the whole neck-and-neck race thing is basically clickbait for ads.

Yea, I kinda hate that attitude, too, honestly. True enough that polls are already like trying to read tea-leaves, and there’s ample motivation to play games with the results to skew a particular way. But people tend to apply that analysis selectively so that they don’t have to confront the possibility their candidate/political calculations aren’t popular. When our media circles are being blasted with petty reporting about one candidate or the other taking a dookey on stage or whatever-the-fuck, it becomes increasingly difficult to keep expectations reasonably close to reality because you’re ignoring about half the signs and granting too much weight to the signs you actually do see.

The race is neck-and-neck, by just about any reasonable projection. But the margin of error is something like ±3/4%, and that’s assuming a healthy sample and is just a snapshot that is still weeks away from election day. A poll on the day of the election that has Harris -1 in Michigan could end up being Trump +3 or vice-versa, and that’s completely within the margin for that poll.

But if you’re not even hearing what’s being said on the opposite end of the spectrum, let alone actually trying to understand what’s being said, then you’re gonna be completely taken for a ride come nov 6. For 6 months after the election, analysts and most Americans will be scratching their heads trying to understand what happened (win or lose) because people just have no idea what the other half of the country is actually feeling. And when people are sure they had it right, and then have those expectations flipped on the day, that’s when you get people storming the capital or spending years prosecuting foreign interference that was completely out in the open the whole time.