 For more videos on people's struggles, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. Hello and welcome to People's Dispatch. Today, we have with us Eugene Puneer of Breakthrough News and we're going to be talking about the United States elections which are happening on the 3rd of November. The presidential elections, of course, also elections to the Senate. The House of Representatives, a lot of local races and initiatives as well. Thank you, Eugene, so much for joining us. Oh, thank you so much for having me. It's always a pleasure. Eugene, so first of all, maybe on a more personal note, you know, this is Breakthrough News, the first election that's covering and I guess it must be difficult covering the election while not falling into the Trump versus Biden rhetoric that is just so all over the media right now. So what are the key issues as we move into the past last few days? Well, you know, I appreciate that it is very difficult, especially since most of the mainstream media is falling into it willingly. You know, I think there's a few issues that are big issues in the last few days. I think the biggest sleeper issue that we have no idea what the effect is going to be are the protests in Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., in Illinois, but especially Philadelphia where there's a curfew, National Guard called out, you know, some so-called looting. Now, you know, it hasn't really been played up in a big way in the mainstream media, but of course the right-wing media and President Trump have been heavily pushing this and, you know, they are really attempting to try to drive white, more middle-class suburban voters to their banner by saying that the Democrats will unleash this total chaos. So it's very unclear how it's going to play, especially because the mainstream media is not talking about it, but it's been a major issue for Trump and I think that's one issue that we should be looking at. You know, the second major issue going into this is the issue of when ballots can be counted and we can of course talk more about that, but in a range of states there have been three or four different opinions. The Supreme Court has said one thing about one state, another thing about another state, now the Court of Appeals has gotten involved and said something different about Minnesota. So there is a huge amount of uncertainty about whether or not the record number of mail-in ballots that are coming in, how many of them will be counted, how many of them will be thrown out, and as wild as this may seem, the decision for that may not actually even be known until after the election itself. So you could think your ballot counted and then have it thrown out a week later. So I think that's the second major issue. And then I think the third issue of course is coronavirus in a way. Ultimately, the Democrats have really premised a huge amount of their campaign around the shambles of a response of the Trump administration, wasn't just him, but he's the president, in terms of addressing COVID-19. And I think that they've tried to build that into a broader narrative about competence, about compassion, about who Trump really is. And I think that as the cases, there's an increase in cases in 41 states here, a number of states are seeing the worst outbreak ever. I think this is also a big wild card issue that maybe two weeks ago, I don't know if it would have played its bigger role. But I think now really could given how Trump has gotten coronavirus itself for what Republicans need, which is for a large turnout on election day. It's mainly Democrats voting early. Is it possible that this would suppress the vote that many conservative people might think, you know what, it's not even worth it. This guy Trump isn't even doing it. So I think there's many more issues in that. But I think those are the three issues that I feel are most likely to affect the race in a way that would make it different than what the polls show now. All right. So we first look at a question of voting itself, whether your votes get even counted. And like you said, there have been court decisions in terms of Wisconsin, in terms of Pennsylvania. But there's also the issue of voter suppression at a more systemic level, which you've talked to activists working on the ground. So could you maybe take us to in a bit detail to both these issues right now? What does it look like with regarding the mail ballots, what are the crucial states where there's going to be a problem and the larger voter suppression issues? Yeah, no. And I appreciate the question. Huge issue. You know, with the mail in ballots, the biggest question that is facing the country, and I know for many people worldwide, this may seem amazing. But in America, there are no universal rules about voting. Every state makes individual rules. So one of the biggest issues for mail in ballots, of course, is what happens if a ballot is postmarked by election day, but because the mail isn't working right or whatever it may be, your ballot doesn't get there until after election day. Now, some states just say, forget it too late, that's on you. But many states allow there for to be a small period. Some say three days, some say nine days, but something that where as long as the postmark on it that says you put this in by on election day or before election day, they can still be counted. So the Republican Party in particular has been aggressively challenging this, potentially because they know the vast majority of Democrats will be voting via mail this year. So there have been a range of different issues that have happened and there have been different rulings. So in Pennsylvania, which is going to be one of the key states here, the Supreme Court has ruled that they are allowed to accept the ballots as they planned up to three days