the current Democratic front-runner, is the top ad spender among non-billionaire candidates, thanks to his "prodigious fundraising ability," the firm said.
He has been able to run television ads in key markets weeks ahead of his competitors, spending a total of $48.6 million so far.
By comparison, former vice president Joe Biden has spent a relatively anemic $13.9 million.
In total, the Democratic candidates combined have spent $969 million, while Republicans have spent $67.9 million in advertising for their party primary, though the nomination of incumbent President Donald Trump is only a formality.
President Donald Trump started off Friday by moaning about the latest Fox News poll showing him losing to every Democrat left in the primary race.
The poll shows 56 percent of respondents believe Trump will be re-elected, but he was at least 7 points behind Joe Biden, Mike Bloomberg and Bernie Sanders, 3 points behind Elizabeth Warren and Pete Buttigieg, and essentially tied with Amy Klobuchar.
"Worst Polls, just like in 2016 when they were so far off the mark, are the @FoxNews Polls," Trump griped at his preferred cable news network. "Why doesn’t Fox finally get a competent Polling Company?"
Rigging elections is as American as apple pie. To wit: Nonwhite people have been systematically denied the right to vote for most of the country's history. Most notably, when black people won the right to vote following the Civil War, in practice that liberty was denied under Jim and Jane Crow and other white supremacist laws, both in the South and other parts of the country, for a full century. Voter registration laws themselves have a long and ugly history of being used to deny nonwhites, white ethnics and other "undesirables" the right to vote.
It's also worth noting that the United States has a long and infamous history of sabotaging democratically elected governments in other countries.
Rigging elections so that they do not reflect the public's democratic will was and remains a partisan tool. It can of course be tied to almost any ideology, but remains especially potent in the hands of the Republican Party and the conservative movement.
Such political skulduggery gave the Republican Party the White House on at least one previous occasion — in the 2000 election, when George W. Bush "defeated" Al Gore based on a deadlocked election in Florida, where all the votes were never counted. In 2016 Donald Trump and the Republican Party benefited from both voter intimidation, voter purges, gerrymandering and other tricks in key "battleground" states. During that same election campaign, Vladimir Putin and his agents also engaged in a widespread effort to install Donald Trump in office by manipulating the American people and their votes. In 2018, Republicans used a range of tactics, including racially motivated voter suppression and outright voter fraud, to sway Georgia's gubernatorial election away from Stacey Abrams to Brian Kemp, the white Republican who began the campaign as Georgia's secretary of state — the person responsible for managing fair elections.
At present, Donald Trump is openly soliciting illegal foreign interference in the 2020 presidential election in order to keep him in office — perhaps permanently.
Greg Palast is an investigative journalist whose work has been featured by the BBC, the Guardian, the Nation and Rolling Stone. He contributed several articles to Salon on the 2018 race in Georgia. He is also the author of the bestselling books "Billionaires & Ballot Bandits" and "The Best Democracy Money Can Buy." Palast is one of the country's foremost experts on voter fraud and the many other ways that elections are rigged — most often by Republicans — so as to prevent the American people from having their votes (and political preferences) fully counted.
In this conversation, Palast explains how Donald Trump, the Republican Party and their agents will try to steal the 2020 presidential election from the American people at the ballot box. Palast also warns that the Democratic Party's leadership will try to stop Sen. Bernie Sanders by sabotaging the vote in the upcoming California primary. He also details the connections between Roger Stone, the 2000 Florida presidential election "recount" fiasco and the rise of Donald Trump.
This conversation has been edited for clarity and length. You can also listen to my conversation with Greg Palast on my podcast The Truth Report or through the player embedded below.
How do you make sense of Trump's presidency? How did this all happen?
