23 Days: Fourteen in One Hundred

On Sundays, I’ve been writing about one simple trick to end Trump. Early voting is open in many places. I voted this week. I hope that by now everyone within the sound of my keyboard has a plan, knows how they’ll vote, and is putting it in motion. The next step is to make sure your friends have voted. Put on your own mask before helping others.

Obsessive watchers of political polling sites might be breathing a little easier as Trump’s numbers have fallen. Trump’s erratic performances at the first debate, in his hospital bed, and on Twitter seem to have convinced even more voters that he is not the best person for the job. But that does not mean we can rest easy. It is comforting to see that Biden now wins 86 out of 100 simulations of the 2020 election with the latest polls and best predictive modeling on fivethirtyeight.com. But Trump still wins 14% of FiveThirtyEight’s simulations which is about the same as an American’s odds of dying of heart disease or cancer, the most common causes of death. Given all we know about Trump, it seems like it ought to be more like the odds of dying from a bold of lighting: 1 in 161,856.

I have often used random chance in my art making. I used a random number generator to schedule the walks for Half/Life. The observations in the resulting poems and drawings might have been very different had the numbers spit out a different schedule. I use random numbers sometimes if I can’t decide which of the ten books in my “actively reading” pile to pick up. And so, when I’ve quoted books in this series of posts, I could easily have written about something else entirely had random chance given me a different reading that day.

I have a quick and easy way of generating a number between one and one hundred right next to me as I write this: two 10-sided gaming dice. If they come up 1-14, Trump wins. If they come up 15-100, Biden wins:

Phew. 28. Biden wins this time. Sadly, we can’t take these dice to the electoral college. Poll numbers and simulations don’t count.

Keep voting. Keep telling your friends to vote. Volunteer for get out the vote efforts.