New top story from Time: ‘It’s About Time.’ For Women Working In Men’s Sports, Kim Ng’s Historic Hiring Means Everything

Jennifer Wolff, the Life Skills Coordinator for the Cleveland Indians, was fixing up some things around her home on Friday morning. Suddenly, her “Women In Baseball” group chat—which includes 80 women working inside the game—started buzzing. News had broken that Kim Ng, a longtime baseball front office executive, was finally hired to run a team: the Miami Marlins made her the first woman team general manager in the history of a major North American men’s sports league.

She felt elation, tinged with some frustration.

“I was so incredibly excited and proud of Kim,” says Wolff, who worked under Ng (pronounced “ANG”) in the MLB front office in the early 2010s. “But then I also kind of thought, it’s about time.” Wolff laughs, a clear acknowledgment of both her happiness about the hire, and the ridiculous nature of the wait. “This is so well deserved,” she says. “But it should have happened years ago.”

Ng, who will also become baseball’s first first Asian-American general manager, has spent three decades working in the game: in 1998, the New York Yankees made her the youngest assistant general manager in baseball, when they hired her at 29: from 2002-2011, she was vice president and assistant general manager for the Los Angeles Dodgers. Recently, she’s worked in the MLB commissioner’s office as senior vice president of baseball operations.

At least seven times, she’s interviewed for general manager’s jobs. At least seven times, teams have passed over her. “You know going into it, it’s going to take longer for women to get to where men get to,” says Wolff. “It’s kind of an acknowledgment that our road is a little harder regardless.”

Linda Cataffo/NY Daily News Archive via Getty ImagesNew York Yankees’ general manager Brian Cashman, Kim Ng and manager Joe Torre (l. to R.), at announcement of Ng’s promotion to vice president and assistant general manager.

Still, for women working in baseball, Ng’s hire hit home. “It’s an iconic moment, it’s a historic moment. For me it’s just the beginning,” says Alexandria Rigoli, manager of pro scouting for the Marlins. “It should be celebrated. I’m excited to see what we can do, as women in baseball and as the Miami Marlins.”

“I want to be a baseball lifer,” says Wolff. “If that means I’m a GM, if that means I’m a farm director, if that means I’m a special assistant, I love the game and I never want to leave. But seeing Kim in this position, just makes it that much more possible. I always knew it would be possible, for her, for me, for other women. But representation matters. I don’t think it’s the only thing. But it is important. It’s important for people like me to have female bosses and role models and mentors. But it’s also important for girls who are growing up now, and boys growing up now, to see that being a person in a leadership role is not limited to white men.”

Ng’s hiring was cheered by women working across sports. “I looked at her years of experience, I thought 30 years, I think she’s more than earned it,” says Kelly Krauskopf, who became the NBA’s first female assistant general manager—for the Indiana Pacers—in 2018. “The double standard is, sometimes you see guys that work four or five years, and oh, they seem really smart, so they must be able to do this job. And then you see a woman, she’s been doing the same thing for twice as long, and still has to prove herself. That’s the hard part. Maybe someday you won’t feel that ‘prove it’ mentality, or that questioning around your qualifications. That’s gone. You get the chance just like your male colleagues.”

Krauskopf says it’s natural to think that Ng’s hiring in baseball could make an NBA team more likely to give her a chance at the top spot. She knows how much representation matters; Krauskopf has been stopped by female Pacers fans bowels of Bankers Life Fieldhouse, who let them know that her success is breaking barriers. Young girls from all over the country sent her congratulatory notes. A family from the Dallas area reached out to Krauskopf and asked if they can bring their seventh grade daughter to Indianapolis to pick her brain about sports management: Krauskopf obliged and they chatted down on the court before a game.

According to Krauskopf, male colleagues throughout the NBA have greeted her warmly: before joining the Pacers, she ran the Indiana Fever, of the WNBA, for nearly two decades. Still, the adjustment to the NBA could be jarring. Before the 2019 draft, she entered a Phoenix gym to scout prospects. “I remember walking it, and it was a gym full of, you know, hundreds of guys,” says Krauskopf. “The door opens and I walk through the door and I’ll never forget, for a slow motion moment, I felt like all these eyes were on me and I’d never felt my gender more than I felt in that moment. Wow, I really am the only woman. There’s not a female for miles here. And I had never felt that way before.”

While working in baseball, Wolff has faced resistance. She recalls not being included in meetings, not being given opportunities for promotions and feeling relegated to administrative tasks. Wolff hopes that Ng’s ascension and other signs of progress, like the San Francisco Giants hiring Alyssa Nakken as a coach, and the New York Yankees and Chicago Cubs hiring women as hitting coaches, can help eradicate such thinking. “It was a big year for women in the game,” says Wolff. “And then we now have a woman in the White House as VP. And so I think it’s just, with all the negatives that have happened this year, and struggling through the pandemic, it’s a really awesome to see the bright spots. And it gives me hope for 2021 and beyond. These women can’t be the only ones. We’ve gotta make sure that this isn’t just a one off.”

New top story from Time: ‘We’ve Seen a Youthquake.’ How Youth of Color Backed Joe Biden in Battleground States

They TikToked, they led marches and they stepped up as poll workers in their communities. Now, they’ve helped tap the next President of the United States.

After a contentious race, former Vice President Joe Biden is headed to the White House with the most votes cast for any presidential candidate in American history — and he’s got millions of young Black, Latino and Asian voters to thank for that distinction. Not only was youth voter turnout in this election the highest in over 100 years, youth of color backed Biden in several battleground states including Pennsylvania, Michigan and Arizona, according to new analysis of voting data.

Tufts University’s Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning & Engagement (CIRCLE), which researches youth civic engagement in the U.S., analyzed the young electorate’s role in this election and found that 73-87% of Black, Asian and Latino voters between age 18 and 29 voted for Biden, compared to the 45-51% support from young white voters. In both Pennsylvania and Michigan, more than 75% of young voters of color voted for Biden.

“If they went more towards Republican or came out in lower numbers in some of these states by just a few percentage points, it could have gone the other way,” says CIRCLE team director, Kei Kawashima-Ginsberg.

According to CIRCLE’s analysis, Black and Latino youth also had a significant impact on Biden’s gains in Georgia and Arizona, both states that President Donald Trump won in 2016. In Georgia, where the race remains tight and a winner has yet to be projected, Biden received 90% of Black youth support, according to CIRCLE’s analysis, bringing in nearly 188,000 more total youth votes than Trump. In Arizona, which Associated Press has called for Biden though votes continue to be counted, 62% of youth voted for Biden, compared to 34% for Trump. Young Latinos in this traditional GOP stronghold were 15% more likely to support Biden than young white voters.

