Why are the state polls almost ALWAYS wrong in the same direction?

[Funtatlaguy]

It just boggles the mind that time after time, year after year, that so many of these state polls that will show a slight Dem lead turn into Repug wins and sometimes routs.
Either people are lying to pollsters, or the polling companies are all bad, or there is some hanky panky somewhere with computer source codes and some votes being changed in a few precincts.

[mr_lebowski]

1. Those are certainly all possibilities ... another one is ... Dem voters are more flaky about

ACTUALLY FREAKING VOTING ... on the average.

Just sayin ... it also could be that.

Or their votes are more likely to be suppressed and/or other types of cheating, for sure.

[Zing Zing Zingbah]

11. Same day voter registration --- all states should have it.

Maine does. Same day voter registration would at least solve the issue of the disappearing voter registrations.

We also let people vote in Maine prisons.

[dlk]

2. Republicans Have Been Cheating and Stealing Elections for Many Years. When Will We Admit it?

And even more important, when will we actually do something about it?

[rzemanfl]

5. +1. n/t

[rampartc]

3. They may not even be polling at all

The repubs believe that their "analytics" of our internet activity is a better indicator of our preferences.

[global1]

4. I've Been Suspect Of The Polls That Show That This Country Is Almost 50%-50% Divided.....

and that if you look at most of the races in this Midterm - the very close margins between winning and losing.

I think all of us here acknowledged that it is not beyond the Repugs to suppress, cheat and steal votes and also maybe get help by foreign hackers to win elections.

We also acknowledged that in order for the Dems to win - that voter turnout should be so big that it would make in nearly impossible for the Repugs to do any funny business to win.

In most of these Midterm races the margin between a win and a loss was close. It was close enough to in many cases to do some hanky panky and steal the election.

[ffr]

6. Not only that, but I'd imagine polls to be skewed towards the GOP due to polling methods

I'm never polled, simply because my primary line is a cellphone and I don't take phone calls from out of state IDs. I would think the democratic leaning youth would be doing much the same, a populace that goes under the radar.

[Funtatlaguy]

7. Fla Rick Scott has now "won" 3 straight races by 1%. Coincidence?

[LonePirate]

8. Florida continues to defy all polling. It's mystifying to me.

Every single poll (2-3 dozen total) except 1 or 2 had Gillum winning, some by several points. Instead he’s down by one. The sheer volume of polls being wrong on his race astounds me.

[Zing Zing Zingbah]

9. What state are you talking about?

Maine polling was pretty spot on this year.

[Funtatlaguy]

10. Tenn, fla, mo, Az, Mt, Ind, off the top of my head...

And that’s just the Senate races that had Dems either leading or very close in all polling in the final few days....only to get beaten and some places shellacked.

[Proud Liberal Dem]

12. What was up in Maine yesterday?

and how did Democrats do?

[Zing Zing Zingbah]

14. Dems did awesome in Maine.

Dems won governor (and first female Maine governor!), majority in the Maine State House and majority in the Maine State Senate. Dems are going to rule in Maine for the next two years at least. ME-2 US house race resulted in re-election (I think for her 5th term) of Dem rep Chellie Pingree. Senator Angus King got re-elected. He is an independent that typically votes with the Dems, like Bernie. ME-2 US house race is too close to call and it will be up to an instant runoff since it is our first ever general election ranked choice voting race. The incumbent is a Repub. Dem is just about tied with him right now. There were two independents in the race. The people that voted for the independents will have their votes redistributed to their second choice, which we're hoping is the Dem. We'll see, but we're still have a chance there. The independent that had the most votes was more like a Dem than a Repub with her stances on the issues, so that might bode well for the Dem picking up their second choice votes. We will see. I'm thinking it might be a week before the outcome of that race is determined. It's pretty exciting to actually have ranked choice voting come into play here for the first time ever in general election and it is awesome that our Dem candidate has a fighting chance in ME-2 because that district is mostly rural and conservative. Overall, very good results for Dems in Maine. We kicked ass there.

[Proud Liberal Dem]

16. Great!

Glad to hear that Indies didn't spoil anything there yesterday

[Zing Zing Zingbah]

20. Yes, I was worried about the Gov race because of the Indie

but Mills did awesome. She got 50% in a 3 way race. Not ranked choice in that one, so if Indie had taken too many votes from the Dem, we could have lost. Seems like liberal leaning folks got the message that they better rally behind the Dem and forget the Indie if they didn't want to endure another 4 years of LePage-like Repub as gov. With the Dem majority, maybe we can finally fix the Maine constitution to fully implement ranked choice voting so that will be an option in the general election state level races like the governor's race. Mainers voted to have ranked choice voting two times already, so they know we want it. LePage and cronies refused to do anything about it of course. If we get that done then there will never been any worries about 3rd party spoilers again in Maine. We've been fighting hard for it over here.

[uponit7771]

18. All red States HRC was closer in 16

[Zing Zing Zingbah]

22. Maybe polling is off in red states

because they underestimated the Republican turn outs there. They were apparently more fired up about Trump's caravan garbage. Racism was a bigger motivator than expected. Probably more likely in the south. There are racist Republicans up north too, but that darn caravan doesn't matter to them all that much. Those people aren't likely to find there way up here. I think sticking to the health care messaging has helped the Dems make some head way with conservatives in the north... with some of the more reasonable ones.

[ChoppinBroccoli]

13. I'll Go You One Better

Why is it that EVERY time there's a recount, they always find that the Democratic candidate's votes weren't counted properly, and the Democrat ALWAYS gains votes from the recount? If this happens 100% of the time there's a recount, what about all the other races that seemingly weren't close enough to trigger a recount? I've literally never seen a race go to a recount where the Democratic candidate didn't gain votes. It couldn't possibly be a coincidence that it's ALWAYS the Democrat who's being shorted votes in the standard vote-count.

[Funtatlaguy]

15. Exactly.

[uponit7771]

19. +1

[joshcryer]

17. Republicans are fucking liars. They lie to the pollsters.

They lie on purpose because they're two faced pieces of shit.

[cwydro]

21. Don't believe polls.

I learned that lesson in 2016.

Never again.