The election factor no one is talking about

| 9:00 pm EDT September 3, 2020
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Election day is now just 61 days away – even sooner in states with lengthy early voting windows. By now there’s a lot we know about this election, and there’s a lot we don’t. Now is a good time to take stock of what we do and don’t know, as we head into the home stretch.

Here’s what we do know: for all of the ways in which it’s been unprecedented, this election has been fairly stable, and voters seem fairly certain of what they want. The polls kept jumping all over the place in 2016, making it impossible to determine the size of Clinton’s lead. In 2020, the polling averages have consistently pegged Biden with an eight point lead over Trump. Nothing thus far – not a pandemic, not the economy, not civil unrest, not the conventions – has changed voters’ minds.

Here’s what we don’t know: the factors we’ll actually be talking about at the end of this election cycle. In 2016, the election ended up being decided primarily by James Comey’s letter, and secondarily by Russian election interference – two topics that no one was talking about or saw coming sixty days out. So it’s entirely possible the things we’re obsessing about right now, such as the Post Office and DNI briefings, will be very different from the things we end up talking about on election night.

The main thing to remember is that even when Trump or Putin or the Republicans try to cheat in a election, they’re not using a lever under their desk that they can just slide to any desired result. Cheating in an election is hard. It takes a lot of sustained and coordinated effort just to move the needle a little. You also have to be competent in your scheming, which Trump and his people are frequently not.

So instead of sitting around trying to randomly guess which cheating, meddling, or suppression tactics Donald Trump will end up using and whether or not they’ll work, there’s something else we can do. If we invest our time in things like volunteering at polling places, phone banking for Biden, and making sure our friends and family are registered to vote, we can run up the score so much that any cheating efforts won’t make a difference in the outcome. Now let’s go win this.