Throughout the US’s 2016 presidential election, the polls have consistently shown that Republican candidate Donald Trump lags well behind Democratic rival Hillary Clinton among the country’s ethnic minorities. The 2016 electorate is the most diverse in American history and, if Clinton wins, this demographic change may be the deciding factor.

As Election Day approaches, it's oh so easy to dismiss the important role you can play in this election. America is a big country, over 300 million people, but it's the actions that civic-minded people take that tip the balance. There are so many different ways to help the campaign and try to make a difference.

The FBI’s last-minute intervention in the 2016 presidential election is consistent with the agency’s history of undermining the left and progressive social movements and aiding the right. Its attempts to disrupt left-wing organizations such as the Communist Party and the Black Panther Party are well known.  Its attacks on the civil rights movement in the 1960s included efforts to get Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to commit suicide.

The New York Times and other national media sources are reporting that late Sunday night, the FBI obtained a search warrant to examine email messages belonging to top Clinton aide Huma Abedin. The messages were stored on a laptop belonging to her estranged husband, Anthony Weiner. The laptop was seized by the agency in connection with an investigation into Weiner’s alleged sexting with a 15-year-old North Carolina girl.

In the Presidential Election of 2016, we have two third party movements that could impact the results of the election and the future of the nation.

Donald Trump touts that as president he would be good for American workers.

Will conservatives break from Trump's GOP to form a new party? | Opinion

By Jennifer Rubin The future of the center-right is, to put it mildly, uncertain. It is not even clear there is a center-right in our era of polarization and ideological extremism. Over at least the past half-century the Republican Party has been the vehicle for political conservatism -- roughly defined as limited government, strong international leadership…

Slaveholding and the business of slavery undergirded the economy of British North America and later the United States. Historians long have demonstrated that the institution of slavery was central to the social and economic development of the northern colonies and states; and since the 1990s there have been a number of studies on how white northerners used slave labor and were key participants in the business of slavery—the buying and selling of people and goods that sustained plantations throughout the Americas. Nevertheless, there is little public knowledge or acknowledgement that the institution of slavery was socially accepted, legally sanctioned and widely practiced in the North. For many Americans, slavery was a southern institution. The divide between scholarly work on northern slavery and public knowledge can be in part attributed to a lack of public education. K-12 history classes often sideline slavery and when it is discussed it is presented as a southern institution. There are also few public memorials to slavery in the North.

It is a cliché by now that Donald Trump has run a reality show campaign — a series of gaffes, surprises, outrages, weirdnesses, explosions, revelations, and just every other ingredient that comprise the popular TV genre of faux authenticity. On reality TV, the subjects are seldom artists or entertainers or high achievers in any field. They are personalities. Their roles are their lives, which creates a Möbius strip. What do the Kardashians actually do besides being on their show, which has, of course, generated all sorts of commercial opportunities that almost make it seem as if they are doing something? What is their talent, other than the talent for self-promotion?

This election will not only settle the question of who next gets to sit behind the large desk in the Oval Office. It will also settle another question, formerly of interest mainly to scholars, but now, for obvious reasons, of concern to a broad audience:  How gullible voters are in the 21st century.

Congress continues to resist decriminalizing marijuana even as a popular crusade to legalize its use state by state may soon mean almost a quarter of Americans can smoke up at will, not including the many more who can use the drug medicinally.