EDITORIAL: Hillary needs to get voters out

REPUBLICAN candidate Donald Trump may have got his dates mixed up recently when urging his supporters to come out and vote for him on November 28th – the US presidential election takes place on Tuesday 8th next – but they will heed his call to ‘Make America Great Again’ and vote for him as a protest against the establishment. The billionaire businessman, who largely financed his own campaign and is not as beholden to big corporations who made huge donations to his opponent Hillary Clinton’s bid for the White House, may be lagging behind in the opinion polls but can do no wrong in the eyes of his supporters.

Democratic Party candidate Hillary Clinton has won the three television debates during the campaign and benefitted from damaging revelations about Trump’s attitude to women, however she is not running away with the race either as some of the mud her main opponent is slinging at her is sticking. The controversy about her use of a public email server when Secretary of State has not gone away and many US voters see her as merely the lesser of two evils, which hardly counts as a ringing endorsement!

However, the Democrats are more united in backing Clinton than the Republicans are in rowing in behind the more divisive Trump who they fear will damage their party in the Senate, House of Representatives and other elections the same day. 

For Clinton to win, she must get the voters who tell the pollsters they will vote for her out on Tuesday 8th to actually do so. Many who dislike the choice of the two main frontrunners may opt, as a protest, to vote for one of the four third party and independent candidates also seeking the presidency.

Those who think Donald Trump will never get elected should remember that, only a few months ago, most people thought that Britain would never actually vote to leave the European Union – and look what happened and the mess the Brexit decision has created. As to what kind of a scenario a Trump presidency would conjure up, the mind boggles!