JOSEPH CAMPBELL: What can we learn from election prediction failures of the past?

These cases together remind us that error stalks even the most confident of forecasts and that elite opinion is not always astute or discerning. In such reminders, there is no small value.

Likewise, they emphasize that impressions, “vibrations” and polls signaling landslides can be unsound bases for forecasting outcomes of presidential elections, especially in these days of a polarized U.S. electorate.

They also reveal something about the appeal of prognostication despite the prospect that forecasts will often go sideways. Offering an election prediction implies that this time will be different, that this time the prediction won’t fail. But as these cases attest, that’s not necessarily so.

Hence the continued reminders to forswear all modalities of the cockiness.