Dear all, as a tangent of the USA elections, I would like to talk specifically about the polls.
Here is a good an comprehensive analysis done after the fact, as news stations try to explain why the polls were wrong again. https://www.yahoo.com/news/why-the-p...234138787.html
It covers what I had to say (reminder, I was saying those things for weeks ) very well, with one small but important difference:
The Pollsters, the actual people that did the math not the reporters that reported on the results or the political analysts that based their prediction on the polls, were aware that their data were suspect. If you read between the lines of what pollsters and experienced politicians (including Biden's campaign!) were saying you would see that they were shaky.
Many reporters wrote about how this is because of the 2016 spectrum, and to a point, they are right. However, that's up to a point.
The pollsters got their models based on some assumptions that they were not 100% sure of and they were not hiding it. Just read how cautious 538 were about their predictions. They were always saying "We see Biden as +5 in Florida if our data is correct" but they were aware that the polling samples were not the best and that there were underlying assumptions.
I.e. while for many reporters, pundits and people on the street the news that Trump increased his appeal with minorities was a surprise, for some people on the ground gathering the data it was not. It is just that many people ignored what didn't align with their vision.
There were things like this that made the Biden Campaign, mistrust the headlines and made the serious pollsters cautious.
But if you want to do your job, you can't adjust based on "gut feeling". You cannot simply say "We know that the people not picking up the phone are Trump voters". You have to prove it first. And it is hard to prove. So, you simply try to work around it by trying to make a better sample.
But there are only so many ways you can skin a rabbit. The toolset is not infinite. As such, pollsters were aware that they could again be very wrong.
Another issue is that people, even pundits and policy-makers do not know how to read polls well. Again, Biden's campaign had the advantage here; they knew the numbers were a bit too favorable to them. Biden himself is in this game for 40 years and knows that.
Democrat senators? Nope, they were not aware and now they sit there looking for answers as to why they lost the elections.
A great problem, in my opinion that is not in the article above with the polls is that they gave too much weight on race. This is especially jarring for people that claim they are not seeing skin color and treat all people the same.
You see, a black person is not just a black person. He or she may also be religious. He or she will be low, middle or high income. He or she will own a business, be employed somewhere or be unemployed.
It was foolish to think that the race-tainted summer would push minorities towards Biden. A black shopkeeper that has his store looted will be angry at the protesters. A religious Latina that is shocked and appalled by free abortions would vote for Pence despite Trump saying mean things about some other Latinos once a while. A Middle-Easterner caring about his employment prospects in the post-lockdown era would look more favorably to Trump.
I am not talking about single-issue voters here. On the contrary, I am talking about pundits treating minority voters as single-issue voters and that issue being race.
So, what do you think?