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A big part of President-elect Joe Biden's victory hinged on Pennsylvania's 20 electoral votes.

Biden has a lead of more than 65,000 votes in Pennsylvania. The state, which was part of the Democratic "blue wall" that collapsed four years ago, went to President Donald Trump by more than 44,000 votes in 2016.

Both Trump and Biden campaigned heavily in the Keystone State in the days leading up to the election. While Pennsylvania has Democratic strongholds in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, to win the state, Biden needed to improve upon former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's 2016 performance in rural communities and smaller towns.

Rachel Thomas, the Northeast communications director for the Biden campaign, said that was the plan. She stressed that it was important to the campaign that they give "every voter the dignity of asking for their vote and not taking any single community for granted."

Democratic Vice Presidential Nominee Sen. Kamala Harris acknowledges the crowd while arriving at a drive-in rally on the eve of the general election on Nov. 2, 2020 in Bethlehem, Pa.

She added, "Our campaign, from the outset, ran an all-of-the-above approach. So, we knew that in order to win Pennsylvania, we couldn't just focus on one particular type of voter or group or region but that we really needed to engage everyone."

Thomas said the Pennsylvania Democratic Party partnered with the campaign to maximize resources. Sincer Harris, the senior advisor to Biden's campaign in Pennsylvania, said their strategy was not one that started overnight or even in the primaries.

"I think the party recognized that we needed to invest in a really strong ground game," Harris said. "We wanted to make sure we had grassroots, labor, the party infrastructure ... and we knew that investing early was going to be important."

Voter engagement delivered, as turnout was at unprecedented levels. In 2016, over 6 million people voted in Pennsylvania. In 2020, more than 6.7 million people showed up at the polls in the state.

"We were able to build the broadest, most diverse coalition," Thomas said. "We reached out not just to people that we knew would support us, but we were actively working to persuade and bring Independents and Republicans over to our side."

This statewide approach can be seen throughout Pennsylvania, which saw an increased turnout among Democrats in predominately red areas as well as blue areas. According to the Pennsylvania Department of State, in 2016 Clinton received 33% of the vote in York County, a traditionally Republican area. This year, Biden received nearly 37% of the vote. This trend of Democratic gains is seen in many other Republican-leaning counties in the state, including Lancaster County, Altoona County and Cumberland County.

Of the 67 counties in the state, Biden won 13, including the two most populous counties: Philadelphia County and Allegheny County, which encompasses Pittsburgh.

Former President Barack Obama speaks at a drive-in rally for Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden on Oct. 21, 2020 in Philadelphia.

Although Biden saw gains in red regions of the state, the majority of Biden's victory can be seen in the more traditionally Democrat strongholds of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh and their neighboring suburbs, where Biden won margins not seen since 2008.

"Our first offices were in Philly, because we knew that we had to win Philly. We had to win the ground game there. We had to have investments in the city for us to be successful. If we don't win by a healthy margin of 400,000-plus votes in Philly, you don't win the state," Harris said.

Philadelphia saw its highest voter registration tally since 1984 with nearly nine in 10 eligible voters registered, according to data from the Philadelphia Office of City Commissioners.

According to the City Commissioners' count, Philadelphia saw a 64% turnout this cycle, an increase from the 59% who came out in 2016.

Thomas said the campaign made "historic investments" in paid media to engage Black and Latino voters and added that they advertised on both English and Spanish language television and radio. "People of color have been the backbone of the Democratic Party and carried this win for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris in Pennsylvania," she said.

That sentiment was seen in the campaign destinations that were chosen.

"They visited communities that don't get to see presidential candidates or presidential candidates often," Harris said, noting that former President Barack Obama visited North Philadelphia on his first campaign stop for Biden and Vice President-elect Harris went to middle-class Black communities. "We met people where they are."

Amid a global pandemic, meeting people where they are is more complicated to achieve. However, Thomas said the ground game in Pennsylvania did not change. It just went mostly virtual.

