There's so much **** that goes into this that it would be exhausting to go through it all. The polls are mostly sound but the largest problem is the proprietary methods companies have for weighted distributions and outcome predictions. They poll nationally for locally-contested polls that work like FPTP, especially when it comes to the electoral college. There are different proprietary models that these pollsters use to take a sample and project the results on a national scale. There will ALWAYS be an element of error to this. They're not and never have been shooting for pin-point accuracy. Predictive models like these are always shooting for a range. The results of the polls have always been well within tolerances of that, for most reputable pollsters anyway.
Right, but what you are missing (I think, anyway) is why polls have started experiencing issues post-2000. It's mobile phones and random sampling, which do not go together. If polls are within tolerances (and I don't think they always are) there would still be a question why Trump support always skews the same way.
It's not "shy Trump voters" but it's "paranoid, "we hate the system", "refuse to talk to pollsters" Trump voters that come out of their holes like groundhogs ONLY TO VOTE FOR TRUMP that are the latest iteration here.
The trouble with hotly contested elections is that the margins of error overlap, so it makes the prediction a lot more difficult. If someone only has a ~17% chance of winning, that's still literally Russian Roulette for the results. 17% is literally a 1:6 chance of winning, so load up that gun, spin the chamber, and pull the trigger. Chances are you survive, but that's still not a game any rational person would look at and say, "there's NO chance of dying."
Ok but Silver's model is NOT a poll it's a subjectively weighted aggregate of polls. He decides, for example, what are 'good' polls and weights them according to.... [throws a dart at dartboard] quality factors.
The problem with polls are not the polls themselves, but rather most people's understanding of what they actually say.
Also true, and I was saying this after 2016 also. But when the 2020 results skewed the same way, something indeed seemed odd. Of course, you can flip a coin and get heads 50 times in a row but this seemed different. The conclusion Five Thirty Eight reached is that there likely is a phantom Trump voter.
The news reports on sensationalist, nonsense absolutes. People are uncomfortable with uncertainty. Statistics is literally the field of math where you need to live in the area of uncertainty.
Sure but good random sampling is the lifeblood of quality polls, and The Five Thirty Eight have their own oddities that have to be absorbed in such a conversation.
That said, I'm still happy with having them around. The Georgia polls showed up accurately, meaning that absence of Trump is a good thing ... in yet another new and wonderful way.