I tried to explain to him most polls til Election Day will either show a tie or show her up and not to put too much faith into them. I feel that her “popularity” is a media invention considering she lasted only a few minutes in the primaries, but there are plenty of people who will blindly vote for her like the “mean tweets” people in 2020. To say nothing of any mysterious overnight ballots come Election Day.
I just told him that the media will be pushing her harder than they did for Obama or Biden. I would love to see a landslide like 84 but ever since 2012 this country has sadly shown they will vote based on emotion and what is trendy in a heartbeat.
Ask yourself, have you ever been asked in these polls? Has anyone you've known been? Do you even respond when you very rarely might get the call about it?
I'm gonna say probably not, and you don't go to the websites where they do the online polling either because why would you.
So what do those polls actually reflect? A bunch of self selection biases of people choosing themselves and a bunch of niche areas of the country that lean heavily blue to begin with where all surveys are taken to begin with.
Out of 10,000 polls you'd still only have a 5% chance of being called, so not being called is is not a good reason to discount them.
Pollsters can correct for respondent bias if they want to.
Richard Baris aka People's Pundit's Big Data Poll does all kinds of bias corrections and factors in "untouchable" things like voting/responding behavior among demographics. Most accurate poll for the last decade, paid for in large part by grassroots donations. Completely blacklisted by all mainstream news.
Fivethirtyeight has a big list evaluating 277 pollsters without even mentioning Big Data Poll. RCP excludes it from their average. You'll only find it on Epoch Times because none of the establishment groups want you to see a real poll result.
Wonder if Nate Silver could be bullied into addressing Baris's work.