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

[Amemenhab]

63. Yup. Advance polls and actual election are two different beasts.

Nice post. The problem with election polls isn’t that they’re wrong, but that voters enter the booths some days after having responded to a poll and might not vote for the same person they’d named in that poll. Candidates wanting to use poll data for campaign strategy then face your problems of unforeseeability.

Hillary obviously didn’t whistle-stop Wisconsin, Michigan or Pennsylvania aggressively enough in October 2016, omitting the first of these altogether, yet she couldn’t have known this before November 8. As few of her poll leads ran a decisive 20%, she had to make decisions about where to campaign and she felt Ohio, Florida and North Carolina more important. Florida has 29 electoral votes. Regardless if she lost the states in the latter group, waging battle there was crucial and the window of time and opportunity wasn’t large enough to include all six states.

Therefore, Hillary probably made the best campaign decisions using available information in a gamble Trump happened to win by chance against the odds.