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  • After four long, tense days,

  • we've reached a historic moment in this election.”

  • Joe Biden is president-elect.”

  • America's democracy is not guaranteed.

  • It is only as strong as our willingness to fight for it.”

  • When I look back on Biden's campaign,

  • I think the single most impressive thing he did,

  • were the Biden-Sanders task forces that followed the primary.

  • CBS News projects the former vice president

  • beat Senator Bernie Sanders in Florida, Illinois, and Arizona.”

  • Biden now has more than half of the 1,991 delegates

  • needed to clinch the Democratic nomination.”

  • My goal as a candidate for president is to unify this party,

  • and then to unify the nation.”

  • He invited all of these different players

  • who had been harsh critics of the Biden campaign.

  • The Sunrise Movement, which is the youth-led climate movement,

  • he invited the Sunrise Movement into the task force.

  • They'd been incredibly critical of Biden.

  • They'd given his climate plan an F.

  • You have had at least some hand in shaping Joe Biden's climate plan.”

  • Joe Biden's plan will represent

  • a seismic shift in climate policy at the federal level,

  • [more] than anything we've seen in the last 40 years.”

  • Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who had said that in another country,

  • her and Biden wouldn't even be in the same political party.

  • Into the task force -- and it worked.

  • Voting for Joe Biden is not about whether you agree with him.

  • It's a vote to let our democracy live another day.

  • That's what this is about.”

  • It's so beautiful to see someone who stood for oppression, and the system,

  • change because of activism, and the voice of young people crying out.”

  • But: There is no reason to think that because Joe Biden won the election,

  • he'll be able to govern.

  • I think the likeliest outcome is that we're going to have

  • a Joe Biden presidency and a Mitch McConnell Senate.

  • And that means that lots of things Joe Biden wants to do

  • are not going to happen.

  • I was looking at some data from a Fox News analysis.

  • There's these questions like,

  • How concerned about the effects of climate change are you?”

  • And you're getting 46% Very, 26% Somewhat

  • Gun laws

  • Pathway to citizenship

  • Changing to a government-run health care plan

  • It seems clear from this data that what the American people want

  • is not being translated to law and policy.

  • And I'm wondering if you can give some context as to why that is.

  • Those numbers don't in any way surprise me.

  • We've seen numbers like that for a very long time.

  • As of right now, Joe Biden holds a lead of about 13,500 votes…”

  • Stop the count! Stop the count!”

  • The key thing to understand about the modern Republican Party,

  • is it is a party that routinely is not able to win the most votes

  • at any level of the national system.

  • It has lost the popular vote in seven of the last presidential elections...

  • It has gotten fewer votes in the last three or four Senate elections in a row...

  • A party that wins power without winning the most votes

  • is going to turn against democracy itself.

  • Many forced to wait for hours, in part because of new voting machines

  • that were either missing or not working.”

  • “20% fewer polling places than we had in 2016.”

  • This line of people wraps around the block.

  • There's a line of cars to curbside vote.”

  • People waited in line for two, three, four hours, just to cast a vote.”

  • Right after the House attempted to pass a bill

  • that would have made voting during a pandemic easier,

  • what Trump said on Fox and Friends was,

  • They had things, levels of voting, that if you'd ever agreed to it,

  • you'd never have a Republican elected in this country again.”

  • What I'm wondering is,

  • obviously there are conservative parties, in other democratic systems,

  • that win power all the time,

  • in Canada or Great Britain, or Australia

  • other majoritarian democracies.

  • He's wrong that the Republican Party would never win power again.

  • What he's right about is that HIS Republican Party

  • would never win power again.

  • They're a party that is increasingly afraid of what would happen to it

  • if it was exposed to full-on, actual democracy.

  • You're saying that if they if they really had to compete for votes,

  • that they would have to begin to embrace some of those policies,

  • as conservative parties in those countries have done?

  • Yes.

  • As we speak, Donald Trump is functionally engaged

  • in what we would understand, in another country, as a coup attempt.

  • If you count the legal votes, I easily win.

  • If you count the illegal votes, they can try to steal the election from us.

  • Our goal is to defend the integrity of the election.

  • We will not allow the corruption to steal such an important election…”

  • Well, we're interrupting this because

  • what the president of the United States is saying,

  • in large part, is absolutely untrue.”

  • It's a very dangerous moment.

  • But even beneath that, what you then end up having is,

  • when a party wins power without winning votes,

  • they will tend to use that power

  • to make it easier to win power without winning votes.

  • All signs, guys, all signs point to a runoff in Georgia.

  • Not just one, but two Senate races here in Georgia.

  • What that means here, is that Georgia could be at

  • the center of the political universe, through early next year.

  • January 5th is when the runoff is.”

  • So those Georgia runoffs, they're really, really, really important.

  • “A record number of Americans, of all races, faiths, religions,

  • chose change over more of the same.”

  • If Democrats win the Senate,

  • and choose to make democracy a priority,

  • there's a lot they can actually do.

  • DC and Puerto Rico should be offered statehood. That's obvious.

  • Things like automatic voter registration,

  • mail-in balloting

  • We should just make elections a lot simpler to participate in,

  • and make sure the people's voices are being heard more clearly.

  • Democracy works.

  • 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. That's the job."

After four long, tense days,

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