Just say no Hello. My name is digby and I am a poll addict. I really wish I wasn’t because I’m not equipped to deal with commentary like that above from the person who runs 538. I am an ordinary person caught in the vortex of a close election and I may just end up losing my mind over it. Don’t go there if you value your sanity. Historian Rick Perlstein has a great column on polls today that you really should read. (And then go read some fiction or watch the game or do some phone banking. Anything but look at those damned polling averages.) W. Joseph Campbell’s Lost in a Gallup: Polling Failure in U.S. Presidential Elections demonstrates—for the first time, strangely enough, given the robust persuasiveness of its conclusions—that presidential polls are almost always wrong, consistently, in deeply patterned ways. Unusual for any historical narrative, the pattern is almost unchanged for a good hundred years. First, someone comes forth with some new means of measuring how people will vote for president, and gets it so right it feels like magic. That was the accomplishment of a magazine called The Literary Digest between 1924 and 1932. They sent as many sample ballots as existing technological infrastructure would allow—in 1932, some 20 million—on postcards that doubled as subscription ads. Then, with the greatest care, they counted the ones that came back. For three straight elections, they got it so right the Raleigh News and Observer half-joked that it “would save millions in money and time”…