It’s admittedly easy to mock the gossamer certainties of cable TV. But the pundit parade’s avatar of unabashed primary-season error was not a television talking head, but a veteran print journalist. On July 19, Gerard Baker, who had been editor in chief of The Wall Street Journal until 2018, offered his definitive judgment of Harris and the Democratic field in his weekly column for the newspaper: “There’s not much doubt that the California senator has suddenly become the sensation of the primary season so far. In the space of a month she has traveled from the crowded middle of the distant second tier of candidates to, arguably perhaps, the front of the front. It’s difficult to recall such a sudden shift of fortunes in a primary contest absent an actual primary or caucus vote.”

These days, it’s hard to recall anything like Harris’s subsequent sudden shift of fortunes downward—without either a scandal or a single vote being cast. (Scott Walker never rose as high on the pundit hit parade.) In early December—with dwindling finances, a bickering staff, and widespread disdain for her themeless campaign—Harris joined Bill de Blasio and Kirsten Gillibrand in the dustbin of the 2020 Democrats. In retrospect, the apogee of the Harris campaign may have come when Maddow crowed during her mid-July monologue, “She’s obviously turning heads. She made a huge impression with her performance in the first debate—a commanding performance.”

I never jumped on a float in the Kamala cavalcade. But before I bask in my moral superiority, I had better confess to my own bum call last spring. In an early June dispatch from Iowa for The New Republic’s website, I threw a lifeline to Beto O’Rourke just when it correctly appeared to many others that he was going down for the third time. Despite O’Rourke’s 2 percent support in the latest Iowa Poll, I bravely (no, make that “foolishly”) wrote, “In covering presidential politics, there are moments when you have to choose between the polls and what you see with your own eyes. After following O’Rourke for most of two days, I am going with my instincts.” In early November, fearful of not qualifying for the next debate, O’Rourke (the one-hit wonder of Democratic politics) went with his own instincts and quit the race.

The more any pundit was tethered to a TV green room, the more he or she treated the latest polls as holy writ.

My Beto boomerang was mostly based on my contrarian skepticism about early polls—especially those that obscured the real preprimary state of indecision that had most Democrats struggling to identify a standard-bearer in the multicandidate field. It was a rough rule of thumb that the more any pundit was tethered to a TV green room, the more he or she treated the latest polls as holy writ. Talking to voters in Iowa and New Hampshire brought home the obvious message that beating Trump mattered far more than ideological purity. But on TV, there was more chatter about “lanes” (progressive, centrist, or whatnot) than could be heard on any walking tour of the British countryside. Democrats in Iowa and New Hampshire have historically been late deciders, according to entrance and exit polls. In 2008, the last serious multicandidate Democratic race, 27 percent of Iowa caucus-goers decided in the last week, and 51 percent made their choices in the final month. In New Hampshire that year—where Hillary Clinton rebounded from a nearly 10-point polling deficit at the last minute to nip Barack Obama—21 percent of the Democratic primary voters picked their candidate in the final three days. At the time, Michael Traugott, a polling expert at the University of Michigan, said, “The most jarring element of the presidential primary polling was that the polls picked the wrong winner in New Hampshire.”