'He does not have a mandate': anti-Trump inauguration plans sow defiance

Extract from The Guardian

In conservative upstate New York an ‘alternative inauguration’ party will hail Hillary Clinton’s win in the popular vote – an outcome, critics say, that makes it imperative to resist the incoming administration

 A protester at Goldman Sachs in New York City, part of the ‘Government Sachs’ operation. Photograph: McGregor/Pacific/Barcroft Images

Ed Pilkington in Saranac Lake, New York

Thursday 19 January 2017 22.00 AEDT 

On the evening of 20 January, just a few hours after the former host of Celebrity Apprentice has taken the oath of office to become the 45th president of the United States, about 80 people in the tiny snowbound town of Saranac Lake in heavily conservative upstate New York will gather for an inauguration party.
The event is being billed as a celebration, a chance to rejoice in the electoral victory that saw their political ideals prevail. Food and drink will flow freely, musicians from across the area will perform. The Stars and Stripes will be flown to denote the deep patriotism of the event. And then at the height of the night the carousers will participate in a rendition of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah, with lyrics specially rewritten for the occasion.

Trump said he’d make us great again
But we don’t even trust the man
He lies and cheats and tries to foster anger

As the lyrics suggest, the party will not be honoring the electoral victory of the newly enshrined President Trump. On the contrary, Saranac Lake’s “Alternative Inauguration Party” will mark the defeat of Donald Trump’s brand of anti-establishment xenophobic nationalism.
A celebration of Trump’s defeat on the day of his inauguration seems several stages beyond fanciful. The real estate billionaire did after all pull off one of the biggest electoral surprises of modern times.
Yet the progressive inhabitants of Saranac Lake are not alone in such thinking. Across the country, a growing chorus of influential voices can be heard exhorting liberals not to wallow in despondency in the wake of the Trump ascendancy, but to embrace optimism and celebrate a victory of their own.

From national leaders such as Bernie Sanders and the Rev Al Sharpton to state authorities on both coasts, through urban bastions and university towns scattered across the heartlands, a unifying message is emerging. Do not despair, it says, we won!
The counterintuitive idea of liberal victory in the 2016 presidential race is posited on Hillary Clinton’s startling triumph in the popular vote. With the final tally of votes now certified by all 50 states, the definitive result of the presidential election carries quite a punch.
Clinton attracted the support of 65,844,610 Americans. Trump was backed by 62,979,636. Which means that fully 2.9 million more Americans voted for Trump’s Democratic opponent than for him.

Mr Trump has got to understand that he does not have a mandate. He lost by almost 3 million votes

Bernie Sanders

Whether those millions voted because they liked Clinton’s vision for the country, or because they detested Trump’s, is impossible to say. But it is fair to say that Trump failed to persuade a majority of voting Americans to back him on his unlikely journey to the White House.
National political leaders have begun, like the folk of Saranac Lake, to draw strength for the no-doubt brutal fight ahead by focusing on the popular vote as a measure of the depth of support for progressive values that persist in the US today. Bernie Sanders, who played no small part in boosting Clinton’s numbers by inspiring young people to rally to the liberal cause, told the Guardian that in his view the president-elect had to take on board the truth of his defeat in terms of national votes and act accordingly.
“Mr Trump has got to understand that he does not have a mandate. He lost by almost 3 million votes.”
Sanders went on to say that the knowledge that most voting Americans backed progressive policies on 8 November should embolden people as the new Trump era begins. “If we stand together, we can effectively take on Mr Trump’s ugly ideas and continue the fight for a progressive vision for this country. On virtually every major issue facing this country – whether it’s raising the minimum wage, pay equity for women, rebuilding our infrastructure, making public colleges and universities tuition-free, criminal justice and immigration reform, dealing with income and wealth inequality – the strong majority of the American people are on our side.”

Barbara Curtis, Emily Martz, Emily Warner and Pete Benson are organizing an Alternative Inauguration Party in Saranac Lake to celebrate Hillary Clinton winning the popular vote. Photograph: Ed Pilkington for the Guardian

For civil rights activist Al Sharpton, the issue of the popular vote is especially poignant and personal. On 20 January 2001, as George Bush was being inaugurated at the Capitol building having lost the popular vote to Al Gore, Sharpton staged a “shadow inauguration” in DC’s nearby Stanton Park as a protest against what he saw as the stealing of the election.
Last Saturday Sharpton echoed that event by leading a We Shall Not Be Moved march from the Washington Monument to the Martin Luther King Memorial. Again, Sharpton is exercised by the popular vote. As he explained to the Guardian: “Numbers do not lie. Most American voters, by almost three million, supported our policies and program – our values were not rejected.”
Sharpton predicts that the 2016 presidential election will “go down in infamy” because of the scale of Clinton’s margin of victory in sheer votes as well as evidence of Russian hacking and other peculiarities. He said the popular vote result should comfort progressive Americans, but more importantly “it should energize people to do something about this misdeed. Rather than say ‘we were robbed’ and then sit around and have a pity-party, we should be getting even.”
The We Shall Not Be Moved march will be followed a week later by the climax of the alternative-inauguration wave of 2016: the Women’s March on Washington. Hundreds of thousands of people of both genders are expected to descend on Washington or attend some 200 sister marches to be held across the US and around the world.
Linda Sarsour, one of four co-chairs of the march, said that she saw in the popular vote results the dominance of progressive values in the US. “We intend to let the president-elect know on his first day in office that we are strong, we are united and we will protect those most vulnerable to attack.”
Sarsour also said that she wanted to see more attention paid to the millions of Americans who cast no ballot on 8 November. “We are focused on the silent majority, those who sat at home and did not vote at all. We want to understand why they were inactive, so that we can provide the spark that will inspire them to be involved.”

