One helpful slap in the face I got from this election: the pointlessness of my obsession with poll forecasts and horserace-style news. I’m great at paying lip service to not “future tripping,” not being attached to outcomes, not thinking that I can ever settle my anxiety in the present by imagining that I know what’s coming. But in practice, at election time, I become consumed by polls and analyses and odds and trends and turning points and gaffes and scandals and everything else that I want to believe will either determine or predict a result.
This year, everything I read and clung to was wrong. As of Tuesday night all the time and energy I gave to 538 and RCP and TPM and HuffPo felt like a total waste. The truth is, though, that even if the predictions had been right, it still would have been a waste. It would have felt better, but it wouldn’t have amounted to anything. Political information is useful when it helps me make up my mind or persuade someone else or take some other effective action. When I’m trying to use it to see the future, it’s worse than useless. It’s a distraction from whatever would actually be worth doing. I need to do whatever I believe is the next right thing and let the universe take care of the results.
As a writer and a political being, there’s value for me in understanding what happened based on what we actually know. But if I’m trying to convince myself that the future isn’t in fact utterly unknowable and beyond my control, forget it. From here on I may have to let Nate Silver go it without me.
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