And it is awesome Perlstein will be writing his for the American Prospect. You can subscribe to it here and I highly recommend you do it. I don’t think that he or the folks at the American Prospect will mind if I reproduce this first introductory column in its entirety. It’s just so good. (I’ll follow the rules in the future, I promise.) You Are Entering the Infernal Triangle Authoritarian Republicans, ineffectual Democrats, and a clueless media As a historian who also writes about the present, there are certain well-worn grooves in the way elections get written about by pundits and political journalists from which I instinctively recoil. The obsession with polling, for one. Polls have value when approached with due humility, though you wonder how politicians and the public managed to make do without them before their modern invention in the 1930s. But given how often pollsters blow their most confident—and consequential—calls, their work is as likely to be of use to historians as object lessons in hubris as for the objective data they mean to provide. Pollsters themselves are often the more useful data to study, especially when their models encode mistaken presumptions frozen in place from the past. In 1980, for instance, Ronald Reagan’s landslide was preceded by a near-universal consensus that the election was tied. The pollster who called it correctly, Lou Harris, was the only one who thought to factor into his models a variable that hadn’t been accounted for in previous elections, because it…