It was a hard lesson learned in 2016 and even harder this time around, but public opinion polls have absolutely no merit. Nate Silver should be ashamed of himself; I have removed his 538 from my bookmarks and will never use it again.
The positive news is a huge voter turnout across the nation means many more people voted than ever before.
That's the good news.
The bad news, for our collective blood pressure, is the outcome of the presidential election hangs by a thread.
As of this hour, 3:30 am EDT, there are a number of states where the outcome is too close to call. I've done a back-of-the-envelope calculation (literally) and if everything breaks as I suspect it will, Biden will end with 270 electoral votes and Trump 268.
But that assumes that Biden wins Wisconsin and Nevada. Trump, according to my assumptions, wins Pennsylvania and North Carolina.
They split Michigan and Georgia, one each. Which comes down to Detroit and Atlanta, where the remaining votes have to be tabulated.
That's my math -- a razor-thin margin. But whoever wins, we will have a more deeply divided nation than at any time since the first Civil War.
This is a difficult moment to be an American.
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