after, but that they could revisit that decision after the election. So right now in Pennsylvania, if it comes in up to three days after your vote can be counted, but that could actually change. So we could have three or four different shifts. North Carolina, also another big state. Biden seems to be relatively well ahead in Pennsylvania. North Carolina, which is a key state, absolute dead heat here. And this could be the key state of the whole country, honestly, is North Carolina. But one of the main ones, they have a nine-day window. The Supreme Court has allowed the nine-day window, but they've also said we could revisit that. Wisconsin, another major state. Now in that case, the Supreme Court has decided they can't count any ballots after the election. So that is just out of the blue. And then last night or late afternoon in a sort of, I don't know if it was unexpected decision, but a major decision, Minnesota, which is usually democratic, but has been trending a little bit more towards Republicans as of late. The 8th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that they cannot have a nine-day window, which means that everyone who voted yesterday, and maybe many people who didn't see the story of the news and voted today, their ballots are now invalid. So we've got Minnesota, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, all states where, maybe not all traditional battlegrounds, but that are all sort of battleground states this year where there's been heavy campaigning. That could be the major states where this comes out. Those states are all at a position where we don't even know what's gonna happen because the rules could change. And right now it seems like it's trending in favor of Democrats in pretty much all of those states. But in most of those states, it's very close. And so a 10,000 ballots here, 5,000 ballots here, 100,000 ballots there could make the election. And we can have three or four flip-flops in the week after the election, so who knows? Now voter suppression, which is also a huge issue, is gonna come into play in a couple other states that are also critical. For instance, Georgia. Georgia is a state that is almost never a swing state for years. It was solidly democratic during the Jim Crow era, and now it has been solidly Republican for really about three or four decades. But there has been a tremendous voter mobilization in Georgia. In the Senate race, there are one of the Senate races, the Democrat is up in a way that seems pretty significant. And another one, it's very, very close. And so there's a lot of conversation. State of Georgia tried to purge 300,000 voters from the rolls, including get this a 92-year-old woman who had voted for the same place for 50 years in a row. And they tried to tell her that she couldn't vote. So there's a lot of efforts going on to sort of fight back against this, to get people to re-register. This has been happening for months, to challenge some of these things. But it's unclear of those 300,000 people how many ultimately will not be allowed to vote, or will have to cast something called a provisional ballot, which means they can't certify you're the person, but they let you fill something out. Many of those aren't counted. Now, Wisconsin, which I previously mentioned, and this is why the issue of the ballots is crucial, Wisconsin is a major voter suppression state. There have been tens of thousands of people purged this year. It's actually, there's still some litigation going on around this, so it's not clear. But to give you a sense of how wild voter suppression is, basically what happens is they send you a card in the mail to say, are you a voter? Are you not? And they're designed to look like junk mail and all these other things so that people won't either will miss it, or just won't respond to it, or whatever. And then they say that you're no longer there. A study was done by investigative reporter Greg Palace, where they looked at thousands and thousands of these votes about, did people really move? Spoiler alert, the vast majority of them did not move at all. And that's the essence of voter suppression is they say, well, we're just trying to keep the voting rolls clean. But they do everything possible in many of these states of voter suppression to get you to not return the ballots. And so it's this interesting dichotomy, but in states like Wisconsin and Georgia, I think this could end up being one of the biggest issues, because Democrats are at a knife's edge. But these, like if the Democrats win Georgia, Trump loses the election. So they're going to have a huge amount of energy on the Republican side to try to block this. And they've already been doing it beforehand. I'm sure they'll do it afterwards. And I think that that's more or less where we stand right now. But more states could come into play, Arizona, Texas, where there have also been similar issues, especially Texas, with massive voter suppression, closing down of polling places, making it difficult to vote early, all these different issues. So in the primary, we saw this in Texas and one place in Houston, where people had to wait for six and a half hours to vote. This is a Democratic primary in a Democratic city, where they're trying to help people vote. So it gives you a sense of the state of affairs. Absolutely. I want to come back to a question we'll actually discuss in one of our earlier conversations. So just to lay out the situation here, we have an election where, like you said, one state might tilt the entire balance. We have, we remember, say, Florida in 2000, where it was just 500 votes, and a very dubious Supreme Court intervention which sealed the decision. And this time we have a president, of course, who is openly, at various points, been hesitant about committing to even respecting the results. So