Here Comes The Polls

[BumRushDaShow]

38. For the partisan GOP pollsters

as noted here - https://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1014&pid=3230491

The ‘Red Wave’ Washout: How Skewed Polls Fed a False Election Narrative

By Jim Rutenberg, Ken Bensinger and Steve Eder
Dec. 31, 2022

Senator Patty Murray, a Democrat, had consistently won re-election by healthy margins in her three decades representing Washington State. This year seemed no different: By midsummer, polls showed her cruising to victory over a Republican newcomer, Tiffany Smiley, by as much as 20 percentage points.

So when a survey in late September by the Republican-leaning Trafalgar Group showed Ms. Murray clinging to a lead of just two points, it seemed like an aberration. But in October, two more Republican-leaning polls put Ms. Murray barely ahead, and a third said the race was a dead heat.

(snip)

Ms. Murray’s own polling showed her with a comfortable lead, and a nonprofit regional news site, using an established local pollster, had her up by 13. Unwilling to take chances, however, she went on the defensive, scuttling her practice of lavishing some of her war chest — she amassed $20 million — on more vulnerable Democratic candidates elsewhere. Instead, she reaped financial help from the party’s national Senate committee and supportive super PACs — resources that would, as a result, be unavailable to other Democrats.

A similar sequence of events played out in battlegrounds nationwide. Surveys showing strength for Republicans, often from the same partisan pollsters, set Democratic klaxons blaring in Pennsylvania, New Hampshire and Colorado. Coupled with the political factors already favoring Republicans — including inflation and President Biden’s unpopularity — the skewed polls helped feed what quickly became an inescapable political narrative: A Republican wave election was about to hit the country with hurricane force. Democrats in each of those states went on to win their Senate races. Ms. Murray clobbered Ms. Smiley by nearly 15 points.

(snip)

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/31/us/politics/polling-election-2022-red-wave.html

When you have "aggregators" like 538 and RCP actually including PARTISAN polls (in some cases, with results that are outliers) into their aggregates and then those aggregate sites argue for allowing them, resulting in polling "averages" that are now "off", and then the pundits run with that, this literally DOES skew their narratives about "the state of the race". And that results in misallocation of funds towards certain races because of that where in reality such shouldn't have needed to happen.

Democrats have had pollsters like PPP, but nowhere near the number that the GOP has created and pushed into the "mainstream" aggregator world.

I still post the bullshit that they did with Fetterman and having Oz basically ahead and "winning" in 2022 by the "horse race" 0.5% -



The ACTUALS were Fetterman WINNING by 4% -



Polls don't vote, PEOPLE vote.