ANALYSIS/OPINION:
Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton have claimed their respective New York City corners for Election Night: Team Clinton will be tended to at the Javits Center, while Team Trump towers at the Hilton.
So, taking a cue from my colleagues about who’s up and who’s down in the polls as the fat lady clears her throat, there remains but a single-word imperative: Vote.
Law enforcement chores have been assigned. Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch reassured voters on Monday that the Justice Department will be covering all bases as polling monitors, and local and state police will be out en masse, too — suggesting rigged elections may not be a thing of the past and that terrorism and violence threats are being taken seriously.
At any rate, what we do need to see — if the prognosticators and exit pollsters really and truly capture America’s decision, especially the working class — is racial/cultural and socio-economic minutiae of the election.
1) How did the Asian-American/Pacific Islander and Hispanic votes go? We might not find out how they voted because we don’t know where they stand.
SEE ALSO: Washington, D.C., voters cast a half-million early ballots
So goes the conclusion of experts in a report on NBCNews.com.
“One fatal flaw of pre-election surveys are too few Latinos in samples, leaving very large margins of error, sometimes exceeding 10 percentage points,” said Gabriel Sanchez of the polling firm Latino Decision. “Additionally, the wrong Latinos are often surveyed, meaning that they are not representative of the population they are supposed to project.”
Said Taeku Lee of Asian American Decisions: “Public polling and the exit polls repeatedly get it wrong when it comes to capturing the Asian American electorate, whether by including too few Asian Americans in the sample, failing to conduct interviews in their primary language, or failing to ask about the issues that really matter to Asian Americans.”
Their comments speak volumes when you consider the fact that Mr. Trump is widely considered too hateful to elect as president and Mrs. Clinton is considered the mother of modern-day American democracy.
Meanwhile, Mrs. Clinton has no one to blame but herself if hard-working Americans vote Trump. For starters, Washington-centric progressives don’t want to admit that migrant labor is as crucial today as slavery was when cotton and tobacco were kings and sugar and produce were queens, and that climate change policy can have a negative effect on agribusiness, including its biotechnology and GMO affairs.
Also, tax increases are no more friends to agribusiness than tough global warming policies, and coal miners want to keep their jobs and their homes, not wear T-shirts proclaiming “We’re with her.”
SEE ALSO: If Clinton wins Florida, it will be because of Puerto Rican voters
Mr. Trump, for his part, leans right on innovative energy and agribusiness policies, and he’s pro-coal.
2) In recent days, Mrs. Clinton and hubby Bill made a point to revisit blue-collar and heavily black urban areas like Detroit and Philadelphia, likely to reassure constituents that a vote for Hillary is the only way to go.
It’s interesting since Mr. Clinton was nicknamed the “first black president” and Mrs. Clinton culturally appropriated an African proverb, “It Takes a Village,” to title her 1996 best-selling book.
Sure, Mrs. Clinton needs black votes to push her to the very top on Tuesday, but apparently didn’t really believe it until FBI chief James Comey said he would look twice as her emails. The black vote, though a Democratic stronghold since last midcentury, is not a monolith — especially when it comes to abortion and religion.
About 25 black clergy wrote to Mrs. Clinton last week to explain their pro-life and religious DNA. In their letter, the clergy called out Mrs. Clinton’s “open contempt for religious freedom,” as cited in emails released by WikiLeaks, and her silence on “soaring abortion rates among black women.”
Unfortunately, the letter’s signatories merely ask that they get an audience with Mrs. Clinton after she moves into the White House. Oh well.
3) The sun will have set in California and a winner (Kamala Harris?) declared in a key U.S. Senate seat before we see the victor emerge in the presidential race, which means there will be plenty of time to vote binge-watch NBC’s “This Is Us.”
This is us, America. We’ll either dump on Trump or trump Hillary.
Vote.
• Deborah Simmons can be contacted at dsimmons@washingtontimes.com.
• Deborah Simmons can be reached at dsimmons@washingtontimes.com.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.