Welcome to my brand new e-newsletter! In addition to a weekly email on discussing what we achieved the week prior, I will now be sending a handful of issue specific updates periodically throughout the year. You can sign up for these on my website, and also take the survey below!
I am excited to offer this new way for us to keep in touch on the issues that matter most to you and all our friends and neighbors across South Carolina. And don’t forget to follow me on Twitter, Instagram,Facebook and YouTube for daily updates!
Last week was a significant one, let’s get to that below.
2020 Presidential Election
As I am sure you are aware, Joe Biden has claimed victory in the 2020 presidential election. While television networks move forward, votes are still being counted across the country. As with every election in our nation’s history, this one is not over until every single legally cast ballot has been counted.
All allegations of fraud or irregular activity must be reported and fully investigated. I am encouraged that states across the country, such as Georgia, have committed to doing exactly this. If any of these allegations are found credible, they must then be brought before the courts. The American people must continue to have faith in our electoral systems, and rooting out any and all fraud is the best way to do so.
While President Trump continues to challenge the results in some states, I will continue with my mission to ensure every American family has the chance to achieve the American Dream. We have made significant progress on that front the past four years through tax reform, permanent funding for HBCUs, and, as you’ll read more below, Opportunity Zones.
Opportunity Zones Continue to Prosper
Some amazing projects have been announced recently in Opportunity Zones across the country, showing our initiative is working to help communities most in need! If you want to learn even more about my efforts to bring economic opportunity to all Americans, sign up for my new Economic Opportunity e-newsletter here!
In Charlotte, a new project will help hire and house 50 people facing homelessness. They will hire, train and house folks to help them get back on their feet as part of efforts towards “conscious capitalism."
In South Los Angeles, the BeeHive is giving local entrepreneurs a space to thrive, while also opening new businesses aiming to hire directly from the community they serve.
And a new, minority-owned real estate partnership focused solely on affordable housing has plans in place to help bring the dream of home ownership to families in Illinois, Florida, Texas, North Carolina, California and Michigan.
These are just a few of the amazing projects in the works in Opportunity Zones across the country (and don’t forget our September announcement right here in South Carolina that will bring 1,500 jobs to Hampton County)! Keep your eyes peeled, we have some exciting new content coming your way next month in this area.
One More Reminder: Sign Up For Our New E-newsletters!
Just a reminder to sign up for our new issue-specific e-newsletters here, or take the survey at the top of this email. I look forward to sharing all the ways my team and I are working hard every day for the people of South Carolina!
Sincerely,
Lowcountry 2500 City Hall Lane 3rd Floor Suite North Charleston, SC 29406 Phone: (843) 727-4525 Fax: (855) 802-9355
Midlands 1901 Main Street Suite 1425 Columbia, SC 29201 Phone: (803) 771-6112 Fax: (855) 802-9355
Upstate 104 South Main Street Suite 803 Greenville, SC 29601 Phone: (864) 233-5366 Fax: (855) 802-9355
Washington, DC 104 Hart Senate Office Building Washington, DC 20510 Phone: (202) 224-6121 Toll Free: (855) 425-6324 Fax: (202) 228-5143
Good morning. Was Joe Biden the only Democrat who would have beaten President Trump?
Kamala Harris and Joe BidenErin Schaff/The New York Times
The Biden Bump
If Democrats had nominated any candidate other than Joe Biden, President Trump may well have won re-election.
It’s impossible to know for sure, of course. But Biden won the states that decided the election narrowly — by two percentage points or less in Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, current vote counts suggest. And there is good reason to believe other Democrats might have lost these states. Consider:
In several swing states — including Georgia, Michigan and North Carolina — Biden also did better than the Democratic nominees for Senate. (Arizona is an exception.)
In Nebraska’s Second Congressional District, the Democrats nominated a Bernie Sanders-style candidate — Kara Eastman, who backs “Medicare for all” and was endorsed by progressive groups like the Justice Democrats — for a House seat. She lost her race by almost five percentage points, while Biden won the district by almost seven points.
These election results are consistent with polls from over the past year that showed Biden faring better against Trump than other Democrats in hypothetical matchups.
