In the Presidential Election, there was no shortage of polls, and no shortage of outrage after the election from both sides of the political spectrum when much of the data appeared to have been unreliable. It’s a complicated and somewhat risky proposition to suggest that we can know the outcome of the horse race before the race Is over, but the obsession with the horse race, from any election cycles earliest moments, is at the heart of the problem. There are other things we can and should glean from polls that are ultimately more revelatory and enlightening than who’s up and who’s down. Dr. Mileah Kromer is the Director of the Sarah T. Hughes Field Politics Center at Goucher College Ariel Edwards Levy is a senior reporter and polling editor at HuffPost, where she oversees collaboration with the website YouGov. Dr. Natalie Jackson is the Director of Research at the Public Religion Research Institute.