I'm going to beg, ok?

[SpankMe]

25. I applaud your enthusiasm and positivity, but...

1. Polls these days are unreliable and are no longer representative of how the public thinks. This is an artifact of: a) runaway misinformation we're exposed to in the internet era and the new fragmented media landscape; b) the deteriorating ability of pollsters to reach a truly random sample of respondents (since no one uses landline phones any more); c) the deteriorating ability of pollsters to craft questions that are neutral and germane enough to get to meaningful results, and; d) we've become so polarized that people are lying when contacted by pollsters in order to deliberately throw them off.

Since GW Bush's term, election outcomes have deviated significantly from poll predictions, whereas before that (going back a century) polls tracked election results almost dead nuts. Exit polling was considered the gold standard. These days, exit pollsters get assaulted.

I think that polls can give a good picture of trends, if repeated with the same respondent pool and with the same questions over time. And we can rely on polls to predict binary results if the margins are large. But if the margins are small, then it's a toss-up. For example, if a poll shows Harris up by 6 in some state, she could still and up loosing there. If multiple poll results show Harris up by 20, however, then we can bank on a win in that region.

2. GOTV should be our focus. In 2016, Trump won Wisconsin by 24,000 votes out of over 3 million cast. In Michigan, he won by 11,000 votes out of 5 million cast! These were paper-thin victories that awarded the Orange Asshole® 26 precious electoral votes. Losing by eleven thousand out of 5 million is infuriating. That's around 0.2% - a very small number. It's practically a rounding error.

Those 11,000 votes were denied to Hillary by people who couldn't be bothered to vote because they thought Trump couldn't win, or because they had poker night on election day and had to go buy beer instead of vote, or were young people who were too cynical to vote and thought they could "punish" Democrats by withholding their vote, or people who were too lazy to order a mail-in ballot, or a million other reasons people use to get out of their civic responsibility to vote.

Getting the vote out in battle ground states where margins are small should be an emphasis item for us. We should be thinking tactically at this stage. It's a battle of inches.