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 sure if I devoted myself to understanding it I would come away with opinions about how different polls do things differently. I just don’t have a reason to spend the time on it. At the end of the day, no poll is going to give me certainty about the future, both candidates could plausibly win.
But yeah, response rates have been very low for a while, polls have remained useful but imperfect, I don't see any reason to think we just passed some major tipping point.
My other thing is, I’ve worked on a lot of high level non-political survey based stuff, and interpreting survey results is actually very tricky. You can’t just take them at face value. This maybe matters less for election surveys but surveys on political issues are really complicated.
you should always just look at the average because different pollsters do different things of varying merit. plausibly yes, either could win. but you’d be a fool to put money down on joe here imo
Yeah. Just for me personally, as someone who isn't making campaign decisions about how to spend money, my situation doesn't change whether Biden has a 30% chance or 70% chance of winning. Both mean a Trump presidency is a serious possibility.
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.
