Like Joe Biden in 2020, Donald Trump is 78 years old and showing signs of dementia. How can Republicans cover up the truth about his cognitive acuity? Fortunately for them, the Democrats showed how it’s done.

In election after election, tinier slices of ever-more-specific demographic groups in fewer battleground states determined the outcome. Finally, A.I. narrowed down the process to the perfect precision of a single person.

Donald Trump, his opponents say, threatens democracy. Democracy in America was already in big trouble long before Trump entered politics, though. It would be a pity to believe that defeating Trump goes far enough to defend democracy.

         Many people who typically vote Republican but dislike Trump, and others who typically vote Democratic but dislike Harris, are wrestling with a fundamental dilemma of the voter who lives in a duopoly.

A vote is an endorsement. A vote declares to the world: “I approve of this candidate.” There is no half-vote. A vote is binary: yes or no. If your vote helps someone win who goes on to do something awful, their sins are partly your fault.

If there are only two major-party candidates, and both seem likely to commit an atrocity if they win, the moral and rational alternative is clear: vote for a third-party or independent candidate whose odds of carrying out a heinous act appear to be low, or boycott the election.

For the 61% of Americans who oppose sending more weapons to Israel, this condition has been met. Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are both enthusiastic supporters of Israel’s genocidal war against Palestinian civilians in Gaza, Lebanon and the West Bank. Both have promised to send more bombs, more missiles, more money and more intelligence to the Israelis. A vote for Harris is a vote for more genocide. So is a vote for Trump. If you vote for either the Democrat or the Republican, the blood of every Palestinian who dies or gets maimed after January 20th will be on you.

I am not saying this to make you feel guilty. I am merely stating a fact.

If they care to vote at all, pro-Palestinian voters can support Jill Stein, Cornel West, Chase Oliver or someone else. But then they must contend with the strategic voting fallacy.

Strategic voting, or “lesser of two evils” voting, is the act of casting a ballot in favor of a candidate you do not support, in order to prevent a second candidate you oppose more, from winning. By definition, because non-duopoly candidates are unlikely to win, a vote for someone other than a Democrat or a Republican is a “wasted” vote that, de facto, supports the major-party candidate you hate most. Aside from the self-alienating cognitive dissonance of consciously endorsing a politician whose policies of which you do not approve, strategic voting is deeply illogical and mathematically ridiculous.

First and foremost, it is statistically impossible—beyond the point of winning-the-Lotto odds—that your single vote could ever change the outcome of an American election at the state or national level. This is not to say that an election can’t be close. The 2000 Bush v. Gore presidential race came down to 537 votes that determined the pivotal state of Florida; the 1916 contest between Woodrow Wilson and Charles Hughes boiled down to 3,420 votes in California. But the odds that one vote can change the result of an American presidential election are so vanishingly small as not to be worthy of serious consideration by anyone with more than two IQ points to rub together.

A statistical analysis of the 2008 election published in the academic journal Economic Inquiry by Andrew Gelman, Nate Silver and Aaron Edlin proves this point. “One of the motivations for voting is that one vote can make a difference. In a presidential election, the probability that your vote is decisive is equal to the probability that your state is necessary for an electoral college win, times the probability the vote in your state is tied in that event,” the authors noted. “On average, a voter in America had a 1 in 60 million chance of being decisive in the presidential election.”

If you vote to “make a difference,” you’d get better results from playing a classic Pick-6 Lotto game; odds of winning the jackpot are 1 in 32 million. Unlike voting, it pays.

True, your vote might determine who sits in the Oval Office the next four years. It’s never happened before. It’s never even been close. Statistically, 537 votes in Florida was not close. Would you go to a job interview where your odds of getting hired were 1-in-537? It would be irrational, just as it would be crazy to avoid flying—even though the odds of dying in a plane crash (1 in 11 million) are much higher than your vote tipping a national election.

Strategic voting requires precise analysis of perfectly accurate polls capped by a completely subjective determination of whether a candidate has a viable chance of winning.