The campaign held "specific" programming for certain demographics of voters, including women voters, Latino voters, Black voters, rural voters and young voters, Thomas said.

"We found that we actually had high engagement rates and a lot more meaningful conversations," she said, "because people were at home and they were wanting to find ways to get more information about our campaign."

COVID-19 dominated the campaign not only in how they reached voters but also in how they urged voters to vote.

"We made a really focused and aggressive effort to get Democrats to adopt vote by mail for the first time and then we ran a huge program that educated voters how to actually fill out those ballots," Thomas said.

Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf expanded mail-in voting in 2019, and mail-in ballots were highly utilized due to the pandemic. Pennsylvanians cast more than 3 million ballots by mail in the general election.

Democratic presidential candidate former vice President Joe Biden attends a drive-in campaign event at Dallas High School in Dallas, Pa., Oct. 24, 2020.

The campaign attributes an increased voter turnout in part to Trump.

Thomas said she thinks people who didn't vote or voted for Trump in 2016 and then voted for Biden in 2020 either wanted to give Trump a shot or "didn't think it mattered."

"But since then they have only felt the disastrous impacts of his presidency personally," she said. "So I think that it's both a combination of our outreach, but also, the impact they personally have felt from a Trump presidency."

Biden, a Scranton native, regularly touted his working-class Pennsylvania roots and often called the election a choice between "Park Avenue vs. Scranton."

The success of the Biden campaign mirrored the structure of the Obama campaign, which heavily relied on urban areas, minorities and a robust ground game.

"I've been in the middle of philosophical arguments asking, 'Is it the ground game or is it the air wars?' 'Do you dump a ton of money on TV and radio, or do you really focus on the field?' But it's an all-of-the-above approach when it comes to the voters," Harris said. "It really did take putting those various puzzle pieces together ... and that's how we won Pennsylvania."

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How Democrats took Pennsylvania back from Trump in the 2020 election - ABC News

Joe Bidens first hours as president-elect were met by his supporters with spontaneous dance parties, champagne showers and car parades that wound through several blocks. But amid the Biden-Harris placards and T-shirts dotting a diverse crowd gathered in front of the White House last week, there was a creeping sense that the source of their shared jubilation had less to do with the dragon-slayer than the dragon slayed.

Since the moment Donald Trump was sworn in as president, Democrats aligned to plot his removal. They resisted, organized and mobilized, unified around the goal of removing a president they believed was uniquely dangerous. They succeeded. But their success also marked the end of an election-season truce that at times obscured deep ideological and generational differences.

Democrats face a reckoning, four years in the making, after an election that accomplished their mission but did little to resolve urgent questions about the partys political future and serious internal divisions.

The first order of business is a deep dive into why more Americans than at any moment in the nations 244-year history voted for Biden and yet, despite bold predictions of a unified government come January 2021, Democrats ended up with a weakened House majority and an uphill battle to take control of the Senate.

Whats clear is that voters did not feel comfortable giving Democrats every lever of power, said Lanae Erickson, senior vice-president for social policy and politics at the centrist thinktank Third Way. And the question is, why not?

The answer, of course, depends on who you ask.

A tense conference call among House Democrats, in which moderate members blamed the left wing for costing them congressional seats, opened a fiery public debate over how to turn a majority coalition into governing majorities.

Moderates argue that Bidens success, which included reclaiming three states in the rust belt Trump won in 2016 and expanding the map to sun belt battlegrounds, was evidence that a moderate who rejected liberal appeals was best positioned to build a winning coalition.

There are clearly some parts of the Democratic brand that voters across the country did not feel comfortable with, Erickson said. A post-election analysis by Third Way found that Republicans effectively weaponized ideas like defunding the police and Medicare for All against Democrats in competitive districts, even if they did not support such policies.

Far from being tempered by the congressional setbacks, progressives are emboldened. In a series of interviews, op-eds and open letters, they blamed unexpected losses on an embrace of status quo centrism that failed to capture voters imagination and faulted moderate candidates for not developing strong enough brands and digital strategies to withstand inevitable attacks.