By The New York Times
Why does this matter? For the past four years, Trump has dominated American politics. At times, he has seemed to possess magical political powers, winning the presidency despite rejecting the usual rules of politics and maintaining a roughly steady approval rating even as he was impeached and presided over a terrible pandemic.
In the end, though, Trump didn’t have magical powers. He instead became only the fourth elected president in the past century to lose re-election, after Herbert Hoover, Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush. That’s the good news for Democrats.
But there is also a large dose of bad news for Democrats. Despite Trump’s defeat, the Republican Party has retained its popularity in much of the country. A small but crucial segment of Americans chose to vote for both Mr. Biden and Republican congressional candidates.
This combination means that neither party has an obvious path forward. Democrats are almost certainly fooling themselves if they conclude that America has turned into a left-leaning country that’s ready to get rid of private health insurance, defund the police, abolish immigration enforcement and vote out Republicans because they are filling the courts with anti-abortion judges. Many working-class voters — white, Hispanic, Black and Asian-American — disagree with progressive activists on several of those issues.
But the notion that Democrats should simply move to the center on every issue also seems wrong. A big increase in the minimum wage passed in Florida last week with 61 percent of the vote. Several drug-decriminalization measures also passed. Expansions of Medicaid, a health-insurance program mostly for low-income people, have also passed in red states.
Republicans have a different set of problems. They have lost the popular vote in seven of the last eight presidential elections. They now appear headed toward a messy struggle over who their new national leaders will be — or whether Trump himself will continue to dominate the party.
Joe Biden during a campaign event last month.Erin Schaff/The New York Times
Biden has said he will undo several Trump administration policies — on climate change, the pandemic, labor unions and more — on his first day in office.
European diplomats expressed relief that the next U.S. president would treat them as allies instead of rivals, while Vladimir Putin of Russia seemed to be preparing for a more acrimonious relationship.
Trump has still not conceded, and several prominent Republicans have urged him to continue challenging the results. “The media can project an election winner, but they don’t get to decide if claims of broken election laws & irregularities are true,” Senator Marco Rubio tweeted. “That’s decided by the courts, and on the basis of clear evidence and the law.” (There has been no evidence of meaningful voter fraud.)
Only two Republican senators — Mitt Romney of Utah and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska — have acknowledged Biden’s win. “At some point, truth, freedom and democracy have to ascend,” Romney said, “and you step aside.”
Former President George W. Bush congratulated Biden, writing: “Though we have political differences, I know Joe Biden to be a good man who has won his opportunity to lead and unify our country.”
A Covid-19 testing site in Milwaukee, Wis.Taylor Glascock for The New York Times
The number of Americans hospitalized with Covid-19 has nearly doubled since mid-September.
Biden is planning to name his virus task force today, with three co-chairs: Dr. Vivek Murthy, a former surgeon general; Dr. David Kessler, a former F.D.A. commissioner; and Dr. Marcella Nunez-Smith, a Yale professor.
OTHER BIG STORIES
Flooding in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.Joe Cavaretta/South Florida Sun-Sentinel, via Associated Press
The Supreme Court will hear arguments tomorrow in a case that seeks to eliminate the Affordable Care Act. If the law is struck down, millions of people would lose health insurance and people with pre-existing conditions would struggle to buy insurance.
Fighting continued between Azerbaijan and Armenia over the weekend in the disputed border region of Nagorno-Karabakh. Azerbaijan — wanting to reclaim the region that is controlled by Armenian forces and mostly populated by Armenians — said its military captured a key town, which Armenian officials denied.
MORNING READS
The Media Equation: For the past four years, The Times’s Maggie Haberman has been the source of much of what we know about Trump’s White House. The end of his presidency means the end of her wild ride, Ben Smith writes.
Lives Lived: Marguerite Littman, a honey-voiced Louisianian and literary muse, taught Hollywood to speak Southern. But her most enduring legacy was as an early force in the fight against AIDS. She died at 90.
Subscribers make our reporting possible, so we can help you make sense of the moment. If you’re not a subscriber, please consider becoming one today.