The nasty secret of American democracy is that we don't count all the votes and we do not let all people vote. In the past two years, according to the federal government, 17 million Americans have been stripped of their right to vote. Some of it is quite legitimate. If someone's dead, they should not be voting. If someone has left Georgia or Michigan, they should not be voting in Georgia or Michigan. But about half of that number, 9 million or so people, were removed from the voter rolls on a false premise. These potential voters are overwhelmingly young people and voters of color. Young people are the new target. There is a massive purge of voters in America and few people are talking about it.
What I've been doing is filing suits to get the lists and names and addresses and the reasons for everyone who has been purged from the voter rolls. One of the most important stories I have ever done was for Salon in 2018. From the lawsuit my organization filed, we discovered a massive number of people blocked from voting — again, overwhelmingly young people and voters of color. That means Democratic Party voters could have had a massive impact on the outcome in states such as Ohio and Georgia. Moreover, Georgia really should be a swing state because it is minority majority. White people are in the minority in Georgia, as of this year.
Michigan is another example. In the 2016 presidential election, 75,355 ballots were never counted. In Michigan, Trump won by 10,700. What is the state's response? "We don't know whose votes those were. These are disqualified ballots." Why were they disqualified? Eighty-seven voting machines broke down in Detroit. Even though there were paper ballots, they had to be scanned by machines. The 87 machines could not read the ballots. Is Detroit Trump country? Of the 75,355 ballots that no one counted, most came out of Detroit. Who won Michigan?
This is what's going on here. In California in 2016, 8.6 million people cast votes in the June 2016 primary. Add up the presidential total, and it comes to 7.3 million votes. This means 1.3 million people did not have their ballots counted for president of the United States in that primary.
In particular, this is the group known as NPP voters — "no party preference voters" — who have a right to vote in the Democratic primary, but the procedure is really complicated. So a big hunk of those voters, close to half of those voters in practice, were disqualified because they got the wrong ballot or they didn't know the procedure. Because you have to use a special ballot if you're a NPP voter — you can't get a regular Democratic Party ballot. If you are given the regular party ballot it gets disqualified.
This procedure is so complicated that almost no one, even at the polling stations, knows what the rules are. So basically, a million people, mostly NPP voters, lose their vote. Now who did they vote for? NPP voters voted more than two to one for Bernie Sanders. Bernie Sanders won the California primary last time, and the Democratic Party leadership is going to try and take it away from him this time in 2020. [In the reported California results in 2016, Hillary Clinton defeated Sanders, 53 to 46 percent.]
How does one go about rigging an election?
Not the way people most people believe. It isn't done by some guy pressing a lever and changing the vote from blue to red. Rigging an election is usually done by blocking people from casting ballots or not counting the ballots they cast. For example, and these are hard numbers from the federal government, more than 2 million provisional ballots were cast in the United States. Most white people, unless they live in California, have never heard of a provisional ballot, but those types of ballots are handed out like candy in black and Hispanic precincts. These provisional ballots are just what they sound like, "provisional." A person's name is not on the voter rolls. So rather than have a person scream and holler and pound the desk and say, "Why is my name missing? I've voted here for 50 years!" they are told, "Don't worry. Here's a provisional ballot. Fill this out and we'll count that later." But those votes are not counted later. Over a million provisional ballots were never counted in each of the last two presidential elections.
Absentee ballots are another problem. In the United States there are about 30 million people who mail in their ballots. This year that number will be closer to 60 million. Many of those ballots will never be counted. And then machines break down. Where do the machines break? Where everything breaks down. In the barrio, in the ghetto. Underresourced schools, bad hospitals — that all equals broken voting machines.
A person's vote in those poor areas is not being changed. The U.S. Civil Rights Commission discovered that the chance your vote will "spoil' is 900% higher if you're black than if you're white. The votes don't get counted. People are not allowed to vote. It's not random at all. This is a violently racial system.
Demographics are against the Republican Party. Their ideas are unpopular. Their solution is to maintain a type of American apartheid. The only way for Trump and his Republicans to stay in power is to keep nonwhites and other people who oppose them from voting. What are some specific examples of the Republican Party rigging elections to achieve their goals?
