Pollsters are waiving the white flag

[WSHazel]

Link to tweet

Link to tweet

Other than Selzer, and a handful of state focused pollsters, the polling services have given up on this election. They are not even trying anymore. When someone like Nate Silver, who has his own credibility problems, calls out an entire industry for making up their results, you know there is a problem.

These are not really even polls anymore, and they are not even guesses of what will happen. These "polls" are just someone aligning their results to match everyone else's results.

Other than Selzer and a few of those local organizations, we are flying blind heading into Tuesday.

[Sucha NastyWoman]

1. I think the lesson learned here

Is that in very close races? Polls are really useless.

[LymphocyteLover]

16. the problem is it was not clear this was ever really a close race

[Klarkashton]

2. They are only reaching the same kinds of people all the time.

The kind of people that answer random phone calls and respond to on line polling requests.

[WSHazel]

3. That is a very generous interpretation of their actions

Silver points out that it is impossible for pollsters to have reached this outcome accidentally.

I think that A) pollsters don’t want to look stupid so they are herding, and B) I think they are afraid of Trump so if they are going to be wrong they want to be wrong favoring Trump.

[-misanthroptimist]

4. Quoting the late, great Groucho Marx:

"I told ya that in the first reel." Okay, not the precise odds, but I did say that the polls didn't look right. Very roughly speaking, one in twenty of the polls should produce a result outside the margin of error just by chance. When dozens and dozens or hundreds produce consistent results within the MoE, it's time to start looking at your sampling criteria.

IANA Statistician...but I've been around the block a few times.

[Jack Valentino]

5. if you look at "ACTUAL" early voting turnout, we are NOT so blind---

Georgia has a RECORD early voting turnout, most of them women---
Georgia's early and absentee voting is 80 freaking percent of the 2020 total vote!


I had doubted our chances of winning Georgia, but no more in light of the above FACTS.

[tgraf66]

6. They've been wrong

...so many times for so long, no one's really paying much attention to them anymore. The D's in particular have been taking up the "Ignore the polls" mantra for months. They've been exposing the problems with the various methodologies employed to blatantly and intentionally game the averages by tossing bogus polls paid for by partisans into the mix. The only purpose is to keep up the appearance of a horse race. Their methods are also outdated and unreliable, so there's no point to them.

[ThePartyThatListens]

7. This SHOULD be the final nail in the coffin for the polls

And the mainstream media, but alas, Americans have short memory.

We'll be back here again.

Yes, the reason is they're afraid of Trump and his base. As usual.

So they're just making crap up.

*sigh*

[SoFlaBro]

8. Nate Silver is a grifting MAGA loving motherfucker. He can eat fucking shit with his crypto grift fuck shit.

[mucholderthandirt]

9. Harris is so far ahead they know they can't tell their masters.

It has to be close, or there would be mass panic, the MAGAs would go insane and probably beat them half to death, and the corporate overlords would need diapers worse than Trump.

[Skittles]

10. I don't believe any of them

nope

and with the fucking Electoral College they are very often irrelevant anyways

[OldBaldy1701E]

15. Me either!

As stated, they are just a means to support their assertion that things are 'hectic' and 'close'. They are desperate to be important and will knowingly lie their asses off to get more clicks.

[Easterncedar]

11. Waiving or waving?

It’s late. I’m easily confused.

[UpInArms]

12. Here's an interesting site

https://virtualtout.io/

[BootinUp]

13. Its telling us something. Meaning it is the people being polled who are acting differently. nt

[Deminpenn]

14. The polls are statistically valid

It's the likely voter, i.e., turnout, models that are problematic. Trying to figure out who's going to vote has bedeviled pollsters since Trump came on the scene in 2015. His supporters are cultlike, if not outright cultists. I doubt pollsters have ever encountered anything like that affecting their turnout models. In 2016, they missed all the "unlikely voters" because a big component of turnout modeling is a voter's history of voting. These Trump voters were mostly left out although you could see the size of this rallies and the enthusiasm. It should've been a clue to pollsters that they were missing something and needed to tweak their LV models.

In 2020, polls were better because pollsters corrected for the 2016 LV error.

In 2022, the increasing use of polling averages caused Rs to release many partisan polls that were then included in the polling averages skewing them. Some people, like Simon Rosenberg and others, saw that and corrected for it and were rewarded by calling the 2022 outcome correctly as no "red wave".

In 2024, pollsters have continued to base their LV models on 2016 and 2020, but they are missing the same subset of "unlikely voters" as they did in 2016 except these voters are now Ds. The same signs as 2016 are there, but this time for Harris, large, enthusiastic crowds and umprompted chanting everywhere she goes.

[KentuckyWoman]

17. All gas no brakes. We'll sleep when we are dead.

Future VP Tim Walz is right. hit it hard.