Some of the polls show Biden ahead by ten points nationally but by much smaller margins in the “battleground” or “swing” states.
Even FiveThirtyEight.com’s Nate Silver, the well-known “guru” of the pollster world, who gives Biden a 90% chance of winning the election, says Trump can still pull off a victory.
We all learned in 2016 that even a popular vote win by almost three million votes was not enough for Hillary Clinton to prevail in the Electoral College.
Silver notes that projected Biden margins in battleground states are considerably narrower than the projections in the national race. So Trump, not even considering all the GOP vote suppression, hundreds of lawsuits his minions are engaging in, and a Supreme Court stacked in his favor, has the Electoral College as a major thing going for him.
Special attention to ongoing voter suppression and legal maneuvering by the GOP is particularly needed in Pennsylvania. If Biden wins all the states in which he is ahead by ten or more points, all he needs to put him over the top with more than 270 Electoral College votes is the state of Pennsylvania. Biden’s lead of 5 points in the polls there is less than half of what it is in major national polls. A massive vote by African-American voters is needed there on Election Day, which is why labor, its allies, and all progressive forces need to be alert to any and all attempts to suppress that vote.
While there are other paths to victory open to Biden, none of them, Silver points out, are “sure” things.
More important than any poll, however, is for all of us to do everything possible to continue the historic and massive voter mobilization that is going on. Over 94 million have already risen up and voted in literal nationwide marches to the polls.
The highest percentages of these voters have turned out in Texas, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, and Arizona.
Trump and the GOP have been laying the groundwork for challenging and dismissing as much of this vote as possible. This is an argument for fighting for every vote—not just in the battleground states but everywhere across the country. The most massive vote everywhere can help beat back the racist and undemocratic challenges planned by the GOP in any one location or another.
Needless to say, that massive vote everywhere is critical to making sure that there are progressive congressional majorities and that local progressives are elected to state legislative and gubernatorial positions who will hold the key to smashing GOP gerrymandering of districts.
Meanwhile, increasing the historic voter upsurge specifically in the battleground states will help shift control of the Senate out of GOP hands and into the hands of senators who will make it possible to realize the progressive planks of the Biden agenda.
Labor, its allies, civil rights, Latino, women’s, youth, and other organizations are absolutely correct in their call for all of us to not let up until the moment the polls close across the country.
It’s ok to finally catch some sleep Tuesday night or early Wednesday morning when the voting is done but don’t catch too much sleep. There will have to be an immediate pivot to joining a movement that demands the counting of every vote and the protection of the results.
There will be rallies in towns and cities across the country on Wednesday, the day after election day at noon local time, and at 5 p.m. local time, with larger mass demonstrations in state capitals and in Washington, D.C., possible for Saturday.
These will be particularly important if Trump declares “victory” early or if he has managed to use the courts or any other avenue to try to pull off an illegitimate victory.
But for now, please don’t rest on the polls that show Biden ahead. Almost all of those polls note anyway that it is still possible for Trump to win.
The thing that will make a Trump win impossible is a continuation of the historic upsurge of voters to the polls between now and closing time on Election Day.
So we know what we have to do.
PROTECT THE RESULTS – Click here for details on actions in your area to demand every vote is counted.
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