ARTS AND IDEAS
Alex TrebekCarol Kaelson/Jeopardy!, via Associated Press
A ‘Jeopardy!’ icon
Alex Trebek began hosting “Jeopardy!” in 1984, sporting a thick mustache and a pale pink pocket square on his first episode. He got the job partly because Lucille Ball, of “I Love Lucy” fame, had encouraged the show’s producer to hire him. He went on to host more than 8,000 episodes, breaking a record set by Bob Barker of “The Price is Right” for hosting the most episodes of a single game show.
On Sunday, Trebek died at 80, more than a year after announcing he had Stage 4 pancreatic cancer. His death led to an outpouring of tributes from fans who saw him as a steady — and witty — presence in their homes.
In living rooms across the country, five nights a week, viewers could count on “an honest, no-frills test of knowledge” guided by Trebek, as a 2002 Times article put it. “We’re comfortable, like an old pair of shoes,” Trebek said. “We don’t come on with a splash.” Pre-pandemic, Trebek would host five episodes a day, two days a week, from July to April. He would go over the 305 clues for that day’s shows at 7:30 a.m., making notes. If a clue seemed too difficult, he would tell the writers to remove it.
Part of his appeal was his honesty, which extended to his fight with cancer. He spoke about it publicly, saying his pain would sometimes shoot “from a three to an 11” during tapings.
“With his cerebral bearing and aura of quiet, impartial authority, he embodies ideals that feel endangered: the pursuit of knowledge, and the inherent value of facts,” Alexandra Alter wrote in a profile this year. And his honesty included flashes of restrained disappointment when contestants missed an easy question. His tone, he once told New York magazine, tried to convey: “How can you not get this? This is not rocket science.”
Still, many contestants adored him. Some were moved to tears upon meeting him. In one episode that aired last week, a contestant — an Indian immigrant named Burt Thakur — said that he had learned to speak English by watching Trebek as a child, sitting on his grandfather’s lap.
Episodes of the show hosted by Trebek will air through Dec. 25.
PLAY, WATCH, EAT, LISTEN
WHAT TO COOK
This gratin is a fresh way to use roasted cauliflower. Tossed with tomato sauce, sautéed red onions and goat cheese, it’s delicious.
GO SIGHTSEEING
Every year, millions of pilgrims descend on the central Iraqi city of Karbala to commemorate the religious holiday of Arbaeen. Take a tour of the festivities last year.
Late night: Dave Chappelle hosted “Saturday Night Live,” hours after Biden was declared the winner, and urged Americans to “find a way to forgive each other.”
NOW TIME TO PLAY
The pangram from Friday’s Spelling Bee was conditioning. Today’s puzzle is above — or you can play online if you have a Games subscription.
Today’s episode of “The Daily” is about Americans’ reaction to the election. On the latest Book Review podcast, Ernest Freeberg discusses the birth of the animal rights movement.
Lalena Fisher, Claire Moses, Ian Prasad Philbrick and Sanam Yar contributed to The Morning. You can reach the team at themorning@nytimes.com.
The Morning Briefing newsletter is now The Morning newsletter. You received this email because you signed up for the newsletter from The New York Times, or as part of your New York Times account.
The election talk right now is about how, after authorities suspiciously ceased vote counting in states President Trump seemed poised to win, Michigan and Wisconsin suddenly "flipped" overnight and could give Joe Biden the presidency. But while such shenanigans were long planned and predicted, deeper questions should be pondered: How did America descend to a point where many state and local elections are run as in a Third World banana republic?
Related to this, how did we reach a stage at which a party with a radical, anti-American, anti-life, and anti-science agenda could be so electorally competitive that cheating would matter?
Author Dex Bahr laments this at American Thinker today, writing:
That the senile and corrupt Joe Biden could finish so strong speaks to either the gullibility or unseriousness of far too many Americans. Biden obviously has mental acuity issues and has a history of corruption, but that did not seem to be a big deal to the Americans who voted for him. I guess the probability of more lockdowns are lost on a number of Americans who are more frightened by the Wuhan virus than the probability of America becoming a socialist, if not communist, nation under a Biden presidency.
