[raincole]

> Either reality has a left bias, or our training data does

Most published polls claimed Trump vs Harris is about 50:50.

Even the more credible analyses like FiveThirtyEight.

So yeah, published information in text form has a certain bias.

[silveraxe93]

So they are biased because they said it was a toss-up and the election ended up being won by a razor's edge?

Votes wise, the electoral college makes small differences in popular votes have a larger effect in state votes.

[PierceJoy]

Trump received 49.8% of the vote. Harris received 48.3%. Where is the bias?

Outcomes that don’t match with polls do not necessarily indicate bias. For instance, if Trump had won every single state by a single vote, that would look like a dominating win to someone who only looks at the number of electors for each candidate. But no rational person would consider a win margin of 50 votes be dominating.

[raincole]

When FiveThirtyEight claimed Harris has 50-in-100 chance, it didn't mean that she'd likely to get 50% of the general vote. It had already taken electoral college into account.

> if Trump had won every single state by a single vote...

Yeah sure but in the reality we live in, Trump didn't win the swing states by just one single vote.

[duskdozer]

"x/100 chance of y winning" for a single event just doesn't really have much meaning or value. if it predicted a 99/100 chance of a Harris victory, Trump winning is still compatible with that model. and despite the presumed urge to say it was inaccurate, it in fact could have been exactly right, but simply that the rare outcome happened. if it instead was predicting a vote share of 99% to 1%, then yeah you could consider that a poor model

[armchairhacker]

> Most published polls claimed Trump vs Harris is about 50:50.

But were they wrong?

Not objectively. "50:50" means that if Trump and Harris had 1,000 elections, it would be unlikely for Harris to not win about 500. But since there was only one election, and the probability wasn't significantly towards Harris, the outcome doesn't even justify questioning the odds, and definitely doesn't disprove them.

Subjectively, today it seems like Trump's victory was practically inevitable, but that's in part because of hindsight bias. Politics in the US is turbulent, and I can imagine plenty of plausible scenarios where the world was just slightly different and Harris won. For example, what if the Epstein revelations and commentary happened one year earlier?

There's a good argument that political polls in general are unreliable and vacuous; I don't believe this for every poll, but I do for ones that say "50:50" in a country with turbulent "vibe-politics" like the US. If you believe this argument, since none of the polls state anything concrete, it follows that none them are actually wrong (and it's not just the left making this kind of poll).