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WASHINGTON (AP) Some Republican lawmakers on Thursday criticized President Donald Trumps unsupported claim that Democrats are trying to steal the election, saying Trumps comments undermine the U.S. political process and the bedrock notion that all Americans should have their vote counted.

Trump, who has complained for weeks about mail-in ballots, escalated his allegations late Thursday, saying at the White House that the ballot-counting process is unfair and corrupt. Trump did not back up his claims with any details or evidence, and state and federal officials have not reported any instances of widespread voter fraud.

Rep. Adam Kinzinger, a Republican from Illinois, tweeted that the presidents claims of fraud are getting insane. If Trump has legit concerns about fraud, they need to be based on evidence and taken to court, Kinzinger said, adding, STOP Spreading debunked misinformation.

Maryland GOP Gov. Larry Hogan, a potential 2024 presidential hopeful who has often criticized Trump, said unequivocally: There is no defense for the Presidents comments tonight undermining our Democratic process. America is counting the votes, and we must respect the results as we always have before.

No election or person is more important than our Democracy, Hogan said on Twitter.

Other criticism, though less direct, came from members of Congress. Sen. Marco Rubio, a Florida Republican who spoke at a recent Trump campaign rally, said in a tweet that if any candidate believes a state is violating election laws they have a right to challenge it in court & produce evidence in support of their claims.

Rubio said earlier: Taking days to count legally cast votes is NOT fraud. And court challenges to votes cast after the legal voting deadline is NOT suppression.

Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah., the partys presidential nominee in 2012, sought to provide a reassuring note. Counting votes is often long and frustrating, Romney said.

If any irregularities are alleged, they will be investigated and ultimately resolved in the courts, Romney tweeted. Have faith in democracy, our Constitution and the American people.

The comments by the Republican lawmakers and other GOP leaders were rare, public rebukes of Trump, who has demanded and generally received loyalty from fellow Republicans throughout his four-year term. Most in the GOP take pains to avoid directly criticizing Trump, even when they find his conduct unhelpful or offensive to their values and goals.

Trumps tweets earlier Thursday declaring victory and calling for officials to STOP THE COUNT were a test of how strongly he can keep Republicans in line as he tries to challenge the voting process in court.

Before Trumps speech in the White House briefing room, several Republicans challenged his attempts to halt vote-counting in Pennsylvania and other battleground states.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Trump ally who won reelection Tuesday in Kentucky, told reporters that claiming youve won the election is different from finishing the counting. His office declined to comment after Trumps address Thursday.

Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, urged everyone to be patient as results come in. It is critical that we give election officials time to complete their jobs, and that we ensure all lawfully cast ballots are allowed and counted, she said in a statement.

Rep. Will Hurd, a Texas Republican who did not seek reelection, called Trumps comments about corruption dangerous and wrong. Trumps remarks undermine the U.S. political process and the very foundation this nation was built upon, Hurd said. Every American should have his or her vote counted.

While Biden was close Thursday to the 270 Electoral College votes needed to win the White House, it was unclear when a national winner would be determined after a long, bitter campaign dominated by the coronavirus pandemic and its effects on Americans and the national economy.

Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut told The Associated Press earlier Thursday he hopes Republicans step up their response to Trumps unsubstantiated claims. While Republicans may want to give Trump time to make his arguments, when it becomes clear that claims are without basis, My hope is that Republicans will put public and private pressure on him, Murphy said.

But one of Trumps top congressional supporters said he supports efforts to question the vote counting process and is donating money to shore up legal challenges. Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said on Fox News Thursday night he would donate $500,000 to the presidents legal defense fund and urged people to go to the Trump campaigns website to pitch in.

Rep. Denver Riggleman, a Virginia Republican who lost a GOP primary this year, addressed Trump directly on Twitter: Count every vote, yes, but stop the Bravo Sierra, Mr. President, and respect the democratic process that makes America great. Riggleman, a former Air Force officer, was using a military euphemism for falsehoods.

In remarks Wednesday at the White House, Trump baselessly claimed victory and alleged major fraud on our nation as state election officials continued counting ballots amid a huge increase in voter turnout.

Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, a Trump ally who is an analyst for ABC News, said there was no basis for Trumps argument. Christie called Trumps attack on the integrity of the election a bad strategic decision and a bad political decision, and its not the kind of decision you would expect someone to make ... who holds the position he holds.

Trumps family, never shy about expressing their support, took to Twitter to question why GOP lawmakers were not rushing to the presidents defense. Where are Republicans! Have some backbone. Fight against this fraud. Our voters will never forget you if your sheep! Trumps son Eric tweeted.

