Recall that I said yesterday to use only the most recent polls in predicting what will happen on Election Day. So here goes.

              The most recent national polls covering more than 16,000 registered and likely voters have Joe up by 10 to 12 points. These polls were taken between October 19 and November 1. More important, these polls all set the dog-shit vote at 4%. If these polls are correct, Joe will wind up with a wider margin for the popular vote since Bush beat Dukakis in 1998.

              As for the electoral votes and the battleground states, the most recent polls have it like this:

              The poll results from the battleground states is entirely consistent with what we have seen since we first started doing this weekly report back on August 17^th. Joe had a 4.5% overall lead against Trump, Joe now leads Trump 50.13% to 46.3%. I added Minnesota to the list after Trump held a rally there a month ago, and if we pull Minnesota out of the current numbers, the gap between the two camps stays just about the same.

              Two other points to note. In August, Trump had slight leads in three states: Iowa, Georgia, and Texas. Now he has slight leads in Ohio, Iowa, and Texas. The other 10 battleground states give Joe margins between 1% and 12%.

              Here’s the most important number of all. Joe is at or above 50% in 6 battleground states; Trump hasn’t hit the 50% mark in any battleground state. Back on August 17, the overall dog-shit vote was 6.77%. It’s now down to 3.56%. If Trump were to pull out every, single undecided vote in evert, single battleground state, Joe would still grab 77 electoral votes. How many does he need? He needs 62 electoral votes.

              No wonder Trump and his gang are trying to suppress the vote. Yesterday our good friend Steve Klitzman sent around an op-ed written by an attorney, Ben Ginsburg, who co-chaired the Bipartisan Presidential Commission on Election Administration in 2013. Ginsburg spent nearly 40 years working for various GOP campaigns, and now believes that Trump is taking the GOP back to the ‘bad old days’ when they signed a consent decree to stop intimidating voters in 1981.

              There’s only one little problem with Ginsburg’s lament about how ‘his party,’ the GOP, is going back to its old-time, ‘voter suppression’ ways. The issue then and now isn’t about votes. It’s about race. The GOP has been playing the race card at lest since 1964 when Barry Goldwater ran a national campaign based on ‘state’s rights.’

              Richard Nixon redrew the national electoral map in 1968 by promising Southern segregationists that he would ‘go slow’ on civil rights. Ronald Reagan held his first 1980 campaign rally in a Mississippi town where three kids who had been registering Blacks were abducted, shot, and dumped in a ditch. George H. W. Bush won in 1988 with a TV ad that featured a Black felon who was given a furlough by Mike Dukakis, then went out and committed armed robbery and rape.

              When Trump began using the term ‘silent majority,’ I knew we were going into yet another national election that would turn on the issue of race. Because those words are nothing but code words for telling Whites that it’s okay to feel superior to Blacks as long as you keep your feelings to yourself but express them when you go to vote.

              And if anyone who reads this column wants to deny the reality of what I just said, then I suggest you contact Attorney Ginsburg and tell him that you are also concerned about efforts to ‘suppress’ the vote.

              Just remember what I said the other day. Trump’s not a racist. Trump is Klan.