Every Vote Counts in the Battle to Win Back Our Country

 By P.S. White

I have been mostly silent the past few months because the general attitude has finally been moving in the right direction against Donald Trump.  The media and many others are finally openly acknowledging Trump's authoritarian power grabs and the imminent threat he poses to our Democracy.  While the polls have shown that the people of this country grow weary of his failed presidency.  And while Joe Biden is yet another compromise candidate, voters appear to have more confidence in him than they previously did in Hillary Clinton.  Quite a number of Republicans have even endorsed Biden or at least urged people not to vote for Trump.  But even though Biden currently has a lead in the national polls of around ten percent, that is no guarantee of a victory, and every last vote will be needed to defeat Trump.

 Hillary was leading in the polls at this point in 2016, though not by as high of a margin.  The assumption was that she would take the election, but Trump ended up pulling the surprise victory which set our country on course for four years of disastrous leadership.  The polls were not wrong, though, it's just that the margin of error worked in Trump's favor.

Polls are simply an estimate of who people will vote by questioning a sampling of prior voters on how they will cast their ballot in the upcoming election.  They offer no guarantee of results and the numbers tend to fluctuate as we get closer to the end of the race.  And the polls have a margin of error anywhere from two to four percent.  So Hillary could have been leading by as much as three to four percent in the polls in any given state and still lost, but the polling would still be accurate within the margin of error.  It's simple statistics.

And in fact, Trump won the 2016 race by a razor-thin margin.  He flipped the states Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin which gave him the victory, but he did it by the narrowest of margins.  Each state he won by a fraction of a percent (in Michigan by only two-tenths of one percent), and across all three states it was a mere 80K votes that turned the election in his favor.  That is 0.6% of the total votes cast across the three states (what amounts to a statistical coin flip) and 0.06% (six one-hundredths of a percent) of the total votes cast across the country.

Currently, Biden is polling well above the margin of error in all three of those states, which would be enough to give him the victory in the coming election.  In addition, he is polling on the upper end of the margin of error in Arizona and North Carolina, both of which went to Trump last election. And he is very competitive in former Republican strongholds such as George and Texas.  But it is far too early to call the victory in his favor.

Trump and his supporters have made claims to a silent majority that is not captured by the polls, a claim that has not been substantiated.  But there is an indication that some voters may be missed in the polls.  Trump tends to energize non-college-educated white males, a segment of the population that has typically not voted in the past, and that has been missed by polls.  Some of the pollsters have adjusted for this, but it is difficult to ascertain if they have been fully accounted for at this point.

So that makes it all the more important that everybody get out and cast their vote to assure that Trump's brand of tyranny does not continue into a second four-year term (and possibly beyond).  The fact that Biden currently has a lead in the polls does not assure a victory on election night.  There could still be pockets of voters out there unaccounted for, and we already saw from the prior election that a small percentage of voters can swing the results.   If Trump remains in office, our Democracy may not survive, so now is the time to make the stand at the polls and vote for a better America.