They are dead wrong, Bernie Sanders, the progressive senator who lost to Biden in the Democratic primary, wrote in an USA Today op-ed. He noted that every House co-sponsor of Medicare for All and all but one co-sponsor of the Green New Deal were re-elected, including several competitive districts.

The lesson is not to abandon popular policies like Medicare for All, a Green New Deal, living wage jobs, criminal justice reform and universal childcare, Sanders wrote, but to enact an agenda that speaks to the economic desperation being felt by the working class Black, white, Latino, Asian American and Native American.

Biden won the primary after refusing to move left, but as the nominee embraced a sweeping economic vision that drew comparisons with FDRs New Deal. In remarks after the election, Biden said that his resounding victory had given him a mandate for action on the economy, the pandemic, climate and racial inequality.

But the breadth and contours of that mandate are up for debate. The election returned a complicated tableau of wins and losses for Democrats that defy sweeping conclusions about the electorate.

Biden won Arizona and is set to take Georgia, after years of organizing by progressive Black and Latino activists in the traditionally Republican states. At the same time, sweeping advances with moderates and independents in the suburbs around fast-growing metropolitan areas like Phoenix and Atlanta helped secure his lead.

It was moderate Democrats who flipped Senate seats in Colorado and Arizona, the partys only additions so far, even as a number of battleground states voted for progressive ballot measures that included legalizing marijuana, raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour and taxing wealthy Americans to fund public education.

In the muddled aftermath, lawmakers, activists and the partys grassroots are all vying for influence. Battles have flared on multiple fronts: the makeup of Bidens executive branch, the new administrations legislative agenda and the approach to a pair of Georgia runoff elections which will determine control of the Senate. If they fall short, there is deep disagreement over the extent to which Biden should work with Senate Republicans and Mitch McConnell, a take-no-prisoners tactician.

Biden must not allow McConnell veto power over how he constructs his administration, leaders of the Revolving Door Project and Demand Progress wrote in an open letter last week. They implored Biden to embrace the same hardball tactics wielded against him in the eight years he was Barack Obamas vice-president, circumventing the Senate confirmation process entirely if necessary.

Biden, an institutionalist whose bipartisan friendships were a prominent feature of his campaign, has repeatedly promised to govern as a president for all Americans. But Republicans unwillingness to congratulate Biden publicly while admitting privately that Trumps refusal to concede is based on meritless claims of voter fraud demonstrate the constraints he will face from the opposition party.

Yet amid the clashes over messaging and policy, there were some signs of agreement. Senator Doug Jones, a moderate Alabama Democrat who lost re-election, said his party needed to invest in grassroots organizing if it wanted to compete in conservative states.

Democrats campaign apparatus spends too much time investing in candidates and not the electorate, he told Politico, echoing a sentiment expressed by New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and other progressives: They dont invest in House districts, they dont invest in states.

Beto ORourke, a former congressman from El Paso and candidate for the presidential nomination, offered the same diagnosis in a memo to supporters after a disappointing showing in Texas. Transforming the political trajectory of a state requires year-round attention, he wrote, so that voters dont just hear from us during an election.

Democrats will have an opportunity to test their competing theories of change before Biden takes office, via Georgias Senate races in January. The stakes couldnt be higher: if Democrats pull off upset victories, the Senate will be equally divided, with Vice-President Kamala Harris as the tie-breaking vote.

Georgia really should answer all these questions, said Cliff Albright, a co-founder of the Atlanta-based Black Voters Matter Fund, credited with helping Democrats turn Georgia blue.

Because this is the debate weve been having here for at least a decade now.

That a Democratic presidential candidate is poised to carry Georgia for the first time in nearly 30 years is proof that mobilizing the partys diverse, progressive base works, Albright said.

Black and brown folks in Georgia right now, we feel like we could put somebody on Mars, Albright said of Bidens edge in the state. But he warned that all of that energy will disappear if Democrats spend the next two months appealing to Republicans and not their base.

