Could we please begin our examination of why "all the polls were wrong" by vowing

[Nederland]

54. Nate Silver says the problem lies in getting a random sample, good luck arguing with him

There was plenty of apprehension at the annual conference of the American Association for Public Opinion Research, which I attended last month, about the state of the polling industry.

The problem is simple but daunting. The foundation of opinion research has historically been the ability to draw a random sample of the population. That’s become much harder to do, at least in the United States. Response rates to telephone surveys have been declining for years and are often in the single digits, even for the highest-quality polls. The relatively few people who respond to polls may not be representative of the majority who don’t. Last week, the Federal Communications Commission proposed new guidelines that could make telephone polling even harder by enabling phone companies to block calls placed by automated dialers, a tool used in almost all surveys.

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/polling-is-getting-harder-but-its-a-vital-check-on-power/