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Young Americans have not been reliable voters in past presidential elections. During the upsurge of protests over racial injustice this summer, politicians and critics of the demonstrations questioned whether youth participation in the massive civic movement would translate into stronger engagement at the polls in November. What’s now clear, says Kawashima-Ginsberg, is that it did. “The myth of them being on the street instead of them voting didn’t pan out,” she says. “It’s been such an active electorate.”

For many within this demographic, getting another white septuagenarian man into the nation’s highest office was not what moved them to action. On social media, many young Americans who have felt underrepresented by political candidates said they finally saw themselves in Vice-President elect Kamala Harris, who will be the first woman, the first Black American and the first Asian American in U.S. history to hold her position.

“I can’t explain how uplifting it feels to be represented by Kamala,” wrote Karsten Daniels, a 20 year-old California student in a tweet. “ I feel even more excited and hopeful to run for office in my career.”

Madeline Khare, 24, tweeted, “I bawled during Kamala’s speech. This is the most impactful biracial, South Asian female representation I have ever seen. And as a biracial, South Asian female who never saw myself in media, you have no no idea what that means to me.”

In the run-up to the election, both national and local get-out-the-vote organizations worked hard to get youth of color, a group that has been disproportionately impacted by voter suppression tactics, out to the ballot box.

In the wake of Russia’s meddling of the 2016 election and the President’s repeatedly raising unsupported concerns over this year’s increase of mail-in-voting due to COVID-19, many young voters of color lost confidence in the electoral process, according to the CIRCLE. The group’s data found, for instance, that 44% of non-white young voters still had concerns of foreign election interference, the highest amongst their age demographic.

The recent get-out-the-vote push is part of a broader effort that’s been happening nationally in battleground states. NextGen America, a progressive non-profit founded by Democratic presidential candidate Tom Steyer, has registered over 1.6 million young voters across swing states since 2014. This year, NextGen focused on getting all eligible young voters out to vote, including the more than 800,000 Latinos that have turned 18 since the last presidential election.

The group reached out to over 1.3 million young Latinos with calls, texts and digital ads across the country, according to executive director Ben Wessel. In the end, young Latinos in states like Nevada and Arizona came out in waves for Biden. In Nevada, Biden had another double-digit youth vote lead over Trump, with 18 to 29 year-olds making up the largest share of Latino voters in the state, according to Latino voter registration organization, Voto Latino.

“Two elections in a row now, we’ve seen a youthquake that completely shakes the pillars of how our politics have been built,” says Wessel. “I think that every Democrat, Republican or independent who’s running for office needs to recognize that Gen Z and Millennials are the most important political force in our country now.”

New top story from Time: Joe Biden Moving Swiftly Ahead with Transition, Despite Donald Trump’s Obstruction

President-elect Joe Biden said Tuesday that he and his team would move steadily ahead with their transition plans, regardless of whether President Donald Trump concedes or he provides the resources traditionally offered to incoming administrations to assist in a transition.

“We’re well underway,” Biden said as he took questions from reporters after delivering remarks about the Affordable Care Act lawsuit. The Trump Administration’s failure to recognize the outcome “does not change the dynamic of what we’re able to do,” he said.”We’re going to be moving along in a consistent manner putting together our administration, our White House, reviewing who we’re going to pick for Cabinet positions, and nothing’s going to stop it.”

The transition is moving steadily ahead even though Biden has not yet been afforded any of the privileges typically offered to a President elect, such as office space in Washington and intelligence briefings. It helps that Biden, as a former Vice President himself, is already intimately familiar with most of the levers of the federal government. “There’s nothing that slows up our effort to put things together,” he said. The additional funding and classified information typically shared with the President-elect would be nice, he said, but aren’t necessary. “We don’t see anything that’s slowing us down, quite frankly.”

Biden said he had not yet spoken to the President, who has so far refused to accept the results of the election, or to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who supports President Trump’s long-shot lawsuits to overturn the results. The General Services Administration, led by Trump appointee Emily Murphy, has not yet certified that Biden is the winner, which is why Biden’s team does not yet have the funding, office space, or access to federal agencies typically offered to a transition team. Biden has also not been given access to the Presidential Daily Brief, the national security briefing that normally gets shared with the President-elect. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence told NBC Biden could not get intelligence briefings until his election was certified by the GSA.

Normally, the incumbent President “has generally seen it in his own interest in terms of his legacy of preserving the presidency as an institution” to ensure a smooth transition of power,” says Martha Kumar, an expert on presidential transitions. ““The tone of the transition is set at the top by the incumbent president.”

Still, the Biden team has forged ahead. Yesterday, Biden and Vice-President elect Kamala Harris met with members of a newly formed COVID-19 Advisory Board, and today the transition team announced the names of “agency review teams” who will be tasked with coordinating the transition of power and the federal government’s biggest agencies.

Except, unlike the Trump Administration “landing teams” formed after the 2016 election, Biden’s “agency review teams” don’t yet have any access to federal agencies until GSA Head Emily Murphy certifies that Biden won the election. “We must be prepared for a seamless transfer of knowledge to the incoming administration to protect our interests at home and abroad,” said Senator Ted Kaufman, a longtime Biden ally and Co-Chair of the Biden-Harris Transition, in a statement. “The agency review process will help lay the foundation for meeting these challenges on Day One.”

Despite the efforts to block his transition, Biden says nothing the Trump Administration does can slow him down. “We’re just going to proceed the way we have,” he said. “We’re doing exactly what we’d be doing if he conceded and said we’d won, which we have. So there’s nothing really changing.”

When a reporter asked what he would say to President Trump, President-elect Biden flashed a grin and said “Mr. President, I look forward to speaking with you.”

Another reporter asked how he would work with Republicans who wouldn’t even acknowledge his win.

Biden seemed unperturbed. “They will,” he said. “They will.”

—With reporting from Tessa Berenson

New top story from Time: Esper’s Firing May Be the Beginning of Donald Trump’s Post-Election Reckoning

The post-election period got off to a raucous start Monday when President Donald Trump fired Defense Secretary Mark Esper by tweet, a decision that tossed Pentagon leadership into tumult with just 72 days before transitioning to a new administration.

“Mark Esper has been terminated,” Trump tweeted. “I would like to thank him for his service.”

I am pleased to announce that Christopher C. Miller, the highly respected Director of the National Counterterrorism Center (unanimously confirmed by the Senate), will be Acting Secretary of Defense, effective immediately..

