sc94597 said:
If you were looking at polling averages that included Republican polls, “you were looking at a completely different election than we were looking at,” he added. When Rosenberg stripped out the partisan polling, he foresaw an election in which New Hampshire, Arizona, Georgia, and Pennsylvania were leaning Democrat, Nevada was too close to call, and Ohio, North Carolina, and Wisconsin were leaning a little Republican. That’s consistent with what actually transpired.
As to the second sentence, there is no binary of "being wrong" and "being right" here. The point of polling isn't to get it exactly right at the individual poll level, but to create an aggregate picture that better reflects the population group that we want to estimate. If we cut-off the tails due to the individual poll being potentially biased (but without showing it), which is what pollsters seem to be doing currently (because of the rating system), we can possibly lose part of the picture and can have a worse aggregate because of it. This is called "herding" where the pollsters are refusing to publish results that show a large difference from their priors. It helps their individual rating and error rate, but hurts our over-all predictability. |
What do you mean cut off the tails? This sounds to me like pollsters are more worried about being right than just reporting the poll numbers as is. But being more worried about being right and then adjusting for it would just make you wrong anyway. Either report the poll numbers as is, or find out how you are missing so many different types of voters that your poll is useless.
