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JWeinCom 4 days ago
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sundin13 said:

I don't trust this whole "The Republicans are skewing the polls" stuff. There are plenty of non-partisan sponsored polls, especially in areas like Pennysylvania, which give Harris a reason to worry about her odds. The NTY/Sienna poll was a positive outlier for Harris in PA but the same poll also showed her down 5pts in Arizona among likely voters.

Besides, any good poll aggregator like 538 or Silver Bulletin will weight the data coming in by reliability, so some Rep Sponsored polls wouldn't do much to move the average (if they were even outliers, which they really haven't been). Even still, Silver Bulletin shows basically every state that matters (except Georgia) moving towards Trump over the last week.

It will be an incredibly close race if polls are somewhat accurate. That hasn't changed and likely won't. Any movement we see from here to election day will likely affect vibes more than actual mathematical odds.

I don't think that's the case.

There was a video, I don't remember quite by who, that pointed out the flaws in Fivethirtyeight's methodology. But here is one clear example.

https://cdn.atlasintel.org/9e0da6ea-7e9c-498c-89e3-511bd7344cd0.pdf

This is the results of an Atlas Intel poll. They have a 2.7 star rating on Fivethirtyeight. According to this poll, Kamala Harris is actually winning men in Arizona by about 12 points, but losing women by 12. She is losing black voters 60 to 40%. In Michigan, the male vote is almost dead even, but Trump is ahead by 4 points because he is winning among women by 10%. Among those who choose not to identify their gender, Jill fucking Stein has 54% of the vote, Trump 48%, and Harris 4%. In North Carolina, Harris is actually winning by 3, and her advantage comes almost solely from men, as women are dead even. In Pennsylvania Trump is winning because he is up by about 5 points among women, and winning 18-29 year olds by 10 points. Trump is also getting 46% of the black vote, up from 7% according to 2020 exit polls. 

Again, this is a fairly highly rated pollster, the 22nd best according to Fivethirtyeight and should be influencing the models. Whether or not Kamala Harris will win, it is almost guaranteed that these polls are total horseshit. Whether it is deliberate or just incompetence I can't say, but there are definitely problems with the polling. The fact that the crosstabs are so wildly off yet the averages are still somewhat close smells of conspiracy to me. I think the problem with the aggregators is that they rely purely on data and I'm not sure if there is any human just looking through and saying "wait that's definitely fucked".