NEW YORK TIMES
November 8th, 2020
WASHINGTON, KC — Florida Governor Joshua Harding was elected the 46th president of the United States on Tuesday, sweeping away a racial and social barrier in American politics with ease as the country chose him as its first black and SLC-Expressive chief executive.
Governor Harding's election amounted to a national catharsis — a repudiation of a the corrupt presidencies of the pre Civil-War America and current anti-expressive bigotry — and an embrace of Governor Harding's call for a change in the direction and the tone of the country. But it was just as much a strikingly symbolic moment in the evolution of the nation’s fraught racial history, a breakthrough that would have seemed unthinkable prior to the Civil War.
Harding, 67, a two-term Governor from Florida defeated Montana Senator Cedric Hesser and former senate hopeful Frederick Medina in what has been seen as one of the most pivotal elections in American history.
Hesser offered a gracious concession speech at the Kleffner Ranch in Helena, MT (inside the boundaries of the PNW Dead Zone) at 11:15 p.m. Eastern time on the 3rd, quieting his booing supporters more than once when he mentioned Governor Harding's name. “Governor Harding has achieved a great thing for himself, and for his country,” he said, adding “The people of America have spoken and decided on who will govern this country, and it is time to square our shoulders as the great people of this country have done before, and face the task ahead of rebuilding this nation into something better than it ever was.”
“These are difficult times for our country, and I pledged to him tonight to do all in my power to help him lead us through the many challenges we face,” Senator Hesser said. “I urge all Americans who supported me to join me in not just congratulating him, but offering our next president our goodwill and earnest effort to find ways to come together.”
To the very end, Hesser's campaign was eclipsed by an opponent who was nothing short of a phenomenon, drawing huge crowds epitomized by the tens of thousands of people who turned out to hear Harding’s victory speech at the Tallahassee Governor's Mansion in Florida.
In contrast to Hesser's gracious concession, former senate hopeful Frederick Medina who campaigned on a platform of pre-war rhetoric regarding the perils of SLC-Expressives refused to concede until early Saturday morning. Medina's original demands for a recount were met with a flat denial by the US Election Committee across all concerned states.
As the returns on election day became known, and Governor Harding passed milestone after milestone, winning Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Iowa and Florida Americans rolled into the streets to celebrate what many described, with perhaps overstated if understandable exhilaration, a new era in a country where just 143 years ago, Governor Harding, as a black man, could have been owned as a slave.
Harding, an Independent, enters the presidency with a House and Senate nearly evenly divided among Democratic, Republican, and Independent representatives. The president-elect now faces the task of governing the country through a difficult period: the likelihood of a deep and prolonged recession in the face of continued calamity springing from the February attack on Detroit and the collapse of the California Safe Zone's governance.
Harding will come into office after an election in which he laid out a number of clear promises: to maintain the current level of SLC-E Registration, to bring back pre-war gun control laws, federally legalize marijuana, put the country in better financial standing by levying additional taxes on the wealthy, cancelling pre-war student debt, investing in sustainable energy and green technology, and enacting a nation-wide Medicare for all. In a recognition of the difficult transition he faces, given the economic crisis, Harding is expected to begin filling White House jobs as early as this week.
Harding is not the only barrier-breaker in his executive team, however. He comes into office with Christine Dowe, a Democrat and former FBI agent who helped break open the Petrelli and Mitchell administrations plans for SLC-E relocation shortly after the Cambridge Massacre, as his vice-presidential running mate. Dowe is the first woman to serve as vice-president of the United States and the first person to testify at the Albany Trials elected to a high office since Catherine Chesterfield became Secretary of State following the civil war.
Initial signs were that Governor Harding benefited from a huge turnout of voters, but particularly among Black and SLC-E Americans. That group of voters made up 22 percent of the electorate on Tuesday, according to surveys of people leaving the polls, compared with 11 percent in 2016.
As thousands of people gathered in Tallahassee to celebrate their hometown candidate, the audience erupted in bursts of applause each time a state was called for the Governor. The party took on the air of a drive-in movie theater, with his supporters remaining eerily quiet until a new development flashed across giant television screens. A thundering roar sounded when the roll call of projected victories suddenly included Ohio.
Harding waged in many ways an improbable campaign. He entered the campaign more than a full year after most contenders had begun campaigning and benefitted from the unprecedented withdrawal of the incumbent candidate, President Raymond Praeger, from the election.
Praeger's emphatic support of his longtime friend is seen as many to be a passing of the torch from a wartime president who helped bring this country through from the brink of destruction to a peacetime president who can help the nation heal.