ROBERT STACY MCCAIN: The End of Polls and Predictions.

Election Day 2026 has finally arrived, bringing with it the merciful end of polls and predictions being presented as “news.” Back in the late 1990s, when I was an assistant national editor at The Washington Times, I sort of assigned myself to be the weekly poll aggregator during election season. This was before Real Clear Politics had become the one-stop source for election polls. It was also pre-Google, when scouring the Internet was done with search engines like Dogpile and others whose names I can’t recall. Each week, using the crude tools available, I would gather up every relevant poll I could find online and compile the results for a graphic that would run in the main news section.

Having been an accumulator of polling data through multiple election cycles, I learned a lot about the variation in quality, and became quite skeptical of polls in general. The fact that deliberate frauds have recently been revealed in the polling racket should serve as an exclamation mark on warnings about the reliability of these numbers. The best way to respond to any election prediction is always, “We’ll see.”

It’s amazing to me that there are people all over X/Twitter giving their analysis of the election before a single vote has been counted: “Trump is to blame for this disaster” is a typical reaction based on a Republican Doomsday reading of the polls, which might be valid, but we don’t know yet.

Vote.