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| Presented By Bank of America |
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| Axios AM |
| By Mike Allen ·Nov 07, 2020 |
| 🏈 Happy Saturday! Today's Smart Brevity™ count: 1,193 words ... 4½ minutes. ⚡ Breaking: White House chief of staff Mark Meadows tested positive for the coronavirus on Wednesday and aides were told to keep it quiet, Bloomberg scooped. - She tested negative, but MSNBC's Rachel Maddow tweeted: "Everything happens, all at once. I have had a close contact test positive," so she's quarantining at home.
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| 1 big thing: Trump's 75-day finale, fully unrestrained |
| Trump supporters demonstrate in Detroit yesterday. Photo: John Moore/Getty Images If President Trump is on his way out the door, he'll have almost limitless power to reward his friends, settle scores and stack boards and commissions with allies during his final days in office, writes Glen Johnson, a formidable former political reporter for AP and the Boston Globe who debuts as an Axios contributor. - Why it matters: After defeat, there are no constraints on ordinary presidential powers between the election and the inauguration. Trump has shown a willingness to stretch the norms of what has been done and what can be done. So expect him to go out the way he came in.
Among his powers: - Executive clemency: Presidents can wipe away or minimize past offenses with pardons, commutations, remissions or reprieves.
- "Burrowing in": Presidents can convert political appointees to career employees, and under certain circumstances, presidents can make recess appointments so personnel can serve into the succeeding administration.
- "Midnight rulemaking": Outgoing presidents often rush to finalize the rules that administrations write to enact laws passed by Congress.
Max Stier of the Partnership for Public Service said: "You can look to the outgoing [George W.] Bush administration ... as the gold standard." John Burke, a retired University of Vermont professor who specializes in presidential transitions, said departing presidents are usually restrained by: "What will history think of me?'" - Burke has a worthy warning for presidents and all of us: "It might be tempting for [Trump] to fire those he deems disloyal, ... but it will not serve him well over the long run. Pettiness is an expensive exercise."
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| 2. Scoop ... Biden takes charge: Will announce COVID task force Monday |
| Joe Biden addresses the nation from Wilmington last night. Photo: Drew Angerer/Getty Images) Joe Biden plans to name a 12-member task force on Monday to combat and contain the spread of the coronavirus, sources tell Axios' Hans Nichols. - Why it matters: By announcing a COVID task force even before unveiling his senior White House staff or a single cabinet appointment, Biden is signaling that addressing the coronavirus will be his immediate priority.
- The task force will be led by three co-chairs: former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, former FDA Commissioner David Kessler and Dr. Marcella Nunez-Smith from Yale University.
The backdrop: The U.S. set a daily record of 126,400 cases yesterday, and is nearing 10 million cases since the start of the pandemic. |
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| 3. Biden claims "mandate for action" |
| Supporters outside Joe Biden's event site in Wilmington. Photo: Sarah Silbiger/Bloomberg via Getty Images Joe Biden — speaking just before 11 p.m. in what he hoped would be a victory speech, but became a brief plea for patience — said Americans have "given us a mandate for action on COVID, the economy, climate change, systemic racism": My responsibility as president will be to represent the whole nation. And I want you to know that I'll work as hard for those who voted against me as those who voted for me. That's the job. Today could be the day: Follow our live updates. |
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| A message from Bank of America |
| Overcoming the global funding gap |
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| The U.N. estimates $6 trillion a year is required to properly address all 17 sustainable development goals, such as providing 800 million people access to clean water. See how Bank of America is aligning its $2.4 trillion balance sheet to the task. |
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| 4. Voter turnout spikes |
| Graphic: AP Tuesday's turnout rate of the voting-eligible population eclipsed elections in most Americans' lifetimes, and is on pace to break a century-old record, per the WashPost: - The latest figure (61.5%) stands only a few points away from breaking a 60-year-old record set in 1960 (63.8%).
- If the current projection of 66.3% holds, 2020 turnout will be the highest since 1900, when 73.7% of eligible Americans cast ballots: "But America had a much smaller voting pool over a century ago. Women did not yet have the right to vote, nor did Asian Americans and many Native Americans."
