By Aly Kamadia, Editor-In-Chief, iDose

You can be forgiven if you believe that this year’s US presidential ‘election day’ will produce a clear winner. But forgiveness doesn’t absolve you from clutching onto an assumption that will likely prove dubious.  

To begin with, even though ‘Sleepy Joe’ Biden has awoken and is kicking Dumb Donald’s ass in all of the polling, the numbers aren’t decisive enough to merit the slightest whiff of complacency.

As of September 22nd, Nate Silver gives Trump a 22 in 100 chance of winning the election. In the latest 40 000 simulations that Silver’s organization (538) has conducted, Trump ends up winning roughly one in five times. With six weeks still to go, no serious person would count Trump out of legitimately winning the 2020 election given these tough though not insurmountable odds.

We should also remind ourselves that polling is far from perfect, and in 2016, there was a virtual consensus that Trump would suffer from a humiliating loss. Keeping that in mind, it is of no comfort to Biden supporters that “if electoral votes in state polls are as wrong as they were in 2016″, Trump is headed for victory.  

Of course, polling relies on statistical analysis to capture current voter sentiment. But Trump has proclaimed that voting itself doesn’t matter if he loses: the entire 2020 election is rigged against him. And it will be quite simple to keep effectively nurturing this fiction.     

Trump and company are spreading this lie during a pandemic that will force a historic number of voters to cast mail-in ballots. Since Biden will rely much more on mail-in ballots (i.e. Republicans are generally much likelier to vote in person), right-wing myths touting massive voter fraud about mail-in ballots (for which there is zero evidence for) are proliferating. Predictably, the US Postal Service has been attacked by Trump, one example of which includes attempts to defund it. And the real people trying to rig the election are pouring tens of millions of dollars into courts while attempting to make it harder to vote (as one example), and thus decrease voter turnout – a clear benefit to Trump.  

Also to his advantage are the large number of followers who are willing to inflict violence on American streets if Lord Donald gives the order (for one of many examples during Trump’s presidency, see Charlottesville). Within the additional context of Trump stating that the election is rigged by evil forces and that he won’t accept the electoral outcome if it doesn’t favor him, why would anyone doubt Trump’s enthusiasm to seed violence on the streets should he lose on ‘election day’ or thereafter?

Moreover, Fox News and other right-wing outlets can be relied upon to spread all sorts of Trump-friendly propaganda with unremitting mercy. Trump TV’s (aka Fox’s) skills in spreading propaganda have proven to be impressive.

As an example, while Covid-19 has officially killed more than 200 000 Americans, the narrative coming out of Fox ‘News’ for much of the year has been that Covid-19 is nothing to worry about. We should expect their extraordinary propaganda skills to continue to disrupt the legitimacy of the 2020 election, particularly if Trump isn’t the clear winner.    

And while picking on Fox is child’s play, any responsible comment cannot leave out the most influential news sources of the day, namely, social media.

For a number of years now, some of Silicon Valley’s tech giants have turned into anti-capitalist monopolies whose entire ‘business model’ is premised on addicting its users, regardless of the horrific negative impacts (e.g. harming peoples mental health, letting fake videos that endanger peoples’ lives go viral etc. etc.).

This author has seen no evidence that platforms such as Facebook have pursued even minimal steps that are in harmony with both the spirit of American law and American values. Companies such as Facebook remain immune from facing basic legal obligations that any of America’s newsrooms must follow (e.g. those related to editorial discretion). As a result, rather than Silicon Valley ‘bringing the world together’, no reader should express shock if companies such as Facebook remain the chief suppliers of all sorts of propaganda, including on ‘election day’.  

This trio of unprecedented mail-in ballots, millions of extremely devoted Trump-followers, and support from some of world’s largest propaganda ‘platforms’ make it easy for President Trump to delegitimize the 2020 election.

Along with the reality that efficient and complete counting of ballots on ‘election day’ may simply be impossible, it is more likely than not, that no clear winner will emerge on November 3^rd.

Don’t say you weren’t warned.

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Aly Kamadia is Editor-In-Chief of iDose. To read selected articles by Kamadia, click here.