Carolyn Bourdeaux, who became the first and so far only Democrat to flip a competitive Republican-held House seat, said her victory in a diverse, suburban Atlanta district demonstrated the importance of grassroots organizing and cross-party appeal.

In the Georgia Senate races, where her district will play a crucial role, Bourdeaux suggests an approach that she admits is neither sexy or fancy.

Voters are looking for reasonable policy solutions and people to get the job done, she said. They want to know you care about them, that youre listening to what their concerns are and they want to know that you are passionately committed to addressing those issues.

Link:
Democrats divided: Biden's election win brings end to party's uneasy truce - The Guardian

Almost three weeks after the Associated Press and other major news organizations determined that Joe Biden would be next president of the United States, Donald Trumps re-election campaign continues to question the legitimacy of the election and the integrity of the democratic process. And even some conservative commentators are questioning this unprecedented post-electoral political maneuvering.

The presidents personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, and Trump campaign lawyer Sidney Powell gave a highly unusual press conference on Thursday at which they continued to level claims of election fraud without presenting any supporting evidence and Giuliani raised eyebrows by both quoting My Cousin Vinny and appearing to drip hair dye while speaking to the media.

This led Fox News contributor and Fox News Radio host Guy Benson to offer a hypothetical scenario while visiting The Story With Martha MacCallum on Thursday night: How would Republicans have reacted four years ago if Democrat Hillary Clinton had refused to concede the election to Trump citing, perhaps, interference by Russia? And what if President Barack Obama started summoning Democrats from swing states to the White House?

Benson said that his fellow conservatives would have been screaming their heads off:

I think conservatives would rightly have been in the streets screaming their heads off, and I would have been right there with them, because thats not what we do in this country.

That would be a shocking departure from our system of governance and the transfer of power in this country, he continued. I think this is a very dangerous path to even consider, let alone go down.

And while Fox News host Tucker Carlson was one of the few to defend Giuliani on Thursday just hours after Kristen Fisher, the networks White House correspondent, had criticized the former New York City mayor for not providing evidence to back up his explosive claims and for saying things that were simply not true or [have] already been thrown out in court he did call out Trumps legal team for getting angry when asked to provide evidence.

Carlson gave a monologue on Thursday night, which was also published as op-ed on the Fox News website, explaining that he had asked Powell to show evidence proving the Trump campaigns claim that some American voting machines used technology developed by the late Venezuelan President Hugo Chvez to change votes to favor Biden.

Now, Carlson didnt completely discredit her baseless claim, instead calling it something that could amount to the single greatest crime in American history. But he did call her out for refusing to show any evidence to support her allegations, or to come on his show to discuss the matter.

She never sent us any evidence despite a lot of requests, polite requests, not a page, said Carlson. When we kept pressing she got angry and told us to stop contacting her.

When we checked with others around the Trump campaign, people in positions of authority, they told us Powell has never given any evidence either. Nor did she provide any today, he continued.

Powell responded to Carlsons comments in an interview with the Washington Examiner.

I would continue to encourage him and all journalists to review all the materials we have provided so far and conduct their own investigations, she said. Evidence continues to pour in, but a five-minute television hit is not my focus now. Collecting evidence and preparing the case are my top priorities.

Republican senators Mitt Romney of Utah and Ben Sasse of Nebraska joined the handful of conservatives criticizing Trump and his team for pressuring state and local election officials to overturn Bidens victories in closely contested states. It is difficult to imagine a worse, more undemocratic action by a sitting American President, Romney tweeted on Thursday.

Rudy and his buddies should not pressure electors to ignore their certification obligations under the statute, Sasse said in a statement. We are a nation of laws, not tweets.

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Republicans would have been screaming their heads off if Democrats tried to overturn the 2016 election: Foxs Guy Benson - MarketWatch

In an April 2019 campaign speech, Senator Elizabeth Warren lambasted Republicans for massive voter suppression and attempting to rig an election in Georgia and North Carolina, respectively. They know that a durable majority of Americans believes in the promise of America, she told her audience. And they know that if all the votes are counted, well win every time.

