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Reblogged by fromjason ("fromjason.xyz ❤️ 💻"):
tom_nomad@kolektiva.social wrote:
OK, so that happened. Let's summarize and talk about next steps
Firstly, the results. The pre-election polling was coming in consistently with a 1-2 point lead for Harris prior to Tuesday, which is a similar lead Biden had going into election day. But, the result was extremely different, so why?
Well, polling has for some time been an approach that has been under assault for very good reasons. I have talked about how polls are simply indicators of dynamics within the confines of electoralism, but that they do not tell us a lot about granular political dynamics. When polls were introduced, and Rick Perlstein has written and spoken about this, they were roundly rejected by journalists. Polls were seen as a horrible reduction of politics to numbers, a gamification of political dynamics that obscure the ins and outs of how power works. Even further, polls and pollsters were under attack for essentially making the news through the way they framed questions, but also in shaping ideas of what is possible due to the confines of the polling.
Polling, in this sense, was seen as mechanization, and a removal of people from the political space. When this was combined with the politics of focus groups, which then took polls as the foundations for their messaging, we end up with a cycle, where the polls feed politics and politics feeds the polls, but no one ever asks whether that is a reflection of reality in any way. During this election, and the last couple, polls have been under a renewed assault, and maybe it is time for us to just move on entirely; it is not a methodology that can be fixed, and it is not one in which there is a desire to fix it.
During this election, toward the end, we started seeing stories about intentionally skewed polls, or polls that are created in order to generate a perception of what candidate has momentum. These stories center around a separation between legitimate polling and propaganda, while ignoring that polls themselves have always helped shape political dynamics and have never been an accurate way to measure much politically outside of an artificially confined series of similar options. When all political questions are reduced to just a series of options like that, it becomes difficult to imagine possibilities outside of that.
So, at the same time, it could be possible for polls to show a specific result, for example Harris up 1-2 points, and have that not reflect reality in any way. The relationship between polling and their perceived reflection of reality has been collapsing for some time, but it is time, now, to just recognize polls as one data point among many other flawed data points all based on measuring a statist concept of politics.
But, beyond just invalidating polling, this election has created conditions for a series of significant shifts in American politics, and I don't just mean on the level of presidential policy.
