2020
November
05
Thursday

Monitor Daily Podcast

November 05, 2020
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Mark Sappenfield
Senior global correspondent

Upon accepting the Republican nomination for United States Senate from Illinois, Abraham Lincoln said, “A house divided against itself cannot stand. ... I do not expect the Union to be dissolved – I do not expect the house to fall – but I do expect it will cease to be divided.”

In 1858, the division had a clear name and object: slavery. That terrible cause would drive America toward dissolution and civil war. Today, those words come back with particular power. Whoever becomes president will govern a deeply divided nation, the election has shown. But the cause has no clear name or object. Neither immigration nor racial justice nor socialism quite encapsulates the burning cause.

Indeed, the closest cause would most likely be “ourselves” – our fear and misunderstanding of one another, divided along borders of red and blue, urban and rural, Black and white, white collar and blue collar. Lincoln could point at a thing to be remedied. Americans today can point only to their own hearts. Elections and legislative bills avail little because it is truly a battle for the soul of the nation. Can America handle the mounting stresses of diversity – be they racial or ideological or any other form – with the founders’ unshakable assurance of “e pluribus unum” – “out of many, one”?

The coming months and years will be a test of Americans’ commitment to the very core of the American experiment – to one another as Americans. Only then, “it will cease to be divided.”


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Today’s stories

And why we wrote them

Mary Altaffer/AP
Municipal workers extract Luzerne County ballots from their envelopes on Nov. 4, 2020, in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.

The course of the presidential election could soon swing from vote-counting to courts. Here, we run down how that could play out in the days ahead and why. 

Matt York/AP
Supporters of President Donald Trump wave a flag during an election watch party, Nov. 3, 2020, in Chandler, Arizona.

The Republican Party has long been cast in the mold of Ronald Reagan. But President Donald Trump’s strong showing this election looks likely to pivot the party toward his image.

With the United States battling a spike in coronavirus cases, Vermont offers a different picture. A sense of civic responsibility has helped the state distinguish itself.

Patterns

Tracing global connections

Europe hoped the U.S. election would reaffirm its place in the “democratic family of nations.” Instead, it is forcing leaders to wrestle with the dramatic changes afoot – no matter who wins.      

Story Hinckley/The Christian Science Monitor
Arlette Morales (left) and Tzipporah Goins can't vote in this election: Ms. Morales isn't a citizen, and Ms. Goins turns 18 next week. Still, the best friends wanted to be engaged in the 2020 election, so they volunteered to work as poll watchers at a local precinct in downtown York, Pennsylvania.

First-time voters on both political sides drove historic participation in this election. So we set out to find them and offer this postcard from the ballot box.   

A deeper look

8 Backstage Flash
Blues phenom Samantha Fish, whose most recent album has been hailed by music critics, poses with her electric guitar on a street in Beverly Hills, California.

Many blues pioneers were Black women, but the rise of the electric guitar pushed men to the fore. Now young female artists are joining in and reinvigorating the art form. 


The Monitor's View

AP
A person carries an upside down flag as people in Seattle march on the night of the Nov. 3 election.

It is customary to the point of cliché for U.S. politicians to follow rough-and-tumble campaigns with calls for unity and consensus. The alchemy of the ballot box is supposed to turn Republicans and Democrats back into Americans. Magnanimous in victory. Decorous in defeat.

That norm felt a little frayed this week. Yes, victory speeches had the usual grace notes. “Clearly, people are saying it’s time to turn the page,” said Democrat John Hickenlooper, a former governor of Colorado, after winning a seat in the Senate. “It’s time to start solving problems and helping people.”

Such calls aside, an already divided country appears to be even more so. A Pew Research Center poll just prior to the election found that only 4% of registered voters in states with a Senate contest said they would be open to voting for a presidential candidate from one party and a Senate candidate from another. Almost 80% said they would vote for candidates from the same party all the way down the ballot.

Those findings held. The “blue wave” – an overwhelming gain for Democrats – did not come. Nor did President Donald Trump’s base crack. Neither side emerged with a clear mandate or grew its majority.

Does parity mean paralysis? America’s founders did not think so. “Can they not harmonize in society unless they have everything in their own hands?” asked Thomas Jefferson, speaking of political blocs. The answer, as is often the case in American politics, becomes more apparent beyond Washington, where government gets closer to the people.

In Utah, Republican Gov.-elect Spencer Cox and his opponent, Democratic House Minority Leader Brian King, emerged from the election voicing hope for cooperation. “I feel strong about including, you know, Democrats and Libertarians and others so we can have those robust discussions and policy inputs,” Mr. Cox told The Salt Lake Tribune.

In a response, Mr. King said, “I’d love to see us lead out in Utah in a way that really crosses the ideological and the policy spectrum and really incorporates the best ideas regardless of where they come from.”

The unusual political career of Jerry Brown in California underscored the value of finding a broader governing perspective. During his first two-term stint as governor starting in 1975, Mr. Brown pursued a progressive agenda that was ahead of its time even for California. He left office eight years later highly unpopular. In 2011 he returned to Sacramento. By the time he finished another two terms, he had become perhaps the most successful governor of a state notoriously difficult to govern.

Most political careers follow a linear upward path from local to higher state and national offices. Between his governorships, Mr. Brown went to Oakland as mayor. “He himself said at one point when he was mayor of Oakland that he was finally understanding that the regulations that he had implemented as governor were hamstringing localities,” Sherry Bebitch Jeffe, a longtime California political analyst, told The Atlantic. “He finally was far [enough] outside the bubble of state politics and the governorship to look at what he was doing.”

That lesson applies now. “If we’ve divided ourselves in half, which statistically we sort of have, and tomorrow we stay in these camps, as a country, we’re only half of ourselves and we are missing the richness of each other,” John Sarrouf, a Boston-based conflict resolution consultant, told the Deseret News.

As America emerges from a taut election in a year shaped by a pandemic and unrest over racial injustice, division is not its only choice. Embracing the different perspectives they have to offer each other, Americans can restore a founding ideal of their democracy: out of many, one.


A Christian Science Perspective

About this feature

There’s an alternative to panic and stress if our current resources seem increasingly limited. As God’s children, we each have the inherent capacity to prove, as so many in the Bible did, that God’s provision leaves no one out.


A message of love

Anupam Nath/AP
A reflected sun turns calm water aglow, as a farmer stands in his paddy on the outskirts of Gauhati, India, late in the day on Nov. 5, 2020.
( The illustrations in today’s Monitor Daily are by Jacob Turcotte. )

A look ahead

Thank you for joining us today. Please come back tomorrow for our continuing election coverage.

You can also follow the day’s top breaking stories on our First Look page. 

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2020
November
05
Thursday
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