The Rev Al Sharpton speaks during the National Action Network’s ‘We Shall Not Be Moved’ march in Washington DC on 14 January. Photograph: Aaron P Bernstein/Reuters

Will President Trump hear all these messages as he takes his seat in the Oval Office? Lawrence Lessig, the Harvard law professor who made a brief bid in 2016 for the Democratic presidential nomination, predicts that Trump will ignore calls for him to show electoral humility, just as Bush did in 2001.
“The Republicans are so good at the chutzpah of their claim to power – minority presidents acting as though they are dominant in the world. We have to develop a way of tamping down their arrogance – these are minority presidents who do not represent most Americans.”
The idea that Trump’s contentious rhetoric from immigration and trade to climate change represents a minority view was what drove Saranac Lake to throw an alternative inauguration party. The town of just 5,500 residents is situated in the middle of the highly conservative rural “north country” of upstate New York, close to the Canadian border, but it is a liberal oasis, a tiny dot of blue bobbing on a sea of red.
On the morning of 10 November, two days after the election when the entire country was still reeling from the shock of election night, four local friends happened to bump into one another in a shop on Main Street owned by one of them, Barbara Curtis.

The values we believe in, of inclusion and justice for all, freedom of press and religion and assembly, had prevailed

Emily Martz

The four were all Sanders supporters who had transferred their allegiance to Clinton in the general election, mainly in the hope of blocking Trump. That morning they were each filled with disbelief and despair that a man whom they consider to be a racist and misogynist had been anointed head of state.
“We were in a miserable mood,” said one of the four, the director of the local library, Pete Benson. “But then we had the idea.”
The idea began by asking a question: what do we do now? The four decided to set up a new group to generate discussion around that conundrum. They called it “Now what?”.
As the days passed, and Clinton’s lead in the popular vote began to grow as late results were counted, they began to see a way forward. “It made us think we could be optimistic,” said another of the gang of four, Emily Martz, an environmental development worker. “The majority of Americans did not vote for the hatred and tolerance of Trump. The values that we believe in, of inclusion and justice for all, freedom of the press and religion and assembly, had in fact prevailed.”

Lawrence Lessig: ‘The Republicans are so good at the chutzpah of their claim to power.’ Photograph: Brian Snyder/Reuters

Out of that sense of hope the Alternative Inauguration Party was born. “It was such a simple idea, but it gave us hope – the feeling that we were not alone,” said the fourth founding member, Emily Warner.
So just how much of a thumping did Trump take in terms of the popular vote? And why should we care anyway? Under the arcane rules laid down by the Founding Fathers for the selection of the nation’s head of state, it’s essentially irrelevant who wins the most votes nationally. Presidents are chosen not directly by the American people, but indirectly through the electoral college that is put together on a state-by-state basis.
Famously, it takes a presidential hopeful 270 electoral college votes out of the total of 538 to win the keys of the White House, and on that official count Trump won handsomely. When the chips were down, according to the centuries-old rules of the game, he soundly defeated Clinton by 306 electoral college votes to 232.
So yes, Trump won, and no amount of brouhaha over recounts and “faithless electors” and talk of Russian hackers will change that now. But there is another way of looking at the results, one that resonates with the vocabulary of modern democracies in which “we the people” are supposed to call the shots.
“What we think of as democratic legitimacy these days is winning popular support,” said John Woolley, professor of political science at UC Santa Barbara. “There’s an equation in most people’s minds that in a modern democracy winning means getting more votes than anyone else.”
The Now What? group in Saranac Lake like to quote the figure that 72% of Americans of eligible voting age did not vote for Trump – a statistic achieved by combining Clinton’s votes to the almost 8 million ballots cast for third-party candidates and then rolling in the hordes of those who did not vote at all. Other estimates put that figure even higher, at 75%.

The 72% figure should be handled with great caution, as there is no way of knowing what the no-voters would have done had they got themselves to the polling stations. But you don’t need to stretch the boundaries of electoral mathematics to know that what happened on 8 November 2016 was historically significant.
Though America is well accustomed to backing presidents who failed to win more than half of the votes cast, winning on the plurality – Abraham Lincoln in 1860, Woodrow Wilson in 1912 and Bill Clinton in 1992 all falling into that camp – it is very rare for presidents to be elected having garnered fewer votes nationwide than their opponent.
Only five presidents in US history have been put into the White House having suffered such ignominy: John Quincy Adams (1824), Rutherford Hayes (1876), Benjamin Harrison (1888), George W Bush (2000) … and now Donald Trump.
Even among that handful of popular vote losers, Trump stands out. Woolley has produced a graph comparing the popular and electoral college vote percentages for all presidential elections since 1824. It shows Trump failing in terms of democratic legitimacy more conclusively than in any other presidential election than that of Adams.