Setting aside the challenges faced by pollsters trying to sample a population’s opinions from mobile phones rather than landlines, a problem illustrated by the many polling organizations who failed to predict Trump’s 2016 victory, high-quality polls are subject to a margin of error of several percentage points. In a tight race, in which the margin of a win can be within that margin, a poll is as useful as a coin flip. Finally, strategic voters must ask themselves: assuming I can find a poll that I totally believe, where is the numerical tipping point where a race becomes so skewed in my state that I should free to vote my conscience, i.e. for a third-party or independent candidate, or not at all?

In Montana, where Trump leads Harris 56-39, it’s safe to say the former president has the state in the bag. Montana voters tempted to cast a protest vote against the Israelis’ genocide in Gaza needn’t lose much sleep by filling in the oval for Jill Stein. It’s a different affair in the battleground state of Pennsylvania, where Harris leads Trump by one point, 49-48, well within the margin of error—that is, of course, assuming these polls are right and that, if they are, they won’t change much between now and when you cast your vote.

What about a state where one candidate leads 55-45? A ten-point difference would be hard to overcome, and it wouldn’t be considered a swing state, but it’s not impossible—such things have happened before.

This is where the absurdity of strategic voting escalates even further.

What constitutes a close race? A close-enough race to believe (falsely, as Nate Silver and his friends proved in their study that your single vote could affect the outcome)? 51-49? Of course. (Though it’s not true.) 75-25. Of course not. (But that’s no less true than the 51-49 scenario.) 53-47? Maybe?

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis. His latest book, brand-new right now, is the graphic novel 2024: Revisited.)

Voters who refuse to consider supporting a third-party candidate often feel that to do so would be to waste their vote. Following that reasoning to its logical extreme, we should all vote for the candidate who is at the top of the polls at any given time (assuming the polls are reliable).

One debate. One interview. No policy specifics. No high-profile achievements or exposure. We may not know anything about Kamala Harris until after she becomes president.

A father whose son shot up a Georgia high school has been charged with giving him an AR-15 assault rifle. When the President gives Israel tons of weapons to kill more than 40,000 Palestinians, however, there are no consequences.

Best friends and editorial cartoonists Ted Rall and Scott Stantis (from the Left and Right, respectively) take on the dramatic escalation of the Middle East conflict into Lebanon by Israel against Hezbollah as well as the state of the presidential race with an emphasis on Kamala Harris’ economic policy rollout.

Watch the Video Version: here.

House Speaker Kevin Johnson is trying to pass a continuing funding resolution for the federal government that also contains a voter ID requirement that even some Republicans oppose. An October 1st deadline looms, but will anyone care if the federal government ceases to operate?

           Mainstream American political leaders regularly argue that the United States adheres to, defends and promotes a “rules-based international order.” What’s that? It’s rarely defined.

            The best summary I’ve been able to find was articulated by John Ikenberry of Princeton University, introduced by The Financial Times as “an influential scholar whose former pupils populate the American government,” in 2023. “I think the rules-based order has a history that predates the U.S. and even predates 1945 and the great order-building efforts after World War II,” Ikenberry said.

He continues: “But if you were to try to identify what open rules-based order is, it’s a set of commitments by states to operate according to principles, rules and institutions that provide governance that is not simply dictated by who is most powerful. So it’s a set of environmental conditions for doing business—contracts, multilateral institutions—and it comes in many layers. At the deepest level it’s really the system of sovereignty. It’s the belief that the world has a kind of foundation built around self-determined states that respect each other. On top of that, you have these layers of treaties and institutions culminating really in the United Nations system, building rules and principles around aspirations for the inclusion of all peoples and societies. Everybody gets a seat at the table that has a membership based on statehood. And then on top of that, even more work-oriented rules and institutions that came out of World War II that are based on problem-solving, regulating interdependence: the IMF, the World Bank, the WHO.”

If this is the rules-based international order, the U.S. is working overtime to undermine it.