I believe a lot of experts have talked about a situation where the results are not very clear on the day to the election that's November 3rd, maybe even in the next couple of days. And there is a situation of chaos and anarchy. So what is the common consensus regarding the possibility of that? I think the common consensus right now is that there's gonna be a contested vote. I think the only situation in which that is likely to not happen is a blowout win on either side. But it seems like the Democrats may win big in the sense of the number of votes, but that in a number of key states, like for instance, North Carolina, it could be very, very close. And if it's close, that will, I mean, Republicans have quite frankly already signaled that they are planning to challenge in a number of these states, certainly if the election is close, the validity of the election itself. So it's certainly possible that the win could be so overwhelming for Biden. And the polls are certainly showing that could happen, that Trump will just concede. I think most people, myself included, are not banking on that because there's so many different variables to it here. And I think it's a real just ball of confusion in terms of what happens. I think the key dates for people to recognize is this. If it's before early December, I believe the date is December 14th, things could ultimately end up happening the way you'd expect. And there's a peaceful transition of power one way or the other. But since the popular vote in America does not matter, we have an electoral college, which means that the popular vote plays some role, but not a significant, not the ultimate role in determining who the electors will be from the various states who then come together and they elect the president. Now, the issue with that is, you have to have a certified election results to then pick the electors to represent the person who won the state. But if the election is contested, then you can put forward, both parties could try to put forward competing slates of electors. And then you're in almost uncharted territory about how that plays out. And those are the sorts of scenarios where the Supreme Court will become involved. So I think it will certainly we will not know election night. I think it's possible we will know in the week after the election and not even improbable. But I think that there's definitely it could be two or three weeks, but I think the level of chaos will certainly depend on the length of time it takes. I think most people are anticipating the longer it goes on, the sharper the conflicts are gonna be. And it's unclear what sort of street politics will be happening. You mentioned 2000, of course, Republicans disrupted the vote count in Florida in 2000 to do whatever they could to try to prevent people from coming in and being able to count the votes and do so on and so forth. So some of that is expected too. So I would say the general consensus is gonna be a contestation. I think most people consider the idea that we could have a true contested election like you get to inauguration day and there's no consensus to be a pretty outside chance. But I think if we get to that early December date and you can't certify electors in a number of different states and you have dueling electors, then the logic on both parties really becomes to maximalism and to do everything possible to win regardless. And there's no clear rules. That's the other thing. There's no clear rules about what exactly happens here. So who knows exactly what's gonna happen there. So I would say the consensus is we're gonna have some level of contestation that probably won't go beyond a week or two and everything will end up being fine. But that there is a very serious chance that some of these issues could really throw this thing into December into January. And it's it's not impossible that we could reach January 20th inauguration day in the United States. And there will be three people who have a claim for president because in the US Constitution, the speaker of the house can become president if there's no consensus on January 20th. So you have Nancy Pelosi, Joe Biden and Donald Trump all with good claims. Right. Absolutely. And really slightly changing track a bit. I mean, there's been a lot of talk about this being an unprecedented historic election. And you yourself have talked about in another interview about how that's a slightly dangerous way of looking at it. But I'd like to look at it from the other aspect, which is that this happens, of course, after some of the most historic waves of protests in the United States. Like you mentioned in your first answer, especially we're still seeing them in Philadelphia, we're still seeing them in Washington DC. And these have continued the demand for justice, the demand against police violence. And in a very organized fashion, these have continued across the country. So how do you see this mobilization sort of shall we say, maybe playing into this election and also continuing after this election so that we don't look at it purely in terms of four year cycle as well or two year cycle as well? Yeah, I think that's a great question because my personal view is if Joe Biden wins this election, he should think that people who were in the streets this summer, because it's pretty clear when you look at how things were playing out in the polls that it was after Donald Trump suppressed the demonstration in front of the White House in such a brutal fashion that that really opened the race up. Millions of people came into the streets all around the country in the next week, and it created almost a new urgency in the country. I mean, as people may remember, Biden was not really the consensus pick of the Democrats. Many people, even centrist people with similar politics, were not that