Some GOP governors responded. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis urged the president to Fight on, exhaust all options. South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem tweeted that Trump was fighting rigged election systems.

Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, said states administer U.S. elections, not the federal government. We should respect that process and ensure that all ballots cast in accordance with state laws are counted. Its that simple, Portman said in a statement.

Its best for everyone to step back from the spin and allow the vote counters to do their job, added Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah.

___

Associated Press writers Mary Clare Jalonick and Lisa Mascaro in Washington and Meg Kinnard in Columbia, S.C., contributed to this report.

Excerpt from:
Some in GOP break with Trump over baseless vote-fraud claims - The Associated Press

Following an election mired in chaos and confusion, this at least is clear: Donald Trumps political career will soon be coming to an end, but Trumpism his inchoate brand of conservative populism is here to stay.

The narrative would surely be different had Trump lost in the resounding landslide foreseen by professional pundits and pollsters. In that universe, the president and everything he represents would have been repudiated, creating an immense temptation for the Republican party to revert back to its lily-white, elite-driven comfort zone.

Instead, Trump defied expectations by winning the largest share of non-white voters of any Republican since 1960. This ranged from modest gains among African American men, to major swings in party preference within working-class Latino communities and not just in Miami-Dade, where Cuban-American turnout helped secure Florida for Trump while unseating two Democratic incumbents. In Starr county, Texas, for example, Biden beat Trump by five points down from Hillary Clintons 60 a 55-point swing in a border town thats 95% Hispanic and which has a median income of only $17,000.

The Missouri senator Josh Hawley, a rising star within the GOPs populist faction, was quick to offer his interpretation on Twitter. Republicans in Washington are going to have a very hard time processing this, he wrote. But the future is clear: we must be a working class party, not a Wall Street party.

The Florida senator Marco Rubio concurred. #Florida & the Rio Grande Valley showed the future of the GOP: A party built on a multi-ethnic multi-racial coalition of working AMERICANS.

Ironically enough, the primary demographic Trump lost relative to 2016 was non-college-educated white men. A key factor seems to have been the Biden campaigns strategic positioning on issues that resonate with rust belt voters from a Buy America plan so supercharged that it made Steve Bannon blush, to tax incentives for manufacturers that reshore. Thus even in defeat, the ideas behind Trumpism were on some level victorious.

All that said, the gap between Trumpism in theory and practice remains enormous. Despite campaigning on a rejection of conservative economic orthodoxies in 2016, once in office Trump pursued an agenda of tax cuts and deregulation that was almost comically conventional. And by the final days of the 2020 campaign, Trump scarcely talked about policy at all, much less his core issues of trade and immigration.

Trumps narrow loss thus marks the beginning of an internal struggle for the soul of American conservatism

Trumps narrow loss thus marks the beginning of an internal struggle for the soul of American conservatism. Many in the Republican party long for a return to the socially moderate, fiscal conservatism of a bygone era. Others, like Hawley and Rubio, are calling upon their peers to embrace the working-class realignment that Trump grasped at an intuitive level, even as he failed in execution.

Between deindustrialization and the steady exodus of college-educated voters to the Democratic party, the Republican partys shift toward the working class has been decades in the making. A similar trend can be seen elsewhere, too, from Boris Johnsons blue-collar supporters, to the unabashedly pro-union platform of Erin OToole, the newly minted leader of the Conservative party of Canada.

The main difference in the US case has been the failure, if not outright resistance, of the Republican partys political machinery to adapt in real time. Indeed, for all of Trumps capacity for disruption, he was no match against the institutional edifice of the so-called conservative movement the dozens of free-market thinktanks, law firms and leadership organizations that were called upon to staff his administration and define his agenda.

So while the notion of the Republican party becoming a multiethnic working-class coalition may seem farcical now, the longer-term trend speaks for itself. The only question is whether the partys elite will continue to deny this reality, or take the next four years to rebuild and realign conservative institutions to better reflect the actual interests of their rank and file.

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Democrats beware: the Republicans will soon be the party of the working class - The Guardian

Republican officials on Long Island kicked it Old School last week, as GOP supporters showed up at polling places on Election Day to cast their ballots even as record numbers of Democrats in Nassau and Suffolk relied on absentee voting.

Jesse Garcia, Suffolk's GOP chairman, and Joseph Cairo, head of Nassau's Republican Party, are old hands at getting out the vote.

Cairo did so for years, operating out of a strip mall storefront as he marshaled a cadre of runners to go here, go there or go anywhere to encourage the faithful to make their way to the polls.