The following is very important. Georgia in 2018 was the test drive for the theft of 2020 by Donald Trump and the Republican Party. All across America — in 20 states and perhaps more — there is a new system of purging the voter rolls which will change the 2020 elections. There has been a massive increase in voter purges through an initiative called "use it or lose it." So for example, in Georgia, if you miss a couple of elections and they mailed you a postcard and you didn't return it, you lost your vote. That is a Jim Crow tactic which is illegal under the National Voter Registration Act. They used to stop black people from voting using such tactics.
What is happening in Georgia? How come Republicans are removing people who have not voted? The answer is they're saying that not returning the postcard is evidence that a given voter moved. "They missed two elections. They didn't return a card. Obviously, they've moved." Is that true? For my Salon piece in 2018 I went to the No. 1 experts on demography and where people actually live. Who are the experts on that subject? Amazon, eBay and American Express. I asked those experts to look at the data and then to tell me who moved In Georgia.
The experts went through the Georgia purge list and found out that exactly 340,134 voters had not ever moved from their original registration address. Over a third of a million voters were removed for leaving Georgia, or leaving their county, and had never actually moved away at all. Stacey Abrams put up a ton of money to go even deeper and found another 100,000 people who were wrongly purged. You're talking close to half a million people who were wrongly purged for moving. Based on my research, that is why Stacey Abrams said that she had won the governorship of Georgia — she just wouldn't be inaugurated.
Now the Republicans are trying to do the same thing in Michigan, Ohio and Wisconsin. All over the country. The Republicans and Trump are going to steal 2020 by saying that millions of people have moved, don't qualify for voting. They won't know until they show up to vote. Then those voters will be given a provisional ballot that won't get counted. These people will think they voted when they have not — and they will lose their vote. If they send in an absentee ballot and they're marked as having moved, their ballot will be thrown away.
This is a type of new Jim Crow. The Republicans are using gerrymandering and voter intimidation. Republicans are literally stuffing ballot boxes in favor of their candidates. There are false mailers being sent out. In terms of coordination, what does that look like?
Kris Kobach of Kansas — he was secretary of state in Kansas. Trump tried to appoint him to run his "Election Integrity Commission," which was going to supposedly expose millions of fraudulent voters and then remove them from the voter rolls. Kobach is the mastermind of a great many of these dirty tricks. Are there others involved? I caught Karl Rove, when he was working for George W. Bush's re-election campaign. Rove used a system called "caging" where his operatives would send letters to people's registration addresses. If the mail came back undelivered, Rove's people would say, "That's a ghost voter! That person doesn't live at their registration address." They'd then lose their right to vote.
Rove and his cronies were sending these letters to soldiers of color stationed overseas. That is a federal crime. Karl Rove was blunt. He reportedly said, "If we can drop black turnout in states like North Carolina by a quarter of a percentage point, we win."
Donald Trump and other Republicans — especially Fox News and the right-wing propaganda machine at large– are obsessed with these stories about nonwhites, especially black Americans, showing up to vote illegally to rig elections against white conservatives. What do we know about that strategic rhetoric?
It is strategic. Absolutely. I call it the "hysteria factory." To kick people off the voter rolls using a system like Crosscheck won't work unless you can claim that people are voting twice en masse. Trump and the Republicans have to create a hysteria that black people are voting twice if they want to be able to purge the votes. It's not as though Kris Kobach or Donald Trump invented that strategy of racial rumor-mongering. Watch the movie "Birth of a Nation" from a hundred years ago and you will see black people shown breaking the law in terms of voting.
This is an old racist trope. And Trump has turned it into a hammer. Kobach turned it into the Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck program, which is supposed to find people that are voting in different states. In reality, if a person votes in two different states in the same election, they can go to prison for five years. Crosscheck is ostensibly chasing something that almost never happens. Kobach, Trump and other Republicans use a racial stereotype that people of color cheat when they vote. People of color vote as some type of horde, and therefore we have to have all these laws to prevent black people, and now Hispanics, Asian-Americans and others, from doing the same thing.
