I’m gonna take this opportunity to clarify a comment I wrote earlier this week: Sure, polling may be difficult to interpret when uncertainty is high and margins are small, but there are many elections every year that are easily predictable blowouts, but which are often not portrayed that way depending on your information diet.

Like, I can’t count the number of times someone will show me an awesome political ad for an awesome person who’s going up against an awful politician I hate, and there’ll be all this hope and the person showing me the ad will be thinking this person has a chance of winning. And then I’ll look at the polling and realize they’re down by 20 points in a state Trump carried by 30 and the error bars are only 3 points in each direction.

So even if polling close races can get messy, polling overall provides an extremely powerful antidote to a lot of propaganda and echo-chamber thinking.