Garcia also dispatched his troops as town Republican chairman in Brookhaven, before becoming the party's county leader.

Recently, both chairmen acknowledged the challenges of campaigning, fundraising and pulling out the vote during the coronavirus pandemic.

But neither ever lost confidence.

Garcia said he intended to bring Suffolk home for President Donald Trump, who won the county in 2016.

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"That's the plan," he said.

And, according to early unofficial results, that plan, thusfar at least, his plan is working.

Trump got a total of 333,100 votes on the Republican and Conservative Party lines, while Biden logged 258,007 votes on the Democratic and Working Families Party lines.

Margins are much narrower in Nassau, where Trump got 286,633 votes on the Republican and Conservative lines. Biden received 280,115 votes on the Democratic and Working Families lines.

There also are tens of thousands of absentee ballots yet to be counted.

In 2016, Nassau went for Democrat Hillary Clinton.

The GOP appears to have easily held on to U.S. Rep. Lee Zeldin's seat in the 1st Congressional District, which extends roughly from Smithtown to the East End. And Republican Andrew Garbarino looks to have beaten Democratic opponent Jackie Gordon in the 2nd, which is split between Nassau and Suffolk.

But while the federal contests drew considerable attention, the GOP, in both counties, also were in a New York State of mind.

The goal was to take out as many freshmen Democratic state senators from Nassau and Suffolk as they could in a region that, not terribly long ago, had been home to the Long Island Nine of Republican state senators who, for decades, brought home the bacon for the region.

Until 2015, that group was unrivaled in channeling millions of dollars to Long Island's school districts, while also having a heavy hand in determining state policy, from clean water to homeland security issues, until the number of Democrats began to increase in the state Legislature.

Two years ago, Democrats won a clear Senate majority, as Democrats won six of Long Island's nine seats.

Cairo and Garcia echoing the state GOP party this year campaigned against those Democrats by painting them as too liberal for Long Island, and too beholden to New York City Democrats, whose interests, according to the party chiefs, do not align with those of Long Islanders.

Richard Schaffer, Suffolk's Democratic chairman, is well aware of the challenges of campaigning as a Democrat in Suffolk.

"It's like campaigning in a purple state," Schaffer said.

Things have changed in Nassau as well.

"It's not like years ago, when everybody was a Republican," said Cairo, whose tenure with the party stretches back to the 1970s, when Nassau's GOP was considered one of the nation's most powerful political machines.

Which is why messaging during campaigns matters.

"We go out with the goal of persuading every voter we can," said Jay Jacobs, who chairs both Nassau's and New York State's Democratic Party organizations.

Even more important, the party chairmen agree, is getting out the vote.

On Long Island, as in the nation, much of that came via absentee, for Democrats.

"We wanted to run up and bank as many votes as we could," Jacobs said,

On Long Island, as in the nation, much of that came in person, and on Election Day, for Republicans.

"Republicans like Election Day," Garcia said. "Republicans like to hold that ballot, and feed it into the machine."

Joye Brown has been a columnist for Newsday since 2006. She joined the newspaper in 1983 and has worked as a reporter, an editor, newsroom administrator and editorial writer.

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Brown: Long Island Republicans kicked it Old School on Election Day - Newsday

Democrats are gaining one seat on the Republican-dominated State Board of Education, while Republicans held on in the other races that Democrats had hoped to flip in the 2020 general election.

Democrat Rebecca Bell-Metereau, a Texas State University professor, has defeated Republican Lani Popp, a Northside Independent School District speech pathologist, in District 5, according to Decision Desk HQ. Incumbent Ken Mercer, a Republican who held the seat for 14 years, decided not to run for reelection in the district, which picks up communities along the Interstate 35 corridor between San Antonio and Austin and stretches into the Hill Country.

Republicans kept control of two other seats that Texas Democrats wanted to flip this year.

GOP incumbent Tom Maynard defeated Democrat Marsha Burnett-Webster, a retired teacher and college administrator, according to results from Decision Desk HQ. They competed for the District 10 seat, which runs northeast of Austin and includes suburban and more rural communities.

Meanwhile, Republican Will Hickman, an intellectual property lawyer, defeated Democrat Michelle Palmer, an Aldine ISD history teacher, according to Decision Desk HQ. They ran for the District 6 seat vacated by Donna Bahorich, a Houston Republican and former board chair. The district stretches from West Houston to the northwestern edge of Harris County.

The board determines what millions of Texas public school students learn in classrooms and is responsible for adopting textbooks, changing curriculum standards and approving new charter school operators. In past years, board meetings have been a lightning rod for national attention due to dramatic debates about racist ethnic studies textbook proposals, abstinence-focused sex education standards and creationist biology standards.

