California Electors Hand Trump Defeat, Give Biden The White House

LOS ANGELES, CA — In the end, it was California that put the nail in the coffin Monday, officially dooming President Donald Trump’s dreams of a second consecutive term.

It was California’s 55 electors who put President-Elect Joe Biden past the 270 vote threshold needed to win the White House Monday afternoon as every state tallied their electors. California, one of the bluest states in the nation, never gets to play the swing state, but for a state that handed Trump a 5 million-vote loss, there was a certain poetry in California's electors sealing his defeat.

What would normally have been an uneventful technicality was a day fraught with tension and heightened security following a weekend of political protests that devolved into violence. Several statehouses shut down to the public amid credible threats, but the count went off without a hitch.

Monday capped weeks of legal wrangling by the Trump administration and Republican lawmakers who sought to have millions of votes thrown out to force an electoral college victory for the president. Despite claiming widespread fraud in public, Trump’s legal team never actually claimed as much in court over the course of dozens of lawsuits in swing states and at the U.S. Supreme Court. His legal challenge failed as did the Trump Administration's efforts to recruit faithless electors to cast their votes for him and to pressure swing-state legislatures to override their state’s popular votes.

Monday’s developments did not prompt a concession from Trump, who is unlikely to attend Biden’s Jan. 20 inauguration, according to CNN. Rather than acknowledging his electoral college defeat Monday, he announced the resignation of U.S. Attorney General William Barr.

Biden is expected to address the nation at 4:30 p.m.(PST) Monday.

"In this battle for the soul of America, democracy prevailed," Biden will say, according to the excerpts published by CNN. "We the people voted. Faith in our institutions held. The integrity of our elections remains intact. And so, now it is time to turn the page. To unite. To heal."

Some members of Trump’s own party echoed that sentiment publicly Monday for the first time.
Senator John Cornyn of Texas became the most ranking member of his party to officially acknowledge Biden’s victory, predicting a “peaceful transition.”

“I think there comes a time when you have to realize that despite your best efforts, you’ve been unsuccessful,” he told the New York Times. “It’s sort of the nature of these elections. You’ve got to have a winner and you’ve got to have a loser.”

California Representative Kevin McCarthy, the ranking Republican in the House, has yet to publicly acknowledge Trump’s loss. As recently as last week, McCarthy backed a failed legal challenge by Texas, asking the U.S. Supreme Court to throw out the results of swing states that went for Biden.

His stance drew a rebuke Monday from fellow Republican Rep. Paul Mitchell of Michigan.

“It is unacceptable for political candidates to treat our election system as though we are a third-world nation and incite distrust of something so basic as the sanctity of our vote,” he wrote in a letter to McCarthy and Ronna McDaniel, the Republican National Committee chairwoman, according to the Times.