It's generally not understood to have positive connotations. In part because there is indeed some evidence to suggest that your concerns about it harming the democratic process are valid. For example: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/708682
In fact, horse race journalism has been observed to have such negative and self-fulling effects that some countries ban polling and/or electoral journalism for hours, days, or weeks before an election. Even in the US, it is illegal to do any "electioneering" within 100ft of a polling place.
On top of that, while 538 initially provided good and solid insights, it has recently been successfully gamed by right-wing players by standing up bogus polling organizations and getting their bogus results into the aggregator's (like 538) results. The goal of course was to make their candidates seem more popular, and the "reliability" scores did not work, as the aggregators results were significantly off in that direction.
> On top of that, while 538 initially provided good and solid insights, it has recently been successfully gamed by right-wing players by standing up bogus polling organizations and getting their bogus results into the aggregator's (like 538) results. The goal of course was to make their candidates seem more popular, and the "reliability" scores did not work, as the aggregators results were significantly off in that direction.
[Citation needed]
Lots of people raised that concern at the time, predicting the effort would bias aggregators, but for 538 at least, I’ve seen no analysis indicating a significant swing to a right bias in 2020, and overall the 2020 results were quite accurate.
I was watching it in real time. The effect was mostly in 2022 (they hadn't really gotten it going in 2020)
Here's the 538 headline before election day about how the Republicans were in very good shape, even potentially a blowout win [0]
In fact, it was the exact opposite.
Yes, there was a lot of statistical handwaving about how they were really right, but, not really. BTW, this was just the top result from a DDG search, and is only one of the things I remember.
It's generally not understood to have positive connotations. In part because there is indeed some evidence to suggest that your concerns about it harming the democratic process are valid. For example: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/708682