Garrick,

Hardly. Three points, in response to your comment:

1) At the time I wrote this article I was unaware of Lichtman's work because I was focusing on quantitative opinion polls. I'm a data guy, and I like numbers, so when I wanted to learn more about the elections, I focused on the area that I specialize in. Note that the title of this piece is literally "New Research Project: Election Polls." I'm just starting off on this, and while I have one area (stats) that I specialize in enough to write confidently about, that doesn't mean that I know everything that there is to know--or even everything important--at the moment I start.

That being said, when I posted this on Substack last week (I post on Substack first, then follow by posting on Medium a week later) a commenter kindly made me aware of Lichtman and I read his stuff immediately. It's pretty cool, and it makes me very hopeful that the polls aren't underestimating Trump this time.

2) Lichtman does not use opinion polling, He uses an entirely different methodology that has nothing to do with public polling at all. So, even if I were aware of Lichtman at the time I wrote this article, it wouldn't have changed much, because this article is about election polls, not Lichtman's 13 keys. Again, Lichtman's method is spectacular--it's just not what I'm writing about here. I care a lot about the polling problem, because it's a really big problem.

3) I'm interested in election polls not because I'm trying to advocate for Trump. I support Harris and very much want her to win. I'm studying election polls because many people rely on them and every three or four election cycles they seem to get things disastrously wrong, creating a false sense of security in an entire nation. My friends and I were misled badly by the polls during the 2016 election. It's reasonable for me to want to know if they are misleading us again. Lichtman's statement that Harris will win is very reassuring, but even with that reassurance, it is really concerning that there are these numbers out there which everyone relies on that seem to mislead us every twelve years or so, and it's reasonable to want to know why it happens.

Best,

J