I’ve been working for this website for nearly a decade, and this election made me think heretical thoughts again. Namely, that all the polls and forecast stuff is really beside the point in the end, a way to kill time before the real show arrives. It is so much more interesting to analyze what voters did than guess at what they might do.
I am not some apostate who is saying polls don’t matter — they tell us a ton about what might happen, and they can shape strategy in ways that affect what does happen. But the media engages with those polls to entertain its audience’s anxiety, not divine its country’s mood. (Surely, we are not entirely innocent on that, either.) A healthy democracy discusses the empirical signs of where the wind is blowing but recognizes that wind shifts all the time. And when we do know where it’s blown, journalists have to get dirty and jump in the leaf piles left behind. The real work is just beginning.