Here’s the terrifying thing about the political debate that has dominated public life for more than a year leading up to Election Day: Almost everything we say is based on our reading of polls that may or may not be accurate. It could turn out that nearly everyone, no matter what side, was wrong because we were all building narratives on incorrect data. We could at this very moment be standing on the 17th floor of a giant house of cards. And the wind began blowing Tuesday night.

As is traditional, a bunch of polls came out on Sunday for a final look at the electorate before Election Day, or at least what’s left of Election Day after all the early and mail-in voting. They showed the race between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump virtually tied nationally with perhaps a little progress for Harris in the swing states. But overall, pretty much the same situation we have seen for weeks.

The poll that got a lot of attention — the “shock poll,” as some like to say — was from the Des Moines Register about the race in Iowa. Conducted by the highly respected pollster Ann Selzer, whose work has come to be known as the “gold standard” in Iowa, it came with this headline: “Iowa poll: Kamala Harris leapfrogs Donald Trump to take lead near Election Day.” Of course, Iowa is not a swing state, and previous polls had shown Trump solidly leading. So to report that Harris was leading Trump by 3 points, 47% to 44%, right before the election was a big deal. If Harris has, in fact, leapfrogged Trump, it would be important in a number of ways, first for Iowa’s six electoral votes but also for similar parts of the electorate in the Rust Belt and “blue wall” states in which the election might well be decided.

“Democrats were giddy Saturday when a gold-standard poll found Kamala Harris narrowly leading Donald Trump in deep-red Iowa,” reported Politico. “But Harris’ senior campaign officials are cautioning against getting too excited about the survey.” Indeed, a lot of people were very cautious about the poll. David Kochel, a Republican who is no fan of Trump but also one of the most experienced political operatives in the state, took a look at the poll when it came out Saturday night and immediately said it simply could not be right. Then, the next morning, he wrote this: “Looking through these numbers, I’m more convinced now than even last night that this poll will be regarded as a complete joke by Tuesday night at 10 p.m. It has massively over-sampled Dems.”

I asked Kochel to elaborate a bit. What, specifically, is wrong with the poll? By text, he answered that Selzer “has an unusual methodology where she lets the poll respondents determine what the electorate will look like. She doesn’t start with any assumptions or demographics. So if you have Trump voters who just don’t answer the poll, you end up with a more heavily Democratic universe, which appears to be what happened here. She uses a more minimalist weighting method, and if Republicans aren’t answering the poll, then you get a pretty healthy skew.”

Selzer strongly defended this particular poll and her methods overall. But a lot of knowledgeable people, and not just Trump supporters, strongly doubted the result. And a couple of hours before the Selzer poll was released, another pollster, Emerson, released an Iowa survey showing Trump ahead of Harris by 10 points, 53% to 43%. Was one or the other right, or both wrong? I don’t know. As Kochel said, we’ll know more late Tuesday night.

Meanwhile, as the poll debate went on, the entertainment industry rushed to make its final contributions to the Harris campaign. NBC’s “Saturday Night Live” gave Harris a spot in the show’s open, with all the viewership and, more importantly, the wall-to-wall press coverage such an appearance can give. It’s probably safe to say that most unbiased judges would call Harris’ actual performance a pretty so-so affair, but Democrats absolutely loved it because they think it will help her.

Not long after, NBC found itself in a bit of controversy when Federal Communications Commission member Brendan Carr, who was appointed by Trump, pointed out that federal law requires broadcasters to give equal time to other candidates during a political race. Of course, SNL’s longtime chief, Lorne Michaels, knew that going in — he had, in fact, told the press in September that neither Trump nor Harris would appear on SNL specifically because of equal time provisions. But as Election Day approached, Michaels did it anyway. On Sunday, NBC quickly tried to make amends by playing a Trump ad, for free, during NASCAR and football broadcasts.

At the same time, the cast of “The West Wing,” an old NBC show much loved by liberals, recorded a message on Harris’ behalf. They did so in conjunction with the Lincoln Project, which is the virulently anti-Trump messaging group founded by some former Republican operatives and fundraisers who discovered that Resistance politics can be very profitable.

The TV stuff was on top of the many music industry figures who pitched in for Harris. Of course, the singer and entrepreneur Beyonce has practically been Harris’s running mate for the last three months. Her song “Freedom” is Harris’s walk-on music at every rally. Bruce Springsteen, Stevie Wonder, James Taylor, Cher, John Legend, Willie Nelson, Lizzo, Jennifer Lopez, and a lot more music figures who have performed for Harris. They, too, have done their part for the Democratic nominee.

And the 2024 campaigning has finished up kind of like it began. The polls are inconclusive, and the Democrat is wildly popular with show business, not to mention with many in the news media, as well. Now we’ll see what the voters think.

This content originally appeared on the Washington Examiner at washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columnists/3216629/amid-poll-flap-celebrities-rush-contributions-harris-campaign/.