Currently, the 15-member education board seats 10 Republicans and five Democrats with eight seats in play this year.

Experts say the boards political dynamic will still remain conservative after this election, though less radical than in decades past. The board continues to be a problem-solving board and doesnt split toward ideological lines like it did toward the 90s or the first decade of this century, said David Anderson, an education lobbyist at HillCo Partners who has watched the board for years. This has been the best elected board we have had in 45 years.

Of the eight seats in play this year, four Republican incumbents stepped down and four incumbents ran for reelection, including three Republicans and one Democrat. Incumbents Keven Ellis and Sue Melton-Malone beat their challengers to keep their seats, according to results from Decision Desk HQ. Georgina Prez, a Democratic incumbent, also beat her opponent in District 1, according to Decision Desk HQ.

Republican Audrey Young, a Nacogdoches ISD administrator, had no Democratic challenger in District 8 and will replace fellow Republican Barbara Cargill, who stepped down.

According to Decision Desk HQ, Republican Jay Johnson, a retired dentist and former Pampa ISD board member, defeated Democrat John Betancourt, a former Amarillo ISD board member, in District 15, where Republican Marty Rowley stepped down.

The District 5 race brought unwanted attention to the board earlier this year when conspiracy theorist Robert Morrow almost beat Popp in the Republican primary. Every member of the board rallied against Morrow, who has a long history of racist and sexist comments, and he lost the runoff.

Mercer, the outgoing incumbent whose conservative record has included arguments for teaching abstinence as the main form of contraception in health lessons, endorsed Popp, who has been an educator for almost three decades. Popp also picked up the support of Texas Values, a conservative statewide advocacy group, which recently urged the board to adopt abstinence-focused sex education.

Bell-Metereau unsuccessfully ran against Mercer in 2010, 2012 and 2016. "It's really all about demographics," she told The Texas Tribune Tuesday afternoon. "We've had so many people move into the area, and they've tended to be better educated, younger and more diverse."

Her priority is to include more climate science in the standards schools must teach students, since the issue is "life and death for the planet" and controversial on the board. "My goal is to try and convince the board to look at some of these details and make sure that we get the best curriculum that we can manage," she said.

The board is weeks away from revising Texas' sex education policy, its first attempt to do so since 1997. The newly elected board will be responsible for adopting new health and sex education textbooks and other instructional materials based on that policy, which school districts may opt to use.

Disclosure: HillCo Partners has been a financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

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Texas education board remains in Republican control - The Texas Tribune

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Some thought it might happen as early as 2014 and then 2016, and, of course, in 2018.

When all those elections proved disappointing, Texas Democrats said 2020 would be the year, given record voter turnout, a once-in-a-century pandemic that grew out of control under Republican leadership and a highly controversial president.

But 2020 proved another disappointment for the states minority party as Republicans remained dominant in Texas, appearing poised to maintain victories in all statewide offices and both chambers of the Legislature. In what has become a familiar refrain, Texas Democrats pointed to 2020s narrow losses as symbolic victories signs that the state will one day change in their favor.

Though the margins in the presidential race were narrower than they have been in years, Democrats underperformed the high expectations they had set for themselves, particularly in a hotly contested battle for dominance in the Texas House. And a number of potential pickups for Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives seemed increasingly unlikely as the night wore on.

With his reelection still uncertain, Donald Trump carried Texas on Tuesday. The last Democratic presidential candidate to carry the state was Jimmy Carter in 1976.

Republican John Cornyn handily won reelection to his seat in the U.S. Senate, soaring past combat veteran MJ Hegar to notch a victory despite a late Democratic spending blitz on her behalf. Republicans held big leads in other statewide races for Railroad Commission, Texas Supreme Court and Court of Criminal Appeals.

And the contest some in-state operatives had focused on as Democrats best hope the battle for a majority in the Texas House appeared to end with a narrow victory for Republicans, leaving intact the partys advantage in the chamber.

As has become habit, Texas Democrats described their losses on Tuesday not as disappointments but as hopeful omens for next time.

With every election, we're getting one step closer to that change, said Ed Espinoza, executive director of Progress Texas.

Although we came up short, Texas Democratic Party Chair Gilberto Hinojosa said of the U.S. Senate race, I am hopeful because we are marching towards victory.

The work we did will move our state forward for years to come, Hegar said.

Republicans, meanwhile, were not shy about celebrating their wins.

Gov. Greg Abbott, who was not on the ballot himself but had been deeply involved in Texas House races, even knocking on doors over the last few weeks, celebrated on Twitter: Texas DID stay Red.

