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I do miss the good old days of, like, 2008 when you could take all your apocalyptic election anxiety, plug it into fivethirtyeight.com and have it spread soft tingles of data-based anaesthesia out from your chest and into your fingertips. As long as the little toggle graphs lined up with your hopes and dreams for yourself and your offspring and humanity as a whole, you could enjoy (for a while) the warm, logy stupor of the illusion of validation before the next twitch in the news cycle forces back upon you the cruel clarity of a universe made of chaos, personified in the form of, like, Frank fucking Luntz.

2016, of course, stole that from us, as it stole many things. Like all robberies, it left us bereft, beaten and afraid, thrashing around in the PTSD of communal/national assault. Even before we were surrounded by poisoned clouds of expectorant, there were precious few opportunities to find any kind of peace. We tried to manufacture it in solidarity and demonstration, literally screaming to remind ourselves we had voices, but even cases of electoral success (and the socio-electoral progress they both reflect and herald) had absolutely no preemptive palliative effect on the coming heebie-jeebies. A vanishing few things can be salved with a placative bromide; for everything else, now only a selective seratonin reuptake inhibitor will do.

Four years on, this seems odd to say, but I've come to the sometimes sort-of-comforting conclusion that the 2016 polls weren't as wrong as they seemed. It's not hard to find articles ahead of the event letting us know there was a lot of noise out there and the static cloud it generated was large enough and close enough to the end that it necessarily obscured the result. The conventional wisdom hindsight is "nobody saw it coming, everyone got it wrong," but I'm suggesting there's a meaningful difference between "getting it wrong" and "missing." The larger national polls were largely correct: Clinton garnered 3 million-plus votes more than the other guy. She didn't beat the spread, but she did confirm her polling advantage. It just turned out that in a couple of specific places, in an electoral system that privileges the bumpkin whims of place-specificity, a fractional margin of anti-educated humans decided to get a running start, ram their fist up the system and work it like a puppet.

The only thing the polling actually got wrong was the actual result. Which, now that I type it, yes, does seem like kind of a big deal. In some ways though, it doesn't really matter if there's comfort to be had there. The relentlessness of the past four years and the almost hilarious acceleration of national cultural and physical decrepitude of the past eight months has left us with a waxy, waterproof skin, like a decent quality cheese. For those of us who have survived, there's no question we're hardier, wilier, more aware. The anger and cynicism aren't nihilistic side-effects, they're earned virtues. Yes, 2020 seems likely to end in bullshit, but we'll all be goddamned if it's going to end in the exact same bullshit as 2016. And yes again, we might lose, to the ruination of all, but this time we'll all be able to say we definitely saw it coming.