Dems, myself included, lived this entire cycle with a pit of existential dread in our stomachs over the polling fiasco in 2016 that left us gut punched on the morning of November 4 that year. No matter how rosy the polling for Biden and Democratic senate candidates appeared leading up to yesterday’s election, it was never easy to get truly excited at the prospect of a clean sweep. The kind of overwhelming, repudiating sweep we would have needed to prove to ourselves and the world that the last four years of abject, military-grade fuckery on the part of Twitler and his cowardly, craven, morally bankrupt enablers on the right was never going to materialize.
By late last night into the early morning, it was clear no Blue Tsunami would emerge. Even after years of broken norms, republican ass-wiping of the Constitution, bald faced lies, hatred, anti-science ignorance, or even Kiddie Koncentration Kamps. What this says about America and a near majority of Americans makes me nauseated. I even found myself feeling slightly ebullient as the polls showed a growing and potentially insurmountable lead in the last few weeks of the campaign. I allowed myself to sleep a bit better than I had in months as the date grew near, believing against hope that there weren’t a near plurality of hateful, small-minded, uneducated, fucksticks living in this once great nation.
Now it is beyond debate. The entire political polling industry, its practices, methodologies, strategies and all the assumptions that support it, is revealed to be worse than worthless.
An article from The Hill said the following.
“Frank Luntz declared that ‘the polling profession is done’ after this year's presidential election, in which a number of polls appeared to show a much brighter picture in various states for Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden.
‘The political polling profession is done,’ Luntz told Axios early Wednesday morning. ‘It is devastating for my industry.’”
Nate Silver’s vaunted polling aggregate was essentially an aggregate of garbage data. I will never even waste time reading polls again (assuming there is still a legitimate republic left to protect after the dust settles here). They are a quaint artifact of a simpler time. One in which Americans didn’t lie with such cavalier and flippant disregard for honesty, integrity and the collective health of the republic. The only poll that matters (should we escape the fascism washing across the country seemingly without resistance) will be the one on election day. I am not sanguine about our ability to preserve this precious right.