excited. His mental state, it was kind of unclear exactly what was going on. So there was a feeling of let's get Trump out, but also a feeling of apathy. And I think that seeing Trump, this brutally suppress a peaceful demonstration, flipped a light switch in people's head. I mean, I would not make this connection. And I think in many ways it's crafts, but I did see someone who was knocking doors for Biden in Philadelphia tell the people they were hyping up to go knock on doors, we're knocking on a door to save a life. And that Donald Trump supporting the suppression of the demonstration shows we have to get rid of him. And I really do believe it'll never be written like this probably until 20 years afterwards. But I really do believe that the mass movement and uprising against racism gave people a reason totally outside of Biden to come out and vote against Trump. And I think if you're someone who says they didn't vote in 2016, but did vote in 2012, you maybe don't love Biden. You didn't know exactly what you were gonna do. You start to see stuff like that and you think, well, how can I just do something to this guy? I can vote him out, I can vote against him. And I think absolutely that's gonna play a huge role in this election. And I think by and large, the election is not gonna resolve anything that was really put forward by these protests, especially, I mean, when you look at the issue of policing, I mean, Biden is saying he's gonna give $20 billion more to cops and basically give them the discretion on how to spend it. So he's gonna give them $20 billion to allegedly address issues in policing, but let the police address the issues. Every time he goes out, he says why don't they just shoot him in the leg? I mean, not only is that a shoot to main mentality, but not to be a marksman here, but it's also more dangerous. You're more likely to hit a bystander. So just the mentality behind that that, yeah, don't kill him, just aim him and maybe hit a baby because the bullet ricochets off the street trying to hit someone in the knee just gives you a sense of Biden is not really taking it that seriously. And that ultimately, most of his surrogates on the city level, the mayors, the council members, the congresspeople are generally supportive of the police, have generally been supportive of these policies, and will continue to be so. So those contradictions on this sort of granular level will continue. And I think really the things that are driving people to be against Trump, whether it be climate change. I mean, Biden mentioned the last debate, he wants 50,000 charging stations. As the Financial Times, I think it might have been the Economist, one of them mentioned, he actually has no plan for how to carry that out. So there's a lot of things that they're saying they're gonna address and saying they're gonna do, but they don't have strong claims around them. You look at the issue of fracking, which has been big. How's all these different things gonna play out? Who knows? So most of the animating issues for why people hate Trump, poverty, income inequality, the lack of jobs, low wages, fracking, the environment, climate justice, racial justice, policing, none of these things are really gonna be resolved by the plans that Biden has. Which means, and I think that the protest movement and the protest energy is, I think could actually get stronger because there will be a feeling amongst many people that, well, we put you in there. What are you possibly doing? And I already say it's unprecedented really in America to have major protests this close to an election. Usually, liberal forces, democratic party forces are trying to tamp down protests in every way possible. And the fact they haven't really been able to do that, and that even among sort of middle of the road liberals, there's a very strong discourse that, well, to get what we want, we're gonna have to keep pushing, we're gonna have to stay in the streets. So I think it's very likely unknown, but very likely that unlike when Obama came in, and people were just very hopeful, and like, let's just see what he does. I think a lot of people are gonna say, no, let's not wait and see. Let's get out here and let's push for Medicare for all and different things like that. And we're already seeing some indications from progressive politicians that they claim that they're gonna do some of these things. Well, they I don't know, but it just shows they're feeling the pressure from their own constituents to have a plan to really get things done. So what we are expecting is that irrespective of if Biden does come to power, it's still going to be a lot of movement on the streets, a lot of push from progressive and radical forces to make sure that none of the sacrifices are the sacrifice of respect and honor. Absolutely. I mean, the chasm is too deep now. The problems are too big and the two major parties are unable to meet the task. And we've seen this multiple times in American history, I mean, most notable the 1850s, that when things like this happen, the status quo can't hold. And even though it has held for 100 years, there's never been any big change. The same two parties have been in there. I think that neither party is offering anything to their own base. I mean, forget what I might want to see as a radical person. Their own base on Republicans and Democrats want to see the parties doing different things, and they're not seeing the response from them in Washington. And I think the depth of that chasm is going to be difficult to bridge. And I think ultimately we're going to see more and more in the streets. And I think we're going to see new political forces emerge in a way that we haven't seen in some time. Right. Thank you so much, Eugene, for talking to us. That's all for today. Keep watching People's Dispatch.