What's your take on all this?

Well, I guess my simplified general conclusion is maybe we pollsters should stay away from primaries.

I say that because primaries are in defense, not of any specific poll or pollster, but just in defense of attempting to poll any particular election.

Primary elections are especially notoriously, really, or they should be notoriously difficult to poll.

Not always, but often you're talking about quite small populations, quite small sample sizes and far more volatility.

among the electorate it can be harder to determine uh turnout uh you know some of some of these are closed primary some of them are open uh it's um some of the candidates are particularly well known while others are appear to be almost anonymous and these are all things that speak to from a polling point of view of the art of polling rather than the science not that the science doesn't have its own challenges with primaries especially so it is to be fair to us and anyone attempting to do it it is that much harder than a general election um that doesn't mean it can't be done well and no one does it well i mean we we haven't done a lot of primary polling especially not public i mean we public poll primary polling we dipped our toes in 2024 doing the republican uh presidential primaries new hampshire iowa texas etc and whether by accident or design uh we had a we had a particularly good really strong performance in that, which means that we either knew what we were doing and we should be doing this, we should go at it again in 2028, or we should quit while we're ahead and not demonstrate that we're as prone to get it wrong in primaries as most other pollsters and just sort of rest on those 2024 laurels.

We haven't made that internal institutional decision yet.

But Patrick, anything to say about the Democracy Institute's numbers?

Torture.

Yes, indeed.

Yeah.

Well, it's mixed feelings really because, um, there's a certain degree, amount of gratification, satisfaction that someone who has done such damage to America, and I would argue the world, over, you know, start- not, not beginning in 2020, but especially 2021, going forward, over COVID, um, has been shown, has shown himself, uh, to, to be somebody who never should have been entrusted with that kind of power.

But also On a personal level, it's very frustrating.

Um, I certainly wasn't the most prominent voice, but I was one of a number of voices from the very beginning, uh, uh, in the spring of 2020, who dared to publicly say that it was all madness in the sense of what the prescriptions were to, to, to save us all, uh, and that it continued to be madness.

And of course, Fauci was one of the key players in ensuring that anyone and everyone who dared to say anything other than...

Yeah.