The Gold Standard hath spoken.
Quinnipiac is a high-quality poll and perhaps a gold standard and Trafalgar is a fraudulent garbage poll that shouldn't even be considered. That's where Dems who follow frauds like Nate Silver and Dave Wasserman were at. They lectured and insulted anybody who called into question these polls and their ridiculous margins as being "non-data driven". They said the polls would not have the same problems that they did in 2016 because they changed their methodologies. For months. To say that we should never trust them (really, just certain ones) again is not unreasonable or hyperbolic at this point.
Maybe, just maybe they should do an autopsy and try to figure out what went wrong. It's too bad though, because they're incentivized to provide Dem-inflated numbers so fraudsters like Silver can prop up a narrative that Democrats are winning. Election after election.
I think it's a bit bizarre to suggest pollsters deliberately set out to destroy their own credibility, especially after witnessing firsthand on this forum how many liberal consumers wanted to be told their favoured candidates were trailing.
Trafalgar still doesn't make any more sense than it did before the election and pollsters did not have the same problems as they did in 2016. They were much worse.
I don't think they're deliberately trying to destroy their credibility. It's incredibly easy to get a Dem-inflated poll because the most Dem-trending groups are the ones most likely to respond to pollsters quickest, it's very difficult and time-consuming to get the representation required in rural areas and R-trending groups. Many of them either are aware of this problem and don't have the resources/time to fix it, or they are aware of it but decide that if they stray to much from the herd in an R-friendly way, they get attacked and maligned by Silver and co. It's the media and university polls that are propped up as high-quality that were the worst, due to this kind of herding/pressure. Most other pollsters were more accurate but were still off due to the natural difficulties of polling today.
And yes, the polls were much worse in 2020 than 2016. My point is that no one who analyzes elections on the left saw that coming and wishfully thought 2016's polling errors were because of a 'perfect storm' where people all broke for Trump last second, there was lots of third party/undecided vote, and the Comey letter eroded Hillary's support. Some of these things I have debunked and many of them just are excuses that don't fully explain what happened. The truth is in 2020 that there was a decent consistent number (5-10%) of people who were undecided or third party the entire time, and they broke late and hard for Trump. In hindsight, people didn't want to talk about this, but that's the "hidden" vote. It's a small 1-4% that say they're "undecided" or voting for a third party when they're really not. They were going to vote for Trump all along but didn't want to admit it to the pollster or even to themselves sometimes.
That doesn't even fully explain what happened in 2020 though, I hope this "stable, less third party, less undecided" election proved to all of you that the problems that pollsters have now in 2020 were present in 2016 but to a smaller degree. The polls were not good in 2016, and the excuses that the left made for them being off didn't fully explain why. They were atrocious in 2020, both because polling the Trump/R coalition is getting more difficult and because of herding due to the media and experts being in lockstep trying to push their projections that happen to align with what they want to happen.
