I'm hearing from many sides that media bias misled us by not anticipating Trump's victory, and by stubbornly assuming Clinton was going to win. Even Michael Moore has blamed the media, calling on us to "Fire all pundits, predictors, pollsters and anyone else in the media who had a narrative they wouldn't let go of and refused to listen to or acknowledge what was really going on."
Excuse me, but I was one of the people confident Clinton would win, and it wasn't because I "refused to listen to or acknowledge what was really going on," it was because I thought scientific polls were reliable. For months, I was presented with polling data from a wide variety of sources, at the national level and state level, and even when the polls were tight, it was pointed out that polls had been remarkably steady in showing an advantage for Clinton for almost a year, shifting a few points one way or the other at moments, but always returning to a baseline that showed she was ahead.
For all these polls to be so wrong, I was told, it would have to be a failure on the scale of Truman's win over Dewey in 1948, and that was extremely unlikely because polling technology and techniques had improved so much since then, and besides, they had stopped polling weeks before that election because they were sure Dewey would win.
So, Moore is right that the pollsters have something to answer for, but the pundits and everybody else who relied on established, variously-sourced, scientific polling to draw what seemed a rational conclusion are not guilty of refusing to listen. Were we supposed to listen to Trump when he cited meaningless online polls? Were we supposed to listen when he and his surrogates talked about the huge crowds at his rallies - a metric that has never been a reliable predictor of the vote? Were we supposed to follow our gut feeling regardless of objective evidence?
Moore often spoke about his gut feeling that Trump was going to win, and I give him credit for seeing something others couldn't, but it wouldn't have been rational to predict a Trump victory in the face of overwhelming polling data.
At least, not in the world we lived in before, the world that was destroyed Tuesday. Going forward, who knows? How will pollsters redeem their product? Scientific polling, the basis for much rational analysis and many rational decisions in politics, is another casualty of the Trump movement, another triumph for militant ignorance.