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Polls? You gotta be kidding me. No one believes polls anymore, ever since Hillary had a 95% probability of winning in 2016.
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Polls are crap, constructed along the ideologies of the purchasers. All polls.
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Nobody believes these polls anymore.
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Well, for me personally.......I'm unpersuaded by these assertions that "
nobody believes polls".
Frankly, I think it is a naïve statement.
Lotsa people believe polls, surveys, market research, data collection, etc.
Hell, they have to.
Kraft wants to know how much mayonnaise sold over the weekend. Pfizer wants to know how many people watched the TV program they advertised on. Political candidates want to know what their constituents think is important.
Polling does that for them.
Here, let me give you a 'political polling'
need and
opportunity:
The Trump Campaign committee wanted to know why he lost. So they commissioned their regular and long-time pollster,
Tony Fabrizio, to do polling for internal consumption. They needed to know the public's perception so that they know what trends to ride or magnify, which ones to avoid or change.
So Fabrizio did polling after the election to get answers to those questions. Here's what
Politico reported. (by the way, there is a link in the Politico story where you can go read the report itself):
"Trump pollster's campaign autopsy paints damning picture of defeat"
"The post-mortem, a copy of which was obtained by POLITICO, says the former president suffered from voter perception that he wasn’t honest or trustworthy and that he was crushed by disapproval of his handling of the coronavirus pandemic. And while Trump spread baseless accusations of ballot-stuffing in heavily Black cities, the report notes that he was done in by hemorrhaging support from white voters.
The 27-page report, which was written by Trump chief pollster Tony Fabrizio, shows how Trump advisers were privately reckoning with his loss even as the former president and many of his supporters engaged in a conspiracy theory-fueled effort to overturn the election. The autopsy was completed in December 2020 and distributed to Trump’s top political advisers….”
The report zeroes in on an array of demographics where Trump suffered decisive reversals in 2020, including among white seniors, the same group that helped to propel him to the White House. The autopsy says that Trump saw the “greatest erosion with white voters, particularly white men,” and that he “lost ground with almost every age group.” In the five states that flipped to Biden, Trump’s biggest drop-off was among voters aged 18-29 and 65 and older.
Suburbanites — who bolted from Trump after 2016 — also played a major role. The report says that the former president suffered a “double-digit erosion” with “White College educated voters across the board.”
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That's just one example.
Oh, btw, the remark about Hillary's "95% probability" is a misstatement by the poster. Her
probability was lower.....90%.
Notably, those '
probability' projections were based on the polling that showed Hillary was leading Trump in the popular vote.....45% to 42%
.
A 3% difference.
Also notably, after the December finalized counts in 2016 it showed that Hillary HAD won the popular vote......by 2.9%. Not a bad projection in the polling business.
But, of course, it was
where those votes came from that mattered. From the states that did or did not contribute significantly to the Electoral College votes. And that's how Hillary lost the race. She won the popular vote. But that wasn't enough.