At the core of an arrangement in which “self-determined states…respect each other” is formal diplomatic recognition. Countries open embassies and consulates on one another’s territory, exchange ambassadors and issue tourist and work visas so their citizens can visit one another. Most essentially, they acknowledge each other’s territorial integrity, right to exist and right to govern their populations as each sees fit.

At present, the United States neither maintains nor seeks diplomatic relations with North Korea, Syria, Iran, or Afghanistan. As the more powerful potential partner, the bulk of the blame and responsibility for the lack of ties lies with the U.S. Beginning in the 1950s, for example, the U.S. unilaterally imposed crippling economic sanctions against the DPRK for having committed the sin of not losing the Korean War. U.S. sanctions against Iran date to the 1979 Islamic Revolution that overthrew the American-backed dictator, the Shah. After negotiating its withdrawal from Afghanistan with the Taliban, the U.S. closed its massive embassy in Kabul, ending consular services. (The U.S. also does not have formal diplomatic relations with isolationist Bhutan, but ties are friendly.)

The U.S. seems to view the establishment of diplomatic relations as a reward for good behavior. In fact, their purpose is to maintain means of communications to resolve conflicts and keep one another informed as needed. If the U.S. wanted diplomatic relations with the aforementioned countries, it could have them.

For “everybody [to get] a seat at the table that has a membership based on statehood,” the goal is a world in which every person on the planet has citizenship of an internationally-recognized nation-state. However, millions of people live in places that, as far as the U.N. and other international governing bodies are concerned, might as well as not exist, like Kashmir, Palestine, Taiwan and post-Soviet frozen-conflict zones like Abkhazia, South Ossetia and the Transnistria. Along with stateless people like the Roma in Europe, the Galjeel of Kenya and Burkino Fasans living in Côte d’Ivoire, the U.N. estimates that 4.4 million people on the planet don’t have a legal home and live in diplomatic purgatory.

The U.S.’ geopolitical policy of regional disruption—divide and conquer or at least divide and keep weak—helps maintain this state of affairs. The U.S. maintains favorable economic and political ties to smaller nation-states that feel threatened by their larger neighbors all over the world, especially outside Europe. Though the U.S. does not recognize Taiwan as a sovereign entity and officially maintains that it belongs to China, America sends billions of dollars of year in cash and weapons to Taiwan to try to keep China off-balance. U.S. military aid props up the government of Ukraine, which stripped many residents of the eastern, ethnic-Russian Donbas of citizenship, rendering them stateless until Russia annexed the region following the start of the war in 2022.

It goes without saying that the U.S. does not respect the sovereignty of other countries. It invaded Liberia in 1997, Afghanistan in 2001, Iraq in 2003, Haiti in 2004, Libya in 2011, Syria in 2014, Yemen in 2015…the list goes on. None of these interventions were justified or legally approved by Congress.

            Further to the U.S.’ bullying other countries, it routinely weaponizes “institutions that came out of World War II that are based on problem-solving, regulating interdependence: the IMF, the World Bank, the WHO.” In 2014, for example, President Barack Obama ejected Russia from the G8 group of the world’s biggest economies—now it’s the G7—to punish Russia for its annexation of Crimea, despite reports by international observers and Western pollsters that the Crimean plebiscite vote was free and fair. The IMF kicked out Russia from consultation meetings after the 2022 Russo-Ukrainian war began but those talks are now set to resume. And Russia was banned from the 2024 Paris Olympics. These sanctions all stemmed from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. If invading another country is just cause for trying to turn a country into a pariah, however, what could be more ridiculous than the effort being led by the U.S.—which has invaded 10 countries over the last 20 years, most of them distant from its own borders.

            Mahatma Gandhi, asked what he thought of Western civilization, supposedly replied: “I think it would be a good idea.” A rules-based international order? It would be a good idea—if there were some way for the U.S. to stop trying to kill it in its crib.

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis. His latest book, brand-new right now, is the graphic novel 2024: Revisited.)