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Turning the page? Republicans acknowledge Biden’s victory

By Jeff Amy And Will Weissert
Associated Press
WASHINGTON — More than a month after the election, top Republicans finally acknowledged Joe Biden as the next U.S. president on Tuesday, a collapse in GOP resistance to the millions of voters who decisively chose the Democrat. Foreign leaders joined the parade, too, including Russia’s Vladimir Putin.

Speaking from the floor of the U.S. Senate where Biden spent 36 years of his career, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell congratulated his former colleague as president-elect. The two men spoke later in the day.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, meanwhile, was to meet with his likely successor in the new administration, Antony Blinken. And GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, one of President Donald Trump’s closest allies, said he’d spoken with some of Biden’s Cabinet picks.

A similar shift unfolded in capitals across the world, where leaders including Russia’s Putin and Mexico’s Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador acknowledged Biden’s win.

The moves come a day after electors nationwide formally cast votes affirming Biden’s victory in last month’s presidential election. And while that clears a more stable path for Biden to assume the presidency, it does little to stop Trump from continuing to try to undermine confidence in the results with baseless allegations that have been rejected by judges across political spectrum.

As Republicans began discussing a Biden presidency more openly on Tuesday, Trump still pledged to press forward with almost nonexistent legal options.

“Tremendous evidence pouring in on voter fraud. There has never been anything like this in our Country!” Trump tweeted just as members of his party were publicly recognizing Biden’s victory.

The growing acknowledgement of reality in Washington was triggered by the Electoral College formally voting on Monday to seal Biden’s win with 306 votes to Trump’s 232, the same margin that Trump pulled together four years ago. The normally humdrum political ceremony didn’t change the facts of the election, but was nonetheless used as political cover by leading Republicans.

“Many of us had hoped the presidential election would yield a different result,” McConnell said. “But our system of government has the processes to determine who will be sworn in on Jan. 20. The Electoral College has spoken.”

The bureaucratic transition from Trump’s government to Biden’s actually began weeks ago, despite the president’s legal challenges. Still, the suddenly conciliatory stance from many Republicans could thaw the political deep freeze that has gripped Washington lately.

Biden has been trying to build momentum as he prepares to assume the presidency while facing the historic challenge of vaccinating hundreds of millions of Americans against the coronavirus. In some of his most forceful remarks since the election, Biden is calling for unity but also calling Trump’s attacks on the voting process “unconscionable” and insisting it is time to “turn the page.’

“We need to work together, give each other a chance, and lower the temperature,” Biden said in a speech Monday.

Still, the shift coming so late in the tone from Republicans has left the president-elect with barely a month to finish building out key parts his new government. Some say the GOP about-face won’t mean much at this point.

“Even them doing this now, the damage has been done because they’ve blocked, they’ve interrupted,” said Anthony Robinson, a former Obama administration appointee who served several national security policy roles including during the transition to the Trump administration in 2016.

“I don’t want to say, ‘Who cares?,’ but it definitely doesn’t symbolize a smooth transition,” said Robinson, who is now political director of the National Democratic Training Committee, which trains candidates and campaign staffers all over the country.

Biden’s first priority will be the fair and efficient distribution of vaccines against the virus. The president-elect said Tuesday that he would follow the advice of Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, who says that getting the president-elect himself vaccinated as soon as possible is a matter of national security.

“Dr. Fauci recommends I get the vaccine sooner than later. I want to make sure we do it by the numbers,” Biden said, adding that he’d be immunized publicly, which could help build public trust in the vaccine.

Trump’s continued opposition to Biden, meanwhile, may still present roadblocks, especially in the U.S. House where Republicans as recently as last week were introducing legislation to punish members of their party who might be seen as urging Trump to “concede prematurely.” Other top Trump administration Cabinet officials haven’t yet followed the lead of Pompeo, who plans to meet Thursday with Blinken, Biden’s secretary of state nominee.

“The president is still involved in ongoing litigation related to the election,” said White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany, calling the Electoral College vote “one step in the constitutional process.”

Rick Tyler, a Republican operative and fierce Trump critic, said it seemed at first like “the Electoral College had broken the evil spell that Trump cast across the Republican Party.”

But he said the attacks on the electoral system that Trump is continuing to wage have many of his supporters now questioning American democracy itself— and that won’t quickly dissipate just because some Republicans and world leaders are now willing to say conciliatory things.

“There really are 50-plus million people who no longer have trust in our system, and that’s a dangerous thing,” said Tyler. He said Biden must “figure out a way to restore that trust. And it can’t just be a partisan attack on Republicans for, frankly, being stupid.”