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 9, 2020

The move comes two days after Joe Biden was projected to win the 2020 Presidential election, a development Trump so far refuses to accept. The President has been complaining about Esper for months, but his abrupt ouster drew immediate concern from Democrats and Republicans alike worried what other destabilizing maneuvers Trump might make before leaving the White House in January. Washington collectively held its breath to see if Trump would fire other high-ranking officials he’s frustrated with, including FBI Director Christopher Wray, CIA Director Gina Haspel and Attorney General William Barr.

Esper, who was Trump’s fourth Pentagon chief, spent the last several months of his tenure trying to thread the needle between implementing Trump’s policy objectives and maintaining long-standing American principles, such as keeping the military from quelling civil protests. The relationship became increasingly bitter this summer after Trump called him “Yesper” during a news conference — a derisive nickname that came from critics who thought Esper failed to forcefully push back against the President’s decisions.

The remaining national security leadership is seen as a stabilizing force as the nation enters a period of transition from one administration to the next. Typically, the Biden team would spend weeks absorbing information on the nation’s most perplexing problems, both internal and external, before taking over on Jan. 20, 2021. It’s critical the hand-off is as seamless as possible, particularly amid a pandemic that’s created disarray across the globe.

Now, with Esper’s firing, the President has made clear he has little interest in a smooth transition. Instead, it appears Trump Administration officials may not start talking to their successors until every last effort made by their boss to stay in power through litigation is expended.

“This is purely an act of retaliation by a president thinking more about his petty grievances than about the good of the country,” said Lawrence Korb, a former assistant Secretary of Defense under President Ronald Reagan and current fellow at the Center for American Progress Action Fund. “The message it sends around the world is that Trump is going to continue his disruptive policies for the rest of his time in office.”

Rep. Adam Smith, a Democrat from Washington, who serves as chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, pointed out that periods of presidential transition leave the country exposed to unique threats. “Dismissing politically appointed national security leaders during a transition is a destabilizing move that will only embolden our adversaries and put our country at greater risk,” he said.

The U.S. is facing headwinds in virtually every corner of the globe. There’s a tense stand-off with Iran. A chilly relationship with China. Russia continues to make problems for the U.S in Europe. The Taliban shows no sign of retreat in Afghanistan. The military is still juggling the fight against terror groups across the Middle East and Africa. And tensions with North Korea continue to be unresolved.

“There is no doubt that our adversaries are already seeking vulnerabilities they can exploit in order to undermine American global leadership and national security during this transition period,” said Democratic Sen. Mark Warner from Virginia, vice chairman of the Intelligence Committee in a statement on Monday. “The transfer of power should be peaceful and fulsome in accordance with the principles that have animated our republic since its founding and the last thing that our country needs is additional upheaval in the institutions designed to protect our national security.”

This president can still do a lot of damage between now and January. We can’t take our eyes off the ball yet.

Secretary Esper deserves our thanks for his service.

And our country deserves better than this. https://t.co/xdyJk4D9Y6

— Mark Warner (@MarkWarner) November 9, 2020

Some military experts worry Russia, China, Iran, and others will be emboldened to test the United States not just in the information space, as the Pentagon calls it, but militarily and diplomatically. It’s important not to play into foreign adversaries’ narratives that the United States is immobilized by governmental dysfunction and a divided citizenry, said Anthony Cordesman, a former intelligence official at the Pentagon who now works at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

“We need the best transition possible,” he said. “We certainly aren’t going to get it if we’re in the middle of petty in-fighting and partisan paralysis.”

Esper, who previously served in both the military and the government, was serving as Army Secretary when Trump chose him in July 2019. He replaced Patrick Shanahan, who resigned as Acting Defense chief after serving for six months. Esper was confirmed as Defense Secretary in July 2019.

During his 18-month stint, he went along with Trump on many controversial issues. He backed Trump when he seized billions of dollars from the military budget to build his border wall with Mexico after Congress blocked funding for the construction project. He watched as Trump meddled in the cases of several service members accused of war crimes—despite senior officers’ objections—by pardoning the accused troops before their cases had even gone to trial.

Esper’s problems with Trump started in August when he and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Mark Milley walked with Trump through Lafayette Park, near the White House, after more than a thousand protestors had been physically cleared out with pepper balls and rubber bullets and police officers swinging riot shields. The Administration officials walked through the park before Trump stopped in front of the parish house of St. John’s Church, which had been vandalized the night before when protestors ignited a fire in the basement. He stood for pictures and requested his aides, including Esper and Milley, to join. Esper said he didn’t know he was heading for a photo shoot, but in the eyes of many Administration critics, the two men became “props” in a photo-op — whether they were happy about it or not.

The next day, Esper held a press conference to say he would prefer not to use troops to stop the violent unrest that erupted across the nation after George Floyd, an unarmed black man, was killed by Minneapolis police. It was the first time Esper publicly broke with Trump on a policy issue, and he’s been unable to get back on Trump’s good side ever since.

In recent weeks, Esper wrote a resignation letter because he felt his tenure was close to coming to an end. “I serve the country in deference to the Constitution,” Esper wrote in the letter obtained by TIME, “so I accept your decision to replace me.”

On Monday, Trump named Christopher Miller, previously director of the National Counterterrorism Center, to become Acting Defense Secretary. Miller is an Army Special Forces who previously oversaw Special Operations policy at the Pentagon and served as a counterterrorism official at the White House National Security Council. He spent the afternoon at the Pentagon getting briefed on the pressing issues that will dominate his next 10 weeks in office—that is, if he’s able to stay in the job until the end of the administration.

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New top story from Time: This Is How Joe Biden Might Start Fixing America’s Relationship With China

President-elect Joe Biden is heading for the White House. A litany of domestic crises will crowd his in-tray, but when he is able to mull foreign policy it’s relations with China that will require immediate attention.

The world’s number two economy, and America’s top trade partner, was cast as a boogeyman by the Trump administration, which blamed the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) for the coronavirus pandemic, the trade deficit, IP theft, opioid addiction, spying, military aggression and much more besides.

Many issues will remain hotly contested, and some Biden might target more severely—such as a human-rights abuses in western Xinjiang province and the erosion of freedoms in semi-autonomous Hong Kong. But trillions of dollars, and global stability, hinge on the estranged superpowers finding common ground wherever possible.

“China and the United States are competitors, of course, but competition in itself should not be viewed as a destructive force,” says Victor Gao, a Chinese expert on international relations who served as translator to reformist leader Deng Xiaoping. “Competition can actually bring also good things for both countries and for mankind as a whole.”

