[nebula8804]

This is not true. I was recently reminded of this during the recent small elections that occured. The parties have "internal polling" that was significantly more accurate such that it caused shifts in actions (see the recent surge in efforts by Trump and his party to maintain control of the TN house seat).

Furthermore we saw Musk's and his buddies confidence in the 2024 election. We now know he had internal applications built to better understand what was really going on and access to better analytics than what was shown in the news.

The regular people (like me) were left to rely on pollsters and our confidence come from the fact that many of these pollsters had decades of experience getting things right. This was then regurgitated among all the news (and political youtubers) about how things were going only to have all their predictions be wrong and these esteemed pollsters deciding to retire.

Looking back it may have been all a scam and that its possible that these pollsters were getting ready to retire anyway and gave into party pressure to make Kamala look better than she really was. The end result is that we wasted our time believing nonsense and I am done with it.

[CamperBob2]

I agree that political sentiment analysis is one area where the high-level players really do have oracular resources that the rest of us lack. Besides Musk, a good example might be how Bezos pivoted instantly from neutral to pro-Trump leading up to the 2024 election. Seems clear that he knew what was about to happen when he killed the Harris endorsement in the Post.

But the question here is more general than that. Musk didn't have a reliable source of ground truth when he accused the Thai cave diver of being a pedophile. If he did, he didn't use it. Ditto, when he woke up one day and decided that Twitter was worth $54.20/share. You could point to countless other examples where highly-positioned, highly-resourceful, "high agency" people simply read the room wrong.