NBC's Meet the Press | Poll-Vaulter

December 15, 2020

The Electoral College continued voting on Monday afternoon, December 14, in Joe Biden as the president-elect—and that President Donald Trump has said will nudge him further toward leaving the White House.

By early afternoon, electors in some of the battleground states that Trump had contested—among them, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Georgia, and Arizona—had voted, with no surprises or defections, The New York Times reported.

Concurrently, the Supreme Court in Wisconsin rejected yet another lawsuit from the Trump campaign, ending the last current legal hurdle in that state.

Despite palpable tensions across the country, wrought in large part by the rhetoric of the president, the Times opined, the Electoral College process appeared to be proceeding smoothly.

“It’s not just out of tradition but to show folks, especially now more than ever, our system works,” said Governor Chris Sununu of New Hampshire, a Republican, in opening remarks before the state’s four electors cast their ballots for Biden.

The schedule on which the electors were due to vote nationwide was largely determined by individual states. California, the state with the most electors, will most likely push Biden past the 270-vote threshold needed to win the presidency when it votes at 5 p.m. (ET).

Nevada’s six electors all cast their votes for. Biden, as expected, holding their ballots in front of the camera during the virtual meeting, and voters in Pennsylvania cast their ballots, giving 20 electoral votes. The states are two of five that some of the president’s closest allies in the House are eyeing to challenge on January 6 in a final-stage effort—all but certain to fail, The Times averred—to reverse Biden’s victory.

Despite the definitive defeat in the Electoral College, Trump has remained defiant—spending his weekend attacking the Supreme Court for rejecting a Texas lawsuit against four battleground states; and issuing more baseless accusations about the election from his Twitter account. The president has shown no indication he intends to concede the election.

The vote will largely remove any cover for Republicans in Congress who have refused to acknowledge Biden as the president-elect. In providing Trump the room to dispute his loss, Republicans in Congress presented the Electoral College vote as the new marker for when a presidential victory should be recognized.

“Everything before Monday is really a projection,” Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee told Chuck Todd on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday, December 13.. “If the president loses, and it appears that he will when the electors vote, he should put the country first, take pride in his accomplishments, congratulate Joe Biden and help him off to a good start.”

Research contact: @nytimes

August 27, 2019

Former congressman Joe Walsh (R-Illinois) announced on ABC’s This Week Sunday that he would challenge President Donald Trump in the 2020 primary—becoming the third Republican to go up against the POTUS, after former Massachusetts Governor William Weld and former South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford announced they were in the race during April and August, respectively.

According to a report by The Washington Post, Walsh, a talk-radio host, was elected to Congress in 2010 as part of the conservative Tea Party wave and served one term. He has described himself as an immigration hard-liner and said he would not challenge Trump from the center but from the right and on moral grounds.

“I’m going to run for president,” Walsh told ABC News anchor George Stephanopoulos, charging that the president is “incompetent,” “a bigot” and “a narcissist.”

When Stephanopoulos pushed back, pointing out that Walsh, himself, had a long history of racist and controversial statements, the new candidate said, “I helped create Trump, and George, that’s not an easy thing to say,” noting, “I went beyond the policy and the idea differences and I got personal and I got hateful. I said some ugly things about President Obama that I regret.”

Like another Republican who recently turned on Trump— former White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci—Walsh would not be averse to invoking the 25^th Amendment in order to remove the “unfit” president from office. He told Stephanopoulos that the amendment should be “looked at” because “we’ve never had a situation like this. You can’t believe a word he says.”

Meanwhile, former Massachusetts governor Bill Weld welcomed Walsh’s entry into the race, saying on NBC’s Meet the Press, “It’s going to be a more robust conversation. Who knows? The networks might even cover Republican primary debates.”

Research contact: @washingtonpost

Posts tagged with "NBC’s Meet the Press"

NYT: Electoral College votes in key battleground states for Biden without any surprises or defections

He’s all in: Former congressman Joe Walsh announces primary challenge against Trump