1. The U.S. and China need to start talking

Biden lambasted Chinese President Xi Jinping as a “thug” on the stump but he has previously boasted of having spent “more time in private meetings” with Xi “than any world leader,” amounting of “25 hours of private dinners.” Xi, in turn, lauded Biden as “my old friend” in 2013—gushing praise in CCP-speak.

Cordiality is sorely needed. Communication channels between U.S. and Chinese officials are currently “zippo,” according to one top U.S. diplomat, while China’s ambassador to the U.S., Cui Tiankai, has been completely frozen out of discussions with even junior Trump administration officials.

This is dangerous on many levels—not least because it creates a lack of a de-escalation mechanisms, should there be an accident, or miscalculation, between each nation’s navies in the contested South China Sea, where Beijing and Washington have been ramping up military drills and freedom-of-navigation sorties respectively.

An early first summit between Biden and Xi will help set the tone for relations. Biden’s easiest win may simply be the fact that he is not his predecessor. “Trump is fundamentally a person without decency, and you cannot have a friend without decency,” says Gao. “Biden is a person with decency—that’s very, very important.”

Read more: U.N. Head Says U.S.-China Tensions Risk Dividing World

2. Calling a truce in the U.S.-China trade war

Trump focused on reducing America’s $345.6 billon trade deficit with China, but it actually grew during his tenure. It also provided an excuse for Xi—a self-proclaimed (albeit reluctant) free-market globalist—to chart a more domestic course.

Last week, Xi published the rationale behind his so-called Dual Circulation Strategy (DCS), which aims to maintain China’s export economy while bolstering domestic consumption through state assistance to local firms. “[As] anti-globalization has intensified, some countries have practiced unilateralism and protectionism,” Xi said. “Under such circumstances, we must … rely more on the domestic market.”

A Biden administration can help torpedo these arguments by returning to rules-based, free-market trade relations. There are inklings of hope, even in areas that have long been a sticking point between China and its trading partners—such as access for foreign firms to the domestic market.

At a major CCP policy forum last month, China unveiled plans to rollback red tape on financial services, of which U.S. firms are market leaders. Although such reforms have been promised many times before, bankers tell TIME that the new proposals are more tangible. Such concessions can be built upon by a determined White House.

Costfoto/Barcroft Media via Getty Images Aerial photography of Yangshan deep water port terminal ships for lifting operations, including many of the world’s container ships carrying exhibits for the third China International Fair. Shanghai, China, October 25, 2020.

3. Building U.S.-China Cooperation

The space for collaboration between the U.S. and China shrank precipitously over Trump’s tenure. The most obvious area for Biden to look for common ground would be climate change, which Trump lambasted as a “hoax,” withdrawing the U.S. from the Paris Climate Accords and stripping back regulation on polluting industries.

“Biden has made clear that climate change will be a big part of his administration, but you can’t do anything on climate change unless you bring China with you,” says Prof. Nick Bisley, an Asia specialist at Australia’s La Trobe University.

China remains the world’s worst polluter but has recast itself in recent years as an environmental champion, unveiling ambitious new targets to reach peak carbon emissions by 2030 and be carbon neutral by 2060.

There are also opportunities to build consensus on issues like coronavirus vaccine development, education, cultural ties, nuclear proliferation, trade and investment. Despite the pandemic and the specter of economic decoupling, Chinese firms are also heading for a record number of IPOs in the U.S. this year. Given the turmoil roiling the U.S., picking more fights with Beijing is unlikely to feature high on Biden agenda.

“Biden’s China policy certainly has a hard edge to it,” says Prof. John Delury, an Asia expert at Yonsei University in Seoul. However, he adds, it will likely be “more coherent and predictable, seeing ways in which to cooperate … and there are elements within Beijing that will be relieved to get back to that.”

Photo by Kevin Frayer/Getty Images Smoke billows from a large steel plant as a Chinese labourer works at an unauthorized steel factory, foreground, on November 4, 2016 in Inner Mongolia, China.

4. Reducing tensions

The Trump administration’s ideological beef with China was spelled out by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who challenged the legitimacy of the CCP and called for regime change. In this light, every aspect of bilateral relations came under attack, including visas for Chinese students, seemingly innocuous social media platforms like TikTok, and the sale of U.S. tech components to Chinese firms.

A lot of these battles were self-defeating, such as a crackdown on Chinese journalists in the U.S., which simply prompted a retaliation against journalists, and local staff, at U.S. media organizations in China. Ordering China to close its consulate in Houston also prompted the shuttering of the U.S. consulate in Chengdu, severing a vital conduit for intelligence on human-rights abuses in nearby Tibet and Xinjiang.

Keeping confrontation limited to the areas that matter most—with human rights front and center—will help dispel notions that the U.S. is determined to undermine China at every turn.

“Ultimately, I think we are going to see a more sophisticated approach to competing with China that doesn’t say everything’s black and white,” says Bisley. “But high-tech competition and the risks of two Internets, will continue to be a challenge.”

Read more: How TikTok Found Itself in the Middle of a U.S.-China Tech War

5. Strengthening U.S. alliances in Asia-Pacific

Ganging up on China might not seem like a great way to mend ties, given that Beijing has traditionally preferred dealing with individual states instead of multinational groupings like the European Union. But Biden was key to the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP)—a sprawling trade pact including the U.S. and 11 other countries from Asia and the Americas.

It was designed to coax better trade practices out of China, but Trump nixed the pact on his first full day in office. The remaining 11 members eventually moved forward with a modified agreement while freezing 22 provisions insisted upon by Washington, including protections for U.S. workers. Whether Biden would be willing to rejoin TPP is an open question—his “Buy American” policy might preclude membership, while existing members may be reluctant to renegotiate terms with Washington. But it’s the kind of consensus-based approach that gives Beijing a migraine.

There is, of course, safety in numbers, especially when China has unleashed unilateral economic retaliation for various grievances. After Australia called for an independent probe into the origins of COVID-19, for example, Beijing hiked tariffs on Australian barley by 80% and cut back meat and wine imports. Canada, Argentina, New Zealand, South Korea are among many nations to have felt similar measures.

State Department sources say they are considering a possible economic equivalent of NATO’s keystone Articlle 5, which states that an attack on one member state is an attack on all. Such a pact is farfetched—economic interests are more divergent than security—but a renewed multilateral approach could be a smart card to play.

