Polling Is Dead

Polling Is Dead: a first-principles account of how a measurement tool eats itself. Polling claims that asking n people tells you what N voters think; that claim requires five conditions to hold at once. Checked one by one, all five collapse — the population does not exist before voting, the frame does not equal the population, selection probabilities are not equal, people do not answer and, having answered, must still be processed, and the population keeps changing. The piece covers the history from straw polls and the Literary Digest to Gallup, the British parallel, and the 2016–2024 nonresponse crisis, then the patches — party weighting, the neighbor question, prediction markets and flooding — and how patches give birth to political stories. Both the English and Chinese versions are included in this record. Research and drafting were assisted by AI. All analysis, judgments, and the final text are the author's own.