Some pollsters get it right
Polls sometimes underestimate Democrats, new Cook ratings, vibe-coding gone wild, AI-proofing your job, TV shows in decline, the age of information laundering, the disappearing urban middle class
No. 387 | January 16, 2026
📈 Nate Silver’s latest pollster rankings are out
Echelon Insights once again scores in the top-tier of pollsters nationally in Nate Silver’s latest pollster ratings.
Lots of pollsters will tell you that accuracy is only a small piece of the puzzle. After all, if the point of polling is to help clients improve their position, you hope your clients will do better on Election Day than they do in your polls.
Nevertheless, we welcome the opportunity to be judged for whether we ultimately got it right. Even if polls are a snapshot in time, clients are much better off with an accurate snapshot than one that’s too optimistic or pessimistic.
And we’re particularly proud to have next to no bias — meaning we don’t systematically overestimate one side or the other.
Lots of pollsters and forecasters can become hot commodities by shading their numbers towards a certain outcome that then comes to pass in any given election. Statistically, polls and forecasts will tend to miss in one direction or the other more often than they get it exactly right. There’s little benefit to being among the many clustered in the middle and being right. But there’s a huge benefit to being an outlier and being right. This paradoxically tends to reward outlier predictions, with a 50% chance you’ll be called a genius.
That’s the easy part. The harder part is to do what us and only a handful of others have done: produce results that consistently overperform whether it’s a good Republican or a good Democratic year.
Eli McKown-Dawson has a further write-up of these rankings reminding us that polls can miss on both sides, underestimating Democrats in the 2025 off-year elections. But recently, when polls have missed, it’s been a presidential election problem.
We’ll have to wait until 2028 to learn if this is a Trump phenomenon or something else.
🇺🇲 Battle for the House: The seat-by-seat landscape
The new Cook Political Report ratings (🔒) show Republicans need to win 67% of the 18 toss up House seats to maintain their majority — seats that are largely unaffected by the largest wave of retirements since 1974. The ratings also showed that while Democrats are enthusiastic, they lack a clear brand or leader, and they have almost no chance of taking the Senate, setting the stage for another split Congress.
🇻🇪 Venezuelans support the capture of Nicolas Maduro
Here’s a poll from Premise and The Economist:
And an AtlasIntel/Bloomberg poll finds the operation overwhelmingly popular throughout Latin America. What distinguishes Venezuela proper from the rest is the large number saying they are unsure, a telltale sign of respondents censoring themselves in a dictatorship.
🤖 Vibe-coding gone wild
Claude Code can now do basically all knowledge work.
The program literally wrote itself in 1.5 weeks, according to Anthropic’s Boris Cherny. RIP traditional software developers.
Claude can show you your MRI results and perform diagnoses without paying for special software.
Odd Lots’ Joe Weisenthal vibe coded Havelock.AI, an “orality detector,” to detect how much Internet language has morphed into oral speech and vice versa.
The evidence is everywhere: the formulaic phrases of political discourse, the repetitive cadences of viral content, the agonistic tenor of online debate, the communal participation of meme culture. Text is becoming speech. The feed has become the fire around which we gather.
👷How to AI-proof your job
The news isn’t all bad for the job market. BlackRock predicts a construction boom with infrastructure-related jobs projected to grow at least 5% in the next 10 years, much of it fueled by the AI data center boom. Will this lead to a lasting shift from white collar to blue collar employment?
Another dimension to job market changes: a recent study highlighted in the FT already shows that soft “people” skills are already valued more highly in promotions than math skills. You’re much better off having good people skills and bad math skills than the opposite. With AI increasingly taking care of the hard skills, will these soft skills become even more important?
📺 Decline is the norm for long-running shows
It’s just science: the longer a TV show goes on, the more its IMDb ratings drop (looking at you Game of Thrones and House of Cards). But some like Breaking Bad, BoJack Horseman, and Better Call Saul continued to climb throughout their run.
🐋 Polymarket and the “age of information laundering”
We all know about the mysterious Polymarket whale who profited last week betting on the deposal of Nicolas Maduro hours before the U.S. raid. When someone this week plowed a lot of money into a weirdly specific bet on a U.S. strike on Iran happening January 14, traders were on alert and bid up the price. But the raid didn’t happen. The original bettors and their copycats lost it all.
But what if they didn’t? We could easily see more and more of what some have called the “Polypump fake:” a whale making a high-dollar, seemingly high-conviction trade that moves the market, and then either cashing out or trading against themselves from another account.
🏙️ The disappearing urban middle class
What’s happening in Chicago is happening in other large cities: cities are growing more and more unequal, with more of their territory home to the very rich and very poor with little left in between.
