The UK elections have left FiveThirtyEight a bit shaken up:
Perhaps it’s just been a run of bad luck. But there are lots of reasons to worry about the state of the polling industry. Voters are becoming harder to contact, especially on landline telephones. Online polls have become commonplace, but some eschew probability sampling, historically the bedrock of polling methodology. And in the U.S., some pollsters have been caught withholding results when they differ from other surveys, "herding" toward a false consensus about a race instead of behaving independently. There may be more difficult times ahead for the polling industry.
Maybe this isn't such a bad thing. It most definitely isn't for homegrown conservatives; they — backed by empirical evidence, which will be a shocking first for them — can now hoot and jeer whenever polls show Hillary with an invincible lead. For everyone else, though, maybe some lingering mystery as to 8 November 2016's outcome will reinvigorate center-left mobilization, ensuring that the mystery never was.
And there's this: a rather charming story in, as I recall, Richard Moe's Roosevelt's Second Act: The Election of 1940 and the Politics of War — an election which, of course, took place in pre-crackjack polling times. Aides had never before seen FDR so visibly out of sorts, until that election night. As disappointing early returns came in, the president turned grim and irascible. He isolated himself. He suspected a bad night and an even worse morning. The numbers soon reversed, and FDR wound up destroying Willkie, 449 to 82 in the Electoral College.
I wasn't around then, but I nonetheless miss such historical drama. Politics has become too clinical, too predictable, too statistical and computerized. The human drama of it is being — has been? — sucked out. Perhaps a touch of doubt can put it back in.