“As China gets bigger and stronger, even non-allies and former enemies like Vietnam want the U.S. to play a more active role in the region,” says Delury. “Even Kim Jong Un worries about being beholden to Xi Jinping.”

New top story from Time: As Biden Wins the Presidency, Trump Digs in for a Fight

Donald Trump lost the presidency while he was at one of his golf courses.

The news came on an unseasonably warm and sunny fall day in Washington, and as major networks and the Associated Press called the presidential race for Joe Biden after nearly five days of vote counting, Trump was playing a round of golf at his course in Sterling, Va. More than five hours after the race was called for Biden, after he had returned to the White House, Trump tweeted, “I WON THE ELECTION,” and perpetuated baseless claims of fraud. Trump then tweeted that he had received nearly 71 million votes, without mentioning that Biden has received nearly 75 million. (The count is ongoing, and it will be weeks until state and local election officials certify the final results.)

A statement from the Trump campaign on Saturday morning suggested their fight will continue. “The simple fact is this election is far from over,” read the statement, attributed to Trump himself. “Joe Biden has not been certified as the winner of any states, let alone any of the highly contested states headed for mandatory recounts, or states where our campaign has valid and legitimate legal challenges that could determine the ultimate victor.” Starting on Monday, the statement read, Trump’s campaign will press forward “prosecuting our case in court to ensure election laws are fully upheld and the rightful winner is seated.”

During the week of the election, the Trump campaign filed roughly a dozen lawsuits in battleground states around the country, but election experts tell TIME that none are likely to change the outcome of the race. Trump’s aides inside the White House are settling in for days of legal challenges to give Trump’s supporters more certainty in the result.

“Do all the court challenges, all the recounts, so that there’s a consensus at the end of the process so everybody says we know for certain that one guy lost and one guy won and we can all be big boys and girls and move on,” says a White House official. “Let’s get this done right, now,” the official says, otherwise “you leave this as a wound to fester.” The official thinks that Trump will concede if he doesn’t win after his legal challenges are exhausted.

For the moment, Trump’s mood is black. “He’s ripsh-t,” a former White House official still in touch with Trump’s inner circle said on Friday, before the race was officially called by the AP. “He thinks that they stole it, and he wants it to play out in the legal fights,” the former official says. Despite Trump’s repeated claims, there is no evidence of wide-spread voter fraud in the election.

A White House spokesperson did not answer when asked Saturday afternoon whether Trump has spoken to Biden today, or whether he plans to concede, instead pointing to the statement the Trump campaign had released earlier in the day. Just before 4 p.m. ET, the White House signaled that Trump would not make any public appearances for the rest of the evening.

When asked about Trump not conceding the race on Saturday, Symone Sanders, senior advisor to Biden’s campaign, said, “Donald Trump does not get to decide the winner of elections. The people decide, voters in the country decide— as we have long said— and voters have made their choice very clear.”

If Trump refuses to concede, it would be historic. “There is no precedent for a defeated candidate in a presidential election to refuse a concession,” says Timothy Naftali, a history professor at New York University. There’s no rule that says a defeated incumbent has to concede, and refusing to concede doesn’t change the outcome of the race. But it has symbolic importance.

“Rituals have a purpose, and traditions have a purpose,” says Naftali. “The reason here is that what you want most of all is for the person who’s elected to be viewed legitimately by all Americans as their head of state. And if you have a candidate who doesn’t concede, it’s as if he’s saying, to in this case over 70 million people, you were cheated.”

While Trump has refused so far to publicly accept the results, the city around him has. Cars honked, music blared and people took to the streets in D.C. around the White House to celebrate his defeat on Saturday.

Fault lines quickly emerged among other Republican leaders over whether to support Trump’s inaccurate claims of a corrupt process and unwillingness to accept the reality of a loss. Ambassador John Bolton, Trump’s former national security advisor, called it a “character test” for Republicans. “Any candidate is entitled to pursue appropriate election-law remedies if they feel there has been misconduct or error,” he said in a statement. “But no one, especially a sitting President, should disparage our electoral system without hard facts.” In a Wall Street Journal op-ed, former White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney wrote that Trump would commit to a peaceful transition of power, but noted that he will “will fight like a gladiator until the election is conclusively determined.”

“I’m afraid it could be a long couple of months, but I’m hopeful it won’t be,” says Republican Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan. “If there are legitimate concerns—there’s always going to be a few abnormalities, if it’s within the margin for a recount that’s perfectly legitimate and a part of the process. What we want to avoid is frivolous lawsuits that drag out the result of the election and continue to keep us divided at a time when we need to come together.”

So far, Trump has given no indication that he’ll work to bridge that divide.

-With reporting by Molly Ball/Washington

New top story from Time: Why It’s A Mistake To Simplify the ‘Latino Vote’

Ten years after political science professor Marisa Abrajano wrote about the false assumptions made towards Latino voters, political pundits and campaigns are still making the same mistakes in this election, she says. The assumption of a singular “Latino vote” is wrong, for one, and actually it should come as no surprise that Cuban Americans in Miami Dade voted for President Trump.

Latinos are not a monolith, and not one unified force. The differences between communities are vast and deep. The U.S. is home to an estimated nearly 61 million Latinos, according to the Pew Research Center, and range in age, race, gender, religion, socio-economic status, political ideology and educational attainment. Most are English proficient, and most were born in the U.S.

Despite these nuances, on Election Day the “Latino vote,” was analyzed as a single, unified entity by some political pundits, journalists and campaign officials without acknowledgment of the complexities of a demographic that makes up an estimated 18% of the U.S. population—a symptom of a wider trend of limited Latino outreach during political elections.

Latinos in the U.S. come from all parts of Latin America, Central America and Mexico. Some Latinos have lived in the U.S. for generations. There’s a variety of Spanish dialects, languages, foods, and traditions. It should come as no surprise that there are also differences in political ideology.

“The assumption is that Latinos are a monolithic group of voters, and the reality is that Latinos make up individuals hailing from more than a dozen different countries,” Abrajano, who teaches at UC San Diego, tells TIME. “The Latino vote in Florida is different from the Latino vote in California, and from Nevada, Arizona—and so to make broad strokes, or using this pan-ethnic term, can be problematic, and the same trend was evident 10 years ago.”

In the aftermath of Election Day, many took to social media to express their concern that analysts were painting Latinos with a broad brush. “It’s laughable that in 2020, this country still needs to be reminded, Sesame Street style, that Latinos are not a monolith & the Latino vote is a mirage,” wrote Los Angeles Times writer Esmeralda Bermudez in a Twitter thread.

