A note on polls
By 
A very common complaint amonng LGM commenters is that any discussion of polls a year before a presidential election is pointless or worse, because polls this far out are “meaningless.”
I think I’ve failed to make clear why I find these kinds of polls worth discussing. It’s not because they give us much added insight into what the precise odds may be at this moment that Trump will be re-elected, which in itself isn’t even a particularly meaningful piece of information, since those odds will of course change a lot, as Trump goes through various criminal and civil trials, continues to deteriorate mentally and emotionally etc.
Rather, what interests me about such polls is the much simpler and more basic fact that the American public is going to be voting on a referendum between, on the one hand, liberal democracy broadly construed, and on the other, a species of ethno-nationalist authoritarianism with very strong fascist overtones (exactly what sort of political movements should be considered “truly” fascist is the kind of No True Scotsman rabbit hole that I don’t believe is, as a practical matter, worth jumping down under current political conditions).
The very fact that this is going to be a competitive election — that the absolute floor of the popular vote for Trump is somewhere in the percentage range of the mid-40s — is what I find so fascinating and horrifying. Biden may well win, and he may even at this point be a strong favorite to win, but for liberal democracy to be a “strong favorite” at this point to defeat the contemporary American version of fascism is what could be called either the worst good news or best bad news we can imagine.
That is why the polling on next November’s election is so interesting to me. Not because of the precise details, but rather because the uncertainty surrounding the question of whether Biden or Trump will win is itself so disturbing. And I believe much of our political culture is still in profound denial about exactly why the existence of real uncertainty on this point is itself the best reflection of the depth of the political crisis the nation is facing.