Records from 1980 were broken in at least 31 states. - Go deeper: Graphic showing turnout rates, 1789-2018.
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| 5. Trump: "Legal proceedings are just now beginning!" |
| President Trump hasn't appeared publicly since Thursday evening, but he's tweeting: Reality check: Joe Biden is ahead in both electoral votes and the popular vote. The president's Twitter feed this morning: |
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| 6. America on standby |
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| Mika Brzezinski, Joe Scarborough and Willie Geist on a special edition of "Morning Joe" today. Via MSNBC |
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| On a special edition of "Morning Joe," Joe Scarborough needled the networks for their restraint amid the ferocious tide for Joe Biden: Four days later, Willie [Geist], after voting, waiting for the calls, but we have one here: It is a long time coming but the network consortiums, Willie, are ready to make the call for the race for Gerald R. Ford. ... [T]hey're not sure yet. But they believe that Gerald R. Ford will be the Republican Party's 1976 presidential nominee. ... We're going to say the quiet part out loud: Either everybody has been lying on every network and in every newspaper ... or all of the networks are doing something they've never done before, and that is they're ignoring the reality that is right in front of them. AP posted an explainer on why it hasn't called Pennsylvania, which would give Biden the presidency if he maintains his edge over Trump — as of last night, 28,800 votes out of more than 6.5 million ballots cast, or 0.43%: A close margin and a large number of outstanding votes are what's making the Pennsylvania contest ... too early to call. ... [T]here were about 89,000 more mail ballots to count [and] potentially tens of thousands of provisional ballots. 📷 In photos: The great count continues, by Ursula Perano. |
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| 7. The $200 million runoffs |
| A Jon Ossoff supporter during a "Don't Boo, Early Vote" event outside Pleasant Hill Baptist Church in Lawrenceville, Ga., on Oct. 30. Photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images Sen. David Perdue (R-Ga.) was forced into a Jan. 5 runoff against Democrat Jon Ossoff, "making Georgia the home to twin 2021 showdowns that could determine control of the U.S. Senate," the Atlanta Journal-Constitution's Greg Bluestein writes. - "Ossoff's rising vote totals as absentee ballots were counted put Perdue under the 50% mark required to win ... outright.
- Sen. Kelly Loeffler, Georgia's other Republican incumbent, will face Democrat Raphael Warnock on Jan. 5.
Hans Nichols reports that conservative groups hope to raise — and spend — more than $100 million per race. - Go deeper ... As we told you Oct. 23, "The cliffhanger could be ... Georgia." Now, as we foreshadowed yesterday, "All eyes — and $$$ — on Georgia."
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| 8. 🎯 We saw it coming |
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| Illustration: Eniola Odetunde/Axios |
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| The unique nature of this election — conducted during a pandemic, with a record-breaking number of mail-in ballots — wreaked havoc on American perceptions, Bryan Walsh writes in his Axios Future newsletter: - Because different states reported at different times — in part because battleground states like Pennsylvania were not permitted to begin counting mail-in ballots until Election Day — it appeared as if President Trump had built a lead that Joe Biden then whittled down over time.
- But remember: the votes existed before they could be counted. What appeared to be Biden "catching up" was just an illusion created by the order in which different votes were counted.
🔮 This was exactly what Axios warned you about going back to Labor Day — the "red mirage" come to life. On election morning, we revealed that modeling showed the mirage forming. |
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| 9. Markets embrace Biden |
| This tweet is the soul of Smart Brevity™: Here's what Wall Street types woke up to this morning: |
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| 10. 1 smile to go: Meet me under the clock |
| Photo: Daniel Boczarski/Getty Images In a year when nothing's normal, I found this comforting: Macy's held its 113th annual Great Tree lighting in Chicago. - The 45-foot tree is in the State Street store's Walnut Room, which Macy's says is the first restaurant ever opened in a department store.
Back in 1907, when the tradition started, the store was Marshall Field & Co. |
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| A message from Bank of America |
| Continuing the commitment to solve global challenges |
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| "The need to mobilize and deploy capital to address climate change has never been more urgent," says Bank of America Vice Chairman Anne Finucane. See how the pandemic has put a new lens on issues such as education and inequality— and what business, government and nonprofits must do to help. |
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