The pundits and pollsters have been criticized ad nauseam for failing to correctly predict the 2016 presidential election. Granted, they didn’t get everything wrong. The popular vote tallies matched the predictive models more closely than the Electoral College projections, which saw Hillary Clinton winning a decisive victory. Nonetheless, it is has been a time of many apologies. Both political science as an academic discipline and professional pollsters have a bull’s-eye on their back for their failures.

Social scientists should recognize and acknowledge their mistakes. But we should first be clear about what these mistakes were. More pressing than flawed models and a failure to predict outcomes is the political science discipline’s complicity in limiting our political imagination. Mainstream political science views its mission in a highly depoliticized, technocratic manner that results in a blinkered understanding of the range of political possibilities. Taking on that vision is more important than ever in the age of Trump.

Polling has become gospel in American politics. Without polling and reliance on datasets, it is nearly impossible to make a respected political argument. This is unfortunate, because polling by its nature is flawed. It does not provide a neutral snapshot of voters’ understandings of politics. Instead, polls reflect the dominant narratives at a moment in a way that naturalizes key controversies.