there’s no evidence for “the polls are unreliable” in any historically special way either. even if you do the simon rosenberg thing and only count the longstanding reputable ones. you can theorize on why This Time Is Different and might even be right. but you’re just vibing, sorry
it’s a weird thing to see folks hyper-focused on any shift (or no shift) in polls and take them as gospel when the vibe was “the polls are unreliable” up until 5 days ago tbh
“what if they’re off 4 points?” great so you only lost wisconsin by 1 or you lost nevada (the actual tipping point i think) and it went to the house. but off by 4 is well into the norm
I mean you can quibble about magnitudes but all reports are that pollsters are trying to come up with ways to combat nonresponse bias and there is literally no credible way to do that that doesn't involve getting people to answer the phone
This is standard for polls though. Polls never put out raw numbers, they always apply all kinds of weights and multipliers based on factors like that. You can dig into the methodology if you want but it’s a whole big field of study.
I'm not a political pollster, but my job used to be to run surveys for a large data gathering organization that you have definitely heard of and we contracted to those surveys with a lot of other organizations you've heard of in the context of political polls
Which is to say, I understand a ton about how the sausage is made. Basically the only part of political polling that I have a shaky understanding of is how exactly they pull voter files and why some states have less reliable ones than others.