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this post was submitted on 28 Jul 2024
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Do you remember 2016? Polls were saying Clinton would beat Trump by a significant margin.
If you're approaching this logically, you'd notice the trend on data being unreliable when Trump is on the ballot.
It's mostly attributed to inaccuracies in putting appropriate weight on likely voters vs. unlikely voters. People considered unlikely to vote by pollsters went out and voted, and they voted for Trump.
Measuring racism is also something that polling is bad at. People simply don't like to admit to being racist. Is this related to the reason why polling on Trump is inaccurate? We don't know because there's no data on this. Some things polling just fails at. Can't do much when people won't provide you with data that may be relevant.
We do know that Trump's primary numbers were lower than polling indicated it would be. Does that mean his numbers in the general will be lower than the polls we're seeing right now? We don't know.
What effect did January 6 have on people's decisions? Some people may not want to talk about it. But the week before election they'll probably be seeing political ads showing video about Jan. 6 and ask people straight up "do you want this to happen again?" which might people who might say Jan. 6 wasn't a big deal to privately think otherwise just stay home on Election Day. Polling is based on past trends, so isn't going to be good a predicting anything after unprecedented events.
After this election pollsters have a baseline for how likely people will vote for a candidate lost the previous election, tried to overthrow the government, was convicted of felonies, had an assassination attempt vs. a candidate that suddenly became prominent after the sitting President and presumptive nominee dropped out the race 3.5 months before the election. But right now there's not a lot of data there on this particular scenario.
The data is simply too unreliable to make any prediction on anything. So... vote!
Not all polls predicted that
The polls pretty accurately predicted the popular vote, but Trump won in 6 highly contested swing states which at the time included Florida
Even if that were the case, we would need some data to indicate which poll is accurate so then we'll know some number that won't actually determine who will end up as president.
Might be better to just ignore the simplistic number that doesn't indicate anything useful and instead focus on numbers indicating what issues people care about and try to convince as many people as possible to vote for Harris.
That is completely off topic. The conversation here is about whether no polling is more trustworthy than some polling.
A fair assessment as to why polling may be unreliable. However keep in mind this thread started as a rebuttal of blind anecdotal enthusiasm in a social media post. The story is 'someone posted on social media that Florida looks like Harris country', and they posted that polls suggest that post is too optimistic. Polls may be imperfect, but the methodology is far closer to informative than "I saw some Harris campaign signs around".
Good write up, but you're doing the thing you said not to do (approaching this logically).
My half baked opinion on this is that people are lying to pollsters. I think it's people of all political walks and for varied reasons, but it's the only thing that keeps making sense.
Even exit polls are getting it wrong. Like, that can only happen if people are lying.
Exit polls getting it wrong didn't mean people are lying. People may be refusing to answer in a way that skews one way or another.