Biden ticks up, but GOP holds advantage on economy, Post-ABC poll finds

[PortTack]

25. I don't think it's that ppl don't want to know, they just don't buy what they're putting out there

I for sure am one of them….And with good reason!

The last 3 election cycles have proven that the polls really are not accurate. They’ve done nothing to change their poor polling methodology and yet are still to be believed?

538 the supposed gold standard, b4 the last presidential election, out of the blue changed the rating of trafalgor and rasmussen from low numbers to As and Bs..really?

Silver came to political prominence in 2008, when his aggregations of election polls produced an impressive predictive model that called that year’s national elections with remarkable accuracy. In subsequent years, he and his organization, FiveThirtyEight, have produced inconsistent results: an inaccurate muck-up of 2010 elections in the U.K.; an accurate prediction of the 2012 results in the U.S.; and a wildly incorrect take on the 2016 elections that he continues to attempt to retcon into an impressive showing by claiming he was slightly less overconfident about a Donald Trump loss than everybody else.

More recently, he was confidently mocking supporters of impeachment for their antimajoritarian views: “Wait aren’t you the guy who thinks impeachment will be a really good political move for Democrats even though it polls at like 37%?,” he tweeted in September, barely a month before the Democrats launched an actual impeachment inquiry following revelations that Trump clumsily sought some kind of foreign assistance in digging up dirt on his political opponents, a decision that within a matter of weeks swung a majority of public sentiment in favor of impeachment.

Increasingly, one suspects that despite his claims to analytical rigor, at some very basic level, Silver does not actually know what a poll is. He is not alone in this; a fair portion of the country’s political punditry and opinion-making class is equally misinformed. In their conception, polls of opinion and sentiment represent not a snapshot of the present as informed by the past, but rather a hazy but prescient view into the future; not a measurement, but a prediction. “[Y]ou can actually write down what will happen in the future, with as much confidence as you write down the history of the past. Because it’s science!” This is why so much media discourse around polling emphasizes a framework that paints polls of present attitudes as a form of absolute constraint on where sentiment will go.

https://www.commondreams.org/views/2019/10/30/nate-silver-making-he-goes