@chaski Said
The polls WERE wrong. Trump won.
Yes.
The polls indicated that she would win.
The fact that the pollsters didn't dig down deep enough to consider the EC thing is really irrelevant.
I suppose you could blame the analysts if that makes you feel better about it, but the reality is that the polls were pointing towards a Clinton win, but she lost.
And it could easily happen again.
The polls ask a sample population that is reflective of the voting population as a whole if they would vote for one candidate or vote for the other. And the raw results are posted. And that’s it. Nowhere in the process are these results skewed to factor in electoral college dynamics...never have, never will. It is news outlets and people like you who want to to mean something more and make it to mean something more. But in reality, data is data, and doesn’t pretend to be anything else. And as it turns out, in this particular instance, it was accurate in its reflection of the actual results of the national popular vote.
It shouldn’t be surprising either. Several polls are churned out weekly leading up to the election, and, as anyone who understands basic statistics know, the more frequent sampling we have, the closer we come to predicting actual results.
People were shocked because they didn’t realize the degree that the electoral college can be different than the popular vote result, not because of the results of the popular vote results themselves, which again mirrored the polls, like they were supposed to.
The electoral college is much, much harder to predict, and isn’t, therefore, as exact a science. This is dependent on state polls, which are NOT churned out every week, MUCH LESS several each week, MUCH LESS all the week or two before the election. If they were all these, we wouldn’t be dependent on analysts to give us their arbitrary take on predicting the victor instead like we are.
So you can still trust the polls. Is is the disinformation campaign of Trump that wants you to believe their are silent voters that are not in polls. Looks like this has been successful. There are not silent voters, just as there were not in 2016. People just didn’t fully understand the electoral college is all.
Therefore, in predicting the national popular vote: Clinton’s lead was 2 points in polling and results. Biden’s lead is 9.7 points.
(Note, I’m now putting on my own analyst spin): This is a huge difference and likely to be enough to overcome any electoral college dynamics that gave Trump the victory in 2016.