Note For The Future: Stop Worrying About Polls

Since the end of the election, two stories have come out regarding the internal understandings of the Biden and Harris campaigns. One involves Biden losing to Trump with over 400 Electoral Votes according to internal polling, and the other sees an advisor to Harris noting that internal polling never had her ahead of Trump during the campaign. The first story is — understandably — being blamed on Joe Biden, while the second story is being ignored even though it totally proves that Harris was not the solution the Democrats promised us she was. It also shows that Biden was held to a totally different standard than Harris, who was never even questioned on if she should hand the campaign off to somebody else despite also clearly losing.

Now, we can discuss if Biden should have dropped out sooner or if a more open primary would have been worthwhile — but discussing this information is, in my view, a bit of a problem on its own. Even assuming both stories are true — and I’m rather skeptical of the first one, if only because even the most pessimistic polling for Biden at the time had him winning more Electoral Votes than this data does — the conversation around these stories ignores a really important fact: Polls don’t actually matter. The only thing a politician should be concerned about is winning elections, not succeeding in a poll which is only made up of a small number of voters and which has no impact on who wins the race.

Biden dropped out on 7/21/2024, he had three and a half months left of the election —…