Everyone makes fun of meteorologists because they are so often wrong, which is patently unfair. Weather takes place over largish regions, and weather-people do a pretty good job predicting regional weather, especially if they are employed in a location with significant land mass due west, whence weather wends its way.

Fans or not, most folks heed the weather forecast for a laugh or a conversation gambit, and we should take polls exactly as seriously, except there’s no regional win or western-land-mass equivalent. Polls are just wrong.

The orangutan-in-the-oval-office miss by all polls in the US in 2016 has neither been explained nor expunged. Recently in the US, polls completely missed the “upset” wins of Andrew Gillum, Ayanna Pressley, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortex.

I’m not sure accurate polls are possible, given individual control of technology. It’s really hard to get a truly random sample across the political spectrum, and the nasty practices of herding and aggregating don’t work on any but the most fastidiously-conducted polls, which require hard, time-consuming work.

Fastidiousness is out-of-fashion these days.

All three candidates named above won their primaries without support from the national Democratic Party, which is good-news/bad-news. The Dems have been out of touch since before they chose a singularly polarizing presidential candidate uncrowned by their own primary system, so it’s good to see People’s Choice candidates triumphing over We-Know-Better-Elite ones. But it means the Dems still don’t get it, and if they haven’t gotten it by this time they never will, which means the party of A Gun for Every Tot could sweep this November.

Don’t even mention those polls. Polls schmolls.

It’s hard to remember, but I have in the past been an actual Independent who voted for candidates regardless of party, before all this shark-jumping started. Have you seen Condoleeza Rice as product-placement at the Kavanaugh hearings? I think she’s become a white supremicist. If I lose my health care and my Social Security, no amount of rabbits with plane tickets, cabinet members with cone-of-silence phone booths, or toxic caterpillars will be enough to laugh my way out of that covfefe.