Progressives take it as an article of faith that a durable majority of Americans, in Warrens words, would support a left-wing policy agenda, if not for various Republican-sponsored voter-suppression efforts, gerrymandering, and anti-majoritarian institutions like the Senate and the Electoral College. Bernie Sanders echoed this view in 2016 when he said: Democrats win when the voter turnout is high . . . Republicans win when the voter turnout is low.

Republicans, for their part, often seem to agree. In March, President Trump publicly worried that a Democratic proposal to expand absentee and mail-in voting would lead to levels of voting that, if you ever agreed to it, youd never have a Republican elected in this country again.

The results of this years election should call this conventional wisdom into question. With a record-high turnout of nearly 160 million voters, the GOP not only held its own but also exceeded expectations at every level. While Donald Trump appears to have lost his reelection bid, he significantly outperformed the landslide losses projected by most polls, as did Republican Senate and House candidates across the country.

With Republicans poised to gain at least six seats in the House and well-positioned to hold on to their Senate majority (pending two Georgia runoffs in early January), the American electorate has once again proved itself significantly more conservative than pollsters and pundits claimed. And while Joe Biden won a comfortable victory in the national popular vote, the GOPs resounding success in down-ballot races has dealt a significant blow to the longstanding myth that a latent majoritarian mandate exists for the progressive agenda.

According to a preponderance of data dating as far back as the 1980s, no consistently identifiable correlation exists between voter turnout and the success of one party over the other. Instead, high voter turnout helps different parties at different times, depending on who turns out (and who doesnt). While some evidence suggests that non-voters lean slightly Democratic, modelling scenarios with full voter participation (100 percent turnout) tend to suggest that they would not have a significant effect on our politics. If everyone voted, wrote political scientist John Sides in 2015, a lot would be the same.

Barack Obamas blowout victory in 2008, which succeeded in turning out large numbers of traditional nonvoters, added fuel to theories on the left about Republican voter suppression. According to this logic, the 2020 elections historic voter turnouthelped along by Democrat-championed initiatives like vote-by-mailshould have led to the GOPs crushing defeat. The problem, of course, is that the wrong people turned out. In Wisconsin, for example, turnout increased by an average of 13 percent in heavily Republican rural counties, compared with only 7 percent in traditionally Democratic areas. Though Biden still eked out a narrow win in the Badger State, Republicans held the legislature, as they did in upset wins in states across the country.

These GOP victories are not solely the result of an energized working-class white electorate. According to New York Times pollster Nate Cohn, Mr. Trump made huge gains in many Hispanic communities across the country, from the agricultural Imperial Valley and the border towns along the Rio Grande to more urban Houston or Philadelphia. The president also doubled his share of the LGBT vote and modestly improved his standing with African-Americans while actually losing support among white men, throwing cold water on another myth about the inevitable leftward drift of a diversifying America.

Many on the left have responded to these facts by trading in their conviction that the vast majority of the country is with them for a profound disdain for the national character. Lets remember that tens of millions of people voted for the status quo, even when it means supporting lies, hate, chaos, and division, Michelle Obama tweeted. Brookings Institution fellow Andre M. Perry was still more blunt: The outsized support Trump has continued to receive exposes Americas soul for what it is. . . . Confronting that part means confronting the nations racism, xenophobia, and classism.

What it doesnt mean, apparently, is confronting progressives own political shortcomings. Democrats lose elections because of voter suppression, bigotry, Russia, disinformation, corporate power, money in politics, third-party candidates, or any number of other factorseverything but the unpopularity of progressive politics.

Nate Hochman (@njhochman) is a senior at Colorado College and a Young Voices associate contributor.

Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images

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Myth of the Democratic Majority - City Journal

By Tessa Venell '08Nov. 19, 2020

Imagine a classroom in the future where teachers are working alongside artificial intelligence partners to ensure no student gets left behind.The AI partners careful monitoring picks up on a student in the back who has been quiet and still for the whole class and the AI partner prompts the teacher to engage the student. When called on, the student asks a question. The teacher clarifies the material that has been presented and every student comes away with a better understanding of the lesson.This is part of a larger vision of future classrooms where human instruction and AI technology interact to improve educational environments and the learning experience.James Pustejovsky, the TJX Feldberg Professor of Computer Science, is working towards that vision with a team led by the University of Colorado Boulder, as part of the new $20 million National Science Foundation-funded AI Institute for Student-AI Teaming.The research will play a critical role in helping ensure the AI agent is a natural partner in the classroom, with language and vision capabilities, allowing it to not only hear what the teacher and each student is saying, but also notice gestures (pointing, shrugs, shaking a head), eye gaze, and facial expressions (student attitudes and emotions).

Pustejovsky took some time to answer questions from BrandeisNOW about his research.

How does your research help build this classroom of the future?For the past five years, we have been working to create a multimodal embodied avatar system, called Diana, that interacts with a human to perform various tasks. She can talk, listen, see, and respond to language and gesture from her human partner, and then perform actions in a 3D simulation environment called VoxWorld. This is work we have been conducting with our collaborators at Colorado State University, led by Ross Beveridge in their vision lab. We are working together again (CSU and Brandeis) to help bring this kind of embodied human computer interaction into the classroom. Nikhil Krishnaswamy, my former Ph.D. student and co-developer of Diana, has joined CSU as part of their team.How does it work in the context of a classroom setting?At first its disembodied, a virtual presence on an iPad, for example, where it is able to recognize the voices of different students. So imagine a classroom: Six to 10 children in grade school. The initial goal in the first year is to have the AI partner passively following the different students, in the way they're talking and interacting, and then eventually the partner will learn to intervene to make sure that everyone is equitably represented and participating in the classroom.Are there other settings that Diana would be useful in besides a classroom?Let's say I've got a Julia Child app on my iPad and I want her to help me make bread. If I start the program on the iPad, the Julia Child avatar would be able to understand my speech. If I have my camera set up, the program allows me to be completely embedded and embodied in a virtual space with her so that she can help me.

Screenshot of the embodied avatar system Diana."

How does she help you?She would look at my table and say, Okay, do you have everything you need. And then Id say, I think so. So the camera will be on, and if you had all your baking materials laid out on your table, she would scan the table. She'd say, I see flour, yeast, salt, and water, but I don't see any utensils: you're going to need a cup, you're going to need a teaspoon. After you had everything you needed, she would tell you to put the flour in that bowl over there. And then she'd show you how to mix it.

Is that where Diana comes in?Yes, Diana is basically becoming an embodied presence in the human-computer interaction: she can see what you're doing, you can see what she's doing. In a classroom interaction, Diana could help with guiding students through lesson plans, through dialogue and gesture, while also monitoring the students progress, mood, and levels of satisfaction or frustration.Does Diana have any uses in virtual learning in education?

Using an AI partner for virtual learning could be a fairly natural interaction. In fact, with a platform such as Zoom, many of the computational issues are actually easier since voice and video tracks of different speakers have already been segmented and identified. Furthermore, in a Hollywood Squares display of all the students, a virtual AI partner may not seem as unnatural, and Diana might more easily integrate with the students online.What stage is the research at now?Within the context of the CU Boulder-led AI Institute, the research has just started. Its a five-year project, and its getting off the ground. This is exciting new research that is starting to answer questions about using our avatar and agent technology with students in the classroom.

The research is funded by the National Science Foundation, and partners with CU Boulder on the research include Brandeis University, Colorado State University, the University of California, Santa Cruz, UC Berkeley, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Georgia Institute of Technology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and University of Wisconsin-Madison.

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Artificial intelligence and the classroom of the future | BrandeisNOW - Brandeis University