Can we please stop with the "polls were wrong in 2016" narritive

[Awsi Dooger]

32. Too many people cherish state polls and ignore national polls

That's been an increasing tendency, somehow the conventional wisdom even though it is brutally misplaced.

Then everyone fixates on certain states as if those polling margins are absolute and if we have enough state polls then they have to be correct. It is garbage and has always been garbage. Many states are simply modeled poorly and it doesn't matter how many times they are polled if the sampling is ridiculous. I've emphasized since I joined this site in 2002 that Georgia and Alaska polling is awful, invariably overstating the Democrat. Somehow I get push back even though it has proven out time and again.

Right now we have a strange new dynamic of paranoid white right wingers with one stupid thought after another, and part of it is distrust of media or any type of organization they associate with media. So that's something that can't be ignored in relation to polling. I remember discussing it here with Febble and OnTheOtherHand as far back as 2005, the transfer of the Shy Tory tendency to this country. And the landscape has exploded exponentially in that direction since 2005. In the heavy white midwestern states I don't see how we can fully trust the polling if it is sharply in favor of Democrats.

The states are not independent of each other on election day. Nate Silver was one of the few who spotlighted that aspect repeatedly in the final weeks of 2016. If there is polling error it would attach to one similar state after another:

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/election-update-why-our-model-is-more-bullish-than-others-on-trump/

"In 2012, Obama beat his polling by 2 or 3 percentage points in almost every swing state. The same was true in 1980 when Ronald Reagan won in a landslide — instead of the modest lead that polls showed a few days before the election — and claimed 489 electoral votes by winning almost every competitive state. You also frequently see this in midterms — Republicans beat their polling in almost every key Senate and gubernatorial race in 2014, for example.

Basically, this means that you shouldn’t count on states to behave independently of one another, especially if they’re demographically similar. If Clinton loses Pennsylvania despite having a big lead in the polls there, for instance, she might also have problems in Michigan, North Carolina and other swing states. What seems like an impregnable firewall in the Electoral College may begin to collapse."