I think you excel at jabs with selected verbiage so you can the victim later.  But cool, I was literally named in your post but sure, it wasn't directed at me.  I totally believe you.

That aside, I think many here are dismissive of data for no reason other than they don't like the trends.  

The only wild card I see is early voting.  Not sure if polls are capturing that demographic.

I hope I'm, wrong but it doesn't look good.

Edit

And frankly I trust betting firms who specialize in odds more than polls.  60% is a strong position.  But again, hopefully they are wrong.  

You were named because I was responding to your argument from the last time you brought up the betting firms. Not everything in my post was directed at you. 

I was also thanking a different user despite not naming them. 

You're also dismissing the data that haxxiy was sharing, that showed betting firms have been wrong in the past. 

I'm not the one claiming to be a victim.

Of course betting firms aren't 100% right, but they are right more than they are wrong.

All that aside, anybody who is confident in harris, go make some money.  

They also big on risk avoidance so if there data say the odds are 50/50 of either side winning but 70 percent of the money coming in on trump they going to adjust those odds to be 60/40 trump because they want the money coming in to be a bit more balance on both sides.

Betting odds are less accurate than most top-rated pollsters, on average.

The former are initially set by polling data and are, by definition, only as accurate as the groups making the bets. Contrary to the common idea of 'wisdom of the crowd,' they seem more likely to add new sources of bias than remove them. See this study for more details.

Of course, if you want to go down that route, you might as well be using Lichtman's keys or halloween mask sales, which are at least an order of magnitude more precise in predicting results (in terms of standard deviation).

You prefer companies that have a financial interest? Individual polls aren't great either but I'd recommend a polling aggregator to average out the biases that polls inherently give. 

No, people are not dismissing the polls because they don't like them, they are dismissing them because they are bad.

Atlas Intel is included in the fivethirtyeight average. They say that Trump will win 45.7% of the urban vote and about 30% of the black vote. That is absurd. According to their sample, 88% of their respondents voted for Biden in 2020, and 96.9% voted Trump. Of course, Biden won the popular vote in 2020, so their sample clearly not representative and skewed towards Trump. 

https://www.atlasintel.org/poll/usa-national-2024-1710

Activote is a poll that I believe is not really sampled. Whoever clicks the link to do the poll does it. This leads to wonky results. For example, they have Trump winning by 1. They also have a sample that when unweighted was 64% male. They did weigh it to 54% female, which is about what the voting population was last year, but the fact that they had such a skewed sample in the first place makes it questionable. More problematic is that even after weighting, their sample was 32% urban and 32% rural and 37% suburban. In reality, rural voters at best make up 20% of the population. As with Atlas, they have Trump winning about 30% of the black vote, which would be a pretty crazy result. Even crazier, they have Trump winning 19% of registered Democrats which is pretty wild. This was 5% in 2020. 

https://www.activote.net/trump-extends-lead/

Beacon, from Fox News, again has Trump winning 29% of black voters. Is this impossible? No, but Trump almost tripling his support among black voters from 2020 is a strange result. This poll also says Trump will be winning 46% of the 18-34 year old vote, up from 30%. Meanwhile, Trump is winning among college educated whites with 51% while he lost this group by 13% in 2020. What is stranger is that this number has just about flipped since September. 

https://www.foxnews.com/official-polls/fox-news-poll-trump-ahead-harris-2-points-nationally

This is what I can see from fly by night pollsters who make their crosstabs available. Either there has been a massive surge in Trump support among the youth, black people, and even among Democrats, or the polls are wrong. Personally, I think the latter is far more likely. Trump is still Trump except older, more sluggish, and more orange. It's hard to see why there would be such a sudden surge.

You might say that immigration and inflation are so bad, or perceived as so bad, that they would cause lots of people to suddenly turn to Trump. Yet, the problem with that is that just about a month ago, these same polls were showing much better numbers for Harris. And I don't think these issues are getting any worse. Plus, there are countervailing factors that would likely boost Harris compared to Biden in 2020, such as Dobbs, January 6th, Trump's continued deterioration, and the fact that she is not 80 years old. 

We shouldn't dismiss polls that give us news we don't like, but there is very good reason to be skeptical of many polls.

As for the betting markets, you are correct that they are not out to lose money. However, you are wrong that could somehow lose money. Polymarket at least, and I imagine the others, make money by charging a transaction fee when bets are placed. If I place a 5 dollar bet and you place one, they take 25 cents from each of us, and the 10 dollars goes in the pot. Whether I win or you win, they get 50 cents. It doesn't matter how well they can analyze data because they are not analyzing data. If they were wanting to make as much money as possible, I believe it would probably behoove them to keep the results right around 50-50. 

I for one, am not dismissing polls entirely, because the averages say it will be a toss-up, I've always said it would be a close race, the polls at NOT saying it's a clear win for either Kamala or Trump, I feel like I would be dismissing polling data even more if I were to say "polls were wrong in 2020 so they'll definitely always be wrong" which hey, they may be, but I've always maintained it will be a close race and that's what polls are saying too. Now some individual polls are iffy, like pointed out above by Jwein but the overall averages are still a toss-up.

I'm dismissing these betting firms though

Honestly the fact that Polymarket's movement towards Trump largely comes from a single dude with $30m is really shady, the fact that Musk is tweeting about it is even shadier, I would not be surprised if Harris wins, this is what Musk will point towards as to "the election was stolen, the betting markets said it was a clear Trump win" bullshit.

That dude is absolutely, 100%, going to peddle stolen election conspiracy theories IF Harris wins.

You mean WHEN Harris wins. She only needs to win the rust belt swing states, after all.

Life is good there right now, because the Packers, Lions, Eagles and Steelers have winning records, so Trump's doomsaying campaign is clearly at odds with reality.

That's why Harris can afford to lose Nevada and North Carolina, and by the way, she will totally lose these states because the Raiders and Panthers are that awful.

Arizona and Georgia are toss-up states, but based on the recent history of the Cardinals and Falcons, they are much more likely to go to Trump than Harris.