Mainers celebrate as voters make Trump a one-term president - mainebeacon.com

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The rally was nearly ready to start.  

Activists in more than a dozen cars were preparing to drive through the streets of Bangor on Saturday morning to demand that the voice of the voters be respected as President Donald Trump continued his desperate attempts to subvert the will of the American people. 

Then came the announcement they had waited days for. 

“We found out that the election had been called for Joe Biden just 30 seconds before the caravan of 15 cars left Bangor,” said Todd Ricker, lead labor representative at the Maine State Nurses Association and one of the organizers of the event. “So all these cars had been placarded up with ‘vote nurses values’ signs and ‘protect every vote’ signs, and suddenly it was a celebration of the election victory.”

The rally in Bangor and a simultaneous one in Portland on Saturday urging that every vote be counted in the face of Trump’s lies about election fraud turned celebratory as news networks called the presidential election for Biden after he was projected to have won Pennsylvania.  

Participants in the Portland rally decorate a car before the demonstration. | Photo by Jenn Nappi

That call ended days of speculation over the result, even as Biden had slowly pulled ahead in key states after mail-in ballots were counted. As Biden took the lead, Trump unleashed a series of false accusations about the integrity of the election, including calling for officials to stop counting votes in certain battleground states. The president’s legal team also filed a litany of lawsuits based on unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud. 

In response, advocates in Maine and around the country mobilized. The day after the election, with the result still hanging in the balance, activists held a rally in Lewiston, chanting “count every vote.” 

On Saturday, event organizers in Bangor and Portland — where about a dozen cars gathered — were also prepared to take a stand against Trump’s attempt to stop votes from being counted.

Instead, they got to spread the news of Biden’s victory. 

from earlier – drivers would stop, get out of their car, and everyone would go dance in the street (also you can hear the bugle cry of one @notoriouslkh) pic.twitter.com/Obfg5Wj7sY

— Esther Pew 🤪 (@esther_pew) November 7, 2020

“As we rode through Bangor and Orono, we were kind of an inadvertent announcement of the election results for people on the streets who hadn’t heard yet,” Ricker said. “So we were honking and waving and people just started shouting and jumping up and down and screaming.”

“It was incredibly important that we were in the street, literally the moment after the vote was announced … to get the word out that the white supremacist, fascist administration of Donald Trump is nearly over,” Ricker added. 

A similar scene unfolded in Portland, where people honked car horns as onlookers cheered and waved. 

Along with the car caravan, additional celebrations broke out Saturday in Maine’s largest city, with the Portland Press Herald reporting that a dance party at Monument Square lasted into the night. Large crowds in other cities across the country also cheered Trump’s defeat. 

Some, however, clung to the president’s claim that the election was stolen from him. Trump supporters gathered Saturday in Augusta as part of rallies that took place around the country. The Kennebec Journal reported that the president’s supporters chanted slogans like “stop the steal” and “recount the vote.” 

But despite claims to the contrary by Trump and his base, it’s clear that the president and his vision for the country were repudiated at the ballot box. While the election was closer than many polls predicted, Biden holds a sizable advantage in the popular vote and could end up with over 300 electoral votes.

The 2020 election wasn’t all good news for Democrats, though, especially at the congressional level. While Democrats will maintain their majority in the U.S. House of Representatives, Republicans gained seats in the chamber.

On the Senate side, Republicans did better than expected. Although Democrats were able to flip seats in Colorado and Arizona, other GOP incumbents survived difficult reelection campaigns. 

In Maine, Sen. Susan Collins beat back a challenge from Democrat Sara Gideon, although her margin of victory was much lower than in previous reelection campaigns. Other vulnerable GOP senators in Iowa and Montana won their races, and Republicans hold the edge in contests in North Carolina and Alaska, although neither race has been called yet. 

Despite those defeats, control of the Senate is still in play for Democrats, as two Senate races in Georgia will go into runoffs in January after no candidate reached the 50 percent threshold. 

Going into those elections, Republicans will likely control 50 seats in the Senate and Democrats will likely have 48. If Democrats win both runoff elections in Georgia, the chamber would be evenly divided between the two parties, meaning Democrats would hold the tie breaking vote courtesy of Kamala Harris, who is set to become the first woman and the first woman of color to ascend to the vice presidency.

Top photo: A participant in the Bangor rally gives the peace sign as advocates celebrate the defeat of Donald Trump. | Todd Ricker 

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