Our nation turns its lonely thoughts to you. . .

By Stephen Macaulay

A caution about polling. No, this has nothing to do with the missed call in the 2016 presidential election, the one where Hillary Clinton was days away from measuring the drapes for the Oval Office.

Although Donald Trump hasn’t heard of (“people tell me. . .”) a poll that he’s not winning in and Kamala Harris supporters are absolutely chuffed to see her leading by mainly the margin of error, polls really need to be taken with a grain of salt approximately the size of the Mount Rushmore National Memorial.

Why?

Consider this:

According to a recent YouGov poll, 9% of US adults think about the Roman Empire “at least weekly.”

You know, that political structure that was done and dusted after some 500 years in 476.

Men, perhaps not surprisingly, think about the Roman Empire more than women do: 

13% to 6%.

Presumably they think of Viva Bianca or Katrina Law from the Spartacus TV show, although technically, Spartacus was under the Roman Republic, not yet an empire.

Still, the YouGov poll found that 52% say they learned about the Roman Empire from movies or TV shows, neither of which is particularly precise about dates and the differences between emperors and consuls.

One might argue that Donald Trump is more interested in becoming the former rather than the later, a distinction with a big difference. But not if you’re someone spending a percentage of each week thinking about the Roman Empire.

However — and I must confess that I am incredulous about this — there could be some good news out of the poll’s findings:

Athens is generally considered to be the cradle of democracy, and it tops the list of historic regions with 54% considering Ancient Athens as “very or somewhat favorable,” besting the Roman Empire by 5%.

The Visigoths and the Huns tie for last, at 14%. There is no indication about the amount of time spent thinking about them.

What do Americans “who know at least a little about the Roman Empire” most admire about it?

Roman buildings and roads top the list at 75%.

In other words, “infrastructure.”

Given that the Trump Administration had plenty of “infrastructure weeks” and little in the way of infrastructure execution, and given that the Biden Administration’s $891-billion Inflation Reduction Act and $280-billion CHIPS Act are putting fresh concrete on the roads and facilitating the construction of chip foundries, if people like infrastructure, this could be advantageous to Harris.

And there is a cautionary finding: 61% of the respondents believe the cause of the fall of the Roman Empire was infighting among Romans.