Well, it looks as though Biden is slowing inching toward winning the election. If all the ballots are allowed to be counted, Biden should capture the White House (lawsuits pending) with a razor thin margin via the Electoral College.
And that margin of victory should come as a shock to most pollsters and pundits who had the former VP way ahead nationally and in most of the so-called battleground states.
I’m not sure why the pollsters get this so wrong in most elections time after time.
I guess you could believe in the conspiracy theories that are now flooding social media. For instance, do you really believe that pollsters for the Washington Post will create a methodology — and word questions — that doesn’t favor liberal Democrats? By the way, The Washington Post and The New York Times (among many other print and broadcast media) used to be real newspapers. Now they are just part of the media gaggle that basically just repeats talking points from the Democratic National Committee. I digress.
The other problem, apparently, is that Trump supporters and conservatives in general are reticent to provide information to pollsters. So since the talking gasbags on MSNBC and elsewhere cover elections as though they are horse races, the so-called “shy” Trump supporters never get into the race until the very end.
Here’s from an article in The Atlantic: “The Polling Crisis Is a Catastrophe for American Democracy”:
Even with the results of the presidential contest still out, there’s a clear loser in this election: polling.
Surveys badly missed the results, predicting an easy win for former Vice President Joe Biden, a Democratic pickup in the Senate, and gains for the party in the House. Instead, the presidential election is still too close to call, Republicans seem poised to hold the Senate, and the Democratic edge in the House is likely to shrink.
This is a disaster for the polling industry and for media outlets and analysts that package and interpret the polls for public consumption, such as FiveThirtyEight, The New York Times’ Upshot, and The Economist’s election unit. They now face serious existential questions. But the greatest problem posed by the polling crisis is not in the presidential election, where the snapshots provided by polling are ultimately measured against an actual tally of votes: As the political cliché goes, the only poll that matters is on Election Day. The real catastrophe is that the failure of the polls leaves Americans with no reliable way to understand what we as a people think outside of elections—which in turn threatens our ability to make choices, or to cohere as a nation.
Oh well.
I guess we have learned at least two things so far about this election.
One:
And two: There are some 70 million voters in this country who believe that Trump deserves to be reelected.
That’s the most depressing statistic of all.
Writing Above The Clouds 