Earlier this week, he had made a prescient, if provocative statement: Democrats dreams will be crushed again.

Abbotts top political strategist, Dave Carney, was blunter in an interview late Tuesday night. He said Democrats were massively underperforming expectations because they buy their own bullshit.

Heres the best standard operating procedure for any campaign: Stop bragging, do your work and then you can gloat afterward, Carney said, contrasting that approach with bragging about whats gonna happen in the future and being embarrassed.

Why anybody would believe what these liars would say to them again is beyond belief, Carney added. How many cycles in a row do they claim Texas will turn blue? Its crazy.

Cornyn, speaking to media after declaring victory Tuesday night, dismissed Democratic spending in Texas, saying Democrats "had more money than they knew what to do with, so they ended up investing in a long shot in places like Texas."

Days before the election, polls showed a close race between Biden and Trump here though neither candidate campaigned as if Texas were a battleground. Kamala Harris, Bidens running mate, made a last-minute swing through the state late last week, but neither presidential candidate had been in Texas in months.

The results Tuesday night showed a close presidential contest in Texas. Trumps lead in Texas was in the mid-single-digits early Wednesday morning, according to Decision Desk HQ smaller than his 9-point 2016 margin, and about a third of Mitt Romneys 16-point victory here in 2012.

Even as Biden performed well in large suburban counties that used to be reliably Republican, he failed to notch wide margins of victory in some critical Democratic strongholds, massively underperforming Hillary Clinton in the mostly Hispanic Rio Grande Valley. For example, Trump was leading in unofficial results in Zapata County where Clinton won with 66% of the vote in 2016.

Victoria DeFrancesco Soto, an assistant dean and politics expert at the University of Texas' Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, pointed to two major reasons for Bidens relative underperformance in the Valley: lower name ID compared with Clinton and limited door-to-door campaigning due to the coronavirus pandemic.

The Valley is old school, and you need that grassroots mobilization, she said. And there wasnt grassroots work, at least on the Democratic side, because of the pandemic. And arguably the GOP did have at least a bit more grassroots work because they had a different vision of public health.

That to me explains the Biden underperformance: He really wasnt known, and then he didnt have the time to make it up, she added.

Trump, meanwhile, launched a Latino outreach initiative for his 2020 bid, she noted.

Republicans had hoped their willingness to knock on doors during the pandemic would give them an edge over Democrats, some of whom leaned on remote campaigning methods.

As expected, lesser-known and less controversial Republicans did better than Trump on the statewide ballot in Texas. Republicans running for seats on the states two high courts, and the board that regulates oil and gas, each looked poised to win by a healthy margin. For the first time in years, Democrats had run contested primaries for most statewide races, including a crowded 12-candidate primary for the U.S. Senate race and competition for the nomination for nearly every judicial seat.

Democrats were also falling far short of expectations in U.S. House races. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee had targeted 10 GOP-held seats this fall in Texas, though by midnight, they had no pickups to tout.

In one race to replace retiring Rep. Will Hurd, R-Helotes Democratic party leaders had started the cycle brimming with confidence that the seat would flip to them, especially after Republicans had to go through a seemingly endless nomination process. But before the night was over, the campaign of the Republican nominee, Tony Gonzales, was declaring victory.

Not only did they underestimate me, I think they underestimated the district, Gonzales said in an interview late Tuesday night. District 23 is just different it is. You have to work your tail off to win the trust of the constituents and you have to work your tail off to keep that trust. TV ads, blanketing the airwaves, isnt enough.

But perhaps the most striking rebuke to Democrats hopes on Tuesday night was their failure to regain a majority or even move the needle much in the 150-member Texas House, where they needed to pick up nine seats.

Even before the chambers majority party had been determined, optimistic Democrats had declared their candidacy to lead it as speaker.

"Before the day is done, Democrats will take the Texas House, one candidate, El Paso Democrat Joe Moody, said Tuesday morning. By early Wednesday morning, it seemed clear they would not.

Democrats will get another chance to test their hopes in 2022, when statewide offices like governor and attorney general will appear on the ballot. It remains to be seen whether they can increase their power in the state.

Is Texas on the route to becoming blue, or is Texas on the road to becoming a perennial battleground? Thats a question I dont know the answer to, DeFrancesco Soto said. But I do feel confident saying we are moving in the purple direction, and we may just stay stuck at purple.

Patrick Svitek contributed reporting.

Continued here:
Texas Republicans again sweep the ballot, crushing Democratic hopes - The Texas Tribune