Also looming large is the divided U.S. Senate, where majority control will depend on the outcome of two special elections in Georgia on Jan. 5.

Early in-person voting began Monday in the runoff elections for Georgia’s two U.S. Senate seats, with lines reported to be shorter than in the first days of early voting for the general election last month.

More than half of the record 5 million votes in the Nov. 3 general election were cast during its three-week early voting period. Early in-person voting could be even more important in the Jan. 5 runoffs because of the short period for voters to request and return ballots by mail.

The two races in which Democrats Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff try to oust Republican Sens. Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, respectively, will decide which party controls the U.S. Senate.

No one expects turnout to be as high as it was for the general election. But Bernard Fraga, an Emory University professor who studies voting, said overall turnout could reach 4 million.

President Donald Trump has relentlessly pushed baseless claims of widespread fraud in the general election, in which he lost in the state of Georgia. In an overnight tweet just hours before early voting began, he continued his attack on Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, pushing him to take action or risk harming the chances for Perdue and Loeffler.

“What a fool Governor @BrianKempGA of Georgia is,” the president tweeted. “Could have been so easy, but now we have to do it the hard way. Demand this clown call a Special Session and open up signature verification, NOW. Otherwise, could be a bad day for two GREAT Senators on January 5th.”

In contrast to the first day of early voting in October, when more than 125,000 people cast ballots and some people lined up for hours, few long lines were reported Monday.

One question was how many mail-in ballots will be cast in the election. By Friday, 1.2 million mail-in ballots had been requested and 200,000 returned. In the general election, Democrat Joe Biden won 65% of the 1.3 million absentee ballots that were returned in Georgia, a record fueled by the coronavirus pandemic.

Fraga said it’s possible that mailed ballots will be even more favorable for Democrats in the runoff because of attacks on the integrity of mail-in voting by Trump and many Georgia Republicans.

That means early in-person voting, which Trump narrowly won in November, could be even more important for Republicans. Both parties may also drive voters toward the early polls with the Christmas and New Year’s holidays looming.

Republican attacks on mail-in voting also worry some Democrats. Meghan Shannon, 36, voted in person for Ossoff and Warnock on Monday at State Farm Arena in downtown Atlanta, partly driven by fears that absentee ballots will be overly scrutinized.

“I think the absentee ballots are going to be questioned when they count the votes,” the architect said. “I wanted to be here in person so my vote is counted and it’s uncontested.”

Melissa McJunkin, 40, voted in Rome, a solidly Republican area in northwest Georgia, and cast her ballot for Perdue and Loeffler, saying they “will help make decisions based on what I think is the right choice.” She’d heard allegations of voter fraud in the general election and was a bit worried about the integrity of the runoff vote.

“I’ve never had a problem before now trusting it, but now I feel like there may be something going on that I don’t trust,” she said.

Towanda Jones voted in downtown Atlanta for Ossoff and Warnock and dismissed the fraud allegations, which have been repeatedly denied by election officials.

“The system is working as it should, and I think our current president is just a sore loser,” she said.

The 54-year-old Black hairstylist said police reform was her main priority.

“I have two grown sons,” Jones said. “The amount of Black lives that have been lost due to police brutality upset me.”

Deborah Harp Gibbs of Lilburn said she voted for Perdue and Loeffler “to keep America great.”

Gibbs said it’s important for people to acknowledge the United States as a Christian nation. “I want prayer in school and ‘God Bless America’ and apple pie,” Gibbs said, adding that she thinks the Republicans could keep things on “the right track.”

Tony Christy, 62, said he was concerned about the balance of power in Washington as he voted in Kennesaw, a conservative-leaning city just northwest of Atlanta, for the two Republicans. If the Democrats win, there will be 50 senators from each party and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris would be the tie-breaking vote in the chamber.

That would give too much power to the Democrats, Christy said, because “then not only will they have the presidency, but they’ll have the House and the Senate, which is not a good balance to have.”

But Araya Araya of Lilburn said he voted for Warnock in part to give Biden a chance to get things done.

“I didn’t want the Senate to be majority Republican where everything President-elect Biden is preparing to do is going to get blocked,” Araya said.

Each of Georgia’s 159 counties must offer at least one early voting location during business hours, with many in metro Atlanta offering multiple sites, extended hours and weekend voting. Early voting will continue through Dec. 31 in some places.

Preparation for early voting saw squabbles over cuts to the number of early polling places. The Center for New Data, a nonprofit group, counted 42 early polling sites statewide scheduled to close for the runoff. In some cases, polling places were relocated.

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