It’s laughable that in 2020, this country still needs to be reminded, Sesame Street style, that Latinos are not a monolith & the Latino vote is a mirage. This misconception comes from how little u bother knowing us, how superficially u cover us & how absent we are in newsrooms.

— Esmeralda Bermudez (@BermudezWrites) November 4, 2020

“I think the most important thing for people to understand is that there is no ‘Latino vote,'” says Lisa García Bedolla, vice provost for graduate studies and dean of the Graduate Division at the UC Berkeley. “What we call Latinos or the Latino community is made up of folks who are very different in terms of national origin, in terms of generation, in terms of language use, nativity, class, gender, gender identity, sexuality, and then it also really matters where people end up living.”

But though social scientists like García Bedolla and Abrajano have for decades studied and even provided advice for how political campaigns could better engage wide-ranging communities with nuance, not much has changed, including this election year. García Bedolla says what often happens is that campaign managers wait until late into a campaign to begin Latino voter outreach. Often that comes in the form of a campaign ad in Spanish.

“I have been involved for at least a decade in trying to educate [political operatives] about these nuances,” García Bedolla says, but, she adds, often the people in decision-making positions lack the cultural awareness necessary to be effective.

“I literally had somebody ask me in 2016 what’s the bumper sticker that is going to mobilize Latinos?” García Bedolla says. “What we actually needed were mobilization strategies that would talk to the third, fourth, fifth, and sixth generation English monolingual Mexican Americans in San Antonio…That’s the kind of specificity that we need.”

García Bedolla and those who spoke to TIME all say that political campaigners need to engage with Latinos early and often, year-round, to understand the needs of individual communities. What’s important to Puerto Ricans in New York City, for example, will differ from Mexican Americans in the Rio Grande Valley.

Because Latinos nationwide vote for Democrats in larger numbers than they do for Republicans, one misconception is that as the population of eligible Latino voters grows in the U.S., so will votes for Democrats. It’s a myth social scientists refer to as “demography as destiny.” Of the estimated nearly 61 million Latinos in the U.S., Pew estimates 32 million were eligible to vote this year, or 13.3% of all eligible voters.

“Both political parties in this country need to recognize that Latinos are not a given entity, they are a constituency that demands recruitment,” says Antonio Arrellano, interim executive director of Jolt Action, a progressive organization in Texas that aims to increase Latino political engagement. Texas is home an estimated 5.6 million eligible Latino voters, coming in second only to California with an estimated 7.9 million, according to Pew.

For that reason, Arrellano says, campaigns cannot take Latino voters for granted. “We need to recognize that Latinx folks across the country have been here for decades, for centuries and have…for generations been overlooked, neglected and underrepresented,” he says. “It looks like now more than ever before, Latinos are coming to terms with the fact that the political power in this country is rightly in their hands and you have seen that turnout in Arizona, in Nevada, in Texas, where Latinos are engaged like never before because they know that the next chapter of American history will be written by them.”

Party recruitment, Arrellano, Abrajano, and García Bedolla stress, cannot be as simple as speaking Spanish during a political debate, or opening a rally with mariachi music—symbolic cultural messaging to relate to Latino voters that lack substance, which García Bedolla adds, she finds insulting.

Just like all voters, life’s experiences inform the way Latino voters vote, not just ethnic or racial identity. “It makes it seem that, if I’m a Democrat, it’s just because I’m a Latina,” she says. “It’s not because of anything that’s happened to me in my life.”

In fact according to Pew, in 2018, 62% of Latino voters identified with or leaned toward the Democratic Party, while 27% leaned toward or identified with Republicans. But this is not something that is widely recognized and political pundits’ surprise at Latino support for Trump on Election Day—the Cuban vote in Florida, for example—points to a lack of understanding of nuances of Latinos in the U.S., says Geraldo Cadava, a professor of history at Northwestern University who wrote “The Hispanic Republican.”

“I mean it really shouldn’t be a surprise,” he tells TIME. “The fact of the matter is that in every presidential election since Richard Nixon won the election in 1972, between a quarter and a third of Latinos have voted for the Republican candidate…by this point you could say that there has been a half-century tradition of Latinos, a significant minority of Latinos, voting for Republican candidates.”

The Cuban American population of Miami-Dade County, for example, has since the 1970s leaned towards the Republican party. But within that community exists nuances as well. Older Cubans who fled from the Castro Regime are still more likely to vote for a Republican than younger generations, Cadava says.

The Trump 2020 Campaign did make attempts to reach Cuban Americans by propagating an anti-socialist message, one that may also resonate with other Latino groups who have their own anti-socialism sentiments, Cadava adds. Venezuelan’s, for example, who take issue with President Nicolás Maduro.

On the other side of the coin, former Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders also saw wide support from Latinos in Nevada. Analysts credit that success to the months-long effort to win over Nevada Latinos, who eventually helped him win the state in February. “It’s because he did something that other politicians sometimes forget to do: He asked for their votes,” wrote USA Today’s Ruben Navarrette Jr.

When political campaigns fail to do the robust outreach to individual Latino communities, grassroots organizers are often the one ones to fill the void. In Arizona, a battleground state, grassroots organizers have stepped up to mobilize Black, indigenous and people of color, an effort at least 10 years in the making, since campaigners were not taking the steps to engage with this block of voters.

This year, the state saw a strong turn out for Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, something Alejandra Gomez, co-executive director of Living United for Change in Arizona (LUCHA), a grassroots organization that works to support communities of color, credits to long-term mobilization efforts of organizations like hers.

For a decade, the organization has mobilized around campaign season, knocking on doors in neighborhoods that went ignored by party officials. They helped to increase Latino voter registration, hosted community meetings in key locations, and developed relationships within communities. Gomez says they considered how an outreach strategy for Latinos who are newly naturalized citizens could differ from a strategy intended for Latinos who have lived in the U.S. for multiple generations.

“Demographics are absolutely not destiny,” Gomez tells TIME. “We just did something historic…and for us that is incredible, that is the work, that is 10 years of organizing. And those voters, we’re not going to lose them because we’re gonna call them next week and we’re gonna debrief and thank them for having participated.”

New top story from Time: The Court Battle Over Key Swing States Has Just Begun. And It’s Not Likely to Be Over Soon

In the wee hours of the morning after Election Day, state officials were still tallying millions of mail-in and absentee ballots in key battleground states, and the presidential race remained too close to call. But that didn’t stop President Donald Trump from gathering his supporters in the East Room of the White House, falsely asserting he had already won, and promising he would challenge future election results in court. “We’ll be going to the U.S. Supreme Court,” he said. “We want all voting to stop. We don’t want them to find any ballots at 4 o’clock in the morning and add them to the list.”