Speaking of a Biden presidency, if he were to win, odds are he would not finish out his first term. Vice President Kamala Harris would become president, a person who dropped out of the Democrat primaries before a single vote was cast based on her lack of voter support, and a politician who is one of the most leftist senators. So the people who squandered American freedom and prosperity for safety or because they don't like Trump's personality, are basically voting for a figurehead, to be replaced by guess who. Either these voters are oblivious to this fact or they simply do not care.
Bahr goes on to say that Biden voters also are either unaware of "his pay-for-play schemes with Ukraine, China, and more, as revealed by son Hunter's laptop" or "think it's not a point of contention."
"Now granted, the corporate media and big tech teamed up to squelch these revelations, but the information could be found if one did one's due diligence before casting a vote," he continues. "Trump certainly mentioned Biden's corruption in every single one of his rallies in the last few weeks."
The problem, however, is deeper still. Just as how people get the government they deserve, as Joseph de Maistre observed, they also in a sense get the entertainment, academia, big business (including tech), and media they deserve.
This is overlooked and, as a proposition, can be taken the wrong way; it may appear condemnatory, as if one is saying, "You're a bad person, and that's why bad things are happening to you."
Even without exploring the theology of man's sinfulness, this issue isn't quite that simple, though. If a person fails to maintain a country home and it degrades, we no doubt would consider hyperbolic the claim that its dilapidation is punishment for his wickedness. Yet if he pouted about how he didn't deserve the broken down house, we may very well point out that he has no one to blame but himself.
All things in life move toward disorder without an application of energy; culture is no exception. Moreover, the energy often applied in our current culture, even by "good" people, is too frequently in the wrong direction.
Every time we purchase a product or service or watch a TV show we are essentially casting a "vote" for that thing. The many millions of these "votes" cast daily by Americans determine how our culture will be.
If enough people tuned out the propagandizing mainstream news, it wouldn't be around to propagandize; the same is true of corruptive entertainment. If Americans didn't pay the left-wing propaganda mills masquerading as institutions of "higher learning" to miseducate their kids, these colleges wouldn't exist and the kids wouldn't be miseducated. Yet many otherwise good people — a few close to me included — have funded these indoctrination centers (paying tuition) because sending their children to a "prestigious" institution is "the thing to do."
If you could transport our toxic, vulgar, sexualized entertainment and loony academia back to, let's say, 1954, people would be aghast. But most Americans today have through gradual, generational desensitization been inured to these things and blithely accept or even endorse
them.
With politics downstream from culture, it's unsurprising that the same phenomenon is apparent in politics. Matching the worst culture in America's history is the worst presidential candidate (Biden), probably the worst vice presidential running mate (Harris), and worst party platform (the Democrats') in our nation's history.
Never intellectually impressive and long corrupt, gaffe-machine Biden is now also clearly suffering dementia, as Bahr noted (on Election Day, Biden introduced a granddaughter as his deceased son Beau and incorrectly said the latter had been a senator). Kamala Harris is a power-hungry phony who was rejected by her own party in the primaries and owns the Senate's most left-wing voting record.
As for their party, it now generally favors prenatal infanticide up till birth; free healthcare for illegals; amnesty; open borders; a radical "transgender" agenda; statehood for Puerto Rico and D.C. and eliminating the Electoral College (to cement power); packing the Supreme Court; economy-rending, "Green New Deal"-like environmental policies; and socialism.
Decades ago people even hinting at one-tenth such lunacy were relegated to society's fringes and discussed their dystopian dreams in darkly lit rooms. Now their Demoralization 5.0 ideological descendants are elevated to prominence. Heck, it's no surprise Biden was interviewed by vice-peddling, "WAP"-(in)famous rapper Cardi B: His party is now the Cardi B of politics.
And the modern West, increasingly, is becoming the Cardi B of world history. Don't be surprised that our elections now are defined by Third World corruption. As our second president, John Adams, warned, "Public virtue cannot exist in a nation without private [virtue]." — and private virtue is lacking today.
As I've often put it, we can't MAGA unless we MAMA: Make America Moral Again. The consequence for not doing so will be the loss of our whole way of life. For as Adams warned in the second part of his above quotation, "Public virtue is the only foundation of republics."
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