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It's obvious for several reasons that political polling is at best nonsense and worst outright fraudulent. Reason 1: people don't change their voting intentions

It's obvious for several reasons that political polling is at best nonsense and worst outright fraudulent. Reason 1: people don't change their voting intentions much. So how can polls swing one way and the other so much? Answer must be that they are measuring noise. Reason 2: headline numbers aggregate several polling results, but apparently don't discard known fraudulent data from partisan polsters. So the results can be trivially changed by simply spending money. Reason 3: nobody sane responds to a polster. So they are measuring data from provably insane people. Reason 4: polsters often exclude samples that should be included, for example by requiring respondents to have voted in two previous elections. So the samples is skewed. And on and on. Add to this the incentives in the news industry to make things click worthy and you have the result we observe. Nobody wants to say the emperor has no clothes. There's also a bias in some media to report a close race for fear of being accused of influencing the outcome.

whimsicalism 2y ago
> There's also a bias in some media to report a close race for fear of being accused of influencing the outcome. This is certainly true. the response I see nowadays if an NYT sponsored poll shows Trump is ahead is… not pretty. People are treating it like a sports game nowadays, wish they would stick to football.
dave4420 2y ago
Re your reason 4: the hardest part of political polling is working out who will actually vote. If your polls are going to get judged on their similarity to the final result, you want to filter out the people who won’t vote.
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jsnell 2y ago
How do you know that people don't change their voting intentions much? The only way you could know what people intend to do is by... umm... polling. Anyway, the polls haven't actually been swinging much this year, I don't know where you're getting that from. The only significant movement was when Biden withdrew from the race, which you would expect to make a big difference.

whimsicalism 2y ago

> There's also a bias in some media to report a close race for fear of being accused of influencing the outcome. This is certainly true. the response I see nowadays if an NYT sponsored poll shows Trump is ahead is… not pretty. People are treating it like a sports game nowadays, wish they would stick to football.

dave4420 2y ago

Re your reason 4: the hardest part of political polling is working out who will actually vote. If your polls are going to get judged on their similarity to the final result, you want to filter out the people who won’t vote.

deleted 2y ago

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jsnell 2y ago

How do you know that people don't change their voting intentions much? The only way you could know what people intend to do is by... umm... polling. Anyway, the polls haven't actually been swinging much this year, I don't know where you're getting that from. The only significant movement was when Biden withdrew from the race, which you would expect to make a big difference.