By the time the sun had risen, the Trump campaign had taken its cue, with top advisers calling for multiple lawsuits on the grounds that the ongoing vote count would result in tallying “illegally cast ballots.” In a recording of a Nov. 4 phone call with supporters obtained by TIME, campaign aides forecast legal challenges in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. By late that afternoon, the campaign had demanded a recount in Wisconsin, filed suit to stop the ballot count in Michigan, and launched two more legal challenges questioning the ballot-counting process and voter-ID laws in Pennsylvania. It also filed a motion to intervene in an existing dispute over Pennsylvania ballots at the U.S. Supreme Court.

Election-law experts from both sides of the aisle dismissed the Trump team’s suggestion that the ongoing vote count was untoward. State election officials routinely take days to finish counting ballots, and with more than 90 million Americans requesting mail-in ballots because of the pandemic, delays were widely expected. “It’s contrary to law and the way we run elections to suggest we should stop counting votes because one of the candidates is ahead and doesn’t want to fall behind,” says Trevor Potter, former general counsel for John McCain’s presidential campaigns.

But with relatively tight margins in key battleground states, including Pennsylvania, Nevada and Georgia, it was also immediately clear that an onslaught of election-related litigation was all but inevitable. It is no longer a question of whether the results of the 2020 presidential race will end up mired in the courts; it is how long and how consequential that court battle will be.

The contours of the coming fights are only beginning to emerge. Experts say that in coming days, new cases could hinge on anything from recounts to obscure state statutes to whether the U.S. Postal Service delivered ballots.

The Biden campaign’s legal team has been sanguine about the deluge to come. “Let me tell you this: if you go to the Supreme Court today, drive around the building, you will not see Donald Trump, and you will not see his lawyers,” says Bob Bauer, former White House counsel under Barack Obama and a senior adviser to the Biden campaign. “He’s not going to the Supreme Court of the United States to get the voting to stop.”

But at least some top Republicans, including Tom Spencer, who worked for George W. Bush in Bush v. Gore, the case that decided the 2000 election, foresee the legal wrangling ending at the court, where Trump has appointed three of the nine Justices. He predicts that the outcome may hinge on three Justices—Brett Kavanaugh, John Roberts and Amy Coney Barrett—all of whom, like Spencer, worked on Bush’s team two decades ago. In September, Trump said he wanted Barrett installed on the high court before the election to ensure a full bench to decide election disputes. “The big issue of course is how is Justice Barrett going to rule,” Spencer says.

The consequences of the coming legal battles may extend beyond who becomes the next President of the United States. The litigation could test Americans’ confidence in the electoral process, shake their faith in the judiciary as an impartial arbiter of U.S. law, and further divide an already polarized nation. “Make no mistake: our democracy is being tested in this election,” Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf said Nov. 4. “This is a stress test of the ideals upon which this country was founded.”

Lawyers for both the Trump and Biden campaigns have been preparing for this moment for months. With backing from deep-pocketed donors, as well as the Republican and Democratic National Committees, each has amassed an army of top-tier lawyers and legal experts who have been deployed at strategic outposts around the country. In the months before the election, lawyers for various Democratic and Republican entities filed more than 400 election-related lawsuits, putting the 2020 race on track to be the most litigated in history.

Some of these decisions may have made a post–Election Day showdown more likely by narrowing the margin between Biden and Trump. On Oct. 26, the Supreme Court upheld Wisconsin’s ballot-receipt deadline. Appeals courts similarly ruled in favor of shorter ballot-receipt deadlines in Georgia and Michigan. The Supreme Court decision in the Wisconsin case “unquestionably” made the margin closer, says Jay Heck, executive director of Common Cause in the state. “There are probably thousands of absentee ballots that will be [arriving] in the next few days.” When the deadline was extended during Wisconsin’s primary this year, the state’s election commission said it resulted in an additional 79,000 ballots being counted.

Lorenzo Meloni—Magnum Photos for TIMEKen Weber, a Pennsylvanian election official, validating votes. All ballots arriving after 8 p.m. on Nov. 3 were segregated

The lawsuits have only just begun. On Nov. 4, Bill Stepien, Trump’s campaign manager, noting the close margins in Wisconsin, called the state “recount territory.” “There have been reports of irregularities in several Wisconsin counties which raise serious doubts about the validity of the results,” he said. Pennsylvania is also likely “ground zero” for coming election-related litigation, experts say. The commonwealth’s 20 electoral votes make it the biggest prize of all the remaining battleground states, and its decision to expand access to mail-in voting for the first time this election cycle opens the door to lawsuits. The two lawsuits filed by the Trump campaign on Nov. 4 are likely just the beginning.

The state has already been the target of multiple Republican-backed lawsuits, with mixed results. In mid-September, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled that mail-in ballots could be accepted through Nov. 6. Republicans tried twice to get the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene, and while the Justices declined to rule, they left open the possibility of hearing the case at a later date. If Pennsylvania is very close, says Potter, lawsuits are much more likely to occur because “both candidates will be fighting over which ballots to count.”

Pennsylvania’s election officials also recently ordered ballots arriving after 8 p.m. on Election Day or without definitive time stamps to be “segregated” from the rest of the ballots—a move that, election experts say, suggests they are anticipating a postelection legal challenge to such ballots. On Election Day, local Republicans filed suit challenging the commonwealth’s rules allowing voters to recast ballots after their first ones were disqualified.

As the lawyers sharpen their arguments, they are most certainly looking at how judges on both the appellate courts and the U.S. Supreme Court have ruled. In prior preelection cases, judicial opinions have most often rested on one of two principles. The first is that courts should not make decisions that change the rules of voting and ballot counting too close to an election, to avoid confusing people. The second is that state legislatures—not judges—should determine election laws, even if those laws may result in some voters not having their ballots counted. “Federal courts have no business dis-regarding those state interests simply because the federal courts believe that later deadlines would be better,” Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote on Oct. 26 in a controversial opinion upholding Wisconsin’s Election Day deadline for receiving mail-in ballots.

Democrats and voting-rights activists, along with dissenting judges and Justices, argue that courts should make decisions that encourage enfranchisement, especially during a global pandemic. Chief Justice John Roberts has staked out the middle ground, arguing that state courts can interpret state laws but that federal courts should stay above the fray.