Talk about Donald Trump's recent pardons and the case of Roger Stone. How is that relationship a tale of election fraud and vote rigging?
I'm very concerned about this right-wing campaign of intimidation. It's violent. It's very important to understand that Roger Stone is going to prison for threatening a witness with death. And believe me, that's a real threat.
In 2000, George W. Bush officially won the presidency by 537 votes in Florida. Just 537 votes. When they had the recount, most people really did not understand the details of what was happening.
First of all, 178,000 ballots were considered disqualified and unreadable. These were concentrated in Democratic and black areas such as Jacksonville, Gadsden County, Miami-Dade and Broward. Stone was the instigator of what the news media described as the "white-collar riot." The 2020 election involved so-called "hanging chads." People laughed about hanging chads, but it's not something funny. This was all very important. A person punches a hole in a card for their candidate, but what they do not know is that on the back of that card, a little piece of paper is hanging there, literally by a corner.
What happens next is that a person puts their ballot through the voting machine, and it kicks it out. It says, "Oh, there's something wrong with this ballot. The punched-out piece of paper is still attached." Miami was recounting those ballots that were disqualified. People misunderstand what happened. This was not a "recount." What really happened was counting ballots that were never actually counted in the first place. Those were overwhelmingly Gore ballots. Bush would have lost. The count was stopped. One way to stop the vote count in Miami was by having Roger Stone literally lead a riot where they were trying to break windows and smashing doors. It was white guys in suits, led by Roger Stone. One can only imagine how the Miami police would have reacted if black people were doing the same things.
Violence elected a president. The Republican operatives loved it. They said, "This guy will do anything we need." And Roger Stone still does. It's not cute. These are not "little dirty tricks." It is deeply evil voter manipulation. It's violent and it's racist. And now Trump tried to get Roger Stone's sentence reduced. Trump was successful. That sends a signal: "Do my work. I'll protect you." It has now been established that there's a very good chance Trump will pardon his people. Stone will get minimal time. These guys have money, they're violent, and they've got their personal stormtroopers.
Here is the scenario. Let's say the 2020 presidential election is very close in several key states. How do Trump and his Republican operatives try to guarantee victory over the Democratic candidate?
If Trump loses, he's going to scream and holler and then the question will be if there is a vote count in Republican-controlled states. Moreover, if the first count looks like Trump is losing, are these secretaries of state or other election officials — and I have no doubt that they will — going to start massively disqualifying ballots? And then say, "Well, on reconsideration, Trump won the 2020 election."
I believe that most of the above will happen before there is an official announcement of any final vote count.
For example, in Ohio back in 2012, there was that moment when Karl Rove was freaking out on Fox News. They called Ohio for Obama in 2012 and Karl Rove had a meltdown on television. He was saying, "No, that's not the right number. I'm talking to the secretary of state's office." I knew the real story behind his fit.
Seventy percent of black people in Ohio vote early. For the first time in Ohio history, no one who voted early was allowed to use a voting machine or a regular ballot. You had to fill out an absentee ballot form and an absentee ballot. I asked the county supervisor in Dayton, Ohio, "Why are we doing this?" He said, "It's simple. You can challenge a paper absentee ballot. Once a person votes on a regular machine or they voted on a regular ballot, you can't challenge it. The vote is a vote."
Karl Rove and John Husted, who was the Republican secretary of state, came up with a scheme to make black people vote on absentee ballots. They have to fill out the ballots. They can't make an error. Rove's concept was that the Republicans were going to throw out 200,000 ballots, mostly cast by black voters — but the scheme got busted and it wasn't successful. That is why Karl Rove was saying, "Don't call Ohio!" He knew that they were going to try to disqualify enough ballots to flip the state to Mitt Romney and flip the election. That's why Karl Rove was acting the way he did on Fox News.
