In my neck of the woods, it seems like for every five people who allowed themselves a day of relief tears this weekend, there’s one who hasn’t yet cracked a smile because they’re so afraid we’ll become complacent under Biden. Joe is no AOC, to be sure, but rather than to push ahead with pessimism, I’m in favor of bottling our joy to pour into organizing efforts going forward when we need that energy. A Zimbabwean-American artist and activist named Shungudzo appears to have captured that spirit perfectly in her new song that repeats over and over, “It’s a good, good day—to fight the system.” Turn it on and twirl around with your arms splayed wide. It’s that kind of bop.

Thanks for sitting tight all week while I nursed my election hangover (Poll work is exhausting! So is popping champagne all over Brooklyn). Now that I’ve got half a brain, let’s talk about the goddamn polls and how much explaining their operators have to do. On Tuesday’s episode of The Daily, Michael Barbaro interviewed the Times’ polling expert, unfortunately also named Nate, to see what we’ve learned from the second grand fuckup. His response was illuminating, both in form and content.

The first big takeaway is that it turns out voting against your own economic interests is a luxury (remember that Trump ran on the economy while Biden ran on Covid). That helps explain the unexpected surge of Latinx Trump voters in Florida, Nevada, etc. as well as the 10% of Black voters who went red. In a different way, it also explains all the rich white people who stick by Trump, but that’s neither here nor there.

“But can’t you see that Coronavirus and the economy are related?!” you ask. Nate Cohn has an answer: “I do think that we take that logic for granted in a way that I’m not sure we should expect of ordinary people.” Hear that, everyone who doesn’t work at the New York Times? Nate thinks you’re dumb. Especially if you voted for Trump.

That is the level of condescension that explains why Trump voters hate the New York Times and therefore DO NOT RESPOND TO THEIR POLLS, inevitably skewing them to the left.

So, where do we go from here? Can we possibly improve polling methods enough to render them useful, or have we simply lost too much public trust in the media to even try any more? Your guess is as good as mine. (Or should we take a poll on that to reinforce our own impressions of the issue?)

In other surprises to the party, it turns out the protests actually helped Biden. The dems spent the summer in a tizzy, worried that “riots” against police violence would deter suburban voters (I hate this sentence so much). Turns out, all those nice white folks were the wrong focus— the protests majorly mobilized Black voters in crucial swing states, both organically and with the help of donations to social justice orgs in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. When Black Lives Matter, PA Black Votes Matter, too. Funny how that works.