We are over a year away from voting who will be America's next president. Summer's not even over, and the first primaries will be held in the bitter cold of next winter. Most people simply aren't paying much attention to politics yet, and won't for some time to come. I truly do understand all of that, but at the same time I've been writing more than my fair share of "horserace" stories already -- a trend which will only accelerate in the coming months (especially when I crank up the 2016 version of my "Electoral Math" column series, which tracks polling from all 50 states). So I wanted to take today to offer up a proactive defense of the concept of watching the polling around the "horserace" that is the presidential contest.

Horserace reporting is sneered upon by many. Critics have a valid set of complaints, actually. Horserace reporting is lazy for reporters -- you can do it from your desktop without attending campaign events or digging through piles of position papers. Horserace reporting is stupid because it focuses almost solely upon national poll results, which is not how we elect either our party nominees or our presidents. Early horserace reporting is especially stupid, because polls so far away from the actual election do no more than measure name recognition. Horserace reporting almost always misses the mark when trying to ascertain the reasons why certain candidates are doing well and others aren't, or when trying to gauge public perception of complicated issues. The poll data is not always accurate, and modern-day polling has several technical issues it didn't use to have.

That's a lot of complaints, and I actually agree with most of them -- to one degree or another. But there are mitigating circumstances for almost all of them. Horserace reporting is indeed lazy stuff -- you look at the polling data, you make a few notes so you get the numbers correct in your story, and then you sit and ponder the meaning of it all. It's a lot easier than following a candidate around or doing a deep dive into the issues. I would say that horserace reporting is indeed facile and superficial, and I would hate a diet of nothing but stories about the horserace. But when complimented by reporting on the issues and on the things candidates are saying, keeping an eye on the polls is still a valuable tool for political writers.

Every pundit lives in a bubble. Some bubbles are larger than others and encompass more sources of interaction, and some are tighter. Any political story reflects the bubble the writer occupies, to some degree or another. This can easily lead to echo-chamber-ism, which I would define as "having a bubble of interaction so small that only people who agree with you are in it" -- which means they'll likely agree with everything you say or write. But no matter how big a writer's circle of friends is, it is likely not representative of America at large. To measure whether the things you believe are also believed by the public, polling is really the only tool that exists which at least attempts to determine such things scientifically.

Focusing on national poll numbers to the exclusion of state-level polling is incredibly stupid, and it's a mistake that the mainstream media routinely makes, especially in the general election cycle. We elect our nominees and presidents state by state. National numbers aren't entirely meaningless, but they don't show who is going to actually win or not. This means while tracking national polling is easier, diving into the next states that are scheduled to vote is much more crucial (in the primary cycle). In the general election, we all vote on the same day, so you've got to take into account 50 separate sets of polling data. But while the mainstream media does occasionally pay attention to state-level polling for primaries, they routinely fall down on the job in the general election. I have personally tried to correct this nonsense, with my "Electoral Math" series of columns -- which break down which candidate is likely to win more Electoral College votes, state by state. In the last two elections, I've been pretty accurate in predicting that Obama was a lock weeks before Election Day even dawned. The state polling evidence was overwhelming. Next year, I'll be starting this column series up again soon after the two nominees emerge from the primary season, as usual.

As for being too early, well, on that I must plead guilty. I've already written many horserace stories on both the Democratic and Republican campaigns, while knowing full well that even the most civic-minded of American voters rarely pay attention before roughly right now -- just after Labor Day of the year before the election. In my defense, I have to say that this year's races in both parties have been too interesting to resist. I mean, six months ago I was facing the crushing boredom of writing endless Jeb-versus-Hillary stories, but that has simply not come to pass. There is excitement on both sides of the aisle, and where things go from here is truly anyone's guess. So I plead guilty to failing to resist the sweet, sweet catnip of both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. Exciting political campaigns are always more fun to cover, whether you agree with the candidate's views or not.

As for the questions of why voters are supporting this candidate or that, I do what most other pundits do (whether they admit it or not), and mostly listen to my gut. Gut feelings are more accurate than polling, at times. Asking "why" questions has always been notoriously hard for pollsters to do with any accuracy. So sometimes my gut tells me the polling is misleading, and sometimes I agree with it. But I always identify such stabbing in the dark when I do it -- prefacing it with "I have no data to base this upon, but here's what I think..." sorts of phrases. You, the reader, get to make your own mind up because I fully identify wild guesses when I take them, instead of presenting them as factual.

Polling may have its problems, and may occasionally be laughably wrong, once everyone actually votes. Pollsters have been struggling with cell phones for over a decade, and still aren't sure they've got the mix right of who to poll. The public as a whole is much less willing to even answer a pollster's call anymore, which also could skew the data in major and unforeseen ways.

Still, polls are all we've got to try to ascertain the mood of the American people. They've been around for a very long time -- the earliest I've read of was when Andrew Jackson was campaigning in the 1820s. Jackson's supporters had people ride up and down the Ohio River on paddle-wheel steamships, and ask everyone they could which candidate they were supporting. At the time, the Ohio was a major transportation corridor, and the equivalent today might be asking people at rest stops along I-95 who they supported. They didn't have the science of statistics to back up their results, but such crude attempts did at least provide some sort of indication of what people were thinking.

Even if the numbers could be wrong -- and often are to varying degree -- for the most part they prove fairly accurate on Election Day. Averaging a lot of individual polls together helps unskew some bad data. Not believing a single poll always equals a clear trend helps, too. Maintaining a healthy degree of skepticism is always a beneficial thing to do.

So while I do agree with some of the critics to some degree, horserace reporting has its place in political punditry. The alternative would be to ignore all the polls and give as much coverage to candidates like Lincoln Chafee and Lindsey Graham as to the obvious frontrunners. While that's a valid thing to do early on in the contest -- everyone should get some coverage -- once the race heats up, it is silly to keep reporting on someone who has proven that they have no support whatsoever in the electorate. They could have the greatest political platform America has ever seen (no matter how you define that), but if nobody's buying what they're selling then it is destined to be no more than a footnote in the campaign.

I've always tried to keep a balance between reporting on how the horserace is going and what the candidates actually stand for. Sometimes this balance tilts too far towards obsessing over the horserace. This always happens at the end of campaigns (both primary and general). So I leave it up to my own readers to haul me in if I'm leaning too far towards poll analysis versus agenda analysis or candidate performance analysis. If I start getting comments that it's getting boring just reading about the polls, then I'll dial it back. But for all the complaints about horserace reporting in general, I think that a good mix between all types of commentary is a good thing to shoot for. I might get the mix wrong at times, but I'm never going to stop commenting about the horserace at least once in a while. I consider it a valid thing to talk about, and always have.

-- Chris Weigant

Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant