Political polling is nothing new. I got a job doing political polling back in the 1970s, cold calling random people on a list to ask about their affiliation and who they would be voting for. Most people hung up on me. Some were all too happy to engage and tell me far more than I asked. In the end, it meant nothing.

Today, we’re inundated by polls. From what we’re being told, it would appear that the Democrats will take the House of Representatives and have an outside chance of taking a majority in the Senate. Will it be a blue wave, a tsunami or will it be a puddle? Trump says the polls show his support to be overwhelming and his endorsees will take it all. What polls he’s talking about is something of a mystery.

My guess is that his poll is limited to all the voices in his head. Only kidding. He’s just making it up because he realizes that the polls influence people and he wants to influence them his way.

Polls can do two things. They can push people to go out and vote for or against a candidate because their favored candidate is going to lose if they don’t. Or push people to go to the polls to be part of the wave the polls say is coming, to enjoy the group comaraderie of being on the winning side against the side you despise. It becomes a motivator for action.

Polls can also crush hopes by making voting seem like a futile act, suggesting a candidate is going to suffer an overwhelming defeat. Why bother to take an hour out of your day to go vote when your vote will prove meaningless and your candidate is going to lose anyway? Voting has always been perceived as a dubious way to make your voice heard, given that it’s one vote out of thousands, millions, and means nothing standing alone. It becomes a motivator for inaction.

Both parties and all candidates play the poll game, trying to spin the polls to get their voters to the polls to vote, the only poll that actually matters. And to get the other team’s voters to stay home in frustration, the pointlessness of fighting a losing battle.

We all know that polls can be wrong. Statisticians take that into account, which is why polls include such details as the margin of error. Even if a candidate has a 10% chance of winning, they can still win. I know, stats are hard, and it seems like the candidate with the greater chance of winning is the candidate who ought to win. And if the candidate with the greater chance of winning doesn’t win, something must have gone awry. After all, the polls foretold the outcome.

Of course, this presumes the polls aren’t fake news, which they aren’t unless your purpose is to tee up a claim that the election was rigged well before the election is held because the polls show you’re going to get crushed and you have no other way to save yourself from crushing humiliation for being a pathetic loser. Sure, there are some polls that aren’t reliable and are crafted only to serve as a mechanism to play the voters, but there are a number of serious polls that are totally legitimate.

While the utility of polls remains dubious, the fact is that we are inundated with them and that they have an undeniable influence on voter behavior. They shouldn’t, in the sense that their theoretical purpose is to provide a snapshot of voter sentiment at any given point in time to inform us of how our politics is shaping up. Polls don’t tell us which way the motivation flows, whether to push voters from the right or left to get off their asses (which is now a permissible political word) and go vote. If more people vote for one candidate than the other, that candidate will win no matter what the polls say.

Tomorrow is election day. If we’re to believe the polls, there really isn’t much of a reason to doubt what we should do. After all, the polls have already told us what the outcome will be, who will win and who will lose. We will either travel as far as we have to travel, take the time out of our day, stand on line for however long it takes, and cast our vote or we won’t. We will brave whatever gets thrown at us, whether it’s armed agents of government agencies or observers challenging our bona fides and the heritage of our children. Voting is both our fundamental right and our duty as Americans.

It doesn’t matter what yesterday’s polls say. The only poll that matters is tomorrow’s. Vote. If you can’t be bothered, then you have forfeited your authority to bitch about the outcome afterward.