Tuesday night, in a brilliant speech before 75,000-plus people on the Ellipse in Washington, D.C., from which Trump sent a murderous mob against our Capitol, Vice President Kamala Harris asked for your vote.
She was explicit about the stakes: “It will probably be the most important vote you ever cast. This election is more than just a choice between two parties and two different candidates. It is a choice about whether we have a country rooted in freedom for every American or ruled by chaos and division.”
Will you, and those you know, respond by voting?
One of the most common reasons people don’t vote is that they think their vote won’t matter. That it’ll be lost in a sea of millions of votes. Over the past 21 years of doing a daily nationwide radio program, I’ve heard this excuse at least a few thousand times.
But it’s wrong: In reality, when people think like this, they have their math upside down. Elections aren’t additive or subtractive: They’re comparative. That’s literally the whole point of an election.
Take as an example the 2022 race for U.S. Senate in Nevada, in which 988,704 total votes were cast. Catherine Cortez Masto, the Democratic incumbent, won with 498,316 votes. Her challenger, Republican Adam Laxalt, received 490,388 votes, meaning that the margin of victory for Cortez Masto was a mere 7,928 votes.
It’s a virtual certainty that during that 2022 election, for example, some canvasser for Cortez Masto or Laxalt was told by a voter on whose door they knocked, “There will be almost a million votes cast in this election; why should I go to all the effort of voting when my vote will be roughly one in a million?”
Sadly, odds are also good that that canvasser at that point put forth some conventional wisdom platitude like, “Well, every vote counts.” That’s not going to convince anybody to get off their butt—or take time off work or hire a babysitter—to go to the trouble of voting.
Here’s where the logical fallacy comes in. An individual vote’s impact on the election like the Nevada Senate one isn’t one out of 988,704 votes, or even one out of 490,388 or 498,316 votes: It’s one out of 7,928 votes.
In the 2000 presidential race, decided in Florida, Bush “won” by 537 votes. In the 2022 race for Alaska’s lone House district, Mary Peltola beat Sarah Palin by 67 votes. In local races, such small numbers are common: Democrat Dana Hillard beat Republican Edith Tucker for the New Hampshire House by just 71 votes (1,870–1,799).
In economics, this is referred to as “marginal impact,” and in statistics it is called “marginal value.” But for people who’ve never taken an econ or statistics course, it probably never occurs to them.
If lotteries offered those odds, we’d all buy tickets every day; those kind of odds are definitely worth jumping in the car and heading down to the local polling place.
This understanding of how a handful of voters can impact an election also tells us why voting for a third-party candidate can be so deadly in our first-past-the-post, winner-take-all system.
Ironically, voting for a candidate most closely philosophically aligned with one of the two major candidates will always hurt, rather than help, that candidate.
In 2016, for example, Hillary Clinton lost Wisconsin to Trump by 22,748 votes; Jill Stein carried 31,072 votes. In Michigan the story that year was similar: Clinton lost to Donald Trump by 10,704 votes, while Stein carried 51,463. Ditto for Pennsylvania, where Trump won by 44,292 votes and Stein pulled in 49,941 votes.
This is why, as The Washington Post noted last week, a Republican group in Wisconsin has spent nearly a million dollars promoting Stein in that state: “A super PAC with Republican Party ties has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in recent days to support the Green Party presidential candidacy of Jill Stein in Wisconsin, in another sign that the supporters of the major parties believe her campaign could affect the election result.”
Votes in our system count on the margin, in other words. Republicans know this, and we should too.
So in this critical election year, here’s how to talk to potential voters:
• First, know in advance and memorize the numbers from the last election for the most important race you’re canvassing on behalf of.
• Then, when you talk with people and they toss out the “one in a million votes” excuse, just reply with (to use the example above), “No, your vote will be one in 7,928 votes. That’s the margin by which Catherine Cortez Masto won (or Laxalt lost) the election last time.”
Suddenly their vote takes on a far greater importance, even if the margin you’re quoting was much higher; no matter what it is, it’ll be a heck of a lot lower than the total-votes-cast number.
Now they can understand how important their vote will be. And they’ll be more likely to get to the polls.
The next few days will be your last chance to participate in what may be the most critical election of our lifetimes. If you’ve been fretting or waking up at night or just depressed that an ass like Trump could even be tied in America, please let me put my old psychotherapist hat on and share with you this little tip from psychology: The number one way to deal with all of those stress responses is to do something.
