Whatever else the year 2020 will be notable for—the pandemic, the protests, having to live without college football—there’s another thing this is real if not so familiar: this will be the year of the most wasted advertising in US political history.

According to Advertising Age, the advertising tab for the presidential campaign passed $1.5 billion as of August 18. As of about that same time, only 5% of voters said that they were undecided. Everybody else had already made up their mind. So, barring some October surprise that is so out of left field it hasn’t already been baked into the decision, all the political ads are doing is annoying the viewers and listeners. And of course, a lot of them will run after the early voters have gone to the polls.

This election will boil down to which party is most successful in getting the voters out. Nearly half of the eligible voters did not participate in 2016, and look where that got us. We have a president who was elected even though he polled about 3,000,000 votes fewer than his opponent.

Six states (Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Florida, North Carolina, and Arizona) went for Trump by a total of fewer than 500,000 votes. In four of those six, the margin was fewer than 100,000 votes.

I know from experience that there’s no profit in trying to convince a Trump true believer that he or she is following a lying, misogynistic, kleptomanic conman. They, like creatures who live miles beneath the surface of the ocean, have developed marvelous mechanisms for survival. These mechanisms usually involve either dismissal or denial. Sometimes both.

I was told last week that I shouldn’t pay attention to what Trump said, but to what he did. That, in my opinion, is a poor argument for anything. We’ve also been told that “he tells it like it is.” This about a man who has logged something like 20,000 false or misleading statements over the past three-and-a-half years.

In the world of General Semantics, a world seldom visited by most people, there are theories about true-to-fact orientation or false-to-fact orientation. A true-to-fact orientation recognizes limits and variables. It is precise and aimed at communicating.  A false-to-fact orientation, usually practiced by “psychotics, rigid believers,  demagogues and of victims of demagogy,” is aimed not at communication but reaction. Anatole Rapaport in What Is Semantics summarizes it this way: Both word magic and demagogy aim to channelize the reactions of people to symbols, so as to make responses automatic, uncritical, and immediate.

He also notes that this is what makes great sales volumes possible unrelated to the quality of the product. Imagine that.

This presidential election is not, unfortunately, about platforms and policy. The Trump party has neither. It is not about the long term health or marginal improvement of our society. It is—and this may be the only true thing Trump has ever said—the most important election of our lifetime. It is, I think, about whether we’ll continue as a democracy.

The message in all of this is simply that we are not going to convince the opposition, even if we were to prove that voting for Trump was a mortal sin and would consign the voter to Hell. The only way to win this election is to show up in sufficiently large numbers that closed polling places, purged voting lists, and intimidation at the polling place won’t make any difference.

Surely more than half the voters want to get that done.