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The pollster are doing well, but is this election, in any meaningful way, predictable? Or, a bit like the guy on PCP, who has been shot twenty times and doesn’t realise that he is dead,

could it be that the psephology types have been brought low by the trauma of the last few years without quite realising it yet? Could it be that the Brexit saga has initiated a revolution in

thought which lays to rest the comfortable (current) assumptions of the predicting class? The John Curtice types, wonderful academics that they are, invade our television with almost ex

Cathedra certainty. They don’t claim to know what the result is likely to be but they are, it seems, infallible when it comes to methodology. What if they’ve misunderstood what is going on?

What if the events of the last two years have made the methodology obsolete? Thomas Kuhn wrote The Structure of Scientific Revolutions in 1962. It’s a counter-intuitive piece of work gifted

us by a subtle thinker, written as a response to a complacency about the nature of science that fell out of the writings of Karl Popper. Kuhn’s corrective is part history, part philosophy;

part descriptive, part normative. Kuhn was attempting to offer an account of why it is that scientific innovations, like Bobby Fisher mating attacks, seem to come from nowhere – when, in

retrospect at least, it is clear that the prevailing orthodoxy was in deep trouble. Let’s assume that psephology is science: it has at least a much of a claim as much of which passes itself

off as such. If it is science then surely its resources of prediction increase over time? Science, after all, always is attached to some arrow of progress? The psephology of 2019 must be at

least a refinement on the calculus which didn’t quite get it right in 2017? No, not necessarily. It’s just as likely that the pollsters are in the grip of a now redundant picture of how

things are. Kuhn’s central ideas are these: that science progresses, if at all, not in a linear fashion, not incrementally, but by sequences of radical reinventions of the way we think. And

that there is no purely “objective” viewpoint from which God nods in approval as the relevant experiments disclose their secrets. (That last bit expresses a theological finesse, Kuhn would

not have put it quite like that, more’s the pity). There are moments in the history of science, Kuhn argues, when previous assumptions collapse, the parameters change, and revolutions occur.

These are the paradigm shifts, and when this happens it becomes impossible to apply the language of the later paradigm in assessment of the system of thought it supersedes. Kuhn argued that

when paradigms shift, revolutions in thought occur, and the language of “before” becomes “incommensurable” with the language of “after”. Brexit – or the failure to implement it- has

occasioned a paradigm shift. The most salient example of a Kuhnian revolution would be this: the replacement of the Newtonian paradigm by the quantum one. Newton had it all sewn up: his

universe was one in which the Creator set things up to run along a Mussolini train timetable (A chronologically impertinent analogy I know) The job of science is, on the Newtonian

assumption, to work out what happened to the last train and to offer an unimpeachable prediction as to the arrival of the next one. Newton’s God is precise and fastidious, he discloses his

purpose at the level of everyday experience. Quantum physics offers a very different perspective: that what seems solid and negotiable is, at its basic level, fluctuating and

incomprehensible (at least to us). Prediction is presumptuous, and any attempt to second guess the God of the dice will lead to bewildering complications, and the uncomfortable feeling that

God himself might be laughing at you. Previous models of psephology have been accurate in a Newtonian way: as at best approximations of what is going on, as summaries of the deeper truth.

But Brexit, or the failure to implement it, has shattered the assumptions of this model. You cannot formulate experiments in quantum physics predicated on the assumptions contained in

Newton’s Philosophae Naturilis Principia Mathematica; and you cannot bring to bear the psephological methods of 2017 in order to make realistic assessments of what’s likely to happen on

December 12th 2019. The revolution has happened as quickly as that. And I’m happy to go further. People who look at the quantum theory stuff will know that in physics there is such a thing

as the observer effect: that to apply an observer-data framework in order to explain data implies, always, that the observer affects the data – that she introduces an ineliminable element of

disruption into the experiment. The pollsters, in this quantum election, are likely doing just that. More so than ever the polls are shaping, rather than reflecting, what is likely to

happen.