These are very sophisticated strategies being used to not count votes. And when one talks about not counting ballots, no state comes close to California. None. Four years ago, over a million ballots were left uncounted in the primary. Not counting ballots and blocking voters and delayed vote counts is what I see happening in 2020. The Republicans are going to disqualify enough ballots until Trump can be declared the winner. That's the danger.
What are your concerns about the California Democratic primary and Bernie Sanders?
As I said earlier, 1.3 million ballots were not counted four years ago. Most of those were non-party preference ballots, cast by independents who are allowed to vote in the Democratic Party. According to a YouGov poll, those voters favored Bernie Sanders more than two to one. There is an effort to stop independent voters from voting in the Democratic primary. There are more than 4 million registered independents in California. These numbers are not small.
They mostly vote Democratic even though they register independent. But the Democratic Party's officials are going to do everything they can, as they did four years ago, to block that independent vote. That vote is Sanders' vote. Those against Sanders in the Democratic leadership are also going to do what they can to reduce the Hispanic vote. It's strange to me that we always talk about Biden and the black vote. What's not talked about is that Sanders really owns the Hispanic vote, and in California that's decisive. They're doing everything they can to block Hispanic voters, young voters and independent voters who support Bernie Sanders. To be clear: I'm not for Sanders. I don't have a dog in the fight. But the powers that be are moving heaven and earth in California to screw Bernie Sanders.
Your claim is that the Democratic Party's leadership is basically saying "Hell no!" to Bernie Sanders....
Alex Padilla is California secretary of state, but unlike most Hispanics, he has endorsed Joe Biden. He's got to deliver for Biden. He cannot let Sanders win California. At this point, I would say that it is going to be impossible for them to stop Sanders from winning California. His lead is so big there. However, California is not a winner-take-all state. What can happen is that those in the Democratic Party who are against Sanders can stop him from winning a lot of delegates. They can hurt his totals wherever they can. In my opinion, that is the establishment trick that will be used against Bernie Sanders.
What would you do to ensure that America's elections are free, fair and open?
I would adopt the Swiss system — no registration. What's registration for, except to remove people from the rolls that one party doesn't like? In that system you walk in, you say you're a citizen, then you vote. We don't have people illegally voting in the United States. When we talk about fixing elections, the fact is that registration was created to stop black people and American citizen immigrants from voting. That is the real history of registration in the United States. We must also stop the voter purges. No one should ever lose their right to vote. That's something that happens when you go to prison. There is absolutely no reason to be erasing people off the voter rolls, unless they ask to be erased. And the other exception is the death list, which is issued by the Social Security Administration. That's it.
On Thursday, Politico reported that Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr (R-NC) warned Sens. Ron Johnson (R-WI) and Chuck Grassley (R-IA) in a meeting on December 5 that their effort to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden over the Ukraine allegations could help Russia interfere with the 2020 presidential election.
This report directly contradicts the claim of Grassley, who told reporters that he hasn't "had any conversation" with Burr about his request for information on Biden.
As it became clear that President Donald Trump had the votes in the Senate to escape conviction for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress, some Republicans, including Johnson and Grassley, turned to trying to validate the very conspiracy theory Trump had sought to prove in Ukraine: that the Bidens' ouster of a notoriously corrupt prosecutor in Ukraine was somehow tied to Biden's son's work for the Ukrainian energy company Burisma.
Senate Republicans are broadly divided on whether to move forward with this effort, according to Politico: "Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) has hinted at similar unease with the Biden investigation, and he has said that some of those concerns were relayed to him by Burr — in particular, the source of the information the committee obtains."
The expanding COVID-19 epidemic and stock market crashes are not the only bad news for President Donald Trump this week.
A new Fox News poll shows Trump trailing six different Democrats in head-to-head matchups.
The poll showed Trump trailing former Vice President Joe Biden, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and former South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg.
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