[fiblye]

Poll percentages aren’t raw data. Usually there are various weights and balances applied to the counts, and these could give misleading numbers. E.g., polls might think male latinos who finished college might turn up at the polls at a lower proportion than they actually did, which can result in significant shifts.

There’s also the factor of questioning, both how things are worded and the means they use to ask them. Landline polling with 50 questions (yes, some pollers do this and you can see the questions they ask) aren’t likely to reach people with jobs or people who are young, so that results in the few people they do reach giving undue weight to “make up” for the voters they couldn’t poll. Wording of a question can also change how a person reports their result, and there’s always the lizard man constant and people who intentionally screw with pollers, some being easy to detect and discard.

In a way, they do end up as forecasters.

[bo1024]

Yes, I agree with all these things. I still think there needs to be a lot more precision and details about what the polls claim to do, to say they screwed up.