With the race tightening in Michigan, it’s time to make a stand against Trump and everything he stands for

A few weeks ago, I mentioned here that I might spend some time working on behalf of the Clinton campaign in either my birth state of Kentucky, where the Republican Governor said not too long ago that patriots may need to shed blood in order to “reclaim” the U.S. if Trump loses, or our neighboring state of Ohio, where a Trump campaign chair not too long ago claimed there was “no racism” during the ’60s, and that black people who haven’t succeeded over the past 50 years only have only themselves to blame. My thinking was that my efforts might be more valuable in one of those more right-leaning states, where, perhaps Democratic canvassers are more hard to come by. Well, now I’m not so sure.

It appears as though the race is tightening in Michigan. According to the folks at FiveThrityEight.com, the latest polling data gives Donald Trump a 20% chance of winning Michigan’s 16 electoral votes. And, it would appear that the Clinton 2016 team is concerned. According to the folks at Bloomberg, the Clinton campaign is not only buying more advertising time in the state, but Clinton herself has changed her plans to spend more time here in hopes of protecting what’s left of her lead, which has dropped considerably since last week’s questionably-timed announcement by F.B.I. Director James B. Comey that he’d be reopening the investigation into the former Secretary of State’s emails, as new evidence has surfaced.

On October 20th, just a little over a week ago, the folks at FiveThirtyEight.com were forecasting that Clinton would get 50.7% of the popular vote here in Michigan, compared to Trump’s 41.2%, giving her a 92.7% chance of taking the state’s 16 electoral votes. Now, though, as you can see in the following graph, they’re calling for Clinton to get 48.7% of the vote to Trump’s 44%. As for why this is happening, I suspect the initial horror of Trump’s “pussy grabber” comment has worn off a bit, allowing the party faithful to once again claim him as their candidate without shame. I also suspect the recent actions of F.B.I. Director Comey, as I noted above, have pushed a few who were reluctantly supporting Clinton to shift their support elsewhere. And perhaps just as importantly, I’ve been reading that there appears to be an enthusiasm gap among African American voters, who have traditionally turned out in large numbers to support Democratic candidates in the past. Regardless of how we got here, though, here’s how things look as of right now according to the folks as FiveThirtyEight.com.

So, with all of that said, I won’t be spending time this week in either Ohio or Kentucky, but focusing instead here at home, where I’ve requested a few days off from work to help with the Clinton campaign. I know it’s difficult to find the time, but, if you’d like to join me, you can find your nearest Clinton campaign office here. Or, if you can’t make the time to help in person, you can donate some money. The important thing is that you do something. This is the fight of our lifetimes, folks, and we owe it to our future generations to stand up and fight. I know it should go without saying, but we cannot allow a man who is self-confessed sexual predator, a xenophobe, a conspiracy theorist, a racist, and a serial liar to lead our country. We just can’t… You do know that, right?

I don’t want to spend too much time right now lamenting the past, and rehashing how it is that we got to this point, as I think we need to focus on the matter at hand, which is getting Clinton into the White House, and banishing Trump and everything he stands for from civil society. But it’s worth noting, I think, that we brought this on ourselves by not standing up against the insanity of the far right sooner. Put very simply, we caused this, and it’s up to us to fix it.

We are just a few days away from the very real possibility of voting a conman turned reality television personality into the highest office in the world, where he’ll have access to our nuclear codes, and we have no one to blame but ourselves. We could have stopped this years ago, but we didn’t. We set all of this in motion, and now it’s up to us to end it. We need to make a stand this week, and put an end to the whole fucking thing once and for all.

We’ve turned a blind eye to all of this kind of nonsense for far too long, and this is where it’s led us. It’s brought us right to the brink… We should have stood up with a united voice years ago and shut this whole thing down, but instead we let it fester. Instead of marching through the streets of DC and stopping it when it would have been relatively easy, we patiently waited, thinking that reason would eventually prevail. We should have fought back when the Republicans first told us that global climate change wasn’t real, putting the future of humanity in peril. But we didn’t. We should have fought back when it became apparent that the Republicans were attempting to delegitimize our first African American president by suggesting that was really an African-born Marxist intent on destroying our country. But we didn’t. We should have fought back when the Republicans gerrymandered the hell out of the American electoral map, making it virtually impossible for them to lose control of our state and local governments, even as the popular vote began to grow against them. But we didn’t. We should have fought back when Fox News started broadcasting lies, convincing an entire generation that, if they wanted to survive, they needed to be more fearful of people not like themselves. But we didn’t. We should have fought back when the Republicans in power told us that corporate money was free speech, allowing the 1% to essentially buy our country outright. But we didn’t. We should have fought back when they started dismantling our public school system, a public school system which, just a few decades before, had produced the engineers that put us on the moon, only to replace it with for-profit charters with no real interest in our kids or our communities. But we didn’t. And we definitely should have fought back when, just a few months ago, the Republicans in the Senate refused to do their Constitutional duty and consider our President’s Supreme Court nominee. But we just continued to sit by and wait for things to get better. We sat by as Donald Trump talked about grabbing pussies and joked about his rival being assassinated. We sat by while he mocked the disabled and said, if he were elected, he’d have his rival thrown in jail, like the dictator of a banana republic. We apparently expected someone else to fix this. The thing is, though, there is no one else. There’s just us. We know that now. We know the problem isn’t going to fix itself. We know that electing a few good people isn’t enough. We know that, to be successful, we need to actually be in the streets, fighting back. And we know that we can’t wait any longer. This is it. This is the point where we either crush the whole paranoid, anti-science, fear-based machine of the far right to dust, or allow them to just take everything we’ve worked so hard for in this country over the past 100 years and destroy it.

We don’t just need to beat Donald Trump next week, we need to banish him from American life, along with every hateful, cruel and violent thought that he conjured out of us. And then we need to build on that victory. This is our moment, and we cannot let our kids down. Not only can we not stay home on election day, but we cannot allow our friends and neighbors to stay home. We need to engage with people like we’ve never engaged before. There’s just too much at risk, and I love my kids too much not to at least try in my small way to set things right. We need to win this thing, and then we need to organize and fight like hell for the kind of government we all deserve.