Amid all the Solomonic parsing, good news may yet await Americans who are eager to see a quick, clean resolution to the presidential race. For one, the incoming litigation from the Trump and Biden campaigns may be moot if the final vote tallies aren’t razor thin. Even if a court rules on a case that results in thousands of ballots being invalidated, it may not change the final result. “We still have votes to count,” says Edward B. Foley, an election-law expert at Ohio State University. “It’s still possible the margins of victory in all the battleground states are decisive enough that it’s not going to be Bush v. Gore–type litigation.” It’s also possible important cases may be resolved quickly at the local level. That would prevent lengthy, high-profile fights at the Supreme Court that could tarnish the credibility of the election’s outcome.

Even if the fight does go up to the Supreme Court, there’s a clear end in sight. Under U.S. law, state electors are presumably valid if chosen by Dec. 8, and electors meet to cast their votes on Dec. 14. On Jan. 6, the newly sworn-in Congress counts the results and the Vice President pronounces them official. Which means even this unusually partisan and unruly moment in American democracy could help underscore one still reliable truth: all the bluster and litigiousness in the world can’t displace the rule of law. —With reporting by Charlotte Alter, Currie Engel and Julia Zorthian/New York and Tessa Berenson and Vera Bergengruen/Washington

New top story from Time: ‘I Vote Because’: Americans Are Sharing Stories of How Their Ancestors Overcame Discrimination in Order to Vote

On Election Day, Americans are always reminded of the power of casting a vote. But, as many social-media users have been reminding their followers, some Americans have historically had a harder time than others when it comes to exercising that power.

On Tuesday and the days leading up to it, people have been sharing stories of family members and historical figures who, because of their race, faced and overcame obstacles to vote. The stories in these posts vary, but share a message of inspiration: the idea that voting in 2020 is a way to honor the men and women who did not have that right or could not exercise it due to violence, intimidation, poll taxes and literacy tests.

To keep Black voters from the polls after the franchise was extended in the wake of the Civil War, some states, particularly in the South, passed laws requiring a fee to vote or requiring them to pass literacy tests, some of which featured impossible questions like “How many grains of sand are on a beach?” and “How many bubbles are in a bar of soap?” While these laws did not explicitly mention race, county registrars often applied them unequally, circumventing the law and effectively disenfranchising Black voters. For Black women, who fought for suffrage only to be left behind when the 19th Amendment granted women the vote in 1920, the struggle was doubly painful—and, in many of the cases highlighted on social media, the motivation was doubly powerful.

On Oct. 22, FOX Sports host Coley Harvey shared a story on Instagram about how his grandmother had to quote the Constitution to register to vote in Crawford County, Ga., in 1947—which she did, and was registered.

Jewel Burks Solomon, head of Google for Startups in the U.S., tweeted that her 94-year-old grandmother told her that she had been voting since she was 21, despite having to pay poll taxes and take literacy tests.

Last night I asked my 94 year old grandmother if she’d voted. She said since age 21 she has never missed an opportunity to vote. She reminded me that for her first several elections she had to pay poll taxes and take literacy tests in order to vote, but was never deterred. #vote

— Jewel Burks Solomon (@jewelmelanie) November 3, 2020

Deborah E. McDowell, Director of the Carter G. Woodson Institute at the University of Virginia and a professor of English, was also inspired by her grandmother Viola Gee Williams, who hosted voter meetings in Alabama.

I vote because I still remember that my parents & grandparents, aunts & uncles, cousins & neighbors had to pay a poll tax in order to vote in AL, my home state. I vote in honor of my grandmother, Viola Gee Williams, who hosted meetings of the Bessemer Voters League in her home. https://t.co/dTWfvY1XpS

— Deborah E. McDowell (@dem8z) November 3, 2020

Latinx historian Lori Flores displayed her grandfather and aunt’s poll tax receipts on her Day of the Dead alter, and shared it on Twitter on Nov. 1 to inspire people to vote on Election Day.

I thought my paternal grandfather and aunt’s poll tax receipts were appropriate to put on my #diadelosmuertos altar this year. #Tejanovote #Latinovote pic.twitter.com/e7gK5mlRs8

— Lori Flores (@lori_flori) November 2, 2020

And voting-rights historian Martha S. Jones shared that her own grandmother Susie Jones helped Black voters in Greensboro, N.C., register to vote with her classmates and teachers at Bennett College during “Operation Door Knock” in 1960, the same year of the famous lunch counter sit-in that galvanized the civil rights movement.

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Jones also shared a circa 1890 list of “colored voters” registered in Greensboro, N.C., circulated so that white Democrats could challenge their right to vote.

I vote because ca. 1890 white Democrats in Greensboro, NC, conspired to drive my great grandfather Dallas Jones and all Black men there away from the polls. pic.twitter.com/ejb122TsVC

— Martha S. Jones, JD, PhD (@marthasjones_) November 3, 2020

Jones, author of Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All, was reminded of the chilling document after watching the footage of police officers pepper-spraying protesters marching to a polling place in Graham, N.C.—now the subject of a federal lawsuit, filed Tuesday, alleging voter intimidation by the city’s police chief and the Alamance County Sheriff. (Police and the sheriff’s office have said they did not aim pepper spray at the protesters and that the crowd was told to disperse before the spray was used.)

And, in tribute to the women who paved the way for all these grandmothers hat-tipped on Twitter, Jones also shared stories of figures from Mary McLeod Bethune—a future FDR Administration official who voted in the 1920s even after the KKK showed up at the Daytona Beach, Fla., school where she taught to try to deter her—to Joe Ella Moore, who was turned away from the Mississippi voter rolls seven times before she successfully registered to vote at a Prentiss, Miss., motel in August 1965, days after the Voting Rights Act was signed into law.

Read more: ‘It’s a Struggle They Will Wage Alone.’ How Black Women Won the Right to Vote

Jones says she hopes these images will help give people the courage to go out and vote during a pandemic, and to remind people “why their votes count and why it’s essential to turn out.”

At a time of national conversation about where the U.S. goes from here, she wants to remind people that voting is an essential step in continuing the long march their ancestors started.

As an expert in the history of Black women securing the vote—a decades-long battle that has often been overlooked—she gets a lot of questions about how to persist through difficult times, she says. And to her, there’s nothing like these stories to help show the way.

“The answer for me is in part the history, is that reminder that in the face of unspeakable odds, there were Black women who persisted,” she says. “They bequeathed to us their inspiration, but I think they also bequeathed to us a kind of responsibility to pay it forward. What we’re doing is not only about us, about this moment. It’s about a long tradition, and it’s also about